Evangelical literary tradition and moral foundations theory

Evangelical literature has long used Biblical stories and genres as inspiration for contemporary fictions—think of C. S. Lewis refreshing the gospel story in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and revising the Eden myth in his science fiction novel Perelandra. Yet Biblical literature, as an anthology of sacred writing by scores of authors (and editors) across perhaps a thousand years in wildly different cultural and historical contexts, is a vast tradition that articulates a range of ethical values, all expressed in an array of genres with varied but specific conventions. This article examines two evangelical bestsellers from the last 20 years, William Paul Young's The Shack (2007) and Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's Glorious Appearing (2004), the final novel in the Left Behind series, arguing that evangelicals draw on different Biblical genres for literary inspiration and religious faith. Their sales and movie adaptations attest to their continued power to move audiences. The Shack has sold over 20 million copies and was adapted in 2017 in a successful Hollywood movie starring Octavia Spencer and Sam Worthington, grossing 96 million in sales worldwide. 1 The Left Behind series, meanwhile, written between 1995 and 2004 (with the prequels and sequel penned 2005–2007), has sold 80 million copies and continues to drive evangelical cultural production in films and video games. The series has been adapted to film six times: Most recently in 2023, starring and directed by Kevin Sorbo, in 2014, starring Nicholas Cage, and in 2000, 2002, 2005, with Kirk Cameron. The 2014 and 2023 reboots are in what we might call the same Left Behind Cinematic Universe (LBCU), with Cage's film ending with him as protagonist Rayford Steele landing the plane many passengers have been raptured from, and Sorbo as Rayford continuing in the months after the Rapture as he and others become born again Christians and discover the Antichrist's identity. The sixth film was a 2017 spinoff of the 40 volume adolescent series Left Behind: The Kids, written between 1998 and 2005, featuring young people becoming Christians and facing the Tribulation. The Shack and the Left Behind series have enjoyed vibrant afterlives since publication, indicating their enduring power to move evangelical audiences over the last 20 years. I argue in this article that we can measure the continued cultural appeal of these evangelical bestsellers by examining their animating moral values. To do so, I follow the lead of Bible scholar Carol Newsom, who uses the prism of Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) to map the values of the book of Proverbs. MFT posits that transcultural human moral concerns are shaped by the values of care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation, which various cultures shape differently. Jonathan Haidt, the primary developer of MFT, has argued that liberals stress the aspects of care and fairness, while conservatives give roughly equal weight to all five values (2013). Here, I use MFT to map the concerns of two very different evangelical retellings of Biblical stories—building on previous research on how The Shack reimagines the theodicy of the Biblical book of Job and the way Glorious Appearing exemplifies the contemporary resonance of the Biblical genre of apocalypse, retelling the book of Revelation's final events. Young's novel and LaHaye and Jenkins's series are deeply indebted to Biblical literary tradition and genres, but their choice of source material reflects different moral priorities. Evangelicals exist along moral and political spectrums, and while there is certainly a shared audience for the novel and the series, with many readers enjoying and being moved by both, MFT shows how The Shack stresses the values of care and fairness while Left Behind depends on values of loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Summarizing Newsom's "test case for a conversation between MFT and biblical literature" focused on Proverbs allows me to outline MFT and its value when analyzing "historical texts concerned with moral issues" which can "also be used to illumine the moral foundations of cultures" (2015, 122, 121). Examining Proverbs' repeated concern about "the wicked" (2015, 124) Newsom finds that Proverbs is concerned with fairness and authority more than care, loyalty, or sanctity. Of the care/harm dichotomy, she notes that "most proverbs denouncing violence do not feature the emotional component of harm to the vulnerable, " mentioning harm to "the poor, the wretched, and the orphan" in only a "small" number of sayings (2015, 126). Intriguingly, she finds that though there are a few sayings about cheating in weights and measures, the question of justice underlies much Biblical Wisdom literature (as well as the Deuteronomistic History and the prophets): Fairness is the "basis for the notion of retributive justice" (2015, 126). As such, "The act-consequence relationship, which is foundational to the thought world of wisdom, is, at its root, a concern about fairness" (2015, 126). The theme of loyalty versus betrayal "is not strongly represented in Proverbs" because "group identity is not a major feature of the moral profile of Proverbs" (2015, 127). But because the opening of "Proverbs 1-9 is largely structured by means of addresses urging a submissive, responsive disposition on the part of the son, who stands in for every reader, " the book takes the authority/subversion dynamic seriously (2015, 128). Lastly, Newsom finds that, in terms of sanctity/degradation, concern for moral or sexual purity is not emphasized in Proverbs: when "talking about sexuality, the concern is not the purity of the individual but care for the social fabric of community (Proverbs 5–7) " (2015, 128). Newsom concludes her test case by suggesting that MFT does not adequately grasp the range of moral concerns of Proverbs and recommends "honesty/deception" as "a separate moral foundation" (not subsumed by fairness/cheating) addressed in "over fifty sayings" (2015, 130). She further suggests that a "harmony/dissension" moral foundation animates over 30 sayings about strife, especially between brothers (2015, 130). She recommends these additions based on Haidt's criteria for "moral foundations": normativity to third parties, a quick emotional reaction, culturally widespread, evidence of innateness (as in children or animals), and explicable in terms of evolutionary adaptive change (Newsom, 2015, 120). Haidt and others, meanwhile, have introduced a sixth moral foundation, liberty/oppression, for reasons I discuss below. 2 While the set is open-ended, MFT's argument is that while different cultures configure these "moral taste receptors" in different ways, the foundations themselves are transcultural and universal (2015, 120). As Newsom concludes her article, "MFT also offers biblical studies a useful tool for better discerning how different moral configurations existed side by side in Judean society" (2015, 132). Newsom's use of MFT to map how different literary texts exemplify synchronous, distinct moral values in a nuanced, non-monolithic culture is a good method for getting at the complexity of early 21st century American evangelicalism, which similarly produces literary and cinematic texts that have quite different "moral configurations. " The Shack attempts to grapple with the kidnapping, abuse, and murder of a child in a universe with a good and omnipotent God. Young is primarily concerned with how harm reduction and fairness resolve the traumatic stories of both the murdered daughter and the bereaved father, himself a victim of childhood abuse. While camping with his family, the protagonist Mack is distracted when two of his children capsize their canoe; coming to their rescue, he momentarily leaves his daughter Missy, who is abducted by a serial murderer, taken to a remote shack in the Oregon woods, assaulted and then murdered, her body not found. Mack's wife finds solace in her Christian faith, but Mack in grief and doubt abandons his. When a mysterious note invites him back to the shack where Missy was murdered, he finds not the murderer he hoped to confront, but a racially and gender-diverse Trinity in which the Father appears as an African American woman (and later a Native American man), the Son as a Middle Eastern man, and the Holy Spirit as an Asian American woman. Over the course of the weekend, Mack cooks with the Father, gardens with the Spirit, hikes with the Son, and shares meals with them as they help him heal and return to faith through lots of theological discussion. As I have argued elsewhere, The Shack is a modern-day retelling of the book of Job: A father's anguished questioning about his murdered child (ren), accompanied by a defensive theodicy structured through rounds of dialogue, favoring theological exploration at the expense of plot, and featuring the theophany of God himself appearing to answer his interlocutor (Douglas, 2020, 509). The Shack also relies on part of the Job poet's resolution, emphasizing Mack's lack of knowledge and power. But because it would disturb the friendship and trust Mack develops with the Trinity, The Shack tries to improve Job by giving the most unsatisfying parts of this answer to a fourth divine being in the novel, Wisdom. Readers of Job who are unsatisfied with how God answers Job's questions about His justice with an occasionally sarcastic speech about His power and knowledge will neither be satisfied with Wisdom's also occasionally sarcastic speech about Mack's ignorance and inability to judge fairly (Young, 2007, 160). One of the strange ways The Shack echoes Job is its proliferation of divine beings. Just as "the accuser" figure in Job helps displace responsibility away from God for Job's woes ("you incited me against him, to destroy him for no reason, " God complains 2. 3), the four (or five, considering God's appearance as a man later) divine beings deflect and distribute responsibility for Mack's (and Missy's) suffering. In this way, The Shack "inadvertently rediscovered the ancient Israelite polytheism of three thousand years ago, for the simple reason that justifying the gods' ways to humans is an easier task than justifying God's ways to humans" (Douglas, 2020, 517). Young's accidental rediscovery occurred for two reasons, I argued. The historical reason is that ancient Israelite religious imagery about a head god and a younger storm warrior god shaped the language and theology of the first two persons in the Trinity. The logical reason is that proliferating divine beings changes the shape of theodicy, distributing divine responsibility across several agents (Douglas, 2020, 531). Building on this analysis, MFT categories illuminate The Shack's "moral profile" (to adopt Newsom's phrase). Most obviously, The Shack turns on the axes of care and fairness, which were violated in Missy's abduction, abuse, and murder. As with Job (and all theodicies), the novel's question is whether there is a moral order in the universe. As Newsom notes in the quotation above, fairness underlies the Biblical sense of retributive justice, that suffering is deserved punishment from God for sin. This view is represented by some of Job's friends, who assume that Job's 10 murdered children must have sinned against God (e. g. , 4. 7–9, 8. 4–6), but it is undercut by the book's premise and God's concluding speech, where he condemns the friends for having "not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has" (42. 7). No one voices this view in The Shack, but Missy's fate still prompts the novel's key question of the unfairness of her murder, as well as the unfairness of what her loss does to her family. How is it, the novel asks, that God is benevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent if he allowed this harm to occur? Much of the dialogue between Mack and the divine beings centers on fairness, making it the novel's primary moral foundation. The four sort-of-gods continually enlarge the frame of Mack's questions about fairness, expanding the scope beyond Missy and her family to consider the larger operation of fairness for other actors and all of humanity. First, God says, they respect the free will of human individuals, some of whom choose a "relationship" with God, while others go their own way to commit evil (Young, 2007, 125). In this classic free will defense, God's fairness to the serial killer effectively trumps the fairness to Missy not to be abused and murdered. That this system itself might not be fair is a question the novel does not raise. The second higher principle of fairness the novel deploys is that suffering and evil in the world are consequences of original sin, of Adam and Eve choosing to go their own way. The novel invokes Adam and Eve several times, not just in a metaphorical or symbolic way (2007, 101, 150). Young appears to think they were actual individuals whose actions cursed all their descendants. Thus, the existence of suffering and evil is fair insofar as it is consequence of human action, not something God intended for the world. Whether this consequence is proportional—that billions of us should be punished for thousands of years due to the actions of two remote ancestors—is likewise a question the novel avoids. The novel's traditional Christian theodicy on these grounds of free will and original sin will be acceptable to some readers and not to others, of course, probably based on prior theological views. But the novel also has a resource unavailable to the Job author: an afterlife of reward. Mack is permitted by Wisdom to see Missy in heaven, playing with Jesus (Young, 2007, 168). Ending her life was unfair but is compensated by an eternal life of flourishing and fulness. Fairness for Missy in the afterlife is achieved by the non-reciprocal gift central to Christian doctrine, of the suffering and innocent Jesus dying on the cross to atone for human sin and reconcile us to Him. The principle of fairness is also drawn upon as Wisdom reveals the backstory of the serial killer to Mack, showing how he was also abused as a child (2007, 163). Unfair childhood suffering malformed him, with the consequence of him inflicting unfairness on other children. Human life is saturated with cascading unfair consequences of people choosing evil instead of relationship with God, all our lives marked by a lack of reciprocal fairness as justice. Nonetheless, the novel's concern for justice is exemplified when the Father leads Mack to Missy's hidden body, which later enables Mack to lead the police to the body, who, based on clues found there, find, and arrest the killer (2007, 248). Mack's conversations with God also reveal that he was physically but not sexually abused by his father, leading him eventually, the reader learns in surprise, to poison him (2007, 10, 217). Mack has also committed murder, although one perhaps sanctioned on grounds of retributive justice. Lastly, the question of fairness is developed by the sense that Mack, like Job, deserves answers from God for the undeserved suffering he and Missy have experienced. Here, God seeks out a person full of pain to heal damage that cannot be undone. These elements of fairness are heightened when we realize that Young in an interview has spoken about his own sexual abuse as a child at the hands of older boys at a Christian boarding school while his parents were missionaries in New Guinea (Binder, 2015). Young experienced part of what Missy experienced, and Mack's anguish at what happens to his daughter in the novel is also the author's anguished questioning of the unfairness that happened to him. The Shack's theological explorations and drama center around the moral foundation of fairness, against the cheating of lives and childhood. Care/harm is an equally important moral foundation of the novel. Missy's entrance into heaven and Mack's renewed relationship with God are forms of care, reconciliation, and reparation. While the initial harm cannot be prevented or undone because of traditional theological rules like free will (which God seems not to have chosen), the compensation and renewal that Missy and her family receive may go a long way for readers to justify the ways of God to humans. Jesus even suggests to Mack that the Spirit "wrapped herself around" Missy to give her Jesus's "peace" before she was abused and murdered (Young, 2007, 175), perhaps softening the cruel experience. The kindness the Trinity extends to Mack includes a beautiful funeral for Missy, her recovered body in an exquisite casket hand-carved by carpenter Jesus and laden with hundreds of flowers from the Spirit's "fractal" garden (2007, 131). God also informs Mack that his older daughter, who accidentally tipped the canoe on the day of Missy's disappearance, blames herself for the tragedy, and that Mack must reassure her on her blamelessness, extending the harm reduction to Missy's family (2007, 238). In helping him grieve and in drawing him into deeper relation with them, the divine beings' words and actions turn on the value of harm reduction after the event, to alleviate human pain and suffering. Other moral foundations are present in The Shack in less salient ways. God's authority is affirmed in the novel, but unlike Job's God, they don't consider Mack's questions about their justice and goodness to be impertinent. Mack becomes pals with the Trinity, noting he feels particularly comfortable around "his newfound friend" (Young, 2007, 116) Jesus. In gendering the Father as female, Young undercuts the male authority so crucial to evangelical hierarchies (Du Mez, 2020), drawing the ire of some conservative critics (Douglas, 2020, 510n6). The principle of sanctity versus degradation is present in our revulsion at the killer's implied pedophilia, a known disgust response trigger (Haidt, 2012, 121). The sense of group loyalty in the novel is very low, however. In multiculturalizing the Trinity, Young was explicitly renouncing the racial resentments of white Christian nationalism that would come to define the Obama and Trump eras (Butler, 2021; Onishi, 2023). The harmony/dissension foundation Newsom finds in Proverbs does not really animate The Shack, despite its dependence on Biblical wisdom literature. Meanwhile, Newsom's proposed honesty/deception foundation threatens to destabilize some of the theological answers when Wisdom tricks Mack through a parlor game of putting him an oversized chair and requiring him to choose which of his remaining children will go to heaven and which to hell. This is deceptive because the novel seems to imply universal salvation (see, e. g. , 194, 227) and no notion of hell, as some evangelical critics complained (Beal, 2010; Douglas, 2020, 513). Such deception may go unnoticed, especially if readers are motivated by Christian apologetics to overlook it. Most readers will be left instead with the overriding moral concerns of care and fairness that animate the novel's theological exploration and resolve its plot. If The Shack's moral foundations prize care and fairness over all others, we find a quite different emphasis in the Left Behind series that concludes with Glorious Appearing and its climactic Armageddon wherein the warrior Jesus returns to wreak violent vengeance on the Antichrist and his supporters, restore the proper authority of God and the sanctity of the "City of God" (LaHaye these and other characters in the series come to true faith, partly prompted by books and DVDs left behind by actual Christians, and form a Tribulation Force to counter the Antichrist's rise as Secretary General of the United Nations and the 7 years of Tribulation that follow as he establishes a "one world religion and eventually one world government" (LaHaye it is more local, and blended with loyalty" (Haidt, 2012, 158). At first glance, abortion is one site where care/harm might be seen as animating the series. "Unborn" babies are raptured along with children in the first novel, putting abortion providers "out of business" (LaHaye LaHaye, 1987, 1, 6). The Antichrist's usurpation of national government through the United Nations likewise plays on old fundamentalist tropes of upended national authority (Du Mez, 2020, 13). Haidt notes that the authority foundation is about authority "perceived to be legitimate" (2012, 168), and the importance of Carpathia's authority in the series is that while the world sees him as a legitimate ruler, he is not. Carpathia's rise to power in Romania and then the United Nations "are enabled by democratic votes (pp. 276, 417), but democracy does not confer legitimacy on Carpathia in the eyes of the Christian characters, authors, or readers, who understand the larger supernatural forces behind democratic processes, and how the demonic manipulates the democratic" (Douglas, 2022, 11). The Left Behind series expresses the authors' view that all kinds of institutions—the press, academia, government, business, and entertainment—have been improperly usurped by those who are not conservative Christians. This extends to our knowledge of the Bible itself, with the series developing a kind of Christian Postmodernism—"the epistemological practice of levelling the field of expert knowledge by cultivating networks and institutions of a counter-expertise that provides more theologically amenable answers" (Douglas, 2019, 31) —for decoding the Bible's many "prophecies" about the End Times. MFT clarifies how these many disparate details likely trigger the authority "taste bud" for many readers, allowing us to see that proper authority is a core ethos for Left Behind. The genre of apocalypse it works in expresses the experience of disorder as God's cosmic authority is challenged by the worldly servants of His enemy. The loyalty/betrayal dichotomy is closely linked to this question of authority and is probably the second most important moral foundation: "Communal ties within the in-group of the church are strong, but such kinship does not extend to the larger society" (Chapman, 2013, 33). As Haidt suggests above, conservative care is "blended" with loyalty, and this can also be said for authority and fairness.