In a review of Jeff Sharlet’s Radiant Truths, an anthology of literary journalism about American religion that ranges from Walt Whitman to Occupy Wall Street, Jonathan Fitzgerald praises the book for what it tells us about our culture:
Having these stories gathered into one eminently readable anthology makes Radiant Truths an important book. I know people say that a lot about all kinds of books, but this one really is important, particularly if you take into account a couple influential trends in American culture. The first, the broader trend, is that American religious identity, which has always been more fragmented than some like to believe, is becoming even more so. That is, religion has always been important to Americans, but it used to be possible to pretend that the United States was a “Christian nation.” But, as Sharlet and Peter Manseau showed in their 2004 religious travelogue Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible—an excerpt of which appears in this collection—it is completely ridiculous to talk in singular terms about American religion.
The other trend perhaps has a narrower reach; it has to do with changes within journalism in the age of the Internet. Though a decade ago everyone seemed certain that the nature of reading news online would all but guarantee that reportage would become shorter and shallower, in many ways, the opposite has been true. Of course, there are plenty examples of the short and shallow, but we are also seeing a trend toward “long reads,” in-depth literary journalism-type pieces published online and read and shared far beyond the reach of the print magazines who used to be the only place to find such writing. As was the case in the 1800s, it is precisely the changes in the medium through which journalism is delivered that contribute to these trends. In the 19th century, it was the proliferation of the penny press and today it has a lot to do with the ubiquity of mobile devices. But Sharlet takes us back to 1863 in a piece by Walt Whitman, who, along with Thoreau (the second author in the collection) Sharlet sees as forming the “hybrid creation of modern literary journalism.”
Jonathan Kirsch walks us through some of the collection’s essays:
The first selection is a fragment from Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days, an account of a Civil War battle that took place at Chancellorsville in 1863. After describing the grim carnage of the battlefield, Whitman allows us to witness his encounter with a young soldier named Oscar, “low with chronic diarrhoea, and a bad wound also,” who asks Whitman to read aloud the account of the crucifixion and resurrection from the New Testament. The dying soldier “ask’d me if I enjoy’d religion,” to which Whitman answers: “Perhaps not, my dear, in the way you mean, and yet, may-be, it is the same thing.” Yet the visit ends in what may or may not be a moment of agape: “He behaved very manly and affectionate,” writes Whitman. “The kiss I gave him as I was about leaving he return’d fourfold.”
The irony that pervades Whitman’s encounter with a dying soldier can be traced throughout the collection, which includes the work of such famous curmudgeons as Mark Twain, whose rollicking Innocents Abroad is briefly excerpted (but, curiously, omitting Twain’s most sharply sarcastic passages), and H. L. Mencken, who contributes a piece written from the scene of the Scopes trial: “An Episcopalian down here in the Coca-Cola belt is regarded as an atheist,” writes Mencken, although the final piece by Francine Prose is as close as we get to old-fashioned witnessing. Sharlet himself contributes “Heartland, Kansas” (co-written with Peter Manseau), an account of “the Heartland Pagan Festival,” which they describe as a “campout for witches and assorted other heathens in rural Kansas,” in which he now detects his own “nervous giggles” and “the gentle absurdity inherent to the documentation of things unseen.”
In an excerpt from his introduction to the anthology, Sharlet explains the questions that shaped his approach to the project:
If you write about religious people, even your friends may start making certain assumptions about the state of your soul. That is, they’ll imagine that you’re either a scholar or a seeker. That you write about religion for the sake of scientific inquiry or that you write about religion because you’re searching for one. That you’re devising a theory, or pursuing a process of elimination. That, sooner or later, you’ll arrive at an answer.
I prefer the questions posed by anthropologist Angela Zito. “What does the term ‘religion,’ when actually used by people, out loud, authorize in the production of social life?” she asks in an essay called “Religion Is Media.” The production of social life—that’s the kind of phrase anthropologists use to draw attention to the ways in which we compose “the stories we tell ourselves in order to live,” as literary journalist Joan Didion famously wrote in The White Album. We are so busy living these stories that we rarely consider their fabrication, a term I use literally: Every story is “made up,” to the extent that stories exist only if we make them. … What do we set in motion when we say religion, out loud? “What acts can then possibly be performed?” Zito asks. “What stories can be told?”
The Dish 