Nomi, the teenage protagonist of A Complicated Kindness, has grown up in a remote village of Mennonites, a Christian sect that emphasizes austere ways of life and limited contact with modernity. However, as she comes of age and confronts the dissolution of her family, Nomi grows to doubt the strict religious principles that govern her life. Nomi endlessly mocks dogma she finds to be pointless and sharply criticizes teachers and clerics who use religion to exert control over others. At the same time, however, she also admires the sincere religious beliefs of humble and selfless people like her father, Ray. By contrasting these two approaches to Christianity, the novel levels a critique not at faith itself but rather at the use of dogma for personal gain.
Much of the novel’s humor comes from Nomi’s irreverent approach to religious principles that other people in her town take extremely seriously. For example, Nomi lampoons a pseudo-scientific church chart illustrating Satan’s fall through “a complicated system of arrows and timelines.” She also reminisces about being reprimanded by her Sunday school teacher for pretending that a Jesus figurine could “leap down from the cross and drop-kick all the bad guys.”
In a particularly dramatic incident, Nomi reluctantly pretends to be a Christian pioneer at the town’s living history museum. While subtly lighting a cigarette under her bonnet, she catches the garment on fire and runs around frantically, ruining the exhibit and angering the town’s minister, whom she has nicknamed “The Mouth” for his pompous speeches. Nomi’s ability to find the humor in these forms of religious dogma undermines the credibility of the adults around her who refuse to examine their own religious principles.
Meanwhile, the adults most invested in enforcing religious dogma are usually those who want to control or hurt others. The Mouth, who also happens to be Nomi’s uncle, uses his adherence to religious dogma to increase his own authority and power, even when doing so verges on cruelty. For example, as a child Nomi is consumed with nightmares that her older sister Tash, who has recently run away with her boyfriend, will go to Hell for her transgressions. Her mother, Trudie, begs The Mouth to promise Nomi that this won’t happen, but the minister refuses to do so. He won’t relinquish his religious rigidity and the social power it confers upon him, even to comfort a child.
Similarly, Nomi is constantly at odds with her English teacher, Mr. Quiring, who punishes her for her irreverent and unorthodox views. But eventually Nomi discovers that Mr. Quiring has violated Mennonite principles by having an extramarital affair with Nomi’s own mother; subsequently he blackmails Trudie by threatening to have her excommunicated. Again, Nomi’s story shows an authority figure mobilizing religious strictures for his own personal benefit.
While the novel often makes fun of religious dogma and those who adhere to it, people of sincere faith nonetheless emerge as pillars of strength and inner tranquility. Nomi’s father Ray is so devoted to the Mennonite lifestyle that he doesn’t even take off his mandated suit and tie to exercise; she often envies his true belief in God, which helps to sustain him even when their family is falling apart. She also develops a friendship with an older woman, Mrs. Peters, whose serene faith in the afterlife helps her withstand her son Clayton’s tragic death. In both these cases, faith is genuine and seems to be a profound source of strength in trying times.
Moreover, while purveyors of religious dogma often judge and condemn others, characters motivated by sincere faith practice acceptance and empathy. Despite Nomi’s flagrant violation of Mennonite principles, Ray doesn’t punish or admonish her; his faith reinforces his love for her, rather than compromising it. Similarly, Nomi’s best friend Lids truly believes in Mennonite ideology but also serves as Nomi’s confidant about her escapades and nascent sex life. Lids’s faith motivates her to accept others’ differences, rather than scorning them.
A Complicated Kindness is irreverent and often mocking in its portrayal of church dogma. However, the novel’s sensitive portrayal of people like Ray and Lids—complex and sympathetic characters who are genuinely motivated by faith—keeps it from becoming a parody of Mennonite life. Rather, the novel restricts its critique to people who use religious principles to acquire power or harm others.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Religion and Dogma ThemeTracker
Religion and Dogma Quotes in A Complicated Kindness
Mr. Quiring has told me that essays and stories generally come, organically, to a preordained ending that is quite out of the writer’s control. He says we will know when it happens, the ending. I don’t know about that I feel that there are so many to choose from.
There’s an invisible force that exerts a steady pressure on our words like a hand to an open, spurting wound. The town office building has a giant filing cabinet full of death certificates that say choked to death of his own anger or suffocated from unexpressed feelings of unhappiness.
The only thing I needed to know was that we were all going to live forever, together, happily, in heaven and with God, and without pain and sadness and sin. And in my town that is the deal. It’s taken for granted. We’ve been hand-picked. We’re on a fast track, singled out, and saved.
But there is kindness here, a complicated kindness. You can see it sometimes in the eyes of people when they look at you and don’t know what to say. When they ask me how my dad is, for instance, and mean how am I managing without my mother.
Americans come here to observe our simple ways. Here, life is so refreshingly uncomplicated. The tourists are encouraged to buy a bag of unbleached flour at the windmill and to wander the dirt lane of the museum village that is set up on the edge of town, depicting the ways in which we used to live. It’s right next to the real town, this one, which is not really real.
I ended up saying stupid stuff like I just want to be myself, I just want to do things without wandering if they’re a sin or not. I want to be free. I want to know what it’s like to be forgiven by another human being (I was stoned, obviously) and not have to wait around all my life anxiously wondering if I’m an okay person or not and having to die to find out.
She once asked me and the other girls in our class if we were gymnasts, but really fat ones, would we think we could just go out and win an Olympic medal one day? No? Well, that’s what Christianity is all about, she said.
I didn’t know why she was crying, until I heard my mom say honey, what is it? What’s wrong? And Tash said: I think I’ll go crazy. I can’t stand it. It’s all a fucking lie. It’s killing me! Mom, it really is! And then something happened that took me completely by surprise, I heard my mom say, I know honey, I know it is.
My mom put some blankets and pillows into a garbage bag and carried it out to Ian’s truck. She put bread and fruit and the fresh ham she’d bought that day into a box and Ian carried that out.
I remembered my mom telling us about the Mennonites in Russia fleeing in the middle of the night, scrambling madly to find a place, any place, where they’d be free. All they needed, she said, was for people to tolerate their unique apartness.
Ask her to forgive you, Trudie said. You’ve scared the shit out of her, Hans. Tell her you’re sorry. Tell her! Tell her it’s not true. Tell her they are stories. You know nothing about love, nothing. You know nothing about anything at all and I hate you so much.
I turned the paper over and studied a chart titled “Satan Cast Down.” There were different categories linked together with arrows and verses. Rapture, saved dead, unsaved dead, millennium, bottomless pit, lake of fire, beast and false prophet, new heaven, new earth. I tried to follow the complicated system of arrows and timelines.
I asked him why he was getting rid of the furniture and he said he liked empty spaces because you could imagine what might go in them someday.
We were quiet for a long, long time. Then I told him I wasn’t going anywhere. That I’d never leave him.
Heaven is always calm, with no wind. She said other stuff but I didn’t really understand it. I understood there was no wind in heaven. That’s partly why I love the wind that blows around in this town. It makes me feel like I’m in the world.
And we counted cars with American plates—twenty-seven. On their way to watch The Mouth read Revelations by candlelight in the fake church while the people of the real town sat in a field of dirt cheering on collisions.
Love is everything. It is the greatest of these. And I think that we all use whatever is in our power, whatever is in our reach, to attempt to keep alive the love we’ve felt. So, in a way, the only difference between you and me is that you reached out and used the church—there it was as it always has been, what a tradition—and I stayed at home, in bed, and closed my eyes.
Truthfully, this story ends with me still sitting on the floor of my room wondering who I’ll become if I leave this town and remembering when I was little kid and loved to fall asleep in my bed […] listening to the voices of my sister and my mother talking and laughing in the kitchen and the sounds of my dad poking around in the yard, making things beautiful right outside my bedroom window.
