Washington, D.C. enters City of God at a moment of formal public articulation, as the setting for Sarah Blumenthal's address to the Conference of American Studies in Religion. It is the one place in the novel where the work's central theological argument is delivered not in private conversation or seminar discussion but as a formal lecture before a professional body of religious scholars. The city thus serves as the national platform on which the novel's most explicit statement of its religious philosophy is made, a public counterpart to the private struggles and intimate gatherings that otherwise define the spiritual life of its characters.

The Conference Address and Its Argument

Sarah Blumenthal's address, delivered in Washington, D.C. as the twentieth century is about to end, advances the novel's boldest claim: that doubt has been the great civilizer on earth. She argues that the constantly debated and flexible inner condition of theological uncertainty, the wish to believe held in balance with rueful or nervous or grieving skepticism, has kept people in thrall to ethical behavior, while the true believers, of whatever stamp, religious or religious-statist, have done the murdering. The impulse to excommunicate, to satanize, to eradicate, to ethnically cleanse, she insists, is a religious impulse. In the practice and politics of religion, God has always been a license to kill. But to hold in abeyance and irresolution any firm convictions of God, or of an afterlife with Him, warrants walking in His spirit, somehow. The address marks the novel's most direct engagement with the political theology that shadows its title, the question of how the City of God relates to the earthly city of power and violence.

The Trust in Doubters

Sarah extends her argument from the abstract to the professional religious, declaring that among the doctrinaire religious she trusts those who gravitate toward symbolic comfort rather than those who reaffirm historic guarantees. It is just those uneasy promulgators of traditional established religion who are not in lockstep with its customs and practices, or who are chafing under doctrinal pronouncements, or losing their congregations to charismatics and stadium-filling conversion performers, who are the professional religious she trusts. She invokes Coleridge's definition of reading poetry or fiction, the willing suspension of disbelief, as the proper mode of reading Scripture. Yet she insists that such faithful must be true to themselves and understand theirs is a compromised faith, and that something more is required of them. The address thus positions Washington, D.C. as the site where the novel's defense of a hallowed secularism, a faith held in doubt, is most fully and publicly articulated.

The City as National Stage

The choice of Washington, D.C. as the setting for this address is significant within the novel's larger meditation on the relationship between religion and the state. The city represents the consolidated institutions of the modern nation, the seat of the political power that Sarah's argument implicitly critiques when she speaks of religious-statist true believers who have done the murdering. Her address in the capital stands in deliberate contrast to the other settings of the novel's religious life: the small East Village synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism where she serves as rabbi, the brownstone study groups where the documentary hypothesis is discussed, and the intimate spaces where Pem's conversion unfolds. Where those are spaces of inquiry and personal transformation, Washington, D.C. is the space of public declaration, where the novel's theology is offered to the institutional world it seeks to challenge.

The Unremarked God and the Earthly City

The novel's vision of the modern city, articulated elsewhere in its meditation on the city of the unremarked God, the sometime-thing God, the God of history, finds its national embodiment in Washington, D.C. The capital is the apex of the consolidated institutions that humanity has built from its disparate intentions, the jeweled wonder visible from above at night, floating like a giant liner on the sea of darkness. Yet the novel warns that this splendor and insolence of the modern city, creatively built from the disparate intentions of generations of men, raises the question of how much God had to do with it. Washington, D.C. thus stands as the earthly city par excellence, the place where the question of whether God inspires human institutions or is merely used by them is most acutely posed, and where Sarah's address offers her answer: that doubt, not certainty, is what keeps the earthly city from becoming a city of murder.