The Modernist God State

Reviews / Votes

"From Lackey's opening argument about the centrality of the novel to human understanding and concepts of social order to his careful analysis of the role of religion in conceptualizing and justifying the Nazi world view, this is a provocative book. It is also deeply informed, fervently purposeful, and decidedly unsettling. A must read." -John Ernest, Interim Chair, Department of EnglishEberly Family Distinguished Professor, Department of English, West Virginia University and author of Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History "Courageous, provocative and insightful, Michael Lackey's The Modernist God State sees through our ingrained but unearned assumption that 'true' Christianity is always and naturally benevolent. As he reveals, novelists often understood what political philosophers did not: that the twentieth-century was an age of faith, of subconscious, in-depth Christianization. This is a powerful and fascinatingly-researched account of how secularization stories have blinded us to the many forms of Christian violence in the modern period. Michael Lackey is the Richard Dawkins of Literary Criticism." - Christopher Douglas, Associate Professor of English, University of Victoria, Canada. "Michael Lackey has given us a passionate, penetrating study of how the novelist (more than the philosopher or the social scientist) has illuminated the monstrous pairing of the Third Reich with Christianity." - James L. W. West III, Sparks Professor of English, Pennsylvania State University, USA, and author of William Styron: A Life (1998). "The Christian cross underlies the Nazi swastika-such is the startling thesis of this boldly revisionist work. Drawing on novelistic insights (Conrad, Styron) more discerning about humanity's unconscious heart of darkness than anything to be found in shallowly rationalistic philosophers, Michael Lackey challenges dominant readings of the Holocaust and the ideology of National Socialism. Against the conventional narrative of Nazi secularism, Lackey insists on the centrality for the key Nazi thinkers of a Christian God-state to be realized through the purification of the world of those whose incapacity for transcending the material demonstrates their sub-humanity-Jesus Christ as Our Aryan Redeemer, bearing not just a sword but a case of Zyklon B." - Charles W. Mills, John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, Northwestern University, USA "Michael Lackey's provocative claims-that modernity is not essentially secular but sustains religious belief at the level of the subconscious, that modernism should be understood in 'theological terms' not as anti-religious, and that secularization theories have distorted our understanding of 20th-century political history-will garner wide attention and arouse vigorous debate among a range of scholars, from modernist literary scholars to historians to theologians. Lackey insists that the 20th-century novel be understood as a theoretical instrument, producing insights into the origins of Hitler's National Socialism that philosophers and historians have missed. Written in an accessible prose style with helpful summaries of the philosophies he examines, The Modernist God State offers compelling, if sometimes controversial, insights into the modernist novel and the origin of the nation state that should be read by anyone interested in the growing field of theology and literature." -- Pamela L. CaughieProfessor of English, Loyola University Chicago, USA, and Past President of the Modernist Studies Association.