The Messiah of Morris Avenue is a contemporary religious satire disguised as a quest for faith, or vice versa. It employs some clever near-futuristic extrapolation (and some painful groaners) to tell the story of an America which has lost the Christian “Culture Wars” and devolved into an uptight sex-starved theocracy.
At the top of the pyramid is Reverend Sabbath, an evangelist extraordinaire, and CEO of the fabulously wealthy Risen Lamb corporation. Think Pat Robertson on spiritual steroids. Sabbath epitomizes everything screwed up about a contemporary Christianity wedded to power, money and violence.
Slaving away somewhere in the middle of the pyramid is Johnny Greco, a washed-up journalist whose career was ruined by Sabbath’s anti-blasphemy laws. Greco works for a seedy tabloid called the Inquiring Mind, and specializes in fluff reports about crazies and con artists. Greco’s career and personal despair turn around, however, when he uncovers somebody who just might be the real deal: a young Latino preacher and miracle worker named Jay (initials J.F.K.) who claims to be Christ returned to earth. Christ, of course, this time around wears a dark hooded sweatshirt, travels around in a beat-up van with an ex-porn star and uses copious basketball metaphors.
The story basically chronicles Greco’s selfish mix of trying to get the exclusive scoop on Jay, while struggling with his own desire to finally put aside his professional skepticism and believe. Intertwined in all this, of course is Sabbath who catches wind of the returned Christ and is determined to stamp him out this time. Sabbath declares at one point, “We corrected Christianity, Christ. Worked out the kinks. We don’t need you.”
As much as I personally agree with a lot of the points Tony Hendra is making with this book, I was a bit disappointed that he opted for the obvious cartoon dichotomy of Sabbath’s contemporary “evil” Christianity and Jay’s authentically human street Christianity. It makes for a fairly entertaining and quick read, but tends to lack any lasting punch because it is everything that you’d expect in a pop religious satire. There aren’t any surprises waiting for you in the book, and no real exploration of the possibility that maybe everybody is as right as they are wrong, that maybe that’s just life, and we ought to just make the best of it regardless of the potential saviors who are paraded in front of us.
Also disappointing is that none of the characters really have any depth or reality too them. The bad guys look and act like idiots and of course get what’s coming to them. The good guys are so good that they are completely lifeless and boring. And not surprisingly, the truth prevails in the end. Well, sort of… It’s hard to say if any of the characters are really transformed by any of the experiences. And not just in a sort of postmodern way, but in a sort of way where you kind of end up feeling like, “Well, why did I read this?”
All that said though, there are some decent modern updates of Christ’s teachings (like the speech he gives at the military base) – even if none of it is really that mind-blowing. And there are some pretty fun sci-fi moments – even though I wouldn’t by any stretch call it a sci-fi novel. My favorite has to be when the returned Christ is captured on an Amish farm by robots leaping out of stealth helicopters. And there are also some subversive elements thrown into the mix, like the American government breezily planning false flag terror attacks as pretexts to launch Armageddon-style wars.
In the end, I would say this is a bit lighter novel than I typically enjoy, but as the dust jacket says, it may be a good read for people not usually inclined in the direction of religious fiction. But reading it, you have to wonder if it really is any less preachy and evangelizing than the sappy Christian fiction it goes to such great lengths to mock. It may quite simply be the same thing packaged for a different more “hip” audience. And that may be okay at the end of the day, because there are room for as many tellings of the story of Jesus as there are people on this planet. As the book makes plain, no one has a monopoly on the truth.
