Religious Minorities in Literature

Introduction

Literature is, for many readers, their introduction to religious minorities. The scarcity of these believers decreases the chance of personal contact and increases the influence of secondhand images. Literary images may not only influence the way the general population views a minority religious group; they may also affect the way that groups see themselves.

Minority status implies difference. In order to maintain a distinctive identity, smaller religions differentiate themselves from the dominant culture, preserving their traditional beliefs by social and even geographic separation. That makes them seem, from a mainstream perspective, peculiar. Quakers are characterized by their plain dress, archaic speech, and open objection to war. The Amish and Old Order Mennonites are distinguished by their black clothing and simple lifestyle. Mormons are known for polygamy—although they no longer practice it—and by their strong emphasis on family. Such peculiarities make distinctive presences in fiction.

Quakers

The Religious Society of Friends was nicknamed Quakers because they believe that inspiration comes from an inner light, often accompanied by trembling. Their literary image is generally positive, if limiting. They tend to appear as kindly and gentle; their mistreatment is the most constant theme.

Caroline Dale Snedeker has written on the sect’s socialist experiment in New Harmony, Indiana, in The Town of the Fearless (1931). Her Unchartered Ways (1935) pictures the persecutions of the Quakers by tyrannical Puritans, examining the religious beliefs that motivated colonial Quakers. Various books have been written portraying Quakers favorably for their involvement in the abolitionist movement. Novels by Ronald de Levington Kirkbridge describe the lives of one Quaker family as they move from Pennsylvania, the heartland of their religion, to South Carolina. Works such as these describe a simple people who are dedicated to helping the less fortunate, who practice conscientious objection to war, and who observe a rural, family-centered way of life.

An influential work featuring a Quaker protagonist is Theodore Dreiser’s The Bulwark (1946), the story of a principled Pennsylvania Quaker who becomes wealthy. He never forgets his roots in religion, and his children react to his example in varying ways as they grow up in a modern world. This book shows the delicate balance that a Quaker attempts to maintain between being in the world but not of it. Another book, written by Elizabeth Emerson, The Good Crop (1946), treats a similar theme: A Quaker couple move their family of eleven children from Tennessee to Illinois in the nineteenth century. The most popular of books featuring Quaker characters is The Friendly Persuasion (1956) by Jessamyn West. This book of fourteen stories details the lives of an Indiana Quaker family, discussing the peculiar language and customs of the Birdwell family in a manner that helps the readers identify with them.

Mennonites

Mennonite literary identity is mainly a matter of distinctively plain dress and horse-and-buggy transportation, although this describes only a minority of modern Mennonites. Mennonites originally came to America for religious freedom, and they are, like Quakers, one of the historical "peace churches," meaning they too formally espouse pacifism. In the modern era, the Mennonite lifestyle runs the gamut from outwardly indistinguishable from mainstream society to the Old Order Mennonite sects, which may eschew basic modern technology like electricity and internal combustion engines. Closely related to Old Order Mennonites, and better known in the public consciousness, are the Amish. Of these groups, the Amish appear most in literature. Much literature about the Amish deals with the difficulty of integrating tradition with the rapidly changing values of a larger society.

A popular dialect work of the early 1900s by Helen Reimensnyder Martin is Tillie, a Mennonite Maid: A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch (1904), which probes the restrictive life of Mennonite women. Martin’s second novel, Sabina: A Story of the Amish (1905), may be the most thorough treatment of the social implications of the Amish and Mennonite faith. Sabina admires the physical and emotional benefits of Amish life, but depicts Amish teachings as cruelly narrow. In the introduction to this book, Martin writes that the Amish faith restricts its adherents “by its unique customs, and the peculiar garb it imposes, setting them apart from the rest of humanity, prohibiting ‘a life of vanity,’ and rigidly enforcing a plain and frugal manner of life and conversation.”

The usual literary view of the Amish lifestyle is one of charming simplicity. In Plain and Simple: A Woman’s Journey to the Amish (1989) Sue Bender gets off the fast track of the frenzied business world and into the world of the Amish, where the slow-paced, community-centered life feeds her soul and changes her priorities. Rudy Wiebe’s fictional Mennonites, in such novels as the popular Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962), range from the rigidly dogmatic to the humane.

Mennonites, in the fiction of insiders and of outsiders, often are portrayed as frugal, shrewd at bargaining, clannish, and passive. Many works of fiction also describe Mennonite families and congregations as authoritarian. Particularly well expressed in Urie Bender’s Four Earthen Vessels (1982) is the seemingly unemotional demeanor and the extreme practicality of his Mennonite characters.

Mormons

Of the minority religions in the United States, the Latter-Day Saints, or Mormons, have received the most literary attention. This is due in part to their large numbers and also to the controversies that have been raised regarding Mormonism. For the first hundred years of Mormon history, beginning in 1830, the dominant view of Mormons was as villains, in part because, until the late nineteenth century, they practiced polygamy. Fitz-James O’Brian’s story “My Wife’s Tempter,” published in Harper’s Weekly in 1857 and widely read in the East, portrays a Mormon antagonist who is fat, boorish, and downright deceptive in stealing another man’s wife. Alvah Milton Kerr describes a polygamous husband in an 1895 story as toadlike and lazy. Many nineteenth-century stories contain a fair unsullied maiden trying to avoid the lecherous advances of a Mormon polygamist. Even worse is the villainous Mormon who carries out the will of God by blood-sacrificing wayward members and antagonistic nonmembers, as in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887).

Humorists such as Artemus Ward and Mark Twain put a comic twist on the Mormon tale. In Ward’s Gloverson the Mormon (1874), a mule-skinner with twenty-one wives, saying good-bye to each, tries to remember their names. In Roughing It (1872), Twain jokes how he thought polygamy sounded great until he saw how ugly the Mormon women were; then he considered the men saints for marrying even one of them. In Max Adeler’s Out of the Hurly Burly: Or, Life in an Odd Corner (1874) Bishop Potts clears out an entire second floor of a female school in Salt Lake City, taking the students off in carriages to wife. Humor was achieved by exaggeration. Marietta Holley, a prominent female humorist of the nineteenth century, attacks all aspects of Mormonism. Her work was a major force in the antipolygamy legislation of the late 1900s.

In the twentieth century Mormons came to be portrayed more as human beings. Vardis Fisher’s Children of God: An American Epic (1939), a historical novel about a family, covers the first seven decades of the church’s history, from the visions and revelations of the boy Joseph Smith to the pioneer trek led by Brigham Young to the days of the Manifesto, when polygamy was no longer practiced in the church. Virginia Eggertsen Sorensen, in such novels as The Evening and the Morning (1949) attempts a more realistic portrayal of Mormons, seeing them less as stereotypical representatives of the faith and more as individuals.

Mormons have fostered a thriving literary community. Orson Scott Card has achieved fame rendering the Mormon condition. His Tales of Alvin Maker series uses Mormon history as a backdrop; many other books of his are about the Mormon philosophy. Mormons such as Louise Plummer and Jack Weyland explore themes of family unity, personal morality, and maintaining a faithful ideal amid the realities of everyday life.

Mormons are, in twentieth-century literature, often portrayed as patriarchal, homogeneous, and exclusionary in their tight-knit communities. As may be expected, however, the most successful literary portrayals of Mormons are those that portray the Mormon as an individual human being rather than as a stereotype.

Implications for Identity

For religious minorities it is increasingly difficult, in the face of the homogenization of culture that has resulted from constantly advancing communications technology, to hold on to the uniqueness of their religion. These groups attempt, in their struggle for identity, to balance individual autonomy with community control. Fictional portrayals of such struggles are seldom historically accurate. For example, portrayals of polygamy were often the only education those in the East had about Mormons. With Mormons staying almost entirely in Utah, there was no one around to prove that the negative characterizations about Mormons that appeared in literature were false. It is true of other religious minorities as well that literature about them has often resorted to stereotype. Often, however, fictional portrayals are psychologically apt in capturing the unique characteristics of minority religions. Successful literary portrayals of religious experience are typically quite an accomplishment, given that religious experience is ineffable. In an art form such as literature, which tends to strive for the universal in the particular, people who are different have often been characterized by the sensational rather than the significant.

Bibliography

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Driedger, Leo. Mennonite Identity in Conflict. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988.

Dye, Alex. "Mennonite Literature as Genre." Englewood Review of Books, 9 Apr. 2012, englewoodreview.org/mennonite-literature-as-genre/. Accessed 25 Sept. 2019.

Ficken, Carl. God’s Story and Modern Literature. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985.

Gershon, Livia. "How Victorian Writers Eroticized Mormons." JSTOR Daily, 4 May 2016, daily.jstor.org/how-victorians-eroticized-mormons/. Accessed 25 Sept. 2019.

Hood, James W. Quakers and Literature. Friends Association for Higher Education, 2016.

Lambert, Neal. “Saints, Sinners, and Scribes.” In Utah Historical Quarterly 36 (Winter, 1968): 64-76.

Lehman, Daniel W. "The construction of Mennonite/Amish character in novels by John Updike and Denis Johnson." Mennonite Quarterly Review, vol. 77, no. 4, 2003, go.gale.com/ps/anonymous?id=GALE%7CA202802649&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=fulltext&issn=00259373&p=LitRC&sw=w. Accessed 25 Sept. 2019.

O’Connor, Leo F. Religion in the American Novel. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984.

Redekop, Calvin Wall. Mennonite Society. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.