Casting the First Stone

Handmaid Fails, 2/3

The author of that book used Islam, not Christianity, as a model for her imaginary world.  This is obviously true, as it resembles Islamic culture and law, and not Christian.

This is one example on Twitter of men explaining the plot of The Handmaid's Tale to its author, Margaret Atwood, in this case as a response to her reposting of a political cartoon.  There is some comedy around this, of course, but also some tragedy beneath it: misunderstandings that point to the moral and therefore political vulnerability of the United States. 

This characterization of The Handmaid's Tale exemplifies impulsive mistakes many of us tend to make on the internet, and helps reveal the general shape of the political crisis Americans now face.  We are about to cast the first stone.

The Handmaid's Tale is about Christianity, or in particular about a plot by a group of Christian Reconstructionists to take power in the United States, and the regime they create.  It was written in the context of the evangelical revival in the United States during the 1980s, and has some roots in the author's family history in Puritanism.  Throughout the story, the Bible is used to justify the Christian Reconstructionist regime, its crusade against what had been the United States of America, and its coercive policy of treating women as reproductive vessels. In this post as well as in the prior one and a succeeding one, I want to make the case that The Handmaid’s Tale is a novel we need to read.

It is funny, of course, that the person who posted the message to Atwood about the inspiration of The Handmaid's Tale did not know that "author of the book" was the person with whom he was communicating.  It is funny that he felt qualified to say what the book was about without having read it.  Almost everyone on Twitter makes mistakes from time to time, though.  The medium encourages it and rewards it. The point is not to pick on any one tweet. 

It is useful, however, to consider the underlying desire to deflect responsibility from Christians to Muslims that underlies the particular error.  This impulse to cast the first stone is so strong that it is applied to a fictional regime in an unread book. 

And I think that impulse is one that many Americans would share.  There cannot possibly be anything wrong with Christians -- many American Christians want to believe -- that might lead to a repressive regime.  Nothing in Christian "culture and law" could possibly lead in that direction. 

Ironically, in the story itself, in the plot of The Handmaid’s Tale, the Christian Reconstructionists begin their crusade against America by falsely claiming that they are heading off Muslim terrorists. They cast the first stone by pointing at someone else.

Jesus said: He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.  (John 8:7) The context, by the way, is a woman accused of adultery -- the sort of person forced to be a Handmaid in the story. One might say that Atwood in The Handmaid's Tale recalls the Christian duty to be self-critical and to thereby avoid violent abuses of power in the name of faith.  It shows where the stone-casting leads. A novel can help us to face and therefore to see ourselves, as in Corinthians 13:12: For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

The Handmaid's Tale is a book about American possibilities.  And so the vague notion of an "imaginary world" can draw us away from the novel’s very specific setting.  The Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale is not a purely invented world based on the law and culture of one religion or another.  It is a well-drawn post-America.  It describes one way that the United States can come to an end.  Gilead is a Christian Reconstructionist regime that controls some but not all of the territory of the United States.  The regime is at war on its borders and inside its own territory with other former Americans. 

To be sure, the plot is fictional, but the setting is the territory of the United States, and the logic is worth considering, especially right at the present moment. 

We have the largest defense budget and the most powerful armed forces in the world.  The elected president has said that our military should be used against "the enemy within," against Americans who disagree with him.  His nominee for secretary of defense is not only accused of sexual assault but also a stone-casting Christian Reconstructionist who believes that his own country needs a crusade against itself, because God so wills it.  

An attempt at such a self-crusade would indeed risk breaking the country apart.  We are a few cast stones away from Gilead, a repressive and failing regime.  In the story, Gilead not only dooms the United States, and opens the world to an order in which Americans no longer exist. We can all be former Americans, and quite soon, if we are not careful. This is the scenario I will consider in the next post.