A Pilgrim’s Digest A Review of A Pilgrim’s Digress: My Perilous, Fumbling Quest For the Celestial City John D. Spaulding (©2003, Harmony Books, ISBN: 1-4000-4653-X)

 

If you ever want to know how you look to others, you have to find out what others are saying. Dispassionate, objective critiques of Christianity are not going to come from the fundamentalist faithful. A Pilgrim’s Digress is just such a look from an “outsider.” John D. Spaulding contributes to Beliefnet.com and edits the “SoMA Review.” Spaulding’s journalistic approach gives his book the kind of view one would expect from someone totally unfamiliar with Christianity.

 

Using the motif of Bunyan’s literary masterpiece, his allegorical The Pilgrim’s Progress, Spaulding takes us on a meandering journey through modern day corollaries to The City of Destruction, Vanity Fair, The Valley of Humiliation, The Valley of the Shadow of Death, The Slough of Despond, A Pilgrim’s Dreams and The Celestial City. The book is a string of vignettes chronicling the individuals Spaulding meets on his “digress” through religion in general.

 

He recounts experiences as diverse as riding in a casket in a pink hearse through New York City with the women who run “Dying-to-Get-In” (a company that helps people overcome a fear of dying), reviewing the strategy of Southern Baptists to evangelize in the Mormon capital during the winter Olympics, visiting with the only full-time chaplain for a Las Vegas Casino and attending a wrestling match with members of the Christian Wrestling Federation. Whether he is finding faith in a bow hunter who has written With God on a Deer Hunt, or finding mass market appeal at the Christian Booksellers Convention, Spaulding never leaves us bored.

 

The chief value of the book is a lighthearted romp through the various expressions of religious devotion common to Americans. Spaulding’s journalistic detachment makes nearly every story feel like it is being viewed by a bemused skeptic who has an affection for his subjects but does not really want to treat them too seriously. Perhaps that is what some of us need – a dose of skepticism – when reading about such items as trepanning (drilling holes in one’s head to open the “third eye”) or a man named Whatshisname who dresses and grooms himself to look like Jesus. More importantly, Spaulding should makes us wonder what our Christianity would sound like if a reporter summarized our story in a brief article for a disbelieving public.

 

by Rick Presley