Margaret Atwood on Christianity, The Handmaids Tale, and What Faithful Activism Looks Like Today

[rug]

By Layton E. Williams
4-25-2017

“If the United States were to have a totalitarianism, what kind of totalitarianism would it be?”

That's how Margaret Atwood explains the theme to her 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale — the sales of which have skyrocketed since the 2016 presidential election. And April 26, the book finds home in a Hulu adaptation — a 10-part series, which, though planned before the election, finds particular resonance today.

Atwood’s story, which depicts a Christian dystopian regime in a future United States renamed Gilead, is being called “eerily timely” by television critics. In Gilead, people are stripped of their rights and forced into factions and roles based on their gender, class, and power status. Environmental pollution has rendered most women infertile, and those who are still able to bear children are conscripted into a form of sexual slavery as “handmaids” to powerful families, based on an extremist interpretation of the biblical account of Sarah and Hagar.

Speaking to Sojourners about the nature of the type of theocratic regime she originally envisioned for America in her book, Atwood pointed out that it is not genuinely Christian so much as “purportedly Christian.”

https://sojo.net/articles/margaret-atwood-christianity-handmaid-s-tale-and-what-faithful-activism-looks-today

Premieres tonight on hulu.