| Summary: | In <i>Restless Secularism</i> (2017), Matthew Mutter points out that Wallace Stevens described three related techniques that could be used to attempt to purge secular life of its religious residue: adaptation, substitution, and elimination. Marilynne Robinson pushes back against such secularizing strategies by employing three related techniques of her own: negotiation, grafting, and invitation. She does so to attempt to bridge the gap between religious and humanistic perspectives and—in the process—mounts a spirited defense of religious faith and practice. Robinson uses a fourth technique as well: jérémiade. In its usual sacred form, jérémiade is a lamentation that denounces self-righteousness, religious hypocrisy, and social injustice. Much of what Robinson says about the Christian Right is essentially jérémiade. Robinson’s critique of parascientists is jérémiade as well, although its grounding assumptions are secular rather than sacred. While Robinson’s jérémiades against the Christian Right and against parascientists are effective in isolation, in aggregate they sometimes undercut her more generous and inclusive attempts at negotiation, grafting, and invitation. This may be because Robinson’s essays do not undergo the moderating influence of what Louis Althusser called the aesthetic effect of art, which in <i>Housekeeping</i> (1980), <i>Gilead</i> (2004), <i>Home</i> (2008), and <i>Lila</i> (2014) helps counterbalance the flashes of anger and tendencies toward judgement that periodically surface elsewhere in Robinson’s work. Taking into account the presence—or absence—of the aesthetic effect in Robinson’s work helps explain the sometimes startling differences between Robinson’s fiction and nonfiction and helps provides a new perspective from which to rethink two of the most influential postsecular readings of Robinson’s work to date: Amy Hungerford’s <i>Postmodern Belief</i> (2010) and Christopher Douglas’s <i>If God Meant to Interfere</i> (2016).
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