American Virgin postmortem

Around the World, the fourth and final volume of Stephen T. Seagle and Becky Cloonan's sex-and-religion comics romp American Virgin, came out this week. American Virgin is the story of Adam Chamberlain, a teenage evangelist whose abstinence ministry hits a rough patch when his divinely-ordained wife-to-be is killed by terrorists. I had high hopes for the series when it first came out, but that it didn't live up to my expectations. (My oldest readers may recall that a review of the first story arc was one of my first posts here.) My latest piece for Religion Dispatches is an essay on the series as a whole: what it got right, what it got wrong, how it could have worked, and the reasons that it ultimately didn't. 

"It’s not just the evangelical world or Adam's past that’s described in shorthand; it’s Adam himself. Issue #19, for example, provides some clues when we learn rather late in the game that Adam’s theology isn’t conservative at all. We learn that he’s never believed in hell, and, more importantly, that he’s “not sure” about Jesus (which I assume means that he doubts the Incarnation, though it’s not entirely clear). These are pretty big bombshells, but they make us question whether or not we know Adam at all. 

"More importantly, it makes us question the extent to which the book’s creators really understand evangelical Christianity. After all, the cornerstone of evangelical theology is a personal relationship with Jesus. There’s another wrong-note moment in the following issue when Adam argues, in contradiction to Acts 15 (and everything after on the subject), that circumcision is a sign of a Christian covenant. And that t-shirt he wears throughout the series that reads “save yourself”—it might seem a clever means of underscoring the self-righteousness that lurks beneath Adam’s message, but you’d be hard-pressed to find an evangelical speaker urging his audience to “save themselves.” The entire evangelical concept of salvation relies on the absolute impossibility of saving oneself—that’s God’s job. The series has a number of clever takes on the surface of evangelical Christianity, but after a few of these wrong notes we begin to wonder how deeply Seagle looked into the culture he was lampooning. Is this picture of spirituality complex, or just confused?"

Read the full essay here.

And my past posts on American Virgin:

My review of the first story arc, Head, here.

The beginning of my disillusionment with a review of #7 here.

Some brief thoughts on issue #10 here.

And an ever-so-slightly longer review of #11 here.