Flannery O’Connor for Atheists

"Parker's Back” ends with O E Parker leaning against a pecan tree in his yard, "crying like a baby." Just minutes before, when he’d whispered his full name through a door barred against him by his wife—“Obadiah Elihue,” the name he'd always hidden and run from—then

all at once he felt the light pouring through him, turning his spider web soul into a perfect arabesque of colors, a garden of trees and birds and beasts.

But after his wife, Sarah Ruth, let him in, and Parker showed her the new stern-eyed Jesus tattoo covering his back, she’d said "It ain't anybody I know,” and she’d screamed “Idolatry!," and she’d beat him with a broom, until "welts had formed on the face of the tattooed Christ.” Clearly, the story is saying, Sarah Ruth is no true Christian. But what of Parker himself? What are we to make of him?

"Parker's Back” was one of Flannery O’Connor’s last stories; she died at 39 from lupus. The suffering her illness caused, and the isolation that suffering necessitated, surely matter for reading her work, and matter especially in conjunction with her faith. O'Connor was a Catholic writer, and sometimes willing to explain the role of religion in her stories:

All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it.

Parker, certainly, is not very willing. Early on he has no use for religion, and he marries the pious Sarah Ruth, it is implied, only to get into her pants. Then, while baling hay, he crashes his tractor into a tree, which bursts into flame. He’s thrown to the ground, and

He could feel the hot breath of the burning tree on his face. He scrambled backwards, still sitting, his eyes cavernous, and if he had known how to cross himself he would have done it.

Parker runs to his truck and drives to the city. When he was fourteen he’d seen a tattooed man at a fair, and it had stirred something in him. Since then he’d covered his body with tattoos—except his back. But after the burning tree,

He only knew that there had been a great change in his life, a leap forward into a worse unknown, and that there was nothing he could do about it.

This change demanded a new tattoo, and this time on his back: a giant image of Jesus.

O’Connor was well-aware that her reading public was not just un-Catholic (in the main), it was un-religious. So too was the world she wrote about: