Horror and Religion: New Literary Approaches to Theology, Race and Sexuality by Eleanor Beal

Author:Eleanor Beal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Wales Press

Cupitt shares with the earlier radical theologians the conviction that traditional theological metaphysics are no longer sustainable in the modern era. Modern scientific thought has removed religion from the sphere of universal knowledge by insisting upon an epistemology of scepticism: ‘The great power and beauty of scientific knowledge’, Cupitt writes, ‘lies in the fact that it is built on a firm foundation of doubt.’22 This epistemology of scepticism renders unsustainable the notion that religious (or any other) truth claims might be held as eternal, ahistorical or absolute. Yet for Cupitt this scepticism towards fixed doctrinal truth is not a reason to reject religion, but rather a source of religion’s capacity for reinvention and renewal: if religion does not consist in a static body of universal truth-claims, then it is capable of reconstructions that allow it to live in its contemporary contexts. ‘Where people attempt to hold religious meanings unchanged’, Cupitt argues, ‘their notion of faith ineluctably becomes increasingly irrational and authoritarian’.23 Sceptical epistemologies are thus framed not as threats to faith per se, but as threats to fundamentalist and conservative conceptions of faith, which in turn become naive – and potentially dangerous – anachronisms in the (post)modern world.

Cupitt’s view of conservative Christianity as irrational and authoritarian is echoed in Dan Simmons’s innovative vampire novel Carrion Comfort (1989). Coinciding with the consolidation of a conservative Evangelical voting bloc around the Reagan administration, Carrion Comfort depicts an America in which secular, scientific modernity conflicts with an unreflective, authoritarian Christianity identified with the preservation of a traditional social order predicated upon white supremacy. One of the novel’s vampires, Melanie, reflects this desire to preserve a static social order when she recalls past Christmases spent with her family and their African- American servants:

It was interesting how, years later in Vienna, Nina, Willi, and I could each trace such common elements of our childhood as kindness to servants … It is only in recent years that I have not celebrated Christmas as thoroughly as I would like. Nina and I had been discussing the sad secularization of the Christmas spirit just two weeks earlier at our last Reunion. People do not know what Christianity means anymore.24

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