An American Gospel: On Family, History, and The Kingdom of God by Erik Reece

From the Publisher

From the award-winning author of Lost Mountain, a stirring, inspiring work of memoir, spiritual journey, and historical inquiry—a dazzling chronicle of a personal and national identity reclaimed.

Erik Reece's grandfather was a Bible-thumping, fire-and-brimstone Baptist preacher. He loved to hunt and fish and explore the Kentucky woods, but for him, existence on this earth was about denying the pleasures of this life in preparation for the next. Erik's father was a Baptist minister, too. But at the age of thirty-three—not coincidentally, Jesus' age when he was crucified— Erik's father violently took his own life, and Erik ended up spending much of his childhood in the care of his grandparents.

So, while Erik grew up with a conflicted relationship with Christianity, he also grew up with an acute awareness of a part of the country suffering ongoing economic, environmental, and even spiritual collapse. When he himself neared age thirty-three, he found unexpected comfort and guidance in his intellectual hero Thomas Jefferson's famous Jefferson Bible, especially when he began to track similarities between it and the Zen-like message of the Gospel of Thomas. Inspired, he undertook what would become a spiritual and literary quest—to identify an "American gospel" coursing through the work of both great and forgotten American geniuses, from William Byrd to Walt Whitman to William James to Lynn Margulis. In synthesizing that gospel—one that prizes the pleasures and glories of this earth—Reece began to find a way to a spiritual and intellectual peace with his own American soul.

The result of Reece's journey is a deeplypersonal but also deeply thought out, inspiring, and stirring book, delivered almost like a secular sermon, about personal, political, and historical demons—and the geniuses we can and must call on to combat them.

Publishers Weekly

Sometimes religious inspiration can come from the most unlikely places. Reece, author of the award-winning Lost Mountain, is the son and grandson of Baptist preachers. His own religious world-view, however, comes not from traditional Protestant Christianity, but from American thinkers such as Walt Whitman, Thomas Jefferson, William James and the lesser-known scientist Lynn Margulis. The author intercalates his personal story, which is one of great tragedy, with those of these great historical figures. His goal is not quite clear from the outset, but that is the point. He is searching for a form of Christianity that he can live with, since he believes that the usual sources are unhelpfully dogmatic. The primary tension is a classic one: the struggle between the material and spiritual worlds. Reece is unconvinced by his stern grandfather's brand of Christianity, based more on the punitive teachings of Paul, he believes, than those of Jesus. The kingdom of God can be found, at least partly, right now-no need to slog through life in order to celebrate one's reward in the hereafter. There are disjointed moments in the narrative, but the overall project is commendable. (Apr. 2)

Kirkus Reviews

Reece (Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness, 2006) identifies and advocates a strain of American spirituality that values the philosophical wisdom of Jesus over his function as a savior. The author assures us that he has found numerous precedents in American thought for a spirituality that merges the proven benefits of religious devotion with a more progressive social agenda, all while skipping the leaps of faith required to believe in the Resurrection and the Life Everlasting. Reece points to several revered thinkers, including Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry, who reject fundamentalism's emphasis on the hereafter as destructive to the human spirit and to the environment, yet keep the radically compassionate message of Jesus intact. The kingdom of God is not in the afterlife, they believe, but all around us. This "good news" has its philosophical basis in the controversial Gospel of Thomas, which Reece claims as the most authentic representation of Jesus' teachings. For the author, the search for an alternative to the dominant Puritan reading of the Gospels resulted from witnessing the devastating psychological effects of fundamentalism on his grandfather and father, both Baptist ministers. Reece's grandfather found solace in a strict dualism of right and wrong, heaven and hell, whereas his father lost the struggle with feelings of doubt and depravity, eventually committing suicide. For the most part, Reece uses these autobiographical details as powerful illustrations, not expressive ends unto themselves-although his own story underlies the narrative throughout. Written with a scholar's precision but in frank, readableprose, the book advances an optimistic, intellectual, environmentalist reclamation of sacred Christian beliefs and of Americans' complex relationship with Jesus. Uplifting, heretical or irrelevant, depending on the reader's religious beliefs.

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