Who is Tom Joad?

[lhooq]

34. Shouldn't Evangelicals love this novel?

Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath has been controversial since it came out in 1939. What's odd, this book -- one of my most beloved books -- is nonetheless filled with family values and old time religion.

There's Ma Joad doing her darndest to hold the Joad family together. She fails, but no one can fault her for not trying. Then there's Jim Casy, the preacher who had lost his calling at the beginning of the novel. Later on, he is born again, well sort of, finding his spiritual calling in organizing. There's Tom Joad, the novel's hero and sinner who has killed a man and does so again. Finally, there is the exodus from dust-choked Oklahoma, and the biblical wandering across the forbidding desert, along Route 66, to the promised land of California and its blossoming fruit trees. Only to find strike breakers, and piles of kerosene-soaked oranges rotting in the sun, and hungry children on the other side of the fence.

The brittle "good news" evangelical religion popular today shatters against hard truths like those in this novel.