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Book Review – Mary Mae And The Gospel Truth by Sandra Dutton

(NOTE: Updated to fix a bad tag.)
What happens when a precocious ten-year-old from a conservative religious family encounters fossils in her school yard and starts asking questions?

Sandra Dutton offers a look at this situation through the eyes of Mary Mae Krebs in her book Mary Mae and the Gospel Truth.

Mary Mae and the Gospel Truth

We meet Mary Mae at a church service in Ohio, circa 1988, where she's singing with her visiting grandmother.   It seems that Mary Mae isn't content to simply accept everything she's told, and she manages to attract some attention to herself by asking uncomfortable questions about the Genesis creation stories.

"The world is six thousand years old.  You look in your Bible."

"Where?"

"Well, Genesis.  Where else?  You got the whole Creation, right there."

Soon as we get home, I get my Bible out and run my finger down every line of Genesis.  I'm looking for six thousand, whether it's in numbers or spelled out in letters.  I go through it twice.  Second time I'm reading with a flashlight in bed.  Only six I find is on the "sixth day," what God created, and in different folks' ages, like Enoch living three hundred and sixty-five  years.

I tell Mama Sunday morning I can't find no six thousand, and she says she don't have time to look, she's got too much work to do. (pg. 12)

Mary Mae's questions and her refusal to let other people think for her provide sources of tension between her and her mother, her pastor, her Sunday school teacher, and her friends.  At various points, she questions a number of issues that she spots in Genesis:

• Light and dark existing before light sources like the sun.
• Varying lengths of generations.
• How all the animals could possibly have fit on the ark, and the logistics associated with their care.

The answers and explanations given to her tend to be in the vein of  "you just have to have faith" or "if the Bible says it, it must be true", but these don't deter her.  I think that's admirable, and anyone who has ever had a child respond to every answer with "why?" should be able to understand Mary Mae's persistence.

At school, Mary Mae's teacher, Miss Sizemore, is teaching her students about fossils, and the ancient age of the Earth, and how the rock layers visible where the local highways are cut through the mountains represent different geological periods.  She finds herself fascinated by the trilobite fossils that she finds in the rocks exposed by an excavation at the school yard and in other places, and she comes to realize that explanations like "God put them there to test us" just don't wash.

A large measure of my interest in this book flows from the fact that I have no life experiences to compare with Mary Mae's.  I grew up as a liberal Catholic, and (try as I might) I cannot recall any time in my school-age years where I learned something in (public) school that caused tensions at home or at church.  I was, of course, familiar with the Genesis creation stories (although it was much later before I realized there were two stories instead of just one), and the story of Noah's flood (again, the actual text suggests two versions of the story), but my Sunday school classes never tackled them in any detail (which I now consider to be a failing...).  For me, the science-vs-religion question is really a no-brainer:  we learn about the observable world by observing it, and science is the framework for making sense of those observations.

As I consider Mary Mae's conundrum, I have to cast it in terms of what I expect the people around her to say and do.  Through this preconceptual lens, Dutton's characters serve their purposes quite well - Miss Sizemore as the voice of secular science for example, or Mary Mae's mother presenting the extremely conservative religious perspective - although the only supporting character with much complexity is Granny (who really serves as an older and wiser version of Mary Mae's own conscience).  While there might be a small risk that a reader could be trapped by stereotypes, Dutton made a smart choice to avoid overdeveloping the ancillary characters beyond Mary Mae's perspective.

The book touches on a number of related topics, and Dutton exposes several important ones just enough to spark some discussion:

• Kids in public schools being given alternative work when the curriculum conflicts with religious beliefs.
• Parents pulling their kids out of school for homeschooling and realizing that it's not as easy as they expected.¹
• Parents of different religious backgrounds deciding how to raise their children.
• People believing whatever their pastor happens to tell them on any given day.

In the end, Mary Mae and her family come to a compromise position that, from the perspective of a ten-year-old is probably sufficient.  In many real-life situations similar to Mary Mae's, some sort of compromise may be the best anyone can hope for, and I think Dutton realizes that.

But it's also a little troubling, in my view, for a couple of reasons.

The first has to do with the audience of the book.  A few obvious candidates are:

• Kids who are in the same situation as Mary Mae - they're learning things at school that contradict what they've been taught at home or in church, and they're trying to figure out a way to reconcile these views.
• Parents of such kids who are trying to deal with challenges to their belief system.
• Pastors/clergy or teachers of such kids who are looking for ways to help the kids work through the issues.

The compromise position that the book takes means that a lot of parents (who want their kids to believe the same way as they do) and clergy (whose livelihood depends on people believing certain things) won't find the book useful - they may want books that reinforce their beliefs.  The kids who are in situations most like Mary Mae's are also likely to be kids from families and churches with very conservative religious beliefs for whom compromises simply aren't acceptable.

Teachers of such kids may be justifiably reluctant to suggest that children challenge the beliefs of their parents.  Teachers that do so may well find themselves looking for work.

That leaves the kids themselves, and I'm honestly not sure how many kids would find this book on their own.  That's a shame, because a clever child reading about Mary Mae's journey could come away much  better prepared to engage with their parents about questions of belief.

There is one other audience for the book, and I think it's probably a large one (though difficult to count):  close friends or relatives of families with Mary Maes who might find themselves involved in the situation.

So, in effect, Dutton's compromise solution to the problem at hand might have the unintended consequence of keeping the book out of the hands of many of the people who would benefit the most from it.  I think that's just a reflection of the nature of the subject and not any fault of hers.

The other reason I find the compromise troubling is that I don't think that it is a stable equilibrium.  This is beyond the scope of the book, but I think it's relevant to mention.

We leave Mary Mae at a point where she's been told that there are some gaps in the Biblical narratives, and science can step in to fill those gaps.  If her interests never went beyond trilobite fossils, that might be sufficient.  But is that likely?  I'm not at all sure that it is.

At some point, she'd learn some world history and find out that Egypt had a well-documented culture and civilization that continued moving right along during the time when, according to the Bible, the world was under water and Noah's family was all that was left of humanity.  She might learn of solid evidence of human habitation in the Americas dating back well over 11,000 years - older than the Earth by some Biblical reckoning.

Maintaining a claim of Biblical truth vis-a-vis science and history becomes an increasingly untenable goal, unless "science" and "history" are redefined to bend around the Bible.

At the end of the day, Dutton has put together a sensitive, gentle story that validates the message that it's OK for kids to ask questions and look outside of the beliefs they've been raised in.  That's the first step of many.  I would hope that the book can find its way into the hands of families facing circumstances like Mary Mae's, and that it might help nurture the spark of curiosity that all children seem to have.

-Jay

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¹I am of two minds about homeschooling.  I can see how, if it's done properly, it could be rewarding for both parents and children, but I've seen far more instances of it being done poorly than of it being done well.  That's all I'll say about it now.  It's a topic for another time, perhaps.