The Unbeliever

A minister who doesn't believe runs into the Devil who doesn't care.

THE TESTAMENT OF GIDEON MACK

By James Robertson

Viking. 387 pp. $24.95

Does He or doesn't He? Judging by the religion books on the bestseller list, Americans are up in arms about the existence of God: not so much a Great Awakening as a Great Arguing. It's become an article of faith that the United States is the most religious nation in the developed world, but The God Delusion, by atheist Richard Dawkins, is racking up heavenly sales. At the same time, we're fascinated by a 2nd-century Gnostic fragment that claims Judas was the best disciple and a book about two archaeologists who have found The Jesus Family Tomb (so much for the Ascension). Sam Harris has written A Letter to a Christian Nation, but Stephen Prothero says our Religious Literacy has gone to hell. It's as though the whole country -- or at least that part of it still buying books -- is crying, "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief."

Into this anxious cultural moment, The Testament of Gideon Mack has arrived like an answer to some demonic prayer. James Robertson's provocative novel claims to present the memoir of a hardworking Presbyterian minister who never believed in God. It's a deeply unsettling story that will prick the faith of the devout, shake the confidence of atheists and haunt those of us who hover uneasily in-between.

Part of the novel's disruption of our sense of what's real and what's not is an introduction by "the editor" -- one of Robertson's clever poses -- who disavows any claims about the story's authenticity. It may be "outlandish enough to attract a cult readership," he speculates, or it may be "a genuine document with its own relevance for our times." He wouldn't presume to judge one way or the other, but he does mention the strange events that recently brought this story to public notice: Gideon Mack, the minister of a small Scottish village, fell into a gorge while trying to rescue a friend's dog. Although presumed dead, he was found alive three days later in what doctors and journalists termed "a miracle." He seemed in good health, but soon after the accident he announced that he had never believed in God, had slept with one of his parishioners and had been rescued from the gorge by the Devil. During the ecclesiastical trial that followed, he vanished, but his body was found many months later in the mountains, and the police recovered the "testament" that constitutes the bulk of this novel.

Gideon begins with a line from St. Paul that quickly slides into his own intense voice: "When I was a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: yet I was already, in so many ways, the man I would become. I think back on how cold I was, even then. It is hard to recall, now that I burn with this dry, feverish fire."

The son of a severe, Calvinist minister and a hollow, frightened mother, Gideon grew up in a dreary home divorced from time. While his schoolmates were "listening agog to Sergeant Pepper," he was reading "children's classics deemed suitable because they were at least half a century old and their authors dead." When his father catches him watching "Batman" (on the Sabbath!), he thunders, "You have betrayed me and you have betrayed God," and then promptly suffers a stroke right there in front of the TV.

His father survives, but that calamity pushes Gideon -- at the age of 12 -- to question and finally reject the stalking God who would set up such traps and punishments. "I didn't want that spooky figure hovering behind me and touching me whenever I tried to make a decision. I wanted to be left alone." But unable to declare his unbelief or leave the church, he develops "hypocrisy down to a fine art," and, in a tragic act of revenge, he follows his father into the ministry. "For nearly forty years," he writes, "I have let the world assume that I believed in God when I did not."

John Updike wrote about a Presbyterian minister who lost his faith in In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), but Updike never quite captured the sticky quality of belief. For his Rev. Wilmot "the sensation was distinct -- a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward. . . . His thoughts had slipped with quicksilver momentum into the recognition that . . . there is no such God." Robertson is far more attentive to the prolonged and violent tension between faith and doubt in the mind of a person who once really believed. Gideon fancies himself an effective minister despite his secretly rationalist mindset. He's busy with charity work, handy with an inclusive sermon. But he never can find any peace or love.

And then his world is overturned by a supernatural intercession. You must meet Robertson's droll Devil. He's "suave and fit-looking" but also a little sad. "I used to have a purpose," he tells Gideon with a sigh. "We both had a purpose, God and me. Now? . . . My heart's not in it. Basically, I don't do anything any more. I despair, if you want the honest truth. I mean, the world doesn't need me." This is an arresting encounter, a wry addition to the line of stories that stretches from Jesus's temptation in the wilderness to Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown." Like God, the Devil never leaves anyone where he finds him, and Gideon returns to his church aflame with a truth he never preached before. What he now knows -- or thinks he knows -- forces everyone to consider the fragile foundation of what they believe.

There's devilry for sure in a story this disquieting. You won't find Robertson blessing the devout or the atheists. But before Gideon departs this world, his testament will affirm your faith in the power of fiction. ·

Ron Charles is a senior editor of Book World.