MS: At the end of the first essay on Calvin in The Death of Adam, you note, “That mysterious energy, Calvinism, appears to be spent.... It is hard to imagine our recovering a sense of it.” Yet surely you have some constructive purpose behind your fascination with Calvin. Apart, then, from simply doing justice to the past, what do you hope a renewed, sympathetic understanding of Calvin’s theology might mean for us now?

MR: It is an irony that Calvin is always pilloried for his insistence on “election,” though the concept is Scriptural and also nearly universal among Christian theologians of every stripe. Yet people in his tradition were active, innovative, and very much inclined toward social transformation. We have opted for petty determinisms—childhood trauma, genetic inheritance, social conditioning, etc.—that have made us comparatively passive. We seem to prefer to find excuses—which are really nothing more than the embrace of determinism, a sort of Stockholm syndrome relative to whatever we can claim as limitation. I am fascinated by the more enabling self-understanding. It has helped me to find my way out of the cloying comforts that are offered by prevalent psychological models. I suspect that the appeal of bare-knuckles competition and even the unembarrassed pleasures of hostility that are rising among us now might have a similar origin. There is a great difference, however. Calvin taught reverence for human beings as such, seeing Christ even in one’s deadliest enemy. If this one thing can be recovered, then perhaps what was best in that ethos will be recovered as well.

MS: You emphasize, rightly, the vital place of “perception” in Calvin’s theology. What separates this subjectivity and individualism from its Cartesian variant, which stands at the head of our contemporary confusions about what the “mind” is, and that you rightly criticize? Or rather, why should certain Reformation emphases—perception, inwardness, subjectivity—not be included in a narrative about the sources of the modern Cartesian self?

MR: I have read Descartes a number of times, trying, and failing, to find the basis for his historical reputation. I have had versions of this experience so often I don’t know why it continues to surprise me. In any case Descartes’ thinking appears to me to be based on an understanding of consciousness that strongly resembles Calvin’s. He did live his adult life in the Low Countries until he left for Protestant Sweden, and he served in the army of a Protestant general in the Dutch wars against Spain. This is not to say that he saw any need to accept Calvinism as a religious identity, though it certainly suggests a degree of sympathy with it. However, it is to say that he found a way to affirm the truth and value of scientific insight in the Calvinist model of thought and perception as continuous, if partial and erring, communication with God. By the standards of medieval dualism, the opposition of mind and body is not even an issue in Descartes. Indeed, his conception of the workings of the mind is strikingly physical. Misreading Descartes is really one part of a larger project, which is the rejecting of the fact that science and perception or thought both open on the problems of epistemology, the nature and accessibility of objective or scientific truth. The modern self is precisely not Cartesian.

MS: You have written a number of essays on political and social themes, from Mother Country to “Onward, Christian Liberals.” However, with a few exceptions, politics seems absent from your novels. Even their titles indicate something of this: Housekeeping, Home, Gilead, all of which gesture toward your concern for the interior, domestic lives of your characters and the dynamics of family life or, slightly more broadly, a particular community. What response do you have to this?

MR: My politics, and my religion as well, are based entirely on the loveliness and value of ordinary human lives. The creaky apparatus called politics shelters or oppresses or threatens these lives, and is therefore of interest.

MS: Another way of getting at this question about politics would be the following: given your emphasis on perception, subjectivity, individualism, “the mind,” and related themes, how do you move outward to consider the basis of political and social life? That is, when you start from the classic Calvinist posture of an irreducible individualism, what cast does that give to theorizing and thinking about politics, society, and community?

MR: People have reduced Calvin just as they have Descartes. Calvin’s social ethic insists on the reverence we owe one another. His sermons are full of attacks on greed and arrogance. His Geneva had public education for all children, boys and girls, with the schooling of poor children paid for by the city. It had institutions for the relief of the poor and refugees. Early generations of Americans looked to Geneva as a model community on these grounds. If “individualism” means the sanctity of every individual, as for Calvin it did, then the creation of a mutually respectful and sustaining community follows very naturally.

MS: Given the topics of your non-fiction essays and the numerous theological references in your novels, the religious concerns informing your work are readily apparent. But I also wonder how much growing up in Idaho continues to shape your work? An older essay you wrote on your “Western roots” was remarkably revealing, I thought. I especially am interested in how your Western roots have mixed with your theological preoccupations—how do you see them fitting together, or not?

MR: No doubt my childhood has had a strong influence on all my work.