The Strength of God

            Winesburg, Ohio highlights the role of religion and God throughout the novel. The most prominent example of the role of religion is in the chapter the ‘Strength of God’. This story details the role of religion and how truth are both affected and necessarily intertwined with one another. The nature of Anderson’s criticism relies on the idea of God as a monolithic entity and whether that notion of an absolute truth. Anderson uses Reverend Curtis Hartman to highlight how an individual would be affected by the omnipresence of God. Anderson also uses irony and contrast to show the effects of a Godly truth on individuals and how they can ultimately be negatively affected by society even though they retain a religious base. This is explicitly shown by Reverend Hartman’s internal struggle with Kate Swift.

            Anderson creates a binary and interesting dichotomy between the religious and non-religious nature of human culture. In the begging of the chapter, when describing the ultra-religious Reverend Hartman, Anderson describes him as “He was forty years old, and by his nature very silent and reticent. To preach, standing in the pulpit before the people, was always a hardship for him and from Wednesday morning until Saturday evening he thought of nothing but the two sermons that must be preached on Sunday” (Anderson, 110). Anderson creates this binary as a mutually exclusive system in which  here must necessarily be a trade-off between religion and non-religion. First Anderson claims “In reality he was much in earnest and sometimes suffered prolonged periods of remorse because he could not go crying the word of God in the highways and byways of the town” (Anderson, 113) This depiction of Reverend Hartman as entirely religious creates a stark contrast to the description given later in the novel. The description that is eventually given contradicts the idea created in the beginning. This shift is to a corrupted view of religion and a focus on unholy activities such as peeping on Kate swift. The negative affects are shown when Reverend Hartman eventually smashes a window but surprisingly remains somewhat resolved, Anderson writes, “ Reverend Curtis Hartman turned and ran out of the office. At the door he stopped, and after looking up and down the deserted street, turned again to George Willard. “I am delivered. Have no fear.” He held up a bleeding fist for the young man to see. “I smashed the glass of the window,” he cried. “Now it will have to be wholly replaced. The strength of God was in me and I broke it with my fist” (Anderson, 115). The resolve that Hartman has shows how the idea of God as a monolithic truth has finally been broken down and Hartman has embraced the idea of other possibilities surrounding religion. Specifically, his smashing of the glass shows that he has metaphorically smashed the idol on his inside. This idol held God on a pedestal and created an internal hierarchy where God and religion were absolute truths. This plays into the notion of grotesqueness and maintaining truth that is unflinching. In this sense, Reverend Hartman is one of the few characters to break the mold and embrace a new ideology and idea of truth.