I don’t presently have a cite. But I’ve read about it in more than one place. Conservative Christian’s just don’t like Mark Twain. They ban his books in their children’s schools, they quote him on religion and the Bible. They just make him a lightening rod for criticism.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835– April 21, 1910), known by his pen name Mark Twain, was a critic and a satirist. He was a little critical of organized religion. But I think he believed in God. And his apparent lack of faith might have been due to some tragedies he faced in life. A social worker once told me, it’s sometimes hard to have faith, when faced with tragedy. It’s not the person’s fault.
So why are radical christians so critical of the man? He lived over a hundred years ago after all. And he was a remarkable author and true American hero.
I don’t have a cite either, but it’s because he used a pseudonym. Conservative Christians are very against pseudonyms.
Or maybe I made that up because it’s impossible to explain something I can’t find examples of. Googling doesn’t really work because any other criticism drowns in discussions about bannings of Huck Finn due to the use of the n-word.
Twain wrote an entire book attacking (humorously, I note) Christian Science, too.
I don’t think I read anything of Twain’s attacking modern Catholicism. He did lay into the Church in his Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, but he was clearlty attacking the all-powerful Church of those times and poking fun at religious ignorance (as with his section on the Holy Fountain).
Twain really wasn’t fond of religious hypocrisy and ignorance. You get a very clear sense from all his writings that, as a child, he was taught from books that elevated the “Good Boy” and showed the “Bad Boy” getting his Just Desserts. But he realized early in life that Life Didn’t Work That Way, and the Evil frequently prospered while the Good languished. He wrote humorous essays pointing this out. He realized that there was a lure of the Forbidden, and loved the company of socially rejected boys like Tom Blankenship 9the model for Huckleberry Finn). So Twain presented a disdainful view even of the Protestant Faith he’d been raised in, at least when it was plainly claiming things he could see weren’t true.
He had a distinct moral code, and contrasted real practical morality with proper-looking by “for show” morality as practiced by apparently religious citizens. Have a read through the posthumous collection Letters from the Earth for his observations on Human morals. Read his essay What is Man and the various versions of The Mysterious Stranger.
In his old age, especially after the heart-breaking deaths of his daughters and his wife, his writings got considerably darker.
On the other hand, he recognized the good done in the name of religion. he appears to have praise for King Arthur’s actions in the smallpox hut in Connecticut Yankee, for instance. He made Joan of Arc his heroine in his novel about her.
The irony of such censorship would not be lost on Clemens.
As for the objections of the “Christian Right”, they stem largely from the posthumously published Letters From Earth for reasons evident to anyone who has read the book.
I’ve long suspected that most of the bannings of Huck Finn are actually because the people doing the banning disapprove of the positive portrayal of Jim, and just use the word used to describe him as a polite fiction for why they’re banning it, so they can say they’re not racists.
I’m sure that number is nonzero, but it’s also not all of them, given some NAACP chapters have called for banning. But “most” vs “some” is going to be hard to tease out.
Much like finding something in the Bible to justify any position one wants to take, we can also find something in Twain to justify anything. In this case, Huck can either embrace the lessons he’s been taught and turn Jim in, or turn his back on them to save Jim.
My WAG is that many Christians are suspicious of sparky, witty sarcastic people like Twain, because such people are generally the likeliest to be religion-skeptic or to poke fun of the faith.
The “Christian Right” in the form we see it today is mostly a 1970s invention. In the US at least, churches tended to lean left if anything historically. Right-wing tendencies tended to be associated more with anti-communist fervor (which existed in both political wings to some degree) and/or racism.
Twain was very liberal for his time. He was a believer of evolution and friends with Darwin. While many Christians today can reconcile their religious beliefs with evolution, it was not so during Twain’s lifetime.
He wrote and believed that the God of the Bible was a malevolent god. His daughter commented after they as a family were visiting Europe and having dinner with the German emperor, that pretty soon, there would no one left that Twain could become acquainted with but God.
My parents were definitely white, and Christian, and right wing. They liked MT because he was sparky, witty, sarcastic and abolitionist. My mother read Tom Sawyer to us when we were young.
On the other hand, the left is notoriously Humorless and Politically Correct. Either you’ve mixed up the Left and the Right, or our assessments are colored by our politically positions.
Well, there’s Al Capp (creator of Li’l Abner) who took shots at liberal caricatures in The Hardhat’s Bedtime Story Book. He was very specifically going after what he perceived as humorlessness among leftist radicals. It’s as much a product of its time, 1971, as a topical editorial cartoon.
It’s… amusing, I guess. Certainly light years beyond Mallard Fillmore.
