Revival

Stephen King was born to a Methodist family from Maine in 1947. Their devout practice of their faith would profoundly influence his work as a writer, even as King lost his affinity for religion early on in his life.

King became a skeptic of organized religion when he was still in high school. His criticism of conservative Christianity can be seen as early as his debut novel, Carrie (1974), in which the titular protagonist’s religious upbringing leads to her bullying and abuse. Carrie White’s classmates mock her when they learn that she has never heard of menstruation before—a sexual naivety that is the direct result of her mother, Margaret’s, religiosity. Margaret believes that sexuality is inherently sinful, making subjects like menstruation taboo in the White household. Likewise, Margaret harasses Carrie for being “sinful,” locking her daughter up in a closet where she is forced to look at images of the Devil to frighten her. King uses Carrie’s experiences to show the parallels between peer pressure and religious judgment. This parallel is revisited in King’s 1980 novella The Mist, where a religious fanatic convinces a group of survivors that the unearthly mist that has trapped them in a supermarket is a sign of the apocalypse. The fanatic convinces many of the survivors to offer a sacrifice from their number to ensure their salvation.

Despite his skepticism of organized religion, King’s narratives often employ moral frameworks that hearken to religion; his works are largely characterized by conflicts in which ordinary people must face down forces of unambiguous evil. The clearest example of this is King’s 1978 postapocalyptic epic novel The Stand, which follows a wide-ranging cast of characters who survive a cataclysmic pandemic. The novel’s characters are drawn to one of two sides, each led by emblematic figures. Mother Abagail Freemantle brings together the novel’s protagonists in Boulder, Colorado, while Randall Flagg uses his dark powers to entice the novel’s antagonists to Las Vegas, Nevada. Mother Abagail is depicted as a religious character who relies on the will of God to direct her group’s actions. Flagg, on the other hand, is frequently implied to be a manifestation of the Devil or the Antichrist, though he also recurs as a character in King’s larger body of work. King uses internal conflicts among the characters in Boulder to show how faith and moral goodness are often tested in times of strife.

King’s 1996 magical realist novel The Green Mile similarly uses religious allusion and symbolism to drive its exploration of moral agency in the face of good and evil. The character of John Coffey is wrongly accused of raping and murdering two girls. He is nevertheless sentenced to die by execution, which is partly informed by the judge’s prejudice against Coffey, a Black man, during the Jim Crow Era of the United States. Coffey is a Christ figure, while the novel’s narrator and protagonist, Paul Edgecomb, is the guard who realizes that he is doing something wrong by putting Coffey to death.

Revival is the King novel that most explicitly deals with the topic of religion, building upon these earlier works by bringing a more nuanced perspective to faith and the way different people practice it. In Revival, King once again criticizes the hypocrisy of organized religion and its effect on ordinary people through Charles Jacobs’s Terrible Sermon. However, Jacobs merely redirects his faith from Christianity toward a force he calls “secret electricity.” Meanwhile (and like King himself), the novel’s protagonist, Jamie Morton, chooses to abandon his faith as a young man. However, King’s adult reckoning with faith also informs the development of Morton as a character. While King has stayed away from organized religion, he has also declared that he believes in God as a result of his experience recovering from drug and alcohol addiction. This partially mirrors Morton’s character arc as a person with a heroin addiction: He becomes indebted to his former minister when Jacobs provides him with a miracle cure. However, as they continue to cross paths throughout their lives, it becomes clearer to Jamie that Jacobs is a force for evil. Revival as a whole therefore comments on the way faith shapes one’s moral agency as well as on The Dynamics of Science and Faith.