Young Goodman Brown: "What If I Stumble?"

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This might be the best allegory I've read in a while. To dissect it right off the bat, Goodman Brown is that generically-named Christian "good man" who anyone can fill the role of. Faith, obviously, is his faith. Goodman Brown ignored the moral teaching of his faith warning him to not go into the woods with the weird satanic man, and as a result he learned the true nature of all the pious believers he spent his whole life looking up to. Seeing the wretchedness of the so-called "Christians" cost him his faith; their actions stole it from him and killed his will to believe with their hypocrisy. Even at the end, when he chose not to join the satanic cult himself, he had no idea whether his faith was well and truly a part of that cult. He couldn't trust it (or any of the Christians) any longer, and that left him miserable all his life.

That story is still far too applicable to the modern church. Claiming to be Christian and then acting like a heathen is going to make people think that all Christians are heathens. Now, this isn't to say that Goodman Brown is blameless in this matter; if he hadn't followed the devil into the woods in the first place, he wouldn't have seen the darker side of the world and had his faith crushed. I won't say "ignorance is bliss" in this matter, but rather that innocence is bliss. If Goodman Brown had a string of scandalous sins trailing behind him like everyone else he knew, I don't doubt that he would've joined that cult pretty willingly. Seeing that all the other Christians were no different from him likely would have brought him comfort. Yet he had kept himself pure, though obviously not perfect, since he's only human and messed up pretty badly with his nocturnal excursion into a place he knew would be corrupt. In the end, all the people Satan used to bring about Goodman Brown's misery were Christians. Some of them he had manipulated for years, but our protagonist he only had to trip once. That says a lot about the relevance of our testimony.

And now I have DC Talk stuck in my head.

P.S. I commented on Carmen and Ethan's posts.

Comments

  1. Trey NorthcuttNovember 5, 2017 at 9:36 PM

    I agree - this is a very applicable allegory for our lives. I noticed a lot of comparisons with Noah and Goodman, in that he kept himself pure, even in the face of true evil, and it paid off relatively well. And it was cool to see that he was human and had weakness, such as his nightly walks into the forest. Hawthorne's brilliance never fails to surprise me.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ty GoramNovember 6, 2017 at 7:56 PM

    I have to agree. I have to say that it was a good way of showing that following the Devil, even just once, could lead you to be miserable for the rest of your life.

    ReplyDelete

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