Disposable Lit Reviews

Random House, 2006
332 pp.
ISBN 1-4000-6172-5

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In response to my review of Daniel Jeffreys’s America’s Back Porch (short version, in case you don’t feel like clicking through: I hated hated hated it), J.C. Hallman offered me a copy of his own book, which overlaps in subject matter but not in treatment. Both books deal with the religious or religiously-flavored subcultures of American society. But where Jeffreys took the exercise as an occasion to prove (or merely assert, rather) his own axiomatic superiority to his subjects, Hallman approaches the “religious fringe” of America (a subtitle I can only assume was added by editorial fiat) with something sorely lacking in that other book: Respect, and a good faith attempt to understand.

Hallman takes as his guide the life and thinking of William James, the philosopher of a century ago whose work sparked the entire idea of comparative religious study (and whose The Varieties of Religious Experience, I’m ashamed to say, I had not read until I was preparing to read Hallman’s book). In fact, half of The Devil is a Gentleman is a biography of James, charting the intellectual development of the man whose underappreciated religious philosophy of Pragmatism could be summed up thusly: If a theology serves its purpose, if it functions in the lives of its adherents as it would if it were true, then it can be considered true. If a belief blesses and enriches the lives of its adherents, then it is as true as it needs to be. With James as his patron saint and touchstone, then, Hallman sets off to examine the community and culture surrounding a select few belief systems in America, to understand and experience them uncritically so that he can best see how “true” they are in a Jamesian sense.

The episodes of Hallman’s exploration, separated by sections of biographical material on James, are chunkier than a survey or attempted comprehensive overview. Hallman spends time with an almost-solitary Druid practitioner, attends Unarius meetings, and submits himself to the entry examinations of Scientology. He prays with Satanists, commiserates with organized Atheists, and feels the burn with Christian wrestlers. He breathes in the empty silence that was once the home of the Heaven’s Gate cult, and helps birth dogs on retreat at a monastery that breeds them for its bread and butter. All along the way, the imagined spectre of James accompanies him and sets the terms by which he examines each faith (or faithlessness): How do its adherents experience it? How does Hallman experience it? What does this religious experience have to offer? The degree to which Hallman opens himself up to each experience, and then does so again in recounting it for the reader, is sometimes quite surprising.

A nonbeliever but not a dedicated unbeliever, Hallman manages to respect almost all of the converted with whom he mingles, or at least to suspend his disrespect. (The furthest he falls from his nonjudgmental stance is as his encounter with Scientology winds down; even Hallman, it appears, has its limits.) And while he comes away from each an unconvinced unbeliever still, he nevertheless documents in casual terms the Jamesian “truth” which each bears in the lives of its adherents. Rather than convert to any creed, it seems, Hallman is more converted to his image of James as the dedicated seeker who sees purpose in the seeking rather than the finding.