Book Review: Radiant Truths: Essential Dispatches, Reports, Confessions, & Other Essays on American Belief, by Jeff Sharlet, ed

Abstract

Radiant Truths: Essential Dispatches, Reports, Confessions, & Other Essays on American Belief. Jeff Sharlet, ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. 424 pp. $30 hbk.It is hard to think of a writer better suited to editing an anthology on American religion than Jeff Sharlet. The Mellon Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College is also a talented journalist especially known for The Family and C Street, investigative works chronicling the ways in which Christian fundamentalism has permeated the political power structure in Washington, D.C. His latest offering is subtler-less expose than meandering meditation. But it offers equally valuable insight into the role of religion in America's politics, communities, and in the private lives of its citizens.More precisely, Radiant Truths concerns itself with American belief, which Sharlet defines as a subset of religion. In practice, focusing on this supposed subset has produced a nonfiction collection that's broader than what one might expect to find in a book about faith. Sharlet begins with Walt Whitman on a Civil War battlefield in 1863 and proceeds chronologically to end in 2011 with a fragment from Francine Prose in which she recounts bursting into tears on seeing the poet's verses at an Occupy Wall Street camp. In between, there are stories that face religion head-on, such as John Jeremiah Sullivan's hilarious and ultimately humane portrayal of Christian rock fans in Upon This Rock (2004) and Zora Neale Hurston's mesmerizing immersion into the Voodoo traditions of New Orleans in Hoodoo (1935). In others, such as the selection from Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night (1968), readers could debate whether the fervor being explored is religious or something else-a manifestation of culture, say, or of a powerful but not necessarily divine political ideology.Unsurprisingly, Sharlet's fascination with the intersection between religion and politics holds. This is good for readers. Without it, he might not have included Garry Wills's incisive Whittier: First Day (1970), which connects Nixon's Quaker roots to a destructive, uniquely American myth of self-improvement. The piece manages to feel fresh despite the fact that Nixon is long gone. His reign may be over, but our national obsession with the self-made man persists to this day, affecting social and political progress in myriad ways. Likewise, Sharlet includes communist writer Meridel Le Sueur's 1934 account of a labor strike, I Was Marching. The piece is another that is not strictly about religion, but the prose is sharp and surprisingly current, offering lines like this to readers fresh off a year of headlines about racism, inequality, and police brutality:Our life seems to be marked with a curious and muffled violence over America, but this action has always been in the dark, men and women dying obscurely, poor and povertymarked lives, but now from city to city runs this violence, into the open, and colossal happenings stand bare before our eyes. …