Nobody With a Good Car Needs to Be Justified

In Flannery O’Connor’s “Wise Blood,” the Church of preacher Hazel Motes is a Church of Moralistic, Therapeutic Deism. It is a Church Without Christ because no redeemer is needed. Is this not what the majority of twenty-first century Christianity has become?

In re-reading Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood I’m struck by the prophetic precision with which she portrays contemporary Protestantism through her story of the wild preacher Hazel Motes.

Back from the war, Hazel Motes (referred to throughout as “Haze”) moves through the world in a haze with more than a mote in his eye. He’s a preacher in a church of his own founding, “The Church Without Christ.” He wants a Jesus that doesn’t redeem anyone with his blood because no one needs redemption. There’s no fall because there’s nothing to fall from. Hazel Motes wants a Jesus that’s all man and no god in him. He wants peace and satisfaction, “I preach peace, I preach the Church Without Christ, the church peaceful and satisfied. What you need is something to take the place of Jesus.”

Is this not what the majority of twenty-first century Christianity has become? Moralistic, Therapeutic Deism is the other name for Arianism—the Church of Hazel Motes—the Church Without Christ—a church without a redeemer because no redeemer is needed.

What is needed in Hazel Motes’ church is a therapist, a teacher of morality and a spiritual guide. Note that Hazel Motes the modern preacher wants Jesus, but not Christ. He doesn’t mind the mild moral teacher, the kindly therapist, or the benign guru. These are fine, for they are unthreatening and bloodless. What Hazel Motes defies and denies is a blood-letting redeemer. He will not stand at the old rugged cross and sing “In the cross of Christ I glory towering o’er the wrecks of time.” He will not  affirm with St Paul, “We preach Christ and him crucified.”

Throughout O’Connor’s violent tale Hazel Motes is obsessed with the “rat colored car” he has just purchased. Despite the fact that it is a fifty-dollar junkyard heap that keeps breaking down, Hazel Motes is assured that it is a fine car that will take him anywhere. He preaches standing on the hood of the car, and the car slinks through the story as a fine symbol of the materialistic ideology that is the foundation of Moralistic, Therapeutic Deism. The material world is all there is and all you need, and thus Haze mutters in the heart of the story, “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.” The Hazel Motes of affluent suburban America might just as easily claim the sufficiency of their home, their possessions, their insurance policies, and their pension plans, and this materialism underlies the smug, therapeutic, moralistic deism of suburban American Christianity.

Hazel’s one disciple, Hoover Shoats (a.k.a. Onnie Jay Holy) understands the theology behind Hazel’s Church of Christ Without Christ and explains why folks can trust it. First of all, there’s nothing foreign about it. “You don’t have to believe nothing you don’t understand and don’t approve of.” Secondly “It’s based on the Bible. Yes sir! It’s based on your own personal interpitation of the Bible. Friends, you can sit ant home and interpit your own Bible however you feel in your heart it ought to be interpited. That’s right. Just the way Jesus would have done.” Onnie Jay’s final reason is that “This church is up to date! When you’re in this church you can know that there’s nothing or nobody ahead of you, nobody knows nothing you don’t know, all the cards are on the table and that’s a fack.”

Later on, Haze preaches faithfully another one of the foundational tenets of the modern church: scientism. “He said it was not right to believe anything you couldn’t see or hold in your hands or test with your teeth.” Then his theology extends to relativism: “I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else’s but behind all of them, there’s only one truth and that is that there’s no truth.”

O’Connor’s story tumbles on into a hellscape of madness and murder, revealing the end point of a Church Without Christ and without the cross. The stupid young Enoch Emery transmogrifies into Gonga the Gorilla, and Hazel Motes uses the rat-colored car to run over the fraudulent preacher who was impersonating him. In the end, a policeman pushes the car over a precipice, and Hazel’s world crumbles. Finally, like modern man, locked into his own self-imposed blindness, Hazel Motes sits on his landlady’s porch, staring into the void. But woven into the final chapter, O’Connor has her anti-hero embark on a pathetic pilgrimage of penance—as if she is prophesying that modern man’s enchantment with despair and disbelief must end not with a bang, but a whimper.

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The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.