Faith, according to Mark (or Samuel)

On the frontage of Kent Library on the Southeast Missouri State University campus, no fewer than 17 names stand as silent sentinels of literature. Nine face Academic Hall. Four are on the Baptist Student Center side of the library; four more are on the University Center side of the building. Some are well-known to virtually any reader. A few require passersby to consult Google for information.

In no particular order, here are the names:

Virgil

Emerson

Whitman

Milton

Thoreau

Shakespeare

Carlyle

Homer

Tolstoy

Field

Newman

Hugo

Ruskin

Chaucer

Goethe

Poe

Wait a minute. That's only 16. There's one more. Yes, the only one left off is the sole writer whose first and last names are included on Kent's impressive edifice. And it's not even his real name.

Mark Twain.

Certainly a university historian would know for sure, but my guess is Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) is so honored at Kent because he's the only Missourian on the list.

Even my own religious judicatory -- the Missouri Conference of the United Methodist Church -- honors the Florida, Missouri-born Twain by naming the district covering the northeast part of the state for him.

Twain's religious views are interesting. Incorrectly called an atheist -- no fair-minded analysis of his writings would permit that description -- Twain certainly had a great deal of criticism for the church and for Christianity.

The one-time riverboat pilot is the author of a host of celebrated books and essays. "Letters From the Earth," a posthumous collection of essays, is perhaps my favorite because it comes out of a period of intense pain in the writer's life. Note the following, please, which appeared in an autobiography published 100 years after Twain's 1910 death:

"There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing, and predatory as it is -- in our country particularly and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree -- it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime -- [namely] the invention of Hell. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilled."

Ouch. Twain was a strong critic of the faith. A daughter and a wife would predecease him and these twin shocks colored his perceptions of the goodness of God. These events helped cause arguably the greatest American humorist to lose all sense of jocularity. I get it. I really do. Yet for all of Twain's criticisms of the church and of Christianity, he seemed never to lose a faint faith in the notion of Providence. A providential God standing above and apart from creation was never far from Twain's thoughts.

If you find yourself pained by your experience of church in particular and of religion in general, perhaps you might take a page from Twain's metaphorical book -- and hold on to a faint faith in Providence. As Moravian preacher Peter Bohler once advised a young and despondent John Wesley, later the founder of the 18th century Methodist movement: "Preach faith until you have it." That's sound counsel for the religiously discouraged.