Why Christians Need to Read H. L. Mencken

Last updated on: December 6, 2016 at 1:00 pm by D. G. Hart

Why Christians Need to Read H. L. Mencken 2016-12-06T13:00:54-04:00 D. G. Hart

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The most self-serving reason is the publication of my new book, Damning Words: The Life and Religious Times of H. L. Mencken. The publisher, Eerdmans, recorded an interview with me about the book, for anyone who wants to learn a little more about the man and the biographer.

But the best reason for Christians to read Mencken is to ponder how Christians sometimes (maybe more often than sometimes) come across to unbelievers. Mencken was aware that his lack of religion put a barrier between him and Christian Americans. But he couldn’t help it:

[T]his deficiency is a handicap in a world peopled, in the overwhelming main, by men who are inherently religious. It sets me apart from my fellows and makes it difficult for me to understand many of their ideas and not a few of their acts. I see them responding constantly and robustly to impulses that to me are quite inexplicable. Worse, it causes these folks to misunderstand me, and often to do me serious injustice. They cannot rid themselves of the notion that because I am anesthetic to the ideas which move them most profoundly, I am, in some vague but nevertheless certain way, a man of aberrant morals, and hence one to be kept at a distance. I have never met a religious man who did not reveal this suspicion. No matter how earnestly he tried to grasp my point of view, he always ended by making an alarmed sort of retreat.

One way to overcome this suspicion is to read Mencken (or books about him).

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