Content area
Full Text
Swinging the Pendulum: Mark Twain and Religion Mark Twain. What Is Man ?And Other Irreverent Essays. Ed. and introd. S. T.Joshi. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009. 229 pages. Paperback. $16.95.
The pendulum continually swings on Mark Twain. The publication in die early 1960s of his later, dark writings forced a re-examination of America's jovial humorist, and die pendulum may have swung too far as critics focused on his extreme bitterness, to the exclusion of his humor and optimism. In the last few years, several book-length studies have re-examined his religious beliefs and writings: William E. Phipps's Mark Twain's Religion (Macon, GA: Mercer UP, 2003); Joe B. Fulton's The Reverend Mark Twain (Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2006), and Harold K Bush, Jr.'s Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2007) . The pendulum swings to posit a man who, while questioning the orthodox religion of his time, actually had a lifelong interest in and commitment to Christianity. In a direct challenge to that pendulum swing, especially to the pro-Christian position taken by Harold Bush, S. T Joshi offers Twain's own words as a counter-argument. The well-chosen works in What Is Man? And Other Irreverent Essays, as well as Joshi 's brief but balanced introduction, make a strong case to reclaim Mark Twain as one of the pre-eminent religious skeptics of his time.
Joshi 's previous books include Atheism: A Reader, The Agnostic Reader, and God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong, and his website calls him "a prominent atheist," so the reader might expect a virulent attack in Joshi's introduction. Instead, his tone is reasoned and well-supported, tracing Twain's religious background, his evolving religious experience, and his lifelong skepticism. He focuses especially on Twain's reading in the 1880s and 1890s, specifically W.E. H. Lecky, Herbert Spencer, and Leslie Stephen - although he might profitably have cited Robert Ingersoll, the leading freethinker of the nineteenth century, gready admired by Twain for his oratory and his anti-religious writing, and more influential on Twain's religious skepticism than many Twain critics have yet acknowledged. Joshi traces Twain's skepticism to two sources: "his acceptance of the theory of evolution and his absorption of some of the central theses of the...