KURT VONNEGUT AMONG THE ICONOCLASTS
Abraham. Erasmus, Anabaptists, and Atheists

Kent Davis Sensenig

Is it possible for Christians to be edified by atheists? In the case of (recently deceased) American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, this Christian says yes!

After all, both Jews and Christians living in the Roman Empire were accused of "atheism" for their monotheistic refusal to worship the pagan (and plural) gods of their age. I would argue a similar kind of "iconoclasm" characterized Vonnegut’s writing. Abraham (as narrated in Genesis, but even more so in the Qur’an) is the father of this idol-rejecting tradition. In the Qur’an, Abraham actually gets to smash idols; in Genesis he simply rejects the paganism of his fathers and then skips town!

The sojourning Abe of Genesis resonates more with my own migratory, "quiet-in-the-land," more flight-than-fight Mennonite tradition. Following Zwingli’s lead, however, the feisty, sixteenth-century Anabaptist ancestors of the Mennonites embraced the (even idol-smashing) tradition of Abraham; thousands of them got sacrificed to the sometimes voracious gods of church and state as a result.

The liberal seventeenth-century Dutch Mennonites—called "Collegiants"—even published the "heretical" (well ahead of his time) Jewish philosopher Spinoza, when no respectable Christian (or Jew) would touch his heterodox ideas. One way to view even the modern atheism that emerged from the Enlightenment (following Spinoza’s lead) is that it was rightly rejecting distorted versions of God, faith, church, and scriptural interpretation that had grown up during centuries of Christendom.

Don’t get me wrong; I am all for keeping the Living God at the heart of one’s tradition. It’s just that, each generation, this requires rejecting the false gods always vying for the Creator’s part, which can get you branded an atheist, heretic, communist or worse, as Vonnegut understood.

Vonnegut made a major impact on my worldview, almost without my realizing it. I read many of his wacky novels for fun in high school and college, then set him aside for years. Maybe the age at which I engaged Vonnegut reflects what some might call an adolescent streak in his writing.

Despite his zany style, I believe Vonnegut remains one of the quintessential American writers. If so, perhaps he followed the tradition of Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin more than Hemmingway or Faulkner. Mark Twain is the most obvious comparison in the world of American letters.

Vonnegut was also a truly decent man who gave the term humanist a good name. We sometimes forget that the humanist cause is a Christian invention; there was no more profoundly "humanitarian" act than God becoming one of us!

The critical Catholic of the Reformation era, Erasmus, was one of the founding fathers of modern humanism. For Erasmus, being a humanist entailed championing a return to the sources of the Greek New Testament (and its pacifism).

His sometimes scathingly satirical attacks on the political-religious follies of his day—especially warfare—not only significantly influenced the Anabaptists, but could be seen as a key predecessor to Vonnegut’s work.

Vonnegut’s life embodied many of the dilemmas and paradoxes of modern-turning-postmodern American life. His life spanned (and helped articulate) the dark tide that surged from the cultural watersheds of World War II into Vietnam and now Iraq. His most famous novel, Slaughter-House Five, captured one of the great cultural cataclysms in American history: the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, toward the end of our last "good war."

Vonnegut survived this massive massacre due to imprisonment as an American POW in an underground meat locker. When he emerged from this bunker, he was put on corpse duty and witnessed the cremation of up to 300,000 Dresden civilians. A cultural treasures of Germany, Dresden held no strategic military value.

The spiritual meaning of Dresden—with which America has never come to terms—is that we possess the technological and ideological will-power to massacre folk on a large scale, in the name of high ideals (i.e. demonic nihilism, a force already present among American elites before the appearance of the A-bomb, whose production was simply a symptom of the disease). Vonnegut was a first-hand witness to this uncomfortable American truth.

Slaughterhouse-Five was also a tour-de-force in bringing a postmodern consciousness to American literature, in that Vonnegut presented his horrific story in fragmented, fantastical, and (as always with Vonnegut) darkly comedic ways. The book was published in 1969 at the nadir of the Vietnam War, capturing the spirit of the age and catapulting him out of relative obscurity. It belatedly joined Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 as one of the great (and anti-war) World War II novels.

After 15 years of trying (and failing) to write about the trauma of Dresden, Vonnegut finally realized that such horrors could not be presented in a conventional fashion. The kaleidoscopic images of Revelation come to mind as a precursor to this "new" style.

A classic example of Vonnegut’s dark humor is his candid acknowledgement that he was the only person in the world to have benefited from the fire-bombing of Dresden, estimating he made $5 dollars for each German corpse via his novel sales. That was Vonnegut!

Vonnegut came from a professional Midwestern family (architects from Indiana; along with David Letterman, Larry Bird, and perhaps Mennonites Harold Bender and Orie Miller, Vonnegut was one of the greatest of "Hoosiers"). Despite their middle-class status, his family experienced real poverty during the Great Depression, so Vonnegut always had a "bleeding heart" for the working-class.

He was a lonely child whose best friend growing up was his African-American cook. The heartfelt stories of virtue and compassion she told him would never be effaced in Vonnegut, even by the relentless cynicism that came with being wide-eyed in imperial America. So he cared about minorities and the marginal.

He also was a picked-upon nerd in school who barely made it through college. Even his M.A. lit thesis was rejected by his faculty committee. In college he gained a reputation for practical jokes. He would show up at finals for classes in which he wasn’t enrolled, then shock everyone by shredding the exam in front of the professor and calmly walking out of class.

Just as he shipped out to World War II, Vonnegut’s mother committed suicide. The causes appear to have included alcohol and pill abuse mixed with deep financial anxieties—again, a quintessentially American vicious cycle. Vonnegut also struggled with depression throughout his life (while making millions laugh for decades). He attempted suicide himself in the 1980s.

Yet he found enough hope to keep on living to the ripe old age of 84, God bless him. Even the G. W. Bush presidency didn’t crush his spirits. In the early 1960s he adopted his sister’s three children after they were suddenly orphaned. He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

In the 1950s—before he was able to make a living writing—Vonnegut worked as a PR pitchman for General Electric and as a car salesman, two quintessential post-war American occupations. These alienating experiences informed Vonnegut’s other great themes (beyond his adamant opposition to war and nationalism): the deadening cultural, spiritual, and ecological effects of a globalizing corporate consumerism; the ominous illusions of technological progress and "quick fixes"; and the lies of advertising. (Be careful what you pretend to be, he would tell us, for you will become your mask.)

At first I thought that Vonnegut’s dying during the Bush Administration’s waning months and days was somehow a defeat. Vonnegut was an avowedly political writer, who once said, "I agree with Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler that writers should serve the people of their nation"—more classic Vonnegut. Now I realize that Vonnegut’s legacy will endure and bear good fruit, whereas "Dubya’s" will blow away like chaff in the Holy Spirit’s wind, for God takes up into the divine life all good deeds (even if "no good deed goes unpunished" on earth).

I believe Vonnegut was attracted to Jesus—most of what he stood for resonates with Jesus’ Way. And I expect when they meet on the Resurrection Day they will embrace. Of course, as will be true for all of us, Vonnegut took plenty of wounds, sins, and chaff of his own to the grave. He will need the healing touch of our Creator-Redeemer.

Perhaps I’m getting sentimental in my old age, but Vonnegut meant a lot to me. He gave voice to things that needed to be said for several generations of truth-seekers in America, in ways full of compassion and a self-deprecating humor that candidly acknowledged his own demons.

Yet he rarely flinched from looking at the ugly truths of our world, not only in Slaughterhouse Five, but also in such novels as Breakfast of Champions, Deadeye Dick (my personal favorite), Cat’s Cradle, Galapagos, Bluebeard, and Player Piano. He is the kind of writer whose books flow into one another . . . like life. Some of his alter-ego characters reappear in several books. His novels are easy to read, though you’ll be either attracted to or repulsed by the cynical, over-the-top nature of this prophet’s style.

I found it humorous that one of the criticisms of his work cited in his Los Angeles Times obituary was that it was "too popular and accessible." Wouldn’t want common people to understand what you’re saying!

One of the greatest of the "greatest generation" of Americans—those who knew war and real economic hardship, even if they moaned about it just like any generation would—has passed on. But he did not "go quietly into that good night." That wasn’t the Vonnegut way. Piss and vinegar and "leave them laughing as you go" was.

—Kent Davis Sensenig, Pasadena, California, is writing a dissertation on John Howard Yoder and Wendell Berry at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena. His wife Jennifer pastors at Pasadena Mennonite Church. Through the grace of his peace-loving tradition, family, and creation itself he believes in the God of Jesus Christ. He reports, however, that if the violent one turns out to be the real deal, he would sooner go to hell than worship him.