I'm halfway through Munther Isaac's new book Christ in the Rubble, released last week. I wanted to read the book because it represents the viewpoint with which I am less familiar, the pro-Palestinian side in the ongoing conflict—to use a word Isaac does not like—between Israel and the Palestinians. When I say I'm less familiar with this viewpoint, I mean I haven't read much thoughtful analysis from this side of things. I come at the issue from the other side, and so I was skeptical when I got my hands on Isaac's book, skeptical but curious. He has managed to soften me. I should also say that this has not been one of my passions, that is, reading up on Israel and Palestine, so I come at this somewhat ignorant. Perhaps I'll have more to say about the book once I'm done with it.
For now I'm going to highlight a few consecutive passages in the middle of his fourth chapter, in a section that argues that western support for Israel is (among other things) a product of racism against Arabs. Having read his argument, I'm not convinced, but I wouldn't argue against the thesis, either.
The first thing I want to highlight is Isaac's response to this set of comments from Nikki Haley, in which she talks about Egypt and other "pro-Hamas" Arab countries taking in Palestinian refugees, and rather she laments that this is not happening. Here is Isaac:
Calls for Arab countries to receive Palestinian refugees are essentially calls for ethnic cleansing. We cannot be fooled by their pretended humanitarian concern. Such calls ignore Palestinians' rootedness in the land and their national identity; such calls are not in the interest of Gazans. Why don't Nikki Haley and others who make such calls instead ask why the United States or western European countries don't open their borders to take in Israeli Jews? The idea that Palestinians are mere numbers that can be moved from one place to another while Israelis take more and more Palestinian land embraces the logic of ethnic cleansing, dehumanizes Palestinians, and denies their right to self-determination in their homeland. (p. 122)
There's a lot here. Some of this is not carefully worded, such as the first sentence quoted above. And (later) the reason no one is calling on western countries to take in Israeli Jews is because Israeli Jews are not refugees. But the reason I highlight this statement from Isaac is because of his comment about "Palestinians' rootedness in the land" and his later statement about "homeland." I'm not sure I feel this same sentiment about land, and I'm just wanting to think about this idea some more. Perhaps reading more Wendell Berry would help; does he feel what Isaac thinks the Palestinians feel? As a biblical scholar, I think of Brueggemann's book on The Land, which I haven't read either. I like the idea of rootedness in a place, but I grew up in Kentucky and now live in Alabama and could very much see myself in several other places of the world, if the situation were right (i.e., job and family). Connection to land doesn't really come into for me, I think. So I'm just signaling here a point at which I think I am failing to properly evaluate a concern that many people consider weighty.
The very next paragraph:
Other instances of the racist logic that has dominated imperial discourse about the war in Gaza can be seen in the discourse surrounding human shields and hostages. The Israeli army first claimed that Hamas uses civilians as human shields without providing any evidence, and the West has repeated the charge at length. Even if this claim were true, would it justify the killing of children sheltering in a school or families in a hospital? If a serial killer were to escape police custody in Dallas, for example, and take a hundred children as hostages while hiding out in a school, would the United States argue for bombing the school to kill this serial killer? (p. 122)
This was one of the things I wanted to see Isaac address, because I have heard the charge about the human shields many times, and the charge seems very plausible to me. But I think Isaac's example about the serial killer was helpful.
A couple paragraphs later:
Responding to a question about the high number of Gazan civilians killed by Israeli airstrikes, US president Joe Biden said that he had "no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using." This remark, which can be characterized as racist, minimizes the scale of death of Palestinians in Gaza and discredits the ability for Palestinians to report on the scale of catastrophe they are experiencing. (p. 123)
The remark quoted from President Biden is cited by Isaac from a Reuters story dated to October 25, 2023. I suppose it's true that Biden's remark "can be characterized as racist," but I'm not sure that that's the most helpful way of characterizing the remark. I do recall in the early days of the war that many westerners were questioning the numbers of casualties reported by the ... uh, wasn't it the Ministry of Health in Palestine? And the reason given for questioning the credibility of these numbers was because this organization was run by Hamas, which had an interest in inflating the numbers, in order to win sympathy to their cause. I'm not sure whether the numbers provided by that Ministry of Health have been fully validated by this point, but at any rate I hear less questioning of their credibility. But I don't think Biden's remark gives very good evidence for Isaac's thesis about racism, or I would like to see more argumentation substantiating the link Isaac is claiming between racism and this statement.
That gives you some idea of the type of material you'll find in this book, and my reaction to it. Some of it I would describe as helpful (e.g., the serial killer example), some less helpful (the characterization of Biden's remark as racist), and some presenting a mindset that is different from mine and that I need to consider (thinking here of the first point about the land).
This is part 2 of my reflections on To Kill a Mockingbird. As I mentioned in the previous post, these two essays were written for chapel talks, and the essay in this post was the text for the chapel talk here.
The text presented here is only slightly revised. The book by Joseph Crespino on Atticus Finch is cited a few times.
Is it okay to watch The Cosby Show? It’s been a few years since I’ve seen the classic show from the 1980s, but in my adult life I have watched many episodes, so I know that the show stands up very well. There are some scenes that are permanently imprinted on my memory, especially the one early in the series when the Huxtable family is on the stair case lipsyncing “The Right Time” by Ray Charles on the occasion of the wedding anniversary of their paternal grandparents. The Cosby Show is the perfect family show—except for one little element. The eponymous star of the show is a convicted sex abuser. (See wikipedia.) Or, maybe right now he’s no longer convicted; I think I remember that his conviction was overturned on a technicality. I don’t know where we are in the legal matters, but let’s at least say that he has been credibly accused of sexual abuse of many women over a period of decades. How much do those actions taint his work? I would like to start watching the show again, mostly so I can show it to my kids. I admire the show a great deal, for a few specific reasons, the same reasons everyone admired the show in the mid-80s: first, because it’s hilarious, and then also because of its depiction of an uber-successful Black family, with mother and father and a bunch of kids all living together and loving one another, not to mention two sets of grandparents who show up frequently, and they were all joyful, and moral, and kind. Heathcliff Huxtable was a great human and a great dad; he just happened to be portrayed by a despicable person, or, to be more specific, a person who did some despicable things. Should that matter? If I watch The Cosby Show, am I supporting sexual abuse? Am I harming vulnerable women? I’ve said that I admire The Cosby Show. Is that okay?
I’m not venturing into a new topic, but the same one from last week, Mrs. Dubose of Maycomb, Alabama, the woman whose death prompted Atticus Finch to declare her the bravest person he’d ever met. Last week I spent all my time arguing that To Kill a Mockingbird, despite its faults, is a morally serious novel, and the centerpiece of its moral seriousness is Atticus Finch. I made this argument in the face of criticisms—real and imagined—faced by the novel and its main adult character from the standpoint of America circa 2024. The point I was trying to make is that meditating on the characters in the novel is worth our while, that such an activity will contribute to our own moral formation. I was arguing that we should take seriously the evaluation of Mrs. Dubose as voiced by Atticus in the novel. Having cleared my throat last week, today I want to attempt to take seriously Mrs. Dubose—cantankerous racist that she is.
Maybe once we meet Mrs. Dubose, we will be so repulsed by her that we will reject the opinion of Atticus, deciding either that the best of men are wrong sometimes or perhaps that Atticus is, not, in fact, the best of men, but that the common understanding of his virtue is misguided. I think the novelist, Harper Lee, would not want readers to adopt either of these approaches. I think, rather, that she wanted readers to accept Atticus as virtuous and wise, and therefore his opinion of Mrs. Dubose as true somehow. I interpret Lee’s intentions partly from the structure of the novel, which is divided into two unequal parts, and the chapter focusing on Mrs. Dubose, chapter 11, is the conclusion of the first part. The reader’s acquaintance with Mrs. Dubose and our encounter with Atticus’ opinion of her stands at a crucial point in the novel. So let’s exercise our critical faculties. If we wanted to support the contention of Atticus about Mrs. Dubose, that she was an unusually brave person, how would we do so? How could we deal with the obvious problems standing in tension with the opinion of Atticus?
These problems are ones the novel takes pains to highlight. Most of the chapter presents Mrs. Dubose as a character with whom we do not sympathize. Harper Lee’s point in constructing such a character is obviously to prod readers to think deeply about human virtue, how it is developed, where it is found, how to identify it in others. Can a bad person display virtue?
Before continuing, let me comment on some words used in the novel as in the movie. There are two n-words that I think deserve some comment. One of them is the n-word. It comes up a fair number of times in the novel, including in this chapter. I think it is correct to say that it never appears on the lips of the Finches, Atticus and his children, except when the children are repeating words told them by others, or when Atticus tells them not to say it. The other n-word is negro. It is definitely considered the nicer word in the context of the novel—not just that, but the appropriate word to call people with dark-colored skin who today would be called “Black.” It was the term used by Black people for self-identification. I think this changed somewhere along about 1980, so that today the word “negro” is archaic and perhaps mildly offensive—but, I think, not so offensive that it should not be pronounced when discussing a historical period in which the word was in common use. So, the one n-word I will not say, the other n-word I will. I hope this is the right decision.
So here goes: according to the second paragraph of the relevant chapter in the novel, “Mrs. Dubose lived alone except for a Negro girl in constant attendance.”
According to the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird—that is, according to an older version of Scout, or perhaps as a narrator she should be called Jean Louise—she and her brother, Jem, hated Mrs. Dubose. The reason is that she was mean to them, yelled at them from her front porch, insulted them and their father. She would say things like, “Jeremy Finch, Maudie Atkinson told me you broke down her scuppernong arbor this morning”—which, the narrator assures us, was a complete fabrication designed merely to harass. To Scout, Mrs. Dubose would say, “what are you doing in those overalls? You should be in a dress and camisole, young lady! You’ll grow up waiting on tables if somebody doesn’t change your ways—a Finch waiting on tables at the O.K. Café—hah!” The narrative tells us that “Countless evenings Atticus would find Jem furious at something Mrs. Dubose had said when we went by.” Atticus would then counsel his son with these words: “Easy does it, son. She’s an old lady and she’s ill. You just hold your head high and be a gentleman. Whatever she says to you, it’s your job not to let her make you mad.”
But then Mrs. Dubose hit her aim when she yelled at the children in regard to their father: “Not only a Finch waiting on tables but one in the courthouse lawing for [Black people]! … Yes indeed, what has this world come to when a Finch goes against his raising? I’ll tell you! … Your father’s no better than the [Black people] and trash he works for!”
So, there it is. Those are the problems with thinking that Mrs. Dubose might display virtue. She’s a racist in the Deep South in the 1930s, and specifically she mocks Atticus Finch for … for … what? For agreeing to serve as the defense attorney for a Black man, Tom Robinson, accused of raping a white woman. It’s not that Atticus is generally known for providing legal services to Black people. In this particular instance, Atticus is a court-appointed attorney. Maybe he had a choice in the matter. Maybe most lawyers would have refused to take the case. At any rate, Tom Robinson did not seek out Atticus, it was arranged by the court. It turns out that Atticus does an admirable job of defending Mr. Robinson, proving to every reader of the novel the complete innocence of his client and the depravity of his accusers—though he failed to persuade the jury (or, if Atticus did persuade the jury, they chose to convict anyway.) But, of course, Mrs. Dubose can’t know how hard Atticus will work to prove Mr. Robinson’s innocence. Apparently she’s mad that he agreed to take the case. She’s not the only one. By the time we meet Mrs. Dubose, we’ve already heard about other townspeople who have lobbed insults at the children on account of their father being a lover of Black people. According to Joseph Crespino, a professor of American history at Emory, “The storyline involving Mrs. Dubose serves an essential purpose in the novel by helping the reader imagine the bitter gossip and harsh words spoken against Atticus behind closed doors by members of Maycomb’s established families” (p. 139).
Does Mrs. Dubose have redeeming qualities? Wherein lies her courage, according to Atticus? As it turns out, she’s addicted to morphine, a drug prescribed to her years earlier that helps her cope with some pain, the cause of which I forget. And once her doctor tells her that she has not long to live, she decides she wants to kick the addiction. Morphine has enslaved her, and she wants to die free. So in the last weeks of her life, she weans herself off of morphine. She voluntarily experiences the symptoms of withdrawal, and she manages to break free of her addiction and so die liberated. This is what prompts Atticus to say that she was the bravest person he’d ever met.
Is that bravery? Um, yes, sure, absolutely, that is brave. Is “brave” the right word? I guess brave is the right word. Whatever. Yes, breaking free of an addiction is a brave thing to do. Is it the bravest thing I’ve ever heard of? No, I wouldn’t put it in that category, but let’s ignore the superlatives and just think about whether it was brave. She was a dying woman who used pain medication that she felt was too controlling of her life and her mind. Her doctors and the other people in her life were telling her that there was no need to end her days in pain, that she could simply continue using the morphine and leave life peacefully. She refused, because she wanted to die free. Whether or not that’s the decision I would have made, or would have advised a loved one to make, it’s the decision she made and she suffered for it. She entered willingly and in the face of opposition into a painful situation, and she persevered. She displayed bravery.
Does that make her a good person? No. From a Christian standpoint, that’s a pretty easy question if we remember Romans 3. “There is none righteous; no, not one. … There is none that doeth good, no, not one” (verses 10, 12). The Apostle continues: “Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips: Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness” (vv. 13–14). That sounds like Mrs. Dubose. Of course, if this is the line we’re going with, that Mrs. Dubose is not a good person because ultimately no one is, then that also implicates Atticus; it implicates, of course, Bob Ewell, but it also implicates Tom Robinson; and it implicates me, and you. And it implicates the Apostle himself. I’m pretty sure that was exactly the point Paul was trying to make.
Okay, so no one is righteous, but some people are more virtuous than others. Is Mrs. Dubose a virtuous person? Well, Atticus didn’t say she was virtuous, he said she was brave. Is it okay to admire some aspects of the character of someone who is otherwise not a good person? Or, to put it another way, are there character flaws that are so disqualifying that a person displaying them cannot be admired for anything? Are there character flaws that compel us to write off a person completely as unworthy of our attention? This is the question I was trying to get at regarding Cosby. The question seems appropriate in our day, since for the past decade or more a great amount of the public discussion on morality has been an all-or-nothing proposition, with two opposing sides. One side says if J.K. Rowling questions whether a trans-woman is in every way a real woman, then we should no longer read Harry Potter, and the morality on display in those books was all a lie. (By the way, have you listened to the podcast The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling. Highly recommended!) The other side says that if Target sells a onesie with a rainbow on it, you can’t shop there anymore. Either you agree with me all the way (or at least you do not overtly disagree with me) or I reject you—or, I guess “cancel” is the word to use.
Obviously, Atticus does not subscribe to this all-or-nothing approach to morality. Though he is a subject of Mrs. Dubose’s most virulent attacks, he manages to find aspects of her character admirable. How does he think through this? Well, for one thing he says that she’s sick. “Jem, she’s old and ill. You can’t hold her responsible for what she says and does. Of course, I’d rather she’d have said it to me than to either of you, but we can’t always have our ’druthers.” Is that right, that she’s not responsible for what she says? I do think there are occasions when we might be right to absolve someone of responsibility for what comes out of their mouths, depending on their mental state, due to disability or something else. Due to sickness? Probably. Should we afford Mrs. Dubose that grace? Um, maybe. I do think that if your aunt had cancer and was using cannabis and opioids for the pain and had some nasty things to say about immigrants, you might not hold it against her.
Let me suggest something else. With her words, Mrs. Dubose comes across as someone who hates the Finch family. But her actions suggest otherwise. When Jem Finch overreacts to Mrs. Dubose, so that he has to apologize to her for his behavior, she punishes him by making him visit with her every day after school. The first day Jem showed up with Scout, Mrs. Dubose greeted them by saying, “So you brought that dirty little sister of yours, did you?” So, she’s not nice to them, but she does want them around. Is that like in middle school, when the boy constantly pulls the pigtails of one particular girl? Is Mrs. Dubose just trying to get the attention of these kids? And then even though she has criticized Atticus up and down, it is Atticus that she has asked to write her will, and when the moment of her death comes, she asks for Atticus to be near her. Does she really hate Atticus, or does she just like picking at people? One day when the children stay with Mrs. Dubose later than normal, Atticus came looking for them after work. The narrator describes the scene: “Mrs. Dubose smiled at him. For the life of me I could not figure out how she could bring herself to speak to him when she seemed to hate him so.”
The fact that Mrs. Dubose, in her fight against morphine, was doing something according to her conscience, against the advice of her doctor and family, probably reminds Atticus of himself. In the novel, Atticus explains a couple times why he felt he had to take Tom Robinson’s case. In chapter 9, he tells Scout: “The main one is, if I didn’t I couldn’t hold up my head in town, I couldn’t represent this county in the legislature, I couldn’t even tell you or Jem not to do something again.” When Scout asks if Atticus has hopes of winning the case, he responds straightforwardly, “No, honey.” And then later, in the chapter about Mrs. Dubose (chapter 11), we encounter this speech:
“Scout,” said Atticus, “when summer comes you’ll have to keep your head about far worse things … it’s not fair for you and Jem, I know that, but sometimes we have to make the best of things, and the way we conduct ourselves when the chips are down—well, all I can say is, when you and Jem are grown, maybe you’ll look back on this with some compassion and some feeling that I didn’t let you down. This case, Tom Robinson’s case, is something that goes to the essence of a man’s conscience—Scout, I couldn’t go to church and worship God if I didn’t try to help that man.”
I think Atticus thought of the struggle Mrs. Dubose was going through in regard to morphine to be similar to his own struggle. It didn’t make sense to most people in town why Atticus would take that case, but it boiled down to his own conscience. Same for Mrs. Dubose. When Atticus praised the courage of Mrs. Dubose, he defined courage this way: “It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.” Atticus was talking about Mrs. Dubose, but of course that’s a description of himself.
When the children visit Mrs. Dubose, she continues to berate them on a selection of subjects, including Atticus’ reputation for being unusually kind to Black people. She uses a term that I’ve already said I won’t repeat, this time hyphenated with the word “lover.” It’s a locution that puzzles Scout to the point that she asks her father its meaning, to which he responds: “it’s hard to explain—ignorant, trashy people use it when they think somebody’s favoring Negroes over and above themselves. It’s slipped into usage with some people like ourselves, when they want a common, ugly term to label somebody.” Scout immediately asks Atticus whether he really is a lover of Black people in the way that people are accusing him of being. He answers: “I certainly am. I do my best to love everybody … I’m hard put, sometimes—baby, it’s never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn’t hurt you. So don’t let Mrs. Dubose get you down. She has enough troubles of her own.”
I think what Atticus is getting at is that Mrs. Dubose may be a racist, and she certainly says nasty, racist things, whatever the reason, but there are other aspects of her character, as well. Some are admirable, some are not. And I think Atticus means that to the extent that she says racist things, you’ve got to look at the situation in which she has grown up and lived. She was dying as an old woman in the 1930s, so she was probably born in Alabama around the time of the Civil War. Life experiences will shape someone’s character. I’ve done a chapel before about how I’m thankful for Juneteenth, because it celebrates the removal of a sin that can no longer be a temptation to me. I am not presented with the opportunity of owning someone else. I know we’ve all had the thought, if I had been born at that place at that time, would I have done the same thing as those people did? Such a thought experiment is right in line with Matthew 7:1. If you were a member of the Nazi party in Germany in, say 1937, that does not necessarily tell me all about your character. I don’t know whether Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a member of the party, but I do know that he worked for the Nazi government—but that emphatically does not tell me everything I need to know about him, not by a long shot. But, if you’re a member of the Nazi party in America in 2024, well, that still may not tell me everything I need to know, but it is a more significant fact about you than if you lived in the 1930s in Germany. Atticus stood (somewhat) opposed to his society when it comes to the subject of race, so he gets points for that. Mrs. Dubose did not stand opposed to her society on that score, but she was unusual in her courage. Atticus was willing to acknowledge the fact.
So, do we need to approach the morality of people with an all-or-nothing attitude, or should we advocate a more nuanced approach? I am reminded of a passage from Mere Christianity, where C. S. Lewis writes:
Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man’s choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. Most of the man’s psychological make-up is probably due to his body: when his body dies that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or the worst out of his material, will stand naked. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was. There will be surprises.
This passage fits so well with chapter 11 of To Kill a Mockingbird that I could almost think Harper Lee wrote the character of Mrs. Dubose after reading Mere Christianity.
The movie To Kill a Mockingbird ends with narration by Jean Louis reflecting on Atticus’ advice that to understand a person, you’ve got to walk around in their shoes for a bit. In the novel, this advice appears early. “First of all,” Atticus said to his young daughter, “if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” That advice assumes that morality is not all-or-nothing. As the apostle said, there is none righteous, no, not one. Judge not, our Lord said. Climb into someone's skin and walk around in it. I certainly want people to do that for me before judging me, and we're all fortunate that Jesus did that exact thing.
A few months ago I gave a chapel presentation on To Kill a Mockingbird, just for the fun of it. Actually, I gave two presentations. They have just now been made available online, which is why I'm mentioning them.
In this first presentation, I talk about whether we should take seriously Atticus Finch as a moral person. I say in the presentation that I have read no critical engagement with the novel or movie, except for the movie review by Roger Ebert (here). But that is no longer true. After my first presentation on the novel/film, someone handed me a copy of Joseph Crespino's 2018 book on Atticus Finch, which I read during the week between the two chapel presentations. In the text of my first speech that I present below, there are adaptations based on my reading of Crespino.
One of the signicant changes between the chapel talk and the text below is what I learned about the evaluation of Atticus Finch by Martin Luther King Jr. (But this change apparently — according to my notes below — came about through my colleague Brad McKinnon rather than through reading Crespino.) I am glad to say that my intuition about what King probably thought about Atticus was basically confirmed.
Here's the chapel talk (delivered in perhaps September 2024).
And here's the revised text of this speech.
If you want to get to know Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose of Maycomb, Alabama, you are better off reading To Kill a Mockingbird than watching the movie. In the film, Mrs. Dubose, played by Ruth White, barely appears on screen; we see just a brief glimpse of her sitting on her front porch, reprimanding Scout and Jem as they walk down the street, along with Dill. They are on their way to meet Atticus as he is coming home from work. As she walks by, Scout hollers, “Hey, Mrs. Dubose.” To which Mrs. Dubose immediately replies, “Don’t you say ‘hey’ to me, you ugly girl. You say, ‘Good afternoon, Mrs. Dubose.’” Atticus then stops to talk to Mrs. Dubose, saying that her flowers are the grandest in the county and that she herself looks like a picture. As Scout whispers to Dill behind Atticus’ back, “he don’t say a picture of what.” In the movie, Mrs. Dubose appears as a cantankerous old woman who doesn’t like kids, but her brief appearance merely adds a little color to this fictional Alabama town.*
*Further scenes with Mrs. Dubose were filmed but did not make the final cut of the film; see Crespino, Atticus Finch, 138–39.
In the novel, it is the same, only more so. The scene I have just described from the movie corresponds nearly word-for-word to material in the novel, but the novel allots to Mrs. Dubose most of an entire chapter, and at the end of this chapter, Atticus offers a startling evaluation of her life: “She was the bravest person I ever knew.” That judgment from Atticus stands in some tension with the depiction of Mrs. Dubose in the novel, in which she comes across mostly as mean, hateful, and racist—not least, mean and hateful toward the Finch family, especially Atticus himself. So what can Atticus mean by paying her such a high compliment?
In my view, the opinion of Atticus Finch is worth pondering not only because he is the moral touchstone in To Kill a Mockingbird, but because the way his character is drawn in the novel has proven so moving and compelling to so many readers. Just go to the novel’s Wikipedia page and read about how many people have decided to study law so that they could do good in their communities like Atticus Finch. To Kill a Mockingbird is one of those novels that has instilled within readers hope and determination to make the world a better place, and Atticus is probably the driving force behind this hope and determination. His judgments have weight in the fictional world of the text and even more so in the real world outside the text. What I’m trying to say is that To Kill a Mockingbird is a morally serious novel, and Atticus is a morally serious character. If this evaluation is correct, then reflecting on Atticus Finch should help us to grow in our morality. Even if we think the novel is not all it’s cracked up to be, still it has been influential on the ethical thinking of a great number of Americans, making it a worthy conversation partner for our own ethical reasoning.
Let me talk about the book and the movie.* And I will admit that I have read no reviews of either, except for one movie review, which I will mention in a moment, so I am basing my comments on my own reading and reviewing, not on what others have said—though I’m sure I could learn a lot from listening to others.
*On the differences between the film and novel, especially in their depictions of Atticus, see Crespino, Atticus Finch, 129, 136–39, 144–48. “Harper Lee adored the movie” (Crespino, 148).
I read the book first in my early twenties, I guess, so about 20-25 years ago, and then I read it a second time just a few months ago. When I read it the first time, I was astonished and captivated. I felt it clearly deserved its reputation as perhaps the greatest American novel of the twentieth century. I still feel that way, although I am somewhat less captivated than I once was. That may be because of who I am now that I am in my mid-40s and have taught academic courses for nearly twenty years and have been an active and publishing scholar for most of that time. Maybe I have so trained myself to read critically that I’m less susceptible to the charms of fiction, less willing to be captivated. If that’s the case, it bums me out a little. Another reason I was less captivated may have been simply that it was my second time through. Probably the biggest reason, though, is that I have kids; I don’t have the luxury at this stage of my life to get lost in a make-believe world—there are things to do, kids that demand attention.
But there’s another reason I want to mention that may have prevented me from being so captivated by the novel: I am more aware now of our nation’s history and of our current moment, more conscious of the history of racism and the complexities involved. I read the novel wondering what different groups in the 21st century would think about it, wondering about the representation of race issues in 1930s Alabama by a white female author, wondering to what extent these were credible depictions of human beings, wondering whether the actions of any of them are worthy of admiration. In short, I was wondering whether people today find the novel problematic, and, if so, whether they are right to make such a judgment. I do find it difficult to think through how we ought to judge people from another time and place. And judging someone like Atticus Finch is difficult partly because, well, he’s a fictional character in a fictional town set in the 1930s but created in the 1960s and now being discussed in the 2020s. Nuance is key; no hot takes.
Not everyone thinks the novel deserves its reputation. An example is Roger Ebert, the revered movie critic who passed away in 2013. Now whenever you want help thinking about a movie made in the last decades of the twentieth century or the first decade of the 21st, you should check out what Roger Ebert has to say about it. Of course, he’s only offering his opinion, but I find his criticisms almost always helpful. He himself is a morally serious critic, highly intelligent and thoughtful. When the film To Kill a Mockingbird was released in 1962, he was not yet regularly publishing movie reviews, but apparently there was a re-release of the movie in 2001, because the review you can find at his website carries that date. He did not much care for the film—he gave it 2 ½ stars out of four—and he seems to have liked the novel only slightly more.
In his movie review, he says about the novel: “It is a beautifully-written book, but it should be used not as a record of how things are, or were, but of how we once liked to think of them.” I find that curious. Roger Ebert read To Kill a Mockingbird and discerned that the novel was about how we once liked to think about things. I find this difficult. I want to take Ebert seriously but I seriously do not understand what he is getting at. Does he really think that anyone would watch that movie or read that book and exclaim, “Ah, the good old days!” It’s such a preposterous idea that I feel I must be misunderstanding Ebert’s criticism. The first line of his movie review says that the film preserves “hopes and sentiments from a kinder, gentler, more naive America.” Does he mean the 1930s or the 1960s? It hardly matters. I cannot fathom an interpretation of the movie or the novel such that the society depicted is kinder and gentler.
That this is what Ebert means to say is suggested by the conclusion of his review, when he depicts the wonderful scene in which a mob gathers at the courthouse to attempt a lynching, only to be met by Atticus and, eventually, Atticus’ children, who succeed in making the crowd ashamed of the actions they had gathered to perform. Ebert says—and these are the final words of his review—“Could a child turn away a lynch mob at that time, in that place? Isn’t it nice to think so.” Look, I also wonder about how credible that scene is. And Ebert is right: I would like to think that a child could turn away a lynch mob.* But that one scene does not define the entire movie, certainly not the entire novel. I think I could defend the credibility of the scene, but let us say that the scene is wishful thinking on the part of Harper Lee. Nevertheless, it is nonsense to say that the novel as a whole is wishful thinking on the part of Harper Lee, as if she were engaging in some sort of Lost Cause narrative, as if the point of the novel were to make readers nostalgic for the 1930s. I say such a reading is nonsense. The entire novel is a lament about the nature of the society in which those children were being raised, a lament about the roles assigned to different people in that society, and how hard it is, and mostly hopeless, to stand against the roles assigned to you. Atticus Finch stood apart from his assigned role—maybe not so far apart from it as he should have, but somewhat apart from it—and he went in to his fight against society’s rules knowing that he would lose, and he did lose, and he fought anyway, explicitly hoping to provide a good example to others.
*Crespino, Atticus Finch, 118–19, calls the scene “an absurdity,” but then he relates the idea of a child facing down a lynch mob to what was happening in the late 1950s with Black children integrating schools despite the white mobs screaming at them.
But how noble is Atticus?* If you told Harper Lee that Atticus was not in fact the hero that readers and viewers have made him out to be, she’d probably respond by saying that if Atticus weren’t a fictional character, he’d be the first one to agree with your assessment. He didn’t think of himself as a hero. If you were able to walk onto that front porch in Maycomb and sit down on the swing next to Atticus, and you told him that you thought he could be doing more for justice in his town, how do you think he’d respond? I imagine he would say, “I’m confident that you’re correct. Tell me what you have in mind.” And then after patiently listening to you, he would respond, “Those are some marvelous ideas. Do you really think my implementing those policies would result in a more just community? I wonder.”
*For a real-life example, consider Reverend Ray Whatley, one-time minister of the Methodist church in Monroeville which claimed the Lee family as members. “Yet it must be said, though Harper Lee herself never seemed to recognize it, that Ray Whatley was a genuine, true-life example of the heroic figure that Mockingbird would eventually evoke to such everlasting fame: the principled white southerner who made a public stand for racial decency and fairness and suffered because of it” (Crespino, Atticus Finch, 68, and see further, pp. 64–69).
Instead of disparaging someone for taking a stand that we think not bold enough even though we ourselves have rarely taken so bold a stand, and even though he himself took his stand upon threat to his personal safety and that of his children, perhaps we should reflect on the different ways in which people can contribute to justice. Would that we had more competent criminal defense attorneys who dealt honestly and courageously with their clients even when they knew they’d lose their case.
Now let me say that some of the criticisms Ebert raises are criticisms that I share, and that bothered me before reading Ebert’s review—not only the scene where Scout turns away a lynch mob, but even more the scene in which Atticus learns about the death of Tom Robinson. These are the segments that strike me as perhaps incredible. I just don’t think they add up to the total case that Ebert is promoting, that the movie and the novel are a product of wishful thinking; it’s not a wish, it’s a lament. And, again, the reason that it’s Ebert that I am critiquing is that I think he’s worth engaging; I value his writing and opinions. Also, his is the only review of To Kill a Mockingbird I’ve read. But, anyway, I have a criticism of the novel and movie that Ebert does not mention: all the Black characters are noble. There’s little nuance to their characterization, making them somewhat unbelievable. But in terms of moral seriousness, such a depiction of Black characters in a novel in 1960 is probably not as significant of a fault as it would be at the quarter mark of the 21st century. (Compare Moberly's take on Von Rad's take on Genesis 12:3 in the context of Nazi Germany.)
I can’t help but wonder whether an 18-year-old Ebert reading To Kill a Mockingbird in the year of its publication would have considered it bold and courageous and a revelation, a worthy recipient of that year’s Pulitzer, and a helpful contribution to justice—whereas a sixty-year-old Ebert, reading the novel and seeing the movie forty years after their initial release considers them inadequate. As the German New Testament scholar Walter Bauer wrote in 1934 (p. xxii), “What constitutes ‘truth’ in one generation can be out of date in the next.”
It was different for civil rights leaders in the 1960s, contemporary with the novel’s release. They viewed Atticus Finch as an ally. At least, Martin Luther King Jr. did. He mentions Atticus in his 1964 book Why We Can’t Wait. Specifically he mentions that scene that both Ebert and I find dubious, but King offers no criticism of the scene but holds it up as an example of what he himself is striving to represent.
Atticus Finch, a white southern lawyer, confronts a group of his neighbors who have become a lynch-crazed mob, seeking the life of his Negro client. Finch, armed with nothing more lethal than a lawbook, disperses the mob with the force of his moral courage, aided by his small daughter, who, innocently calling the would-be lynchers by name, reminds them that they are individual men, not a pack of beasts.
To the Negro in 1963, as to Atticus Finch, it had become obvious that nonviolence could symbolize the gold badge of heroism rather than the white feather of cowardice. In addition to being consistent with his religious precepts, it served his need to act on his own for his own liberation. It enabled him to transmute hatred into constructive energy, to seek not only to free himself but to free his oppressor from his sins. This transformation, in turn, had the marvelous effect of changing the face of the enemy. The enemy the Negro faced became not the individual who had oppressed him but the evil system which permitted that individual to do so.
The argument that nonviolence is a coward’s refuge lost its force as its heroic and often perilous acts uttered their wordless but convincing rebuttal in Montgomery, in the sit-ins, on the freedom rides, and finally in Birmingham.*
*Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (1964; repr.: New York: Signet, 2000), 24. This passage appears in ch. 2, “The Sword that Heals,” §3. I appreciate my colleague, Brad McKinnon, for directing me to this passage.
At the end of that excerpt, King transitions from Atticus to his own movement in 1960s Alabama. King presents Atticus as a model. But, it should be noted, that King presents Atticus as a model not in terms of race relations but in terms of nonviolence. Did MLK think that Atticus provided a good model for other white southerners with regard to race issues? He did not say.
Neither did Malcolm X, as far as I know, but I feel pretty confident that he would have felt that way—or, at least, he would have near the end of his life. If you’ve read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, you may remember the white college girl who asks Malcolm X what she can do to help his movement. This scene is in chapter 15, and it’s also briefly depicted in Spike Lee’s film with Denzel Washington. To this white girl’s question, Malcolm X replies, “Nothing.” It’s an amazing encounter, one that Malcolm X would come to regret. In chapter 19, Malcolm X mentions this white girl again, and how he wished he could talk to her and tell her how, in fact, she could help his movement, by working among other white people to stamp out racist attitudes.
So let me speculate. What if Harper Lee had been that white college girl (of course, she was not), and what if Malcolm X agreed to have a conversation with her, in which she revealed that she was a budding novelist. What would he have advised her to do? Mightn’t he have told her to write a novel in which the main character is a white man in Alabama who stands opposed to the racist attitudes surrounding him. This man leads no demonstrations, would probably say that he’s too old for marches, but he lives a simple and quiet life and when the issue of race comes to him, he takes a firm stand on the side of justice, and he raises his children to do the same. It seems to me that such may well have been the advice from Malcolm X, or from MLK. And it seems to me that Harper Lee did just that, in such a brilliant way that her admittedly imperfect novel has inspired a couple of generations to live more justly and at peace with one another.*
*For an account of Harper Lee’s ambitions with Mockingbird along the lines that Malcolm X suggested for the white college girl (but without mentioning Malcolm X), see Crespino, Atticus Finch, 112–13.
I have spent all my time defending a reading of To Kill a Mockingbird and the moral seriousness of the novel and of Atticus Finch that I don’t have time to talk about Mrs. Dubose. Next time. More troublesome, I have not mentioned Scripture at all, so let me end today by reminding you of Matthew 7:1, where our Lord said, “Judge not, lest you be judged.” I’m not sure how far to press these words of Jesus, in what all situations they apply, but I do know that he was warning us from measuring people’s worth, their virtue, with a stricter standard than we apply to ourselves. It should probably be just the reverse. Or as Atticus told Scout early in the novel (near the end of ch. 3), “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
So, have you heard the one about how the Hebrew name for God, often spelled in English YHWH, is related to the sound of breathing? Google it and you'll find people talking about it, both affirming it and critically examining it.
I myself am not sure what to make of this idea.
Well, let me clarify. I don't take the idea seriously as an accurate explanation for the origins of the name YHWH. There is nothing in the Bible or, as far as I can tell, Second Temple Judaism reflecting this idea relating God's name to breathing. There were, in fact, ancient ideas explaining the meaning of God's name, but not in relation to breathing. The Bible itself has an explanation, in the revelation to Moses at the bush, when the Name is explained in reference to the verb "to be" (hayah in Hebrew). And I think most scholars would accept that there is indeed a relationship between the name YHWH and the Hebrew verb for being. Nothing about breathing here. (Of course, you can't "be" if you don't breathe, but anyway.)
But I am curious about the origins of this connection to breathing. Of course, I am quite certain that most people who repeat this explanation for God's name have done no research on the matter. I just heard this idea promoted in church a couple weeks ago, and I think the guy who said it was telling us that this is an ancient idea, the correct explanation for the origins of the name—which is clearly wrong. But, still, where did the idea come from? Who first said it?
I don't know, and I'm not going to do any research right now on it, other than googling. That has led me to a Nooma video by Rob Bell, called "Breathe," published I think in 2005 or so. And Bell does indeed mention this idea at about the 4:00 mark, and he attributes it to "the ancient rabbis."
Is Bell right? I don't know. As my teachers at Hebrew Union often said, rabbinic literature is a vast corpus with many viewpoints. I could imagine something in rabbinic literature, or lets say, the post-rabbinic Jewish mystical tradition, connecting the Tetragrammaton to breath—not necessarily as an attempt at explaining the origins of the Name, but as an attempt to give (further) mystical meaning to the Name. I could imagine this idea being mentioned by more recent rabbis, and thence entering Christian discourse. But this is all just guesswork. I have only ever actually encountered the idea in very recent Christian popular speakers.
My book The Apocrypha through History (OUP) will be published in America in July, and Amazon now has it available for pre-order. Don't look at the price, just buy it. Really, wouldn't you be willing to pay any price for a book with the subtitle The Canonical Reception of the Deuterocanonical Literature? Wow, that sounds exciting!
Near the end of the first chapter of her autobiography, St. Térèse of Lisieux recounts a dream she had when she was young, in which a couple of devils played near her home until they saw here and ran in fright. She comments on the significance of the dream: "I do not suppose this dream was very extraordinary, but I do think God made use of it to show me that a soul in the state of grace need never be afraid of the devil, who is such a coward that even the gaze of a child will frighten him away" (this edition, p. 13).
I thought of this passage when reading the blurb by John Mark Hicks for my forthcoming book Satan and His Friends (ACU Press), which is now available for pre-order from Amazon. I like very much how the cover turned out, and the price is nice at $22.99.
Here is John Mark's blurb, copied from Amazon.
Drawing on the ancient Near Eastern context, Second Temple Judaism, and early Christian interpretation, Edmon L. Gallagher unveils how disputed and uncertain many widely accepted views are. Gallagher walks us through the texts about the unseen realm and provides an account that is more restrained in his conclusions in contrast to what one might often hear from Christian pulpits. Reading this book is a healthy exercise in exegetical and theological caution. I appreciate where he ultimately lands—God is sovereign, Christ is victor, and we do not fear the unseen forces. I recommend the book as an alternative perspective to the dominant popular conceptions of the heavenly realm.
I appreciate John Mark for reading my book and supplying the recommendation.
As the title of this post hints, this book on Satan is not actually my next book scheduled for publication, though it is my next book scheduled for publication in America. A few months before this Satan book is published in July, my Apocrypha book will be published by OUP in the UK, and that book is available for pre-order on the UK Amazon. But it's not yet available for pre-order on the American version of Amazon, though there is a page dedicated to it that provides information and a cover image. It will be published in America a week after my Satan book. When I notice it available for pre-order on Amazon.com, I'll post about it.
I've been doing my daily Bible reading from the King James Version, I guess partly because I feel like I'm finally smart enough to understand most the words. So today I read Mark 4, which at the end contains an account of Jesus stilling the storm. This surprising power from their master baffles the disciples, who then ask, "What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?"
I stopped at that "What manner of man is this," because those precise words were familiar to me, but not from the Bible. But let me explain why reading from the KJV was important to this insight. The Bible I carry with me to church is the NRSV, which says here, "Who then is this?"—a very close approximation of the Greek. It's the same in the ESV, and the NET Bible, which are the only ones I have checked. So until today I didn't realize that the same question was expressed in the most popular English version ever with the words "what manner of man is this?"
When I read those words at the end of Mark 4, I immediately thought of a man locked in a castle in Transylvania, looking out his window to see his captor crawl out of a lower window and down the castle wall in lizard fashion. I'll let Jonathan Harker explain.
What I saw was the Count’s head coming out from the window. I did not see the face, but I knew the man by the neck and the movement of his back and arms. In any case I could not mistake the hands which I had had so many opportunities of studying. I was at first interested and somewhat amused, for it is wonderful how small a matter will interest and amuse a man when he is a prisoner. But my very feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings. At first I could not believe my eyes. I thought it was some trick of the moonlight, some weird effect of shadow; but I kept looking, and it could be no delusion. I saw the fingers and toes grasp the corners of the stones, worn clear of the mortar by the stress of years, and by thus using every projection and inequality move downwards with considerable speed, just as a lizard moves along a wall.
What manner of man is this, or what manner of creature is it in the semblance of man? I feel the dread of this horrible place overpowering me; I am in fear—in awful fear—and there is no escape for me; I am encompassed about with terrors that I dare not think of....
This is the end of Jonathan Harker's diary entry from May 12, in chapter 3 of the novel Dracula. It is at this moment that Harker realizes that the being who has confined him in the castle is no ordinary man. Well, there have been previous hints, but this crawling along the wall—though Harker himself goes on to accomplish the same feat, twice—provides the strongest clue.
I don't know if Bram Stoker had the disciples' bewildered query in mind when he wrote of Harker's own shock, but I can imagine that the phrasing stuck in his head and he decided to reuse it in a very different context. Perhaps I am underselling how ordinary the expression is, particularly 130 years ago, but it does strike me as plausible that Harker's expression has been influenced somehow by the Bible reading that Stoker has experienced in church.
Just about every October, I listen to this reading of Stoker's wonderful novel (I've listened to it 10-12 times), so there has been plenty of opportunity for phrasings from the novel to stick in my mind. You can hear the reading of the passage quoted above in this video, starting at about 20:30. This past October I gave a chapel speech on the novel (available at FaceBook).
I wonder if this is the first time that someone reading the Bible has thought, that sounds like Dracula, rather than the reverse.
