If you were to bioengineer a living embodiment of unhipness and demographic irrelevance, it would look like Marilynne Robinson – a 72-year-old, white academic at a land-grant college in the Midwest, who is not just a Christian but a Calvinist. She is someone who believes in predestination and thinks that the Puritans were the good guys, and who grew up looking to “Galilee for meaning and to Spokane for orthodonture”. Her extraordinary prominence is based on a handful of novels about “some old pastor in the middle of cornfields”.
That last description comes from Barack Obama, who admires her so much that, in September, he amended his itinerary on a trip to Iowa so that he could interview her. You can listen to their conversation on the New York Review of Books website. It is extremely cheering to hear a western leader listening with rapt attention to someone who has argued, “Competition is a questionable value,” and that the West “has a way of plunging into wars we weary of and abandon . . . having forgotten what our object was”. It’s refreshing to hear a politician being deferential to a thinker, as opposed to, say, a media mogul. They talk freely about the disjunction between their experience of America – as, by and large, a pretty good place to live – and the “spasm of fear” that characterises the national mood.
Content from our partners
