Just a random Flannery O’Connor thought. I am currently enjoying Wise Blood very much, and it struck me how seriously O’Connor took her fundamentalist misfits. She was a Roman Catholic, and yet we find that her literary (and very Southern) genius really sees Jesus in the angular, raw Tishbite street preachers. She expects us to see the same thing. And if we are ordinary readers, that is precisely what we do see. But if we are Flannery fanboys, smoking our pipes in a swav n’ deboner fashion, that is the very last thing we could possibly see.
Hers was the famous comment that the South was Christ-haunted, and she really believed it. “Jesus been a long time gone.” Which is why He is still here.