American Pilgrims: Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, and the Last Cultural Christians

In just fifteen days, we have lost two of the great American writers of our time. On August 31, Wendell Berry passed away in Port Royal, Kentucky after finishing lunch with his wife Tanya. He went upstairs and, his daughter Mary said, “he fell, and was gone.” On September 15, Annie Dillard at the age of 81 died at her home in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts. The papers say only that she died of “natural causes.” Berry was 92, but had been working in his writing cabin in the woods just months earlier. Dillard had not published in a decade.

I first read Annie Dillard in Grade 12 but didn’t know it was her. Our English teacher gave us a paragraph on a hand-out, and we read it aloud. The teacher beamed at us. “Isn’t that just fantastic?” she said. It was:

Another time I saw another wonder: sharks off the Atlantic coast of Florida. There is a way a wave rises above the ocean horizon, a triangular wedge against the sky. If you stand where the ocean breaks on a shallow beach, you see the raised water in a wave is translucent, shot with lights. One late afternoon at low tide a hundred big sharks passed the beach near the mouth of a tidal river in a feeding frenzy. As each green wave rose from the churning water, it illuminated within itself the six- or eight-foot-long bodies of twisting sharks. The sharks disappeared as each wave rolled toward me; then a new wave would swell above the horizon, containing in it, like scorpions in amber, sharks that roiled and heaved. The sight held awesome wonders: power and beauty, grace tangled in a rapture with violence.

It was fifteen years before I found out who had written it. I was reading Dillard’s 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and there it was. The whole book is like that, a deeply religious and breathtaking meditation on Creation that took me months to get through not because it was long but because each page is packed with passages that stop you in your tracks.

Her 1992 novel The Living is magnificent; I think it is one of the best books of that decade. It is set in northeastern Washington State in an area I know well; I was born in Seattle, attended church for years in Lynden, and Dillard’s rendering of the Pacific Northwest is palpably recognizable to those who have lived there. Her one other novel is The Maytrees, published in 2007. The prose is just as good; the plot struck me as implausible. But Dillard always played by her own rules.

Both Dillard and Berry were beloved of many of today’s Christian writers, as evidenced by the outpouring of tributes that greeted their deaths. Neither, however, identified as Christian writers per se. They were, rather, two of the last and greatest culturally Christian writers, in that what they wrote was indecipherable to those not literate in the Christian language and theological traditions of the West. Christianity was not just their context, but their frame of reference. Dillard and Berry saw their world through Christian eyes. If you removed the Christian elements from their work, there wouldn’t be much left.

When asked if he considered himself a Christian, Berry replied: “I still consider myself a person who takes the gospels very seriously.” When Annie Dillard was asked the same question, she stated in her last published article in 2020 that while she accepted the label, she could not assent to most of Christianity’s fundamental doctrines. “I know only one thing for certain: there is holiness,” she wrote. “Standing there, a person can sing myriad songs.” Those answers sum up, in so many words, what it means to be a cultural Christian.

Dillard and Berry were two of the last of a generation weaned on the King James Bible, which shaped the American social imaginary for centuries. As an adolescent, Dillard memorized long passages from the King James, absorbed its cadences, and wrote poems carefully emulating its rhythms. Those deeply familiar with the Bible that shaped the English language—and there are not many left—will immediately recognize its impact on Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and her other work.

In reflecting on the advance of autumn creating “gaps” as the skeletal trees shed their garb: “The gaps are the cliffs in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God.” On paying attention to Creation: “The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price.” On grappling with it: “I am Jacob at Peniel wrestling with the angel.” On what it reveals: “Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God’s speaking from the whirlwind, nature’s old song, and dance.” A concluding command: “Pray without ceasing.”

Berry’s novels are filled with the King James; his foundational concept of community “membership” was taken from 1 Corinthians 12:12: “For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.” Hannah Coulter describes the membership in the words of Act 17 as “those in whom we live and move and have our being.”

The culture that produced generations of Americans intimately familiar with the King James is dead and gone, but it is still a Rosetta Stone for much of literature. Over several years, I exchanged a handful of letters with Berry, and I asked if this worried him. “The Bible is important to me,” he told me. “The King James Version is important to me because of its beauty, and because it was the Bible for every English-speaking reader for over 400 years. Most people now don’t know the Bible in any version, nor will they recognize other references to work in our literary tradition. That is a worry, of course, but there is no reason that my writing should be influenced by the ignorance of readers.”

“One thing that makes me sad about the deaths of Wendell Berry and Annie Dillard is that the deeply literate culture that allowed us all to know and love them simply no longer exists at scale, and so we will not, together, see their like again, at least not for many, many years,” Paul Pastor of Harper Collins wrote recently. He’s right, but the literate culture he is referring to was a Christian culture. Berry and Dillard, the ecumenically beloved American pilgrims, were two of the last great culturally Christian writers, and they were predeceased by the culture that produced them.

As usual, Annie Dillard put it best in one of her most chilling and brilliant lines, on the retreat of the sacred in our secular world: “We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.”