Was Mark Twain an Evil Man?

Mark Twain after the loss of his daughter Suzy

A Christian's Defense of Mark Twain

• ...a God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave is angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell--mouths mercy, and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him! - Mark Twain (The Mysterious Stranger)

Mark Twain is a favorite of mine as a source of great quotations. Lately a friend has been busting my chops for quoting him. He posted the above passage to prove I shouldn't quote Twain if I was a Christian. The passage itself is from Twain's "Mysterious Stranger", a story he wrote following a series of tragic losses in his life. The passage, as you can see asks some very hard questions of Christians and of God Himself. Sadly, Twain doesn't have any answers. In his day, Christian apologists were virtually uniform in their embrace of the loving God/eternal torturer portrait of the Almighty. That picture of God has driven sturdier souls than Sam Clemens away from the church and into outer darkness where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

So let me offer a defense of Twain. He is not the first man to question God's will. He won't be the last. First of all, Twain asked the question a lot of grieving people ask when they lose a loved one to death. They want to know what happens to them next. In Twain's day, churchmen almost universally offered but two possibilities. One was eternity as some vague floaty creature who gets issued a harp and is commanded to sing eternal praises. The other is a blistered miserable creature writhing in a vast pit of fire and unable to die.

Suzy Clemens who died of spinal
meningitis at age 24.

Remember, Mark Twain had just lost his beloved daughter and being a public figure and a writer all that got worked out on a public stage in a very public way. This was a man grieving and Twain was too smart to accept the easy religious pablum about disembodied spirits floating off to heaven. And the idea that his daughter might be consigned to hell was just too horrible to contemplate. 

I imagine that other versions of the "what happens when we die" doctrine might have made Twain think more kindly of Christians, but Twain was only acquainted with the hell fire immortal soul doctrine as generally preached to him as a boy.  There actually are other interpretations of Scripture on that point. I, for instance, am a Seventh-day Adventist. We do not believe the soul is immortal, or that anyone burns in hell forever. For us death is sleep and the resurrection happens at the Second Coming. Hell is a quick and merciful end for those who insist on being evil.

Perhaps if Twain had seen another portrait of an actually merciful God, it might have helped him in his grief. Sadly, for Twain there was no other picture of God available to him. As he rightly points out, the God of the Golden Rule and the God of eternal torment being the same person doesn't make sense. Remember, that Christianity as Twain knew it was chock-a-block with hypocrisy and its adherents preached a cruel God who burned babies alive for an eternity, consigning even relatively minor sinners to writhe in the flames for ages without end. Twain had a really hard time with the doctrine of hell and he greatly feared for his daughter's soul. It was easier for him to believe in no God at all than in the sadistic God of Christianity as preached in most churches of the day.

One can hardly blame him for his negative reaction to the picture of God that the Christians of his day presented. I suspect God would prefer that Twain ask the question and demand answers than for him to have accepted the smooth and horrific lies told about Him by the great hell fire and damnation preachers of Twain's day. It's not an accident that the first book of the Bible written (chronologically) was Job and that book is all about demanding answers from God with regard to death and suffering. And in that book God seems to approve of honest questions over self-serving assumptions.

Twain loved his family deeply.

Myself, I have found Twain a gentle soul and an extraordinarily honest observer of the human condition, often bruised by the cruelty of life on Earth. I suspect he was searching for the very God I met when I was seventeen years old. I also suspect God will be merciful to Twain and other grieving fathers and mothers in the end who in their despair were simply searching for the God who is the Comforter. That what they got from their pastors was God the Punisher is not their fault. I suspect many will be saved who were driven from the fold by lies about the nature of God. "Other sheep have I who are not of this fold," said Jesus - Jesus, who by the way, came to show us what a merciful God really looks like.

Had I not discovered the truth about God, I'd have asked the same questions Twain did and made the same accusations. Remember, it was God, Himself, who approved of Job's impertinent demands for answers over his friends' smooth "explanations" of God's behavior. It was to Job that God gave the responsibility of presenting offerings for Eliphaz, Bildad, and the rest, who were chastised for accusing God of cursing Job.

A lot of good souls are driven from the church over the very issues that Mark Twain presents in the passage you quoted. There is no sin in asking questions and demanding answers from God. Twain pointed out the hypocrisy of smug ideas about what God is like as presented by preachers who preached the big lie of an ever-burning hell. It's all through Twain's writings at this time of bitter loss and grief.

How about a little mercy for the man, guys? Nobody from our bunch ever introduced Sam Clemens to the real and merciful God with whom he could have trusted his lost precious daughter. Twain did the best he knew how. It is we Christians who failed him in his hour of need.

There's been an anti-Twain sentiment in the evangelical and apostate Protestant community of late and of course there has. Twain, with brutal accuracy, pointed out the logical impossibility of a loving God who would consign souls to eternal torment. He's messing with the "Christian" leadership's favorite terrorist tool for scaring sinners into the pews. They must, therefore, frighten their sheep away from Twain lest they too ask uncomfortable questions for which there are no easy answers.

As a Seventh Day Adventist, I agree with Twain. A God like the one many Christians preach is not one I could worship either. Were I Jesus, I'd meet Sam Clemens at the Second Coming and tell him not to worry about hell. Those preachers were wrong. There's no eternal torment and anyone who really wants eternal life and an end to evil will have it and then, I think, Jesus will place his nail-scarred hands on the shoulders of that poor broken man and lead him to where his lost daughter has risen and is alive again.

That's the merciful God I know and I do believe that if Twain had ever been properly introduced to Him, he'd have written a much different book. It's a trap of the devil that turns well-meaning Christians against someone like Twain who asks the question that should be asked of every preacher, priest and missionary who confidently preaches hell fire and damnation and eternal torment and then tries to tell his terrified audience that God is love. How can we defend those people?

The picture of God, presented by theologians, that presents Him as a loving eternal torturer is so ludicrous, that it's long been the main reason people reject Christianity. I mean how can you love someone who does worse to people than Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot and all the kings and emperors put together? Many of the great theologians of all denominations have also rejected the idea of eternal torment in hell for the lost, but they have had to keep quiet about it lest they be shouted down by those of their colleagues who wish to retain the doctrine of fiery hell as a terror tool. CS Lewis said that in Scripture, hell is always spoken of as an ending, not a change of state from human to eternally tormented soul. He didn't speak very loudly about it, though or he'd have been ridden out on a rail as a heretic.

The confusion about God's character began when we chose to believed the very first lie - "Thou shalt not surely die." Remember that he who said it is a liar. But the idea that we can't really die is seductive. It lets us be immortal gods and condemns the actual God of Heaven as a slave-master for threatening us with hell to win our obedience. Twain merely pointed out the absurdity of what Christians were saying about God themselves.

So how about we lay off Twain and answer the question he asks? Is God some kind of omnipotent psychopath or is He love incarnate?  The answer to that question is, I think, the most important question in the great controversy between good and evil.

© 2017 by Tom