Speaking of the Fantastic III. Darrell Schweitzer
of evolution and subscribes to the scientific understanding of reality. I guess the book is questioning the assumption that embracing the Christian worldview—or any other variety of supernaturalism—is some sort of accomplishment or end state. Something like the opposite, I’d say. There are always more questions to ask.
You mentioned the Universal horror movies that are satirized at one point in The Last Witchfinder. I always find it strange how in, say, the Mummy series—most of which starred Lon Chaney, Jr.—when we get to the end of the picture, the characters don’t seem to have noticed that the entire fabric of consensus reality has evidently changed completely. Everything that modern humans assume about Nature being driven by rational laws, without a supernatural substratum, has just been proven utterly wrong—and yet the characters go right back to living their mundane little lives, as if the paradigm shift hadn’t occurred. It’s a very bizarre convention. Because if you really had a mummy running around in Louisiana or New England that would throw the entire Enlightenment argument about how the world works out the window. The Universal monster movies always beg the question of why the heroes and heroines don’t have nervous breakdowns at the end.
True, in the universe of these movies, the vampires and werewolves and mummies operate by laws, too, and so you have Edward Van Sloan knowing exactly what it takes to vaporize a vampire, or Turhan Bey knowing exactly how many tana leaves it takes to get Kharis’s heart beating, and how many it takes to get him shuffling around and abducting people. But these aren’t remotely scientific principles. There’s no explanatory mechanism involved. They’re magic. Maybe someday I’ll write a mummy novel in which the characters think through the full epistemological implications of their adventures, and end up going insane.
Q: I suspect that the serious answer to this is that most Americans today still live in the witch-universe. The Enlightenment has not penetrated below the level of the intellectuals. Even to this day most people believe in psychics, UFOs, astrology, ghosts, and such. They probably do believe in forms of magic. Certainly a lot of them do. Then there is the Christian Fundamentalist side of the population, which is enormous, who would probably be afraid to read your book because it would evoke the Devil. So I think the real answer is they’re still in the witch-universe.
Morrow: Good point. I suppose The Last Witchfinder is not about the death of the witch-universe per se. It’s about the death of the witch-universe as a political force that made courts and magistrates behave in abominable ways toward people we would now regard as innocent of any demonic compact. Of course, these victims weren’t necessarily people of tremendous virtue. They weren’t John Proctor in The Crucible. They weren’t pure of heart. They were the outcasts. They were the people upon whom this sort of persecution could be performed with impunity.
I guess I’m saying that, yes, as individual private selves, we all want to live in a supernatural universe. It’s instinctive, and we all have a right to our private fantasies. Nevertheless, the reining intellectual consensus, thank God, is that promiscuous supernaturalism is not the case, and we have no business putting gods and demons at the center of our political institutions. It’s been remarked that the most important word in the United States Constitution is the one that isn’t there—the word “God.” I think that’s genuine progress.
Now, I know that our postmodern brethren have problematized, I think legitimately, the notion of progress. You always have to ask, “Progress for whom?” But I think even the Bush Administration recognizes that fundamentalism is a terrible idea. I am continually struck by the irony of Bush and his henchmen being perfectly happy to allow a low-grade, smiley-face, feel-good theocracy emerge on these shores, even as they pursue the opposite agenda in Iraq. I think of the recent Supreme Court decision that taxpayers cannot sue the government for having recently broken down the wall between church and state through so-called faith-based grants. I think of Bush going on record as saying he thinks Intelligent Design is commensurate with Darwinism and should also be taught in public school classroom. I think of his canceling stem-cell research for reasons that ultimately trace to his supposed personal relationship with Jesus.
At the same time, we have the Bushies realizing that what they want in the Middle East is a process we would have to call secular and rational. Saddam Hussein constantly used religion to manipulate his bleeding country, even though it was technically not a theocracy, and now the great fear—great and also justified—is that this same theocratic impulse will reemerge in Iraq in a different form, and that society will become every bit as much of a nightmare as it was before we invaded. Certainly for women Iraq threatens to become a nightmare. The Koran has very little in it that’s good news for women.
The Bushies would never admit this paradox. They would never come out and say they’re contradicting themselves. But what they’re hoping for is some kind of neo-Enlightenment, secular democracy in Iraq—a regime that religious skeptics like Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson would recognize and salute for its lack of a supernatural argument at its center.
Q: Despite which, in the United States, there was just a few years ago an episode of witchcraft hysteria in a day-school, in which they managed to get all the children to testify about Satanic ritual abuse. Remember that? It was Salem all over again, with neighbor suspecting neighbor, and people being assumed guilty until proven innocent and guilty by association. It was exactly the same phenomenon.
Morrow: That sort of hysteria, when it crops us, is always very disturbing. But at least today—here in the post-Enlightenment West—today we pretty much accept the idea that our courts and other legal institutions have an essentially secular mission. The Devil doesn’t routinely appear before judges and juries anymore. Our justice system is not shot through with supernatural assumptions about the world, or even shot through with theism, and so the fantasies of children as no longer admissible, as they were in Salem. Yes, you do have to put your hand on the Bible when you testify in court, but after that something resembling reason kicks in.
So while that Satanic ritual abuse phenomenon was horrible, it was also short-lived, because at a certain point it became clear that the accusers didn’t have cases, that they had run out of evidence, and that the children themselves were being manipulated. Anyone who knows even a little bit of child psychology would recognize that these kids were telling their supposed deliverers what they wanted to hear. The motto of the people who thought they were acting in the alleged victims’ interest was “Believe the children.” Well, it turns out that what they really meant was “Believe the children unless the children say they haven’t been abused.”
It was a terrible abuse of the trust that a child naturally has in adults, ironically in the name of protecting children. I think virtually no evidence emerged that ritual Satanic abuse was actually occurring. But, yes, it was hysteria, and one can certainly psychologize about it, as one can do about Salem. My novel is about the fact that at least we’ve gotten rid of fantasy, private delusion, and religious mania as admissible evidence. It suggests that, in certain public contexts, theism is a luxury we simply can’t afford.
Q: Then again, you’ve written about God being dead and found floating in the Atlantic. I can’t imagine this has been published in, say, an Arabic translation.
Morrow: [Laughs] Not likely. But I have to say I get quite a bit of fan e-mail from believers, and that’s very gratifying to me. I think I value those letters even more than the ones I get from militant atheists, who cheer me on and say, “Go for it, Jim. Give the carcass of organized religion another kick in the groin.”
I’m pleased to find there are a lot of readers out there, people of faith, who enjoy my novels as theological speculation, as thought experiments that satirize the misuses of religion. You can be part of an institution and still perceive its dark side. You don’t have to resign from an institution to critique it. You might actually be doing the world more good by staying within your church and trying to reform it. In that regard, I may be in a worse position to do good than believers. I’m not actively trying to change the homophobia that seems rampant in so many evangelical churches, but there are people inside those evangelical churches, I am sure, who are making arguments against that kind of bigotry.
Q: At what point in your life did you abandon God and discover his corpse was floating in the Atlantic?
Morrow: