Terry Lindvall,God Mocks: A History of Religious Satire from the Hebrew Prophets to Stephen Colbert

Reviewed by David Feltmate, Auburn University, Montgomery, USA

Terry Lindvall’s God Mocks is a much needed addition to the literature on religion, humor, and culture. Surveying Western satire from the Greeks and Hebrews to contemporary late night television with a focus on Christian satire and its inward reflection, God Mocks is an excellent starting point for somebody new to satire in the Christian tradition. The book is broad in its scope and introduces us to dozens of voices, but this breadth sacrifices considerable depth and raises questions for critical scholars of religion. Lindvall also takes a heavily theological approach to satire, which colors his analysis in favor of those satirists whose vision of Christianity he shares. The sacrifice of depth for breadth and the heavy emphasis on Christian satire are choices that readers will have to weigh when deciding the book’s value.

God Mocks covers a wide array of religious satire starting with the ancient Greeks and Hebrew prophets, travelling through the medieval fools and Protestant reformers to the satirists Lindvall seems most comfortable with—Protestant and atheist satirists in the Anglo world from the 17th to 20th centuries. Most of these chapters look at satire in a constructed time period and, as such, Lindvall crafts arguments about the long influence of satire on Christians that are built around what he sees as consistent themes and patterns across different time periods and geographic locations. As such, he can sometimes try to deal with too much material in too short a span (e.g. chapter eight examines American religious satire to from the Puritans to H. L. Mencken’s coverage of the Scopes Trial). For the critical scholar of religion, these sweeping generalizations may be too much. The chapters cover a great deal of territory without going deeply into any one figure. For example, chapter five contains two of Christianity’s best known satirists: Erasmus and Luther. Instead of chapters dedicated to either Reformation satirist, they share a thirty-page chapter with Sir Thomas More, Marguerite of Navarre, and others. This choice restricts their voices and their satire does not rise to the reader’s attention the way it would in a more focused study. This was the choice Lindvall made to make a larger argument about satire’s role in Christian history and it leaves a lot of fresh trails for the budding researcher to follow, even as it avoids being a final word on either theologian.

Part of the reason for this broad treatment is to develop God Mocks’ major theoretical contribution: a four-quadrant approach to satire. Built along the twin poles of wit (between humor and rage) and morality (between moral purpose and ridicule), Lindvall helpfully locates his different satirists relative to these extremes in each chapter. While the rankings are somewhat arbitrary (mimicking a four-quadrant graph, the visuals appear more objective than they actually are), they helpfully summarize Lindvall’s interpretation. It is also in these rankings that Lindvall’s theological bias shines through. For Lindvall, religious satire has a prophetic character that calls people out of their folly and into redemption. Identifying satirists with those who mock for the down-trodden’s sake and who call others to reform misses an important dynamic of satire. Namely, satire not only represents a call to reform, but it also exists in places and times of moral conflict between different groups. His overviews of the Protestant Reformation, Enlightenment philosophy, and American critics of religion would make more sense if Lindvall foregrounded the conflict, rather than the call to reform. A problem emerges because calls to reform are sometimes calls to convert to the satirist’s way of thinking and this makes satire both a tool of moral reform and of ridicule, humor, and rage simultaneously when seen from multiple angles.

For scholars who are concerned with critical research on religion, the satires mentioned in this book can be usefully mined for a multitude of critical voices who are not only good to think with, they are also fun to think with. The downside to God Mocks is that it is a survey of these voices and much remains to be done when it comes to digging through each person’s satirical perspective in a more focused way. These close readings will also call some of Lindvall’s basic assumptions and conclusions into question. God Mocks’ most problematic aspect is the easy equation of “religious satire” with “Christian satire.” Lindvall makes this connection early in his introduction, writing lines such as “The satiric weapon of the Spirit as a two-edged sword pierces the human heart. In afflicting the sinner, satire works as a scourge of God, purifying the soul through a kind of comic mortification” (5) and

Thus, to follow the paths of the satirist is to encounter the odd and peculiar treasures who are God’s mouthpieces. To retell their tales, parables, and witticisms in the cause of moral and spiritual reform is to look back into universal mirrors that confront us with our own stupid and selfish ways. (6)

Yet, voices such as Voltaire (163–167) and H. L. Mencken (211–216) are included in Lindvall’s survey. Unfortunately, Lindvall’s framework cannot give them their full due since they were criticizing Christianity without an eye towards reform. Lindvall’s theory of satire would be more powerful if he had admitted that satire is a tool, a way of comically framing criticism that is available to anybody, and then focused on its use within specific religious contexts. He provides a foundation for this approach in the introduction when he writes,

First, as satire is used to attack, it aims not just to slice and dice, but to correct and reform. I argue that the heart of true satire is recognition of a moral discrepancy between what is proclaimed and what is practiced, often with an attempt to remedy it. (5)

These are excellent premises because they do not presuppose that certain content and moral frameworks characterize satire. Instead, it is the purposes for which the humor and morality are deployed that enable satire’s identification and analysis. Taking this position would also bring some of Lindvall’s conclusions into question. For example, he argues that satire pulls all people to an equal level (280) and from that perspective argues, “The recurring metaphor of satire as a reflecting glass requires an ethic of love” (280). This interpretation can work for readers who want to read Christian satire in a specific theological vein, but arguably Lindvall’s approach misses the wide variety of reasons why somebody might satirize somebody else. Love is not the only critical edge that one can sharpen with satire and Lindvall’s religious focus blunts the scathingly critical voices that could have been used to greater extents were such critique his goal. God Mocks should not be treated as a framework for interpreting all religious satire, but it is a strong argument for satire as a tool for interpreting moral disputes within the Western Christian tradition.

These criticisms aside, anybody who is considering writing satire or writing about it could benefit from reading God Mocks and then visiting the different satirists who comprise Lindvall’s conversation partners. They are a colorful bunch, they have interesting and insightful things to say and ways to say them, and their humorous edge is woefully understudied. For these reasons, I recommend God Mocks for the critical research of religion as a good map of Western Christian satire, if not a critical model for studying it.