Ten minutes with … Tom Perrotta

c. 2007 Religion News Service (UNDATED) In a strange way, literature and the culture wars are a little alike. Both take small moments _ an off-the-cuff remark in a sex-ed lecture, a team prayer after a youth soccer match _ and make them full-blown phenomena. Two such incidents form the center of Tom Perrotta’s new […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) In a strange way, literature and the culture wars are a little alike.

Both take small moments _ an off-the-cuff remark in a sex-ed lecture, a team prayer after a youth soccer match _ and make them full-blown phenomena.


Two such incidents form the center of Tom Perrotta’s new novel “The Abstinence Teacher,” a keen look at the culture wars from the kitchens and bedrooms of its sometimes reluctant soldiers.

The novel’s twin poles are Ruth Ramsey, a high-school sex education teacher whose curriculum, and life, are upended when a fiery evangelical preacher moves into her sedate suburb, and Tim Mason, a local soccer coach who turns to Jesus to save his drug-addled life.

Perrotta, a New Jersey native whose acclaimed novels “Election” and “Little Children” have been made into Hollywood movies, talked recently about a professional culture war, how Jesus was an angry man, and kinky evangelical sex.

Q: How did you research your novel?

A: With Tim (the evangelical former drug addict), the character started with people I know. Every once in a while, I would run into people I know who would really surprise me by revealing that they’re a serious evangelical Christian. Nine times out of 10, they had come to it as a result of problems they had with drugs or alcohol.

The pastor (character) was a real case of navigation from the outside. That was a trickier case. I had only written about religion once before, and that was about a wedding band thinking a good way to make money might be to become a Christian rock band.

So I started going to church, reading the Bible, which was incredibly useful and fun. It was one of those things I had never really understood the pleasure of before _ how interesting it is when you have a text to compare your actions to.

Q: Did you have anyone in mind when writing the Pastor Dennis character?

A: The pastor is part of the second wave of the Christian right. The first wave (such as disgraced television evangelist Jim Bakker), I felt like they were all going to go away. But they came back oddly strengthened and purified, and, it struck me late in the game that these people were serious and have integrity, and in a way, that’s more a challenge to secular America than the hypocrites (were).

Q: I read recently that you’re a lapsed Catholic?

A: Yes, like most Catholics I saw my Confirmation as graduation. Well, maybe not most Catholics, but certainly I did.


Q: The opening inscription of your book is from the Mark’s Gospel, when Jesus says those who cause the “little ones to sin” should be drowned. What’s behind that choice?

A: I wanted it to be kind of a surprising quote. It’s almost a little manifesto in a sense. You can read it a lot of ways. You can see it as tongue-and-cheek alone, and in that sense its satirical. On the other hand, its a direct quote.

Like a lot of people, I had really bought into this hippie ideal of Jesus as love. By I was struck in the Bible by what an angry figure he could be. You can see that in Pastor Dennis in the sense that he’s a really uncompromising figure. He says `Here’s the path I’m laying out before you and it’s hard.”’

Q: One of the interesting parts of the book is the way you play with stereotypes, show the chinks in everyone’s armor. Why’d you do that?

A: One thing I was really hoping to do is to honestly see what these people had in common. The American form of discourse is two hardened warriors shouting across the table, never expressing a doubt, never giving an inch.

So, I was definitely thinking about about how tenuous people’s convictions sometimes are, and how that’s a good thing.


(Tim and Ruth are) both adults trying to help other people’s kids, and in doing so they can’t help but transmit values that are really problematic to some parents.

Q: The book, in a way, revolves around two small incidents _ a sex-ed lecture and a prayer on a youth soccer field _ that keep spiraling outward. What was your inspiration for that approach?

A: When I started this book, I was kind of fascinated by the tone of constant grievance and outrage often based on what seems like fairly small stuff. You know, the “War on Christmas” that think tanks and public relations firms put out there. Something that starts maybe innocently enough becomes an insurgency. The culture war has become professionalized like everything else in America.

Q: What’s been the response to the book from evangelicals?

A: I have yet to hear from an angry evangelical. A few reviews suggested disappointment by the secular left that I hadn’t taken a harder line or done a satirical hatchet job on the religious right. But I’m happy that I didn’t do that.

One thing I learned from this is both the novelist and Christians have this impossible responsibility not to judge.

Q: I have to ask this, there’s so much talk of sex in your novel, what’s the most surprising thing you learned about evangelicals’ relationship with sex?


A: That apparently light bondage is OK! (Laughs) Or, as long as there’s not a third person involved it’s OK. For Catholics, there’s a somewhat limited range of activities because it all has to be open to procreation.

But I don’t want to get in trouble; already Catholics have e-mailed me criticizing me for getting the religions’ approach to sex wrong. And the evangelicals are extremely proud that I had suggested that their culture was sexy. I didn’t anticipate this battle about who has the sexier religion!

KRE/CM END BURKE900 words

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