What if the most astonishing greatness about Flannery O’Connor is not some moral life she lived but the grace her own writing brought into her own airless, privileged box of whiteness? The way grace liberated much of her writing from her own bias, prejudice, and racism? What if by making excuses for her, whitewashing her racism, and rewriting her biography as hagiography, the very thing we wrote out of her life was GRACE—the very thing she was obsessed with in all of her characters and would have most wanted us to see working within her own character? (Remember Ruby Turpin in “Revelation,” who is saved from false righteousness and her own racism by a girl named Mary Grace, who violently smacks her in the face?) The grace that transforms, upends, reverses, revolutionizes? Honestly, I think Flannery would be pissed off at us for our cowardly redactions. She wouldn’t want us to edit, delete, revise, pretend, make excuses, call her a product of her time. Her writing was bigger and better than the confines of her own mind and culture and white privilege, and that is the miracle. To God be the glory.
Flannery O’Connor was great as a writer for the same reason every prophet was great. She was willing to step aside and allow herself to become God’s mouthpiece.
Of course, we must acknowledge the theological danger and contestability inherent in the assertion that any finite human speaks for God. After all, many people have publicly claimed to be God’s mouthpiece, but history ultimately revealed that they sought none other than the selfish reinforcement of their own privilege and power. What makes Flannery such a fascinating— and distinct—case is that the passage of time has revealed the exact opposite. As God’s mouthpiece, her words revealed her own selfishness and racism, and unspun the coil of her own privilege and power. As such, her story reveals a potential litmus test for anyone who claims to speak for or with God.
The epiphany? We can’t erase the grotesqueness of Flannery O’Connor herself, of her life, any more than we can erase the grotesqueness of her fiction. She wouldn’t want us to, because to do so erases grace, deletes God—the one constant Flannery always pointed us toward—from right out of her biography. When we redact the author’s letters, make excuses for her bigoted and biased claims, or shrink from directly identifying her racist words and actions as racist, what we expunge in the end is Godself. Were she alive today, she would no doubt protest this.
Flannery O’Connor got canceled, yes. But ironically, when we attempt to overturn her cancellation, we cancel the action of God’s grace within and behind the fiction. A grace that permeates Flannery’s writing and allows it to transcend its author’s personal limitations. We end up denying the Holy Spirit’s “underground springs.” Concealing the ugly truth about Flannery’s personal grotesqueness leads us to efface an ancillary truth, which is this: God called Flannery to the vocation of the Divine’s own Smith Corona. Faithfully, she answered.
Flannery O’Connor wasn’t a faithful Christian because she was antiracist. She was a faithful Christian because as an author she showed up for the page, and got out of the way so grace could perform its mystery. The writer Flannery is a miracle, created by God’s grace and her own willingness to show up for the page . . . no matter what wildness emerged. For this faithfulness, she should be praised and recognized. Just as for her own sin and racism, she should be critiqued.
What if from this moment on, all of us lovers of O’Connor just stopped all these frenetic efforts to angelize, hagiographize, revise, besaint, ensky, beatify, and canonize her? What if at long last we put an end to all the defensiveness? the excuses? the textual gloss? the cultural justifications? The endless redaction with its vigilant eye hell-bent on deleting all the nasty bits from Flannery’s life? What if we just accepted her for the sinner she was? What if we just accepted her own bald-faced categorization of herself as selfish, narrow-minded, desperately in need of grace, and as a writer whom God mysteriously uses to critique the very sins she herself participated in?
I think we would find ourselves led, splendidly, to the offensive miraculousness of God’s extraordinary grace.
I propose we do something radically new and use O’Connor’s unusual understanding of grace to interpret not only her fiction, as has been done for decades, but also the author’s own life. Writing on the use of the grotesque in her fiction, O’Connor famously once observed, “Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has a feeling for the nature of the violences which preceded and followed them. The Devil’s greatest wile, Baudelaire has said, is to convince us that he does not exist.” When we read Flannery O’Connor and ignore her personal racism, aren’t we falling into this very trap?
In my view, racism is the grotesque violence that, tragically, precedes and follows the grace of O’Connor’s fiction. Yet most critics and readers deny its very existence. The irony!
O’Connor also wrote, “Violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moments of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work.” And so I ask: Where is the moment of grace in the hardheaded author’s own life and legacy? If Flannery O’Connor could hear us now, would she see our antiracist critiques and her own cancellation as an act of grace, an act of grace as violent as any that happened to her self-righteous protagonists, like the grandma and Ruby Turpin? I think she would, and I want to believe that, if she read that odd sentence on this page, she might even chuckle.
O’Connor, after all, repeatedly compared herself not only to Ruby Turpin but also to the self-righteous grandmother in her story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The grandma only recognizes her shared humanity with those she perceives as beneath her at the moment when she stares down the barrel of a serial killer’s gun. After murdering her, the serial killer in the story concludes, “She would of been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every day of her life.”
Is it possible to conceive of cancel culture as a violent act of grace, a blow to the head that can reverse our vision like Ruby Turpin’s? Would Flannery O’Connor have been a better antiracist if people of color and their white allies had been empowered to cancel her, or at least call her out, every day of her life? I dare say she might’ve been. I want to believe that she was open to grace, even the violent kind of grace that hurts to receive. I could be wrong, but I crave to believe she would’ve changed and repented.
From the day she first set pen to paper, Flannery O’Connor longed for her work to glorify God. And guess what? It does. But only if we her readers unflinchingly name, claim, and confront— not hide, whitewash, or excuse—the reality of her lived racism. Seen in this light, O’Connor can remain beloved—though never besainted—in our hearts forever.
Jacqueline A. Bussie is the executive director of the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research. She previously taught religion, theology, and interfaith studies at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. Her books include The Laughter of the Oppressed (T&T Clark, 2007), which won the national Trinity Prize; Outlaw Christian: Finding Authentic Faith by Breaking the Rules (Thomas Nelson, 2016), which won the 2017 Gold Medal Illumination Award for Christian Living; and Love Without Limits: Jesus’ Radical Vision for a Love with No Exceptions (Fortress, 2018).
