“Very Religious”
How to Regard a New Term of Belittlement
Reading Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men last week, I let out a small sigh when I read Jack Burden’s offhand remark that Governor Willie Stark was “not a religious man.” Not a criticism, of course. Just the kind of thing men say with a shrug and a drink in hand, as if godlessness were a matter of taste—an irreverence that floats by untouched, not because it’s right, but because it’d be too earnest to say so. So we don’t. In the 79 years that have passed since All the King’s Men was first published, we are more apt to hear, if anything, that so-and-so is “very religious” now that “not a religious man” has become the default.
When a sophisticated man of the 1940s, like Jack Burden, described someone as “not a religious man,” you understood what he meant—namely, that Willie, like Jack—and probably you too, dear reader—wasn’t your average Louisiana Bible-thumper. Likewise today, when someone tells you that so-and-so is “very religious,” the presumption is that you aren’t—thank God.
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J. Douglas Johnson is the executive editor of Touchstone and the executive director of the Fellowship of St. James.
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