Marilynne Robinson on Biblical Interpretation, Calvinist Thought, and Religion in America

Novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson joins Tyler Cowen shortly after the publication of her book Reading Genesis for a conversation ranging across biblical interpretation, the theology of John Calvin, American religiosity, Shakespeare, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Key ideas

1. Robinson reads the Bible’s flawed protagonists as the point, not a flaw. Where Homeric heroes are demigods whose exceptional nature explains their deeds, biblical figures — Moses the stutterer, younger sons repeatedly chosen over elder — are ordinary and fallible; God working through unremarkable people, she argues, is itself the text’s claim: that greatness reflects God’s action rather than any singular quality in the person acting.
2. She distances her own Calvinism from the popular caricature by insisting on interpretation. Against a ‘bite-the-bullet’ literalist Calvinism that treats scripture as beyond human judgement, Robinson insists Calvin himself was an interpreter first — he wrote that a thousand years of misreading would take a thousand years to correct — and that his central move was reconciling the text to the best available understanding of God’s nature, not enforcing a flat literal reading.
3. Leviticus’s arbitrary laws are nation-building, not legalism for its own sake. Robinson reads the book’s dietary and ritual prohibitions, like Herodotus’s catalogue of tribal customs, as deliberate markers of a distinct community identity under Moses — not a fixed law that persists unchanged into Christianity, since ‘other means’ of identity were later given.
4. Calvin’s reputation as harsh and intolerant is, in her account, an artefact of his revolutionary influence. Calvinism fuelled early European revolutions — Cromwell’s England, the French Wars of Religion, the Dutch revolt against Spain, arguably the American Revolution and Civil War — and Robinson argues that this volatility, not the substance of his theology, explains why he became a target of polemic that persists because ‘no one reads Calvin’ to check it.
5. American secularism, in her view, is substantially performed rather than real. She argues Americans are considerably more religious than surface behaviour suggests — religion has become associated with ‘inhumane values’ in public life, so people conceal belief rather than abandon it — and that immigrant communities, not the native-born majority, are now the country’s most reliable carriers of sustained religious practice.

Content

Betrayal, election, and biblical characterisation

Cowen opens on the Hebrew Bible’s recurring theme of betrayal between brothers and the puzzling pattern by which younger sons are repeatedly elevated over elder ones. Robinson reads betrayal as ‘a small model of the offenses against ourselves as human beings that happen at every scale’, and the younger-son pattern as evidence that ‘there’s no necessity, no causality in the way that things work among human beings’ — God is free to choose against convention, including primogeniture. Pressed on whether this amounts to predestination, she resists the label as too narrow: nearly every theologian, including Aquinas in the Summa Contra Gentiles and Summa Theologica, has held that God’s choices reflect his intentions, and isolating a single scene as ‘predestination’ distorts its place in the text. She contrasts biblical characterisation directly with Homer’s: Homeric heroes are demigods whose superhuman nature explains their feats, while biblical figures — she cites Moses, ‘a stumbling, bumbling figure, a stutterer’ whom God elevates regardless — are recognisably ordinary, so that the reader understands God as acting through people rather than rewarding some innate exceptional quality in them. She calls the Bible ‘the most complex document on the planet’ and does not treat her own inability to resolve all its difficulties as a criticism of the text.

Leviticus, ritual sacrifice, and the Antichrist

Asked how a Calvinist who takes the Old Testament seriously reads Leviticus’s ritualism, Robinson draws a parallel to Herodotus’s descriptions of small ancient civilisations distinguished by arbitrary customs — diet, dress, bodily markings. Leviticus’s prohibitions, in her reading, serve the same function under Moses: establishing a ‘defined, distinctive human community’ against the surrounding idolatrous culture, rather than expressing legalism as an end in itself — and this Mosaic law, she is clear, is not still in force, since ‘we’ve been given other means by which to create identity.’ On ritual sacrifice, she reads the biblical form as adapted into a communal feast — sacrificial meat shared with ‘the widow, the orphan, the Levite’ — functioning, she suggests, partly as a public-health measure ensuring periodic nourishment for the whole group, a form she also sees paralleled in Homer. She resists a single-figure reading of the Antichrist, describing it instead as ‘probably an array of bad human actors and behaviors’ recurring cyclically across historical epochs rather than one person to be named.

Calvin: the interpreter, not the caricature

Robinson’s most sustained argument concerns Calvin’s reputation. Against a ‘bite-the-bullet’ Calvinism that treats the Bible as divine revelation admitting no interpretive judgement, she insists that interpretation was Calvin’s own method: ‘these people that call themselves Calvinists’ rarely read the Institutes itself, in which Calvin argues that centuries of misreading require centuries to correct, and that scripture must be reconciled to ‘the best understanding we feel we have about the nature of God’ — not read with flat literalism. She traces his diminished modern reputation to his historical association with revolution — Cromwell’s England, the French Wars of Religion, the Dutch revolt against Spain, and, in her reading, arguably the American Revolution and Civil War — arguing that this volatility, not the content of his theology, explains why he attracts polemic. She notes that Calvin’s one association with religious execution, that of Michael Servetus, is ‘a very minor event by the standards of the period’ set against contemporary monarchs and bishops. Pressed to characterise what makes the Institutes worth reading despite its length, she highlights Calvin’s opening move — ‘the only true knowledge of God is born of obedience’, and his instruction to ‘descend into yourself’ to encounter God and ‘contemplate God’ to understand yourself — as a celebration of human beings drawn from Renaissance humanism, which precedes any discussion of sin. On predestination specifically, she is emphatic that Calvin never licensed judging who is saved or damned — ‘Can’t. You can’t tell about yourself; you can’t tell about anybody else’ — and argues his Dutch, English Protestant, and early American cultures were comparatively egalitarian by the standards of their time, not hierarchical.

Shakespeare and Calvinist encounter

Robinson, who wrote her doctoral thesis on Shakespeare, situates his religious context as more political than theological: the operative distinction in his lifetime was Anglican versus popular Protestant dissent, not Catholic versus Protestant, since the Catholic church had been effectively expelled from England since Henry VIII. She locates Calvin’s influence on Shakespeare’s late plays — The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest — in his account of any human encounter as an encounter with God, asking ‘what would God want from this encounter?’ (a gloss she attributes to Calvin’s reading of ‘who is my neighbour?’ in the Institutes), which she connects to the late plays’ recurring scenes of recognition, pardon, and embrace. On The Winter’s Tale’s ambiguous plot, she reads Leontes’s jealousy as pure imagination rather than an implied infidelity, comparing the play to Othello, and treats Hermione and the play’s other wronged women as ‘honest, virtuous people.‘

American religiosity and its concealment

Robinson argues that American secularism is substantially a matter of appearance rather than substance: ‘religion has become associated with inhumane values, inhumane episodes among the governing class’, which drives people — including ostensibly secular academics — to conceal religious belief or practice rather than abandon it; she cites the ordinary phenomenon of a seemingly secular person asking to be prayed for in a crisis as evidence that private religiosity runs deeper than public affiliation suggests. Pressed on whether increasing religious pluralism dilutes American religiosity through a ‘least common denominator’ effect, she argues the opposite: immigrant communities, sustained by religious cultures tied to their places of origin, are now the country’s most reliable carriers of active religious practice. On Iowa’s rightward political shift, which she attributes largely to the ‘brief period’ of Kim Reynolds’s governorship and a broader Trumpist ‘fad’, she expresses grief at the erosion of what she calls the state’s longstanding ‘generosity and civility’, and hopes it proves temporary. Asked whether progressive ‘woke’ politics descend ideologically from seventeenth-century American Protestantism, she declines the framing but accepts a version of it: ‘insofar as any social movement wishes to alleviate injustice … I’m perfectly happy to adopt it as a Protestant’, reading it as the ordinary ‘generous evolution of a democratic society’ rather than a Protestant inheritance specifically.

Bible translation and teaching at Iowa

Asked about her preferred Bible translation amid a wave of new, deliberately ‘rougher’ retranslations, Robinson names the Revised Standard Version — ‘the classic American Protestant Bible in its latest form’ — and criticises later translations for retaining words like ‘jealousy’ and ‘vengeance’, which she considers poor renderings that reflect badly on God in modern English; she prefers the Jewish Publication Society’s substitution of ‘passionate’ for ‘jealous’, and reads ‘vengeance’ as a mistranslation of a term closer to ‘judgement’, which could vindicate as well as condemn. On roughly twenty-five years teaching literature at the University of Iowa, she reports being repeatedly surprised by how much biblical knowledge students privately carry despite public reticence about their religious upbringing, and identifies a ‘spontaneous generosity’ in younger students’ admiration for Jesus that she thinks exceeds formal Christian adherence.

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and craft

Robinson, who moved to Iowa to teach at the Writers’ Workshop after growing up in Idaho and studying and living on the East Coast, attributes the Workshop’s enduring pre-eminence over rival programmes to a self-sustaining culture: students trained to be constructive critics of one another, a faculty granted near-total autonomy with minimal institutional oversight, and a reputation in which ‘everybody’s success feels like everyone else’s success.’ Unlike Southern writers, who she says actively write as Southern writers, most Iowa students arrive from elsewhere and do not write to express an ‘Iowa voice’ — they come to study, not to represent a regional identity. On her own writing practice, she names patience with the slow, often frustrating and depressive approach to a piece as her ‘most unusual successful work habit’, treating that difficulty as itself part of the process rather than an obstacle to it. Asked about artificial intelligence and large language models, she declines any engagement, saying she feels fortunate her lifespan has not required her to become ‘adequate with’ them.

See also

• Marilynne Robinson — speaker
• Tyler Cowen — host
• Reading Genesis — Robinson’s 2024 book on the Book of Genesis, the episode’s occasioning work
• Science and Religion — the wiki’s existing science-and-religion concept page; Robinson’s Calvinist, literary-interpretive case for taking scripture seriously sits alongside its evidentiary and philosophical treatments of the same territory