Mark Twain

The Argument

Mark Twain is the great American ironist, and his irony is theological even when it is anti-theological. His attacks on organized religion and on the God of the Old Testament are sharp and sometimes funny, but they presuppose the very moral standard they claim to be applying. When Twain condemns the God of the Bible for ordering the slaughter of the Canaanites, he is condemning it by a standard — the wrongness of killing the innocent — that he nowhere justifies outside the tradition he is attacking.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is his masterpiece, and its moral center is one of the most remarkable moments in American literature: Huck's decision not to turn Jim in, which he understands as a decision to go to hell. Huck has been taught that helping a runaway slave is a sin. He cannot argue his way out of this theology. He simply decides, against his stated convictions, that he will do what his conscience tells him rather than what his religion teaches. For Twain, this is the triumph of natural morality over revealed religion. For a literary apologist, it raises a different question: where did Huck's conscience come from?

For literary apologetics, Twain is the test case for the question of whether a conscience formed by Christian culture can operate effectively once the theological ground is removed. The evidence of his life — the increasing bitterness, the late work saturated with nihilism — suggests it is harder than Huck's moment of decision makes it appear.