A Bum with No Connections

Last updated on: June 30, 2026 at 6:43 pm by Edwin Woodruff Tait

A Bum with No Connections 2026-06-30T18:43:43-05:00 Edwin Woodruff Tait

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Slaughter-House Five

This past Good Friday I did not intend to work as a substitute teacher, as I often do. I had two church services in the evening and many other things I was behind on, as usual. And, of course, ideally one would spend Good Friday in prayer and contemplation, not work anyway. But a little after 11 I got a call that they needed someone to sub for the person who usually oversees detention. That seemed important so I got on my bike and headed over to the school. For the second time recently, they had put someone else on the job by the time I got there. So, instead, I wound up subbing for half a day for a teacher whose job it was to co-teach with other teachers. And so I found myself in an English class that was just starting Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter-House Five.

This is one of the many books I’ve meant to read for a long time but haven’t got around to. I did read Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, years ago in college, which is a rather unusual first Vonnegut novel to read. (It was an independent study and my professor was constrained by my family’s objections to novels with sex in them, which may explain the choice.) So naturally I started reading the book right there, during the class. I finished it next day, a day I had hoped to get some of those many other things done (including writing a blog post). Which, of course, was Holy Saturday.

The well-connected victim?

Slaughter-House Five is actually a great novel to read during the Triduum. At least it was this year, with a mad President threatening genocide and a host of righteous Christians cheering him on because the prospective victims were Muslims who have had the effrontery to oppose us for decades. The novel’s subject is the horrific fire-bombing of Dresden, one of the greatest Allied atrocities of WWII. (To be fair, Vonnegut’s figures for the casualties do seem to have been inflated–it was not, as he claimed, a greater slaughter than Hiroshima. But it was bad enough and if anything even less justifiable in terms of any legitimate military purpose.)

Around this historical tragedy, Vonnegut creates an absurdist sci-fi narrative involving time travel and alien abduction. The story includes a fictional sci-fi writer, Kilgore Trout, whose novels help the protagonist make sense of his own experiences. One of these novels includes an alien criticism of Christianity. According to the alien, Christians “find it so easy to be cruel” because the lesson we take from the crucifixion story is that the people who crucified Jesus “picked the wrong guy to lynch.” People “less well connected” are legitimate victims. The alien writes an alternative Gospel in which Jesus “really was a nobody,” and at the moment of his death God adopts Jesus as his son and announced that “from this moment on, he will punish horribly anyone who torments a bum with no connections.”

A brief lapse into apologetics

If I wanted to go into apologetics mode I could argue, against Vonnegut, that this is actually what the Gospels as we have them say. After all, Jesus explicitly says in Matthew 25 that how we treat the poor and wretched is how we are treating him. In fact, this is one of only three passages in the NT (and one of only two in the Gospels) where the phrase “eternal fire” or “everlasting fire” is used. And the other Gospel passage using the phrase (Matthew, 18:8) is, in context, also about how we treat the “little ones.”

Historically, a good case can be made that the cruelty of Christians is pretty similar to the cruelty of humans in general, and that the main effect of the story of Jesus is to introduce a new (or at least a much more powerful) impulse to identify with victims of oppression and persecution. (I’m currently reading Tom Holland’s Dominion, which does make that argument, while also recognizing the persecution and violence that has been inspired by Christianity.)

Icons of Jesus

But Vonnegut, or Kilgore Trout, or the alien in Kilgore Trout’s nonexistent novel, has a point. Even if it were true that Christians haven’t been any worse than anyone else, and have sometimes been quite a bit better, it would still be worth asking how people who worship a victim of persecution have been persecutors so often themselves. And essentially it does seem to boil down to the idea that Jesus’ “connections” matter. Christians in the Middle Ages committed atrocities against Jews because they saw Jews as the killers of Jesus. Instead of seeing Jews as victims, icons of Jesus, they saw them as the evil people who had killed someone “well connected” and thus deserved punishment.

Vonnegut, like Tolstoy, thought that Christian beliefs about the divinity of Jesus undercut the power of Jesus’ teachings. I disagree. I think that to claim that a crucified nobody was truly God of God and Light of Light is far more revolutionary than simply saying that he was a guy with a lot of great ideas about how we should treat each other. But there is, no doubt, a certain kind of reverence for Jesus as divine that assimilates him to our existing models of power and authority and sacred awe. And we have defaulted to that over and over again.

Renewing the revolution: Easter in July

The Christian revolution, as Holland calls it, has to be renewed constantly. And sympathetic critics like Vonnegut contribute powerfully to that renewal.

I began this post several months ago, right after reading the book. It was supposed to be an Easter post. And now here we are almost in July. So I suppose we can call this “Easter in July.”

There is never a time when it is not good to be reminded that to be a Christian is to worship a bum with no connections.

Image: Mathis Grunewald, The Small Crucifixion. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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