Marilynne Robinson is the author of four novels, Housekeeping, Gilead, which won a Pulitzer, Home, which won the Orange prize, and Lila. One of her legions of fans is Barack Obama, who visited her recently in Iowa, where she lives and teaches. Famously dedicated to her work, she once told an interviewer that “switching off” was her version of George Orwell’s Room 101. This conversation was frequently punctuated by Robinson’s rich, deep laughter.

The New York Review of Books’s transcript of your meeting with Barack Obama revealed an extraordinarily wide-ranging discussion. How was that experience for you?

Well, you know, it was wonderful. I mean, it’s not the sort of thing one expects. The president is a very, very intellectual man with a very strong literary interest. And I think that he sort of felt like having the kind of conversation that he would like to have, rather than one that is always dictated by the politics of the moment or world circumstances. He was in Des Moines for this speech that he gave about education reform, and since I was here, he just added me into the itinerary, and I was very pleased.

You spoke at length about all sorts of things, including democracy, its relationship to Christianity… what were the highlights?

Well, I was very happy that we did talk about democracy. It’s one of those very central values that get lost in our political discourse. It’s one of the things that I think we really share pretty profoundly as a value and yet to return to it and to think about what it is substantially, how it is practised and protected and so on, that’s unusual these days and I was glad to have the subject come up.

You talked about it as a crowning achievement for humanity, something that we’ve all created together, with our best selves, which meant we had to think the best of one another, rather than merely as a matter of pragmatism…

Yes, I feel that very strongly. You know, in non-adversarial circumstances, it works so well, and this adversarial culture that we have at the moment politically puts a lot of democratic resolutions of problems and so on out of reach, because these kinds of assumptions about – yes, we all intend well, the question is how to arrive at what would be best, and so on, the kind of thinking that undergirds democracy – is short-circuited by facets of antagonism, really, adversarial attitudes that are too narrow to serve the public well.

What did you feel about what the president said about novels, and what they had taught him about the value of empathy, and understanding other people?

Yes, I think that’s wonderful. To the extent that we’ve talked about things like that, he would rather have me writing novels than nonfiction. I don’t really know what he thinks about my nonfiction – for me they’re both important. But it’s very, very touching how deeply the problem of empathy and the problem of identity, and so on, and the interest in, you know, sort of the ethical content of ordinary life, this is very characteristic of him, very remarkable I think.

Your new collection of essays, The Givenness of Things, addresses the importance of the humanities and the current state of religion in its broadest sense. There’s also this wonderful thought that at the moment, “we are less interested in the exploration of the glorious mind, more engrossed in the drama of staying ahead of whatever it is we think is pursuing us”. It’s an intriguing idea – what did you mean?

There’s a strange future orientation in contemporary thinking. We don’t know anything about the future; we probably know less than people have known at any given time, because everything is in flux. We know that huge technological innovations can permeate society very quickly, and yet they’re always saying that we have to prepare for the future – they use this word competition irritatingly frequently. At the same time, there’s no secure model of what it is that we have to do in order to become the societies that they see as being prosperous or as surviving as viable societies over even the next decade.

And meanwhile, the most interesting thing that could be imagined, which is to be a human consciousness on a beautiful planet, this is something that is completely bypassed; that only present experience and reflection can give us access to and allow us to enjoy the privilege of existing.

Why do you think that happens?

It’s truly a great mystery to me, because as far as I’m concerned people have allowed to be taken out of their hands an unimaginable pleasure. I do a lot of work, obviously, in very obscure texts, which are on the internet – what saint is it that puts Foxe’s Acts and Monuments on the internet? I mean, the irony of a culture that truly supplies so much to be known and at the same time turns its back on the whole privilege of knowing – it’s amazing to me.

I have this dream of stimulating an argument. But I frankly have had very little success at that

Is there a way to turn people towards these things again?

Well, you know, this is just a feeling that I’ve had for a long time, that in the United States, certainly, the cultural centres, the churches, the universities, have been condescending to their audience, as it were. They assume that people would not be interested in what are often the very things that fascinate them, the professors and the ministers and so on. And so they sort of systematically deprive people of not only a rich sense of what is to be known, but also of the sense that these things are interesting, available.

How can it be changed? Does writing essays such as these help?

I certainly hope so. One thing I tend to do is to go against the grain of what seems to be the received state of a question, academically speaking. I make the case in the hope that somebody will say, oh you are so wrong, you have missed something so essential – I have this dream of stimulating an argument. But I frankly have had very little success at that.

You mean your ideal would be to have a disputation with somebody or a set of people, to stimulate that sort of fierce argument?

Exactly. And then when you think of them galvanising all the resources that they would have to make the reply to me, then I would learn things from that. It would be wonderful.

From the standpoint of your Christian faith, with its Calvinist influence, you also argue for a broader idea of what religion means.

Dear old Calvin! He tends to treat highly developed, highly reified, in a sense, doctrine as idolatry – the assumption being that you’re always wrong about things. It’s like scientific method, really; you’re always wrong, and if you become insistent on your model of things, this is idolatrous thinking. And I think we do that now. The religions have settled down into doctrines, which differentiate each other, and then they’ve fitted the boundaries of these artificial distinctions. And all of that is incredibly trivialising. Religion addresses reality in enormously large and enormously inclusive terms – and that’s what we’ve forgotten.

Do you feel that on every level of your life? Does religion permeate the emotional, intellectual, spiritual planes?

I feel that, yes. I can’t find a principle for excluding one from another.

There is a striking gap in your career as a novelist: Housekeeping was published in 1980, and when you returned with Gilead in 2004, and in your subsequent novels, religion was at the forefront. What happened? What did you want to do when you returned to fiction?

Well, you know, I became a strange novelist, if not simply a strange person outright. I tend to do what I want to do. For a long time I didn’t want to write fiction. Then suddenly a fictional world was in my imagination, so I wrote it. It’s ridiculous to say I’m passive in relation to these things, because obviously I do exactly what I want to do… I’m a sort of hedonist in the sense that I want to enjoy my life, and sometimes that means writing fiction and sometimes it means writing nonfiction.

The trilogy made up by Gilead, Home and Lila has had immense success. But what has it meant for you?

There’s a way in which, nonfiction or fiction, you learn your own mind, you find out what matters to you, what the questions are for you… And with fiction, you can put the problem out in front of yourself in a three-dimensional way, and work through it, and that’s very, very interesting.

One of the ideas you explore is how we know if we’ve lived a good life, how we know what constitutes a state of grace?

My impulse is to think that religion is often too self-regarding. That the question is not whether I’m living a good life, but whether I’m doing well toward other people, whether I’m apprehending the sacredness of someone who is perhaps very unlike me. I’m very oriented towards the experience of living in the world in those terms, rather than thinking of whether you’re adding up tokens that will finally allow you to say I was really very good.

You mean it’s about embodying the religious in your everyday life, in your relationships with other people?

One of the things that Calvin does, which I love, is that he says that God presents people to you, or he gives people to you, that are occasions, and God wants something out of that occasion; an understanding that the other person is precisely as important to God as you are.

Is it too crude to say that we are replacing reflectiveness and deep thought with materialism or instant distraction, or what you call in the essays a “joyless urgency”? Is that too pessimistic?

I think that one of the problems that we have in contemporary society is this willingness to speak dismissively of people in general. It’s part of the ratcheting down, you know. It’s very strange because I think most people, in their encounters with other people, seldom see them slavering over material objects. People live profound lives. People care for their parents, and care for their children, and have ideas of what would be right and wrong, or better at any rate. And then we say, oh no, it’s simply materialist – and it’s a self-perpetuating thing, a downward cycle.

People need help being articulate about these deep things and that’s why we have poetry and we have music and so on. But to assume that these things would be meaningless to people creates an artificial famine that makes people less and less competent in these things that they could otherwise enjoy and being enriched by.

You come across as very free of vanity, but you must feel that the response to your books proves you right, in a way. People have really responded to what you want to write about.

I’m very grateful to have seen that phenomenon. But it does confirm what I’m saying – that people have other interests than car crashes and this trivia that’s fed to them constantly.

You’ve said in the past that you’d like to travel but that there are just too many books to read…

Yes – I tend to be at home reading my books, you know. It’s a pretty good life.

Coming back to Obama, I sense the two of you have a continuing conversation...

That’s true, within limits – he’s a busy man, I’m a busy woman! Thank God I have my job and he has his!

The Givenness of Things is published by Virago (£18.99). Click here to buy a copy for £15.19