Religious and not religious

INTERVIEWER

In your second novel, Gilead, the protagonist is a pastor, John Ames. Do you think of yourself as a religious writer?

ROBINSON

I don’t like categories like religious and not religious. As soon as religion draws a line around itself it becomes falsified. It seems to me that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer intends it to be religious or not.

From an interview with Marilynne Robinson, The Paris Review, Fall 2008.