"However, his Christianity did not seem to comfort him or rein in his adulterous behaviour."

Why would anyone assume that it would?

Glen C. Good question. I am not fond of the utilitarian approach to Christianity, the "believe in Jesus and you will feel better", approach. I think that is a tempting but flawed promise. On the other hand I think there is genuine comfort to be had but not to our prescription. In other words we find comfort where we least expect to find it, not in grasping for something but in letting go of something. The self has to be de-centered and that is very uncomfortable.

The other point about morality is similarly not straight forward. For example, the ten commandments are a good guide to behaviour but they are useless unless the habits of the heart remain untransformed. In Updike's case his adultery points to a certain immaturity and a fragile understanding of what it means to be married. The commandments about adultery and coveting ones neighbour's wife are warnings that this way lies disaster. The tragedy is that we do not hear the warnings and reap the consequences of marital failure and all that that means for our partners and our children and ourselves.

I think that Updike has done a great thing by exposing the sexual revolution for what it is, immature, narcissistic and naive. We need to learn that falling in love outside of marriage may be a common experience but that we must not take the bait. It is not good enough to simply follow desire, the bait hides a hook of consequences that will destroy us. Your question implies that we should not even try to live ordered lives and that Christian faith is impotent in that ordering. Perhaps we should live for the moment, grasp the day, take the risk. But nothing remains hidden as Updike found out in his first marriage.

Sells < " Your question implies that we should not even try to live ordered lives and that Christian faith is impotent in that ordering."

No Sells, to me, the question implies that one does not have to be Christian to hold good morals, and neither is a non-Christian person any more likely to 'commit adultery' than a Christian person.

The 'sexual revolution' was an inevitable part of our history in that women were finally able to take more control of their own fertility and enjoy the sexual freedom that men have always enjoyed. I see no problem with that.

Certainly, adultery has been with us since the dawn of time, and will certainly always be around.
I do agree that married people (or de-facto) with children at home, who play around outside the marriage, do cause enormous damage that impacts on society in many ways.
But none of this has anything to do with a being a Christian or not...

Susan,
I do not believe that Christians should claim the high moral ground and that non- Christians are incapable of living moral lives. Indeed, my atheistic scientific friends often are more
pre-ocupied with morality that I am. As far as morality is concerned I think we are all in it together. However, the Judeo-Christian tradition is based on a unique analysis of human experience that produced varieties of texts that reflect that experience. It seems to me closed to ignore such a resource. It is empirical! Dogma is derived from lived lives and amounts to a map of the human heart. It is the faulty rationalism of the Enlightenment that hides this and robs us of a unique cultural resource for understanding the what being human means.

As far the the sexual revolution is concerned do you you really think that letting women practice their sexuality in the same way as men was really a step forward? The number of single parent families, the fatherless children, the destruction of marriage all give witness to the failure of the sexual revolution. Sexual freedom is not freedom, it is a distraction from there real game which is raising the next generation in a stable environment.

The mayhem produced by the sexual revolution has everything to do with the loss of the Christian tradition. It is only at the altar that vows of taken that set the stage for the formation of families of human flourishing. The Church has been the big defender of marriage. I would have thought that was obvious.

There is no reason to presume that being a Bible reading, church going Christian leads to any kind of superior morality, sexual or otherwise.

One of the factors that triggered off the Protestant "Reformation" was the wide spread decadent immorality of the "catholic" ecclesiastical establishment at all levels. A classic example being the infamous Borgia's - did anyone see the recent TV series?

Then there is the behavior of the popes themselves, who are oft-times touted as the "vicars of 'Christ'" and/or "icons" of 'Christ' too.
Their wall-to-wall criminal behavior is described in great detail by Tony Bushby in his book The Criminal History of the Papacy.

Why not also google the topic the sexual lives of the popes.

Christianity has of course always been an entirely utilitarian religion. Indeed the reason that christian-ism become the world dominant political "religion" is because Christians (both individually and collectively) systematically and deliberately broke all of the ten commandments - including, and especially, the first one. To be fair, much of that was in some sense understandable due to the extraordinary pressure just to merely survive in most times and places, and taking into account the fact that humankind has always been in a state of perpetual psychosis. And caught up in the march of folly as it was being dramatized in their time and place.
This was/is especially the case with Western man.

Perhaps Updike was permanently of the horn and a damned fornicator because he WAS a man of God, he WAS a promiscuous Churchgoer and scholastically too close to the choirboys of Harvard?

As the Archbishop of Dapto uttered to Linda Lovelace "waste not want not".

Pete