The salvation in "Salvation Boulevard"

Larry Beinhart, of Wag the Dog fame, has a new novel out, Salvation Boulevard. It's a tangled, messy, brilliant, sexy tale of a murdered atheist college professor; a Muslim college student, who after being tortured, confesses to the crime; a TV evangelist busy "reclaiming America for Christ" and building a complex of church and city to safely ensconce the saved; a Jewish lawyer who dies but doesn't go away; and the lawyer's investigator who was once saved by the evangelist, but in the course of events, loses his faith, only to find himself and faith once again.

But all of that is the wrapping. The gift inside the wrapping is a delightful and delicate romp through all those God questions with which humans struggle, the biggest of which has to do with the co-existence of evil and a beneficent diety.


Here's a taste.

Nate, the college professor, introduced his students to theodicy [how can we reconcile a loving god with all the evil in the world] by telling a story:

"A man is sitting beside a pool, enjoying his cigar and a mojito. A woman and her child are nearby. A stone falls out of the sky and knocks the woman out. Unattended, the child falls into the pool. It's only three feet deep, so it would be easy for the man to get up and rescue the toddler, but he sits by and watches the child drown. When the woman wakes up, she finds her baby dead. She screams and weeps. She yells at the man smoking his cigar, 'Why didn't you save my baby?' The man tells her she should be grateful for this great chance to experience grief and loss. Furthermore, she should love and adore him for giving her that opportunity."

In the discussion that follows, the professor says, "Here's the question, the real question. We all agree that the man was evil. How is it that we hold ourselves to a higher moral standard than we hold God?"


Toward the end of the story, the detective, a born-again, "evangelical" Christian, saved by the power of God through the TV evangelist's laying on of hands, has lost his faith:

"It wasn't a matter of finding some other church, maybe one less dogmatic and certain. Or some other pastor, one less powerful and less of a sinner. The lesson of the parable, for me, was that belief, in and of itself, was neither good nor evil. It wasn't even a guide to good and evil. They existed independently of faith, came from a different source and resided in a different place."


At the end of the story, the detective has found "salvation" more or less. It's not what you might think.


There's more here.