Bonus Post: What We Can Learn from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Story, “Young Goodman Brown”

This year, after fifteen years of teaching Biblical Worldview and Biblical Studies, both at the high school and college level, I have taken a teaching job teaching high school English again. Although Biblical Studies has, as will always be, my primary area of love and interest, English Literature will also (and always will) be a love of mine as well.

One of the enjoyable things I’ve experienced this year is the opportunity to go through some classic short stories (albeit with 9^th graders!). And a few weeks ago, we read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous short story, “Young Goodman Brown.” I remember reading it in college (and who knows, maybe in high school?), but it didn’t leave a lasting impression on me at that time. This time around, though, partly, no doubt, due to all the experience I’ve gained over the past few years teaching Biblical Worldview and Biblical Studies, I’ve gained a deeper appreciation for “Young Goodman Brown.” In fact, that is what this post will be about.

A Quick Summary of the Story
All in all, “Young Goodman Brown” takes up about ten pages. It is set in Salem, Massachusetts and tells the strange tale of a Puritan named Young Goodman Brown who, for some reason we are not told, leaves his young wife Faith one night to go on a strange errand in the forest. Despite her pleas for him to stay home that night, he tells her he has to go, but that she shouldn’t worry—she should just say her prayers and he’d be back in the morning.

As it turns out, Young Goodman Brown’s “errand” involves meeting up with an old man, who ends up being the Devil, to be tempted. This old man, we are told, resembles Brown’s father, yet holds a walking staff that resembles a serpent. When he offers it to Brown, he declines to take it and tells the old man he really shouldn’t even be there. After all, his entire family has always been good Christians. To that, the old man tells Brown that he, in fact, knew both his father and grandfather very well. In fact, he helped Brown’s grandfather beat a Quaker woman back in the day; and he helped Brown’s father burn down an Indian village during King Philip’s War. In fact, the old man tells Brown that he has been very well-acquainted with the people of Salem.

Young Goodman Brown, though, doesn’t believe it. And when he tells the old man he doesn’t believe it, and that he really should get back because he’d be ashamed to show his face in church and encounter the godly minister if he went any further. To this, though, the old man starts to laugh hysterically.

At that point, Brown sees Goody Cloyse, an old woman from the village walking down the forest path. Since he is ashamed to be out walking with the Devil, he hides. Yet the old man/Devil walks right up to Goody Cloyse and, to Brown’s shock, not only recognizes he is the Devil, but she calls him “Your worship.” It turns out that Goody Cloyse is a witch and she is making her way to a satanic communion meeting in the forest that night. After she moves on, Brown, in astonishment, says, “That old woman taught me my catechism!” Then, while the Devil proceeds to make another staff for Brown (after all, Brown refused the Devil’s serpent-staff), Brown doubles down on his faith. It may be a shock that Goody Cloyse was a witch, but that is just one person. Brown would not lose his faith. Still, he decides to take the new maple staff the Devil made for him.

Just then, Brown hears two other people coming down the path. Once again he hides. This time, he makes out the voices of not only the minister, but one of the deacons of his church, Deacon Gookin. And, just like Goody Cloyse, Brown learns that they too are making their way to the satanic communion meeting. Strangely, though, because he is hiding in the bushes, although he hears their voices, he never actually sees them. Nevertheless, after they pass by Brown feels sick, looks up to the sky and doubts whether there really was a Heaven after all. Let’s face it, if you just found out your Sunday School teacher, pastor, and a deacon were actually Satan worshippers, you probably wouldn’t be feeling too good either. Nevertheless, Brown exclaims, “With Heaven above, and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil!”

But then a cloud passed overhead and hid all the light from the stars, and immediately Brown heard a chorus of voices in the forest. Once again, he doesn’t actually see anyone, but he hears the voices of people from Salem village—both the godly Christians, along with the degenerate sinners—and they were all making their way to the Satanic meeting. And worst of all, he heard the voice of his beloved wife Faith among them. The cloud then passed and Brown, to his horror, finds one of his wife’s pink ribbons on the branch of a tree.

At this point, Brown screams out, “My Faith is gone!” and he grabs his staff (the one the Devil made for him) and goes racing through the woods. Then entire forest seemed to scream out in demonic laughter as Brown rushed along until he came to the clearing in the woods where the Satanic communion meeting was gathering—a crowd of both saints and sinners, not just from the current town, but ghosts from times past. Just then, the minister and Deacon Gookin grabbed his arms and brought him forward when there was a call for converts.

It is at that point that the Devil says the following (I’ll modernize the language a bit):

“Welcome, my children, to the communion of your race! This your nature and your destiny! Just look around you! These are all the people you thought were holier than yourselves. You shrank from your own sin when you contrasted your life with their lives of righteousness and prayerful aspirations heavenward! Yet, here are they all, in my worshipping assembly!”

The Devil then declares that some of the elders of the Church had at times said overtly sexual things to some of the women, and some of the women had killed their husbands, and some of the young men had wanted their parents to die so they could inherit their wealth, and some of the young women had essentially aborted their babies in secret. In short, he makes know the people’s “secret sins” and then, after Brown’s wife Faith is also brought forth, declares, “Evil is the nature of mankind! Evil must be your only happiness! Welcome, again, my children, to the communion of your race!”

When Brown sees that they were preparing to baptize them into their wicked and unholy communion, he cries out to his wife Faith, “Look up to Heaven, and resist the Wicked One!”

And just like that, everything disappeared. It was the next morning and Brown was alone in the forest. When he went back to Salem, though, he was a changed man. He looked upon Goody Cloyse, the minister, Deacon Gookin, and even his beloved Faith in a different light. As Hawthorne states, “A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man, did he become.” He couldn’t listen to the singing in church anymore. He was sickened by the minister’s sermons. He couldn’t pray with his family at prayer time anymore. And at the end of his life, he died, and the people of the town “carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.”

Some Thoughts
So, what is “Young Goodman Brown” really about? A loss of faith? Sure…but a loss of faith in whom? And then we must ask, “Was what Young Goodman Brown learned that night in the forest true?” Answering those two questions is the key to understanding the story. In short, I think we need to see that what Brown encountered in the forest that night was, in fact, not true. After all, it was the Devil who was showing him those things. In fact, the godly townspeople of Salem were not, in fact, Devil-worshippers…but they were sinful and flawed human beings.

And that leads to us answering the first question. Young Goodman Brown certainly lost his faith, but it wasn’t necessarily in God. He lost his faith and trust in his fellow Christians in Salem. But then, if none of what the Devil showed him was true—if it was all a dream—then why would Brown lose his faith in the goodness of his Christian neighbors? The answer to that question needs to be answered this way: Not everything the Devil showed Brown was false. As is always the case, the way the Devil deceives is not by telling us flat out falsehoods. He touches upon a truth and then twists it to trap us in a larger lie.

The problem with Young Goodman Brown at the beginning of the story was that, being young and idealistic, he essentially believed that the godly people in his village were essentially perfect and never really sinned. Simply put, he had put them up on a pedestal of righteousness. In his mind (as seen in the story), he had divided the world into two groups: godly Christians who never really sinned, and those ungodly wicked sinners who should be avoided at all costs.

And so, all the Devil had to do was to show Brown that those “godly saints” whom he pretty much idolized were, in fact, sinners who failed many times in their attempts to be righteous. And once Brown’s idealized faith in the sinlessness of those people was shattered, he became bitter and suspicious of everyone who claimed to be a Christian. Again, the minister, Deacon Gookin, Goody Cloyse, and even his wife Faith—none of them were actually worshippers of Satan. But, as the Devil (correctly) pointed out in the course of the story, they, along with Brown’s father, grandfather, and every other Christian had sinned quite often in their lives.

Of course, some of those sins were quite heinous. And a look throughout both history (and our own lives) reveals that Christians sometimes end up doing some very sinful stuff. If we’re honest, none of us should be surprised by this. Sure, not everyone has beaten a woman, burned down an Indian village, made inappropriate sexual advances toward someone, or aborted a baby, but everyone—yes, every Christian—has done plenty of things that he/she is ashamed of…and rightfully so.

This reminds me of a comedy bit by Daniel Tosh in which he basically said (I can’t remember the quote perfectly), “Ladies, if you knew all the weird, twisted stuff rolling around in men’s head—all that sick, twisted stuff just men are always thinking about—you’d get a gun and blow your head off! Of course, you don’t want to acknowledge that, because you just want to cuddle up to someone at night, so you don’t feel alone…and that says a bit more about you!”

Granted, that is kind of mean and a bit hyperbolic, but I have to laugh because it actually gets to a very real truth about everyone actually, including Christians—We are not perfect. We really are sinful, and we all have our fair share of shameful screw-ups.

But Young Goodman Brown didn’t get that. He held to an over-simplistic and black-and-white view of the world, where the people in his church were “godly” and those wretches in the tavern were wicked and sinful. Therefore, when the Devil told him the truth that those “godly” churchgoers were just as sinful as everyone else, Brown’s faith in his fellow Christians crumbled.

The Devil’s mode of deceiving Brown is seen throughout the story. First, Brown rejects the Devil snake-like staff, so the Devil just makes a different one that Brown takes…but it was still the Devil’s staff. Secondly, both with the encounter with the minister and Deacon Gookin, and the encounter in which Brown heard the voices of both the godly and ungodly townspeople in the forest, he never actually sees any of them—he only hears voices. It was the Devil’s deception, plain and simple. And it was only after Brown declares that he has lost his faith that he races through the forest, comes upon the meeting and sees the deceptive vision.

Simply put, the Devil roped Brown in with only hearing deceptive voices. By the time Brown had come to the clearing in the woods, he had already been lured into the Devil’s deception. And that deception is simple: The people you thought were good Christians really are sinful, and some have done shameful things, therefore THEY’RE ALL EVIL WORSHIPPERS OF SATAN!

And that is what destroys Brown’s faith and trust in his fellow Christians. He thought they were perfect, and when he found out they weren’t, he simply raced to the opposite conclusion: All of them are hypocrites and frauds. They’re all evil.

I think the lesson in “Young Goodman Brown” is something we need to take to heart nowadays. I’ve come across so many former Christians, or “ex-Evangelicals,” or just Christians who still claim to be Christians but who are just embittered at their fellow Christians over differing political views to the point where they essentially say, “You betrayed Christ when you voted for this or that party or candidate.” But more simply, I’ve seen so many people who just rail on everything Christian, or Evangelical, or Conservative—and it often comes down to the fact that those people have become disillusioned with the Christian community they had grown up in.

Let’s just be honest, nowadays it always comes down to essentially, “I thought the Christians at my church where I grew up were godly and honest people. But now I see that they don’t really love Jesus! They just want political power!” And sure enough, some are really like that. But certainly not all. I’ve said this before: Even though I ended up leaving Evangelicalism and embracing Orthodoxy, and even though I’ve been deeply hurt by some pretty unscrupulous Evangelicals, I’ve never let my disappointment with those individuals change me into becoming bitter and suspicious toward all Evangelicals.

I find it sad when I see that happen with anybody. But I have met quite a few like that…and that is why reading “Young Goodman Brown” really spoke to me this time around. I’ve seen quite a few Young Goodman Browns over the past few years, and it is just sad to see. I don’t know why the hurt I experienced didn’t embitter me toward Christianity as a whole and cause me to lose my faith in Christ. Part of it probably has to do with the fact that I am just a strong-willed person, and part of it probably has to do with the fact that I was lucky to have been raised by humble, sensitive, and honest parents who didn’t shy away from admitting Christians sometimes screw up. So, when Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart had their scandals, it never occurred to me they represented Christianity. They were just self-righteous con-artists. And when our pastor had to step away because of a certain indiscretion, well, he was human, and he screwed up. He was a good man, but he wasn’t perfect. I was lucky to learn from my parents not to put Christians on pedestals.

I see I’m starting to ramble, so I’ll just end with this. The story of Young Goodman Brown still resonates today. If you’ve grown up in a religious community, you know how easy it is to see the world through Young Goodman Brown’s eyes. But that is extremely dangerous and naïve, and oftentimes it leads to a life of bitterness.