News

The Flight of American Christianity

By William Schultz, Assistant Professor of American Religions | June 3, 2026

First edition cover of The Flight of Peter Fromm

Martin Gardner's The Flight of Peter Fromm and the Making of Modern American Religion

Quick: Name the most accomplished fictional scholar to teach at Swift Hall. The easy answer is Franz Bibfeldt, that spoof of academic faddishness and triviality. But I’d like to suggest another name: Homer Wilson, professor of the psychology of religion, as renowned for his flamboyant vests as for his staunch atheism.

Bibfeldt was the creation of longtime University of Chicago Divinity School professor Martin Marty. Wilson was the brainchild of another Martin: Martin Gardner. Just as Marty dominated the study of American religious history, so did Gardner dominate his field: popular mathematics. His long-running “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American inspired a generation of mathematicians and popularized (among other things) fractals, tangrams, and the art of M.C. Escher. Gardner published dozens of collections of mathematical games and logic puzzles, as well as books on pseudoscience, philosophy, religion, and literature. But he published only one novel: The Flight of Peter Fromm (1973), featuring Prof. Homer Wilson of Swift Hall.

Wilson narrates the story of Peter Fromm, a young man from a fundamentalist background who comes to the University of Chicago Divinity School hoping to conquer it for Christ. He is, instead, transformed by the school. Peter sheds his fundamentalism and tries on a variety of replacements: Catholicism, Marxism, the neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth, the prophetic Christianity of Reinhold Niebuhr. Watching this journey, Wilson remarks: “In a loose, fragmented way, the story of Peter Fromm parallels the history of Protestant theology.”

By the novel’s end, Peter has lost his Christianity and is in danger of losing his sanity as well. While preaching an Easter sermon at Wilson’s church, he is overcome by disgust at the empty pieties he is delivering. He bursts into a fit of maniacal laughter and begins declaiming Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem “Jabberwocky.” For Peter, Christianity has become so much nonsense.

Gardner never publicly broke down like that, but otherwise his own story runs parallel with Peter’s. He, too, came from the world of Protestant fundamentalism; he, too, came to question his faith while at the University of Chicago. And he ultimately reached the equilibrium that Peter reached after his collapse and recovery. Both Peter Fromm and Martin Gardner accepted the existence of God while acknowledging that this belief requires a “leap of faith” that can have no rational justification.

As befits a novel written by a University of Chicago graduate, The Flight of Peter Fromm is filled with references to Hyde Park institutions. Peter attends services at Bond Chapel, eats lunch at the Quad Club, and ponders theological questions on the C-shaped bench in front of Cobb Hall. Various university luminaries appear in these pages, most of them in thin disguise. Wilson, for instance, was modeled on Eustace Haydon, longtime professor of comparative religion, with some touches of theologian Henry Nelson Wieman and Edward Scribner Ames, dean of the Disciples Divinity House.

But this novel is more than a nostalgic evocation of the Divinity School’s past glories. It illustrates the transformation of American religion in the twentieth century—as well as Swift Hall’s central role in that process. As the historian Conrad Cherry has shown in his book Hurrying toward Zion, in the first decades of the twentieth century, divinity schools (even prominent ones like Chicago, Harvard, and Yale) primarily served young men from rural and small-town backgrounds whose previous education was at church-affiliated colleges. None of them broke down the way Peter did. But there is truth to Homer Wilson’s remark that “[Peter’s] history seemed to me more and more a paradigm of the mental growth of thousands of young men who come to the University of Chicago Divinity School from the small towns of the Midwest, bringing with them the shabby, disintegrating baggage of their narrow sectarian backgrounds.”

Swift Hall forced students like Peter to reflect on the assumptions, theological and otherwise, they had long taken for granted. Most kept their Christianity—after all, learning is not inimical to piety—but what they understood by “Christianity” changed.

And this often brought them into conflict with the people they wanted to serve. Peter agonizes over whether to be a “loyal liar,” preaching a message he doesn’t believe, or a “truthful traitor,” challenging his congregants to examine their beliefs. His nervous breakdown is triggered by a confrontation with Norman Wesley Middleton, a parody of positive-thinking preacher Norman Vincent Peale. Middleton uses vague phrases to convince his prosperous suburban congregation that he believes in the literal resurrection of Christ, which enrages Peter, who might have shed his fundamentalist beliefs but remains committed to the search for “capital-T” Truth and can’t stand Middleton’s equivocations.

The strain that drives Peter to a breakdown also broke down the structures of American Christianity. Evangelicalism supplanted liberalism as the dominant force in American Protestantism in part because evangelical churches offered Christians a shelter from the searching questions asked by Peter Fromm and his kin—as demonstrated by David Hollinger, Gene Zubovich, and other historians of American religion.

It was not supposed to be like this.

William Rainey Harper, the Baptist philologist who played a key role in founding the Divinity School, believed the School could reduce the gap between clergy and laity by putting Sunday schools and church colleges on a more scientific footing. The Flight of Peter Fromm shows how hard this was to realize in practice.

Gardner’s novel was hardly a bestseller, but it did find a few dedicated readers, most of them people who recognized their story in Peter’s. One wrote: “The intellectual journey of Peter was my journey, and much of it took place where his took place, at the Divinity School of the U. of Chicago. I felt as though I were walking through my own journey again.”

Another: “It has been a long time since I read a book that has moved me as much as Martin Gardner’s The Flight of Peter Fromm. As an ex-clergyman, this book has brought out all sorts of emotions in me. Indeed, the book is sheer therapy.”

And another dedicated reader: me. Long before I dreamed of teaching at the Divinity School, I encountered it through The Flight of Peter Fromm. I picked up the book because I had seen it mentioned in Gardner’s obituary and thought it sounded intriguing. For all I knew at that point, every aspect of the book was fictional, including Swift Hall. And so, sometimes I still stop and wonder at the strangeness of teaching at a place frequented by the fictional Peter Fromm and Homer Wilson and the very real Martin Gardner.

Gardner, who loved strange coincidences, would no doubt be amused.

Read additional faculty reflections upon Swift Hall's centennial: