Stephen King, Theologian?

 

I can't claim to be a Stephen King fan, but I have enjoyed a couple of his novel's, taking care to read those which are lower on the creepy scale. I scare easy -- really easy. I have enjoyed lunch in the Stanley Hotel in Rocky Mountain National Park, which was the inspiration for The Shining. I have never considered King to be a theologian and I figured that he doesn't have much time for organized religion, although his daughter is a Unitarian minister. Then I read a review by David Zahl of Douglas Cowan’s America’s Dark Theologian, which is about King's religious and spiritual themes.

 

Both Zahl and Cowan make a pretty good case for King as someone who gets that both the seen and the unseen matter and that faith shouldn't simply be dismissed. Here is an excerpt from the review: 

While it’s true that organized religion seldom comes off well in his books, King handles the Christian faith itself in a myriad of ways—as the motivator for bravery just as often as cruelty, a reservoir of strength as well as a shield for cowardice. Characters regularly wrestle with the divine, and rarely the same way twice. Sometimes a character’s faith wavers, sometimes it evaporates, sometimes it morphs, and sometimes it triumphs. But it’s almost always there in some way.

Cowan’s title is, by his own admission, a bit of a misnomer. King has little interest in laying out anything like a coherent theology or cosmology. He doesn’t make assertions about metaphysics so much as he explores the relationship between the seen and the unseen—a relationship that William James memorably described as the province of religion. In this respect, King has few peers. He knows full well that the unseen can be a repository of fear just as much as hope, if not more so.

Much of the horror of King’s stories derives from the notion that the unseen order is far more fraught and sinister than conventional religion would lead you to believe. You could even describe his novels as a catalog of the potential permutations of what lies beyond human perception—and how these mysteries break in on our ordinary lives. Sometimes that unseen order is monstrous, sometimes extraterrestrial, sometimes incomprehensible, and yes, sometimes divine. What remains constant in his oeuvre is the sense that there is a lot more going on than we know, and not all of it good.

In case you're wondering, you couldn't pay me decent money to watch a King-inspired film. I'm even wussier about scary movies than scary books. Still, this review got me thinking.

Any King fans or aficionado's out there? Does this make sense to you? Are you hiding under the covers?