It would be easy to think that Taylor Caldwell's preoccupations must be considered old-fashioned today. I think not. Typical Trump supporters may not be serious readers, and the phrasing of their issues may be unsophisticated. But the breeding of so many conspiracy theories requires an explanation. Maybe:
a conspiracy theory is just correct; or
it has a grain of truth and points to something possible; or
given that knowing the whole truth is difficult, it is plausible; or
at least it isn't a complete and total fabrication pushed because it can't be proven false, and the conspiracy implicates those the pusher regards as an enemy.
When Jesus was new, many others preached a gospel of a sort. Even historians who study that period know only a few of those. Despite the shortness of Jesus' ministry, there are signs he had established himself in many minds. What was in flux, because it took some time for those who wanted to be gatekeepers to his legacy, was what exactly was the heart of Jesus' legacy. There were many more writings than we know about today, but even among those we know about, it took a long time to decide which would be regarded as crucial.
Eventually, during the last third of her career, TC invited her readers to engage with Jesus only through prayer without thinking about the meaning and intention of such prayer. Her most exciting innovation – in any of her novels – was a modern version of the "heresy" of Marcion. Marcion insisted St. Luke and St. Paul were, by far, the most crucial ingredients of the New Testament.
Why would that be a heresy? Where did TC pick up this heresy as her best way to present herself as a person of great religious conviction? How much influence did her presentation of Luke as a supreme carrier of the vision of Jesus have? How did it match with her subsequent novels? What precursors – since it came at the very middle of her career – appeared in her previous novels?
What is left out of TC's career is the leap in this middle period starting from The Sound of Thunder (SOT, published in 1957), with a break to the following publication Dear and Glorious Physician (DAG published in 1959). These are ambitious novels. They are rarely seen as related. Yet, they are. TC wrote them to relate to genius and – with the aid of her conspiracy theories – to explain better than previously the cause of hostility in the world.
The subject of genius takes up the first two (of three) parts of SOT. In these, TC has created a family, four of whose siblings were cast as geniuses – each in a disparate area (music, art, literature, architecture) – within which TC has much to say about the misunderstanding between perfection in an area and true genius. A weave of sub-stories casts aspects of the genius of each sibling as a sham, but she plants a related vocation for each that, had they only the strength to try it, would be fulfilling in a way that wouldn't otherwise happen. It is only the fifth sibling (the strong one) through which this story comes to create a big picture of America before WWI.
SOT, had many elements in common with Dynasty of Death. For instance, the romance of Amy Dumphill and Ernest Barbour in Dynasty of Death was foreseen with no fanfare. There are two ultimate romances here without prelude in SOT. More telling than these is TC's elevation of her greatest hatred, the graduated income tax, and therefore the biggest evil on the planet in her estimation, as a fearful ingredient of America's corruption. It was the essence of socialism.
From this, she presented ties that are part of today's political talk: Socialism (her claim that those who benefitted from it didn't work as people like she did). This she equated to communism and thus to the all-knowing perpetrators of war that would destroy democracy. Though the time of her writing was far past WWII, it was WWI that she was foretelling. She blamed the socialist Eugene Debs – a hero to many – (somewhat as Marjorie Taylor Greene blames George Soros and his use of lasers) for conspiring to bring it about.
She laid out her tie to the John Birch Society at the very time Robert Welch was calling Dwight Eisenhauer a communist. Edward, her hero, has created a "Save America Committee" (this is well into the 3rd Part, over 2/3rds of the way through the novel). His goal was to thwart the socialist plot against the people of the world by wealthy degenerates who lusted for power. That would be under the guise of social reforms and public welfare to enslave them. All, says TC, to reduce people's dependency on the Government.
Edward has been enlightened by those who have enabled his career. He is getting wind of the deep forces aimed at America from them. TC does not spare us talk about Satan that gets confused with the role of taxes meted out by the Government. Yet, the heart of this is the complicated relationship between Edward and his siblings. He feels they hate him because he has forced them to pursue the genius for which they were intended. They are said to be too weak to break into (each their own) vocation for which they show genuine aptitude. TC uses this to speculate on what exactly genius is about.
Edward struggles at the end, trying to ensure meaning in his life. TC has a soldier with a wooden leg, preaching the perfection of the constitution, which came from God and should be the heart of the nation, though it is not. You can see that TC is struggling to find a character of genius who can speak to us of what God has offered us and that we have not accepted.
Here's the rub. TC needed someone of unassailable genius to tell us what the world could be about. Well, after 20 years of publications that had brought her a great deal of money and fame, she found it by returning to what she had tried to write since she was very young. It's confusing, but it seems TC struggled to ensure that she – unlike her sibling characters – took on the genius of St. Luke. He and St. Paul – she did much better with Luke than with Paul – more than any others, had come to a profound understanding of Jesus.
TC's most significant unfulfilled promise is DAG. Why would I call it unfulfilled since it sold over 5 million hardbound copies long ago? Answer: Its long gestation from TC's childhood included a connection to the New Testament that hadn't – to my knowledge – been explored since the late 2nd Century AD. Also, I know from where she got the idea.
She created, from St. Luke, though he was not formally considered an apostle, a more approachable surrogate to Jesus. We could approach an understanding of Jesus through what Luke had learned. She took advantage of Marcion's heresy to give a vision of the construction of the New Testament. She fell short of taking that idea to its proper conclusion. Even if it still needs to be completed by someone else, it represents TC's attempt to understand the role of genius in preparing us for the world's mysteries.
This concludes Part I of TC's connection to what is happening today with talk of Socialism. That takes us to what seems to drive Putin, especially among all the world's autocrats. Isn't it confusing that TC sees socialism and communism as such an evil, calling Peggy's friends communists (as demonstrated in the Part I volume) when she goes into one of her hysterias. The very hysterics that endeared her to the members of the John Birch Society.
Yet, what TC hated, liberalism, socialism, modernity especially, and freedom of expression, are the exact things that Putin hates too. These are the same topics that get positive support from Republicans and Supreme Court conservatives. The source of new laws overturning precedents that appear without warning. They claim, as does Putin, that they speak for God. That they have the right to take away freedoms from Americans because Americans have not adhered to their view of God? Oh, and they do hate, as did TC, anything that the world has learned through science or rationality.
*|FNAME|*! How could it be that the John Birch Society's ideas are coming back along with acceptance of Hitler and the most horrific communist nation on Earth by so many Americans? Out of fear? Trump certainly had an idea popular with many autocrats: Put together your own brown shirts. Fear will get many to see your side.
