Book Review: Subversive
Subversive: Christ, Culture, and the Shocking Dorothy L. Sayers by Crystal Downing (Broadleaf Books, 2020)
Dr. Crystal Downing is a longtime friend and mentor of mine. Some of you who know me have heard this story, but for the rest of you, Crystal and I met when she was an English professor at Messiah College, and I was a nervous student stammering out a request for her to be my adviser on a senior honors project about Dorothy L. Sayers. She perked up when she heard the name, and providentially, it turned out that she herself had just recently become interested in studying Sayers.
All these years later, the two of us are having another providential Sayers-related moment, with each of us releasing a book about her in the same year! Now co-director of The Wade Center at Wheaton College, Crystal has become a true expert on Sayers, and her expertise shines throughout Subversive. It’s not so much a biography as it is a study of the major themes in Sayers’s work and thought, and it’s a richly rewarding book.
Those who know Sayers well tend to love her for certain things: her honesty and integrity, her playful wit and piercing intelligence, the brilliance of her ideas, and the vigorous language in which she expressed them. In Subversive, Crystal explores how all these qualities served her as a writer, particularly as a writer of Christian apologetics. Also, she explains with great clarity and insight the great paradox of Sayers’s apologetic writing: the way that she, as a strictly orthodox Christian, was constantly believed to be coming up with new ideas about Christianity because of the fresh and original language in which she clothed traditional Christian dogma.
Much has been made of Sayers’s reserve about her personal life. Some of it may have been integral to her nature, some of it may have had to do with the son she kept a secret from almost everyone she knew, but the really fascinating thing is how that reserve too fed into her emphasis on timeless Christian truths over personal testimonies. As Crystal puts it, “Often asking Sayers to explain how her personal beliefs shaped the radio scripts [of The Man Born to Be King], such enthusiasts reduced Christianity to religious preference, as though belief were a matter of shopping for the most up-to-date clothes worn by a celebrity author.”
Of course our own personal experiences cannot help but shape the way we think about and practice faith, and Crystal makes a strong case that Sayers’s understanding of grace was warped in some ways by her experiences in adolescence and early adulthood. But it was coming to a new understanding of the creeds taught by the church—such as the idea of grace as a free gift and not something that can be bought and paid for—that turned things around for her, and inspired her to share those truths in her own writing. “By writing The Zeal of Thy House,” Crystal writes, “Sayers began to fully internalize the subversive implications of God’s gift. . . . Sayers recognized that the only unforgivable sin is to reject the gift of forgiveness, offered by a God who wants to be in relationship with every human being, no matter how terrible their mistakes in life.” Tracing the development of Sayers’s thought, Crystal throws light on the mistaken beliefs that we too often persist in to this day, and shows how far we Christians tend to stray from the truths of the gospel—and how reading Sayers’s “subversive” works can bring us back to the right path.
The depth of Crystal’s insights and the strength of her writing make Subversive a must-read, even for those who are still new to Sayers. And I believe she’s read a couple of Sayers’s essays that I haven’t yet (there were definitely one or two quotes and titles I didn’t recognize), making me eager to go find them!
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Happy Easter in advance, and see you all in two weeks!