Recently The Witherspoon Institute Public Discourse website featured a post by Gerald R. McDermott in the “Literature, Religion and the Public Square” subsection on “‘A Rather Antinomian Christianity’: John Updike’s Religion.” 

“How could a man be so religious and yet be so enthusiastic for infidelity?” McDermott asks.

“The answer seems to lie in his religion. It was a strange sort of Christianity that rejected the structures of traditional faith, choosing divine comfort while rejecting divine commands. In other words, it was gospel without law, grace without repentance, the love of God without the holiness of God.

“To be sure, Updike held on to parts of historic Christian belief. He rejected materialism as a failure to make sense of emotion and conscience, and defended Christ’s divinity against his first wife’s Unitarianism. At the same time, he took from Kierkegaard the idea that Christian faith is subjective, not a conclusion from rationality or objectivity. So he insisted that resurrection from the dead is ‘unthinkable’ to the modern mind, that God can be known only as ‘the self projected onto reality’ by our natural optimism, and that the closer one moves toward Christianity the more it disappears, ‘as a fog solidly opaque in the distance thins to transparency when you walk into it.’

“Updike’s Christianity was a religion of self-affirmation. His greatest fears were of death and its threat of nothingness. But religion, he wrote, ‘enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.'”