![](\"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/atlovescommand.jpeg\")
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When the Romance Writers of America presented an award for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Best Romance with Religious or Spiritual Elements\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to Karen Witemeyer for her novel At Love\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Command<\/em>, several of the genre\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fans (including a number of writers) were extremely pissed at this decision, arguing that a former officer in the United States cavalry who had participated in the massacre at Wounded Knee, even a fictional one, should not be held up as a hero in a historical romance novel.<\/p>\n That sounded reasonable to me on general principle, but as I noted on Twitter, it was entirely possible the hero had engaged in a searing moral self-examination and was committed to a lifetime path of repentance and reparation. Or Wounded Knee could just be a colorful bit of backstory in an otherwise generic romance. I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know, and I would have to read the book to find out.<\/p>\n Luckily, my public library had the ebook, so I downloaded it and got to reading. (Before that, though, I learned a lot about what was at stake by reading tweets from romance writers like Jackie Barbosa, Eve Pendle, Clyve Rose, and Courtney Milan, among others.)<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the RWA\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s president had issued a statement declaring that At Love\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Command<\/em> met all the requirements of an inspirational romance, particularly a narrative arc of personal redemption by means of a religious awakening, and the judges hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t noticed anything wrong with Karen Witemeyer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s depiction of Wounded Knee, so if the judges thought it was the best book in its category, then it was<\/em> the best book in its category, no matter how many people didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like it.<\/p>\n This did precisely nothing to abate the criticism, and the RWA\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s board ended up scrambling into an emergency meeting, where they decided that they suddenly had the power to overrule the judges and rescind an award days after it had been issued, so they were going to go ahead and do that.<\/p>\n I was just about done reading the book at this point, and I was convinced that the fans protesting the award were spot on: Witemeyer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s novel does not<\/em> work as a redemption narrative, not least of all because her hero, Matt Hanger, doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t regret the genocidal campaign that led to Wounded Knee. He only regrets that Wounded Knee went badly. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153This was supposed to be a simple weapon confiscation,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he thinks. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153An escort to the reservation.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s his idea of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153bring[ing] justice and order to the frontier.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Wounded Knee was a legitimate conflict, in his mind, until Lakota women and children were killed, because that<\/em> offended his sense of honor. Witemeyer even has him literally assert \u00e2\u20ac\u0153plenty of blame and plenty of sin on both sides<\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of the conflict between the United States and the Native population (emphasis mine), specifically blaming agitators among the Lakota for the way Wounded Knee got out of hand.<\/p>\n Anyway, after Wounded Knee, Matt and three of his comrades \u00e2\u20ac\u009d[had] all sworn an oath to do everything in their power to preserve life and justice.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d They are not<\/em>, however, atoning for the White supremacy of the Indian Wars. Instead, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re \u00e2\u20ac\u0153fighting the battles ordinary people couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t fight for themselves\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 protecting the innocent and righting wrongs.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Yes, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re mercenaries, but they charge fair rates, and they always fight for the little guy.<\/p>\n If this sounds like The A-Team <\/em>to you, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not an accident. One of the four ex-soldiers is even Black. (Never mind how Witemeyer makes that <\/em>work in 1890s Texas; that would be a whole other essay unto itself.)<\/p>\n On her website, Witemeyer discusses how Hanger\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Horsemen, the main characters in At Love\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Command<\/em> and its sequels, were inspired by The A-Team<\/em>. (She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s less candid about the setup being a variation on a specific episode.) Ultimately, though, using the A-Team as her inspiration is precisely why the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153redemption\u00e2\u20ac\u009d narrative fails.<\/p>\n The A-Team, after all, didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t become the A-Team to atone for anything they did in Vietnam. (If I remember correctly, the show consistently and explicitly avoided criticizing the war.) They became vigilantes for the common man because it was the only job open to four fugitives with their combat skills. So the pretense that four ex-cavalrymen spend their days riding around Texas, defending small ranchers and the like, because they feel guilty about taking part in a genocidal battle, is flimsy as hell.<\/p>\n I want to share something with you that Bethany House, the publisher of At Love\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Command<\/em>, wrote in defense of the novel before it was rescinded, when it was still just a matter of intense vocal criticism:<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153In the opening scene of the novel, Witemeyer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hero, a military officer, is at war with the Lakota, weary of war, but fully participating in the battle at Wounded Knee. The death toll, including noncombatant Lakota women and children, sickens him, and he identifies it as the massacre it is and begs God for forgiveness for what he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s done. The author makes it clear throughout the book that the protagonist deeply regrets his actions and spends the rest of his life trying to atone for the wrong that he did.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The idea that Matt \u00e2\u20ac\u0153begs God for forgiveness for what he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s done\u00e2\u20ac\u009d takes up literally one<\/em> sentence in the prologue: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcGod forgive us,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 he murmured.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the full extent of his \u00e2\u20ac\u0153repentance.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t absolve himself for (what he thinks he did wrong at) Wounded Knee; he still sees himself \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a man who carried demons in his saddlebags.\u00e2\u20ac\u0153 But because he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s chosen to, basically, let go and let God, the novel considers him redeemed\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand readers are expected to follow suit.<\/p>\n As for the notion that Matt \u00e2\u20ac\u0153spends the rest of his life trying to atone for the wrong that he did,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he does nothing<\/em> in the book to address his sins against the Lakota at Wounded Knee. Instead, he assuages his guilt as a hired gun for White folks in peril.<\/p>\n Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s where we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re going to get theological for a bit, because this is a cheap form of repentance that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all too common in inspirational romance, because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all too common in modern American Christianity\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthe idea God gives us infinite resets if we just say we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re sorry. (It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a lazy interpretation of 1 John 1:9: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d)<\/p>\n John the Baptist, though, calls on us to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153produce fruit in keeping with repentance.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Matthew 3:8) That means saying you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re sorry isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t enough\u00e2\u20ac\u201dyou must change your life, and the way you live your life, to set the balance right. Maybe<\/em> you could get away with citing James 1:27 and arguing that Matt and his comrades are \u00e2\u20ac\u0153looking after orphans and widows in their distress,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d but they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not doing anything to make up for the deadly harm perpetrated on the Lakota. They don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t atone for that<\/em>.<\/p>\n The need for specificity in atonement is made abundantly clear in Leviticus. If you sin against your neighbor, you must make restitution in full, and then some<\/em>, to your victim. (6:1-5) Ezekiel, too, is clear about the requirements for redemption (33:15): You need to restore what you broke, reimburse what you stole, and then \u00e2\u20ac\u0153walk in the statutes of life, not doing injustice.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n If At Love\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Command<\/em> were a novel about a cavalryman so appalled by his conduct at Wounded Knee he dedicated his life to protecting the Lakota and making reparations, it would be a redemption story. But that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not the book Karen Witemeyer wrote.<\/p>\n Let me be clear: There is no redemption in At Love\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Command<\/em>, because Witemeyer refuses to confront the reality of why Wounded Knee happened, so Matt and his colleagues aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t atoning for the real damage they did there. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re merely play acting at repentance. He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not a saved man; he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just a vigilante with a Scripture-inflected sense of honor and a dark past.<\/p>\n That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a distillation of a few Twitter threads I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve written about At Love\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Command<\/em> over the last two days. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a story that interests me because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not the first time the Romance Writers of America have blundered into a minefield of their own White privilege<\/a>, and because I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m a fan of the genre with a particular interest in inclusive stories that share diverse experiences with readers.<\/p>\n I want to shift gears, though, and talk about this story in the context of a theme that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve hit upon in this newsletter over and over again: We take up our writing practices because we want to find out what matters most to us, because we have something to share with the world and in order to share it effectively, we need to understand it. It needs to be clear to us before we can make it clear to anyone else.<\/p>\n If we write to share our truth, you might well ask me: Okay, Ron, what if At Love\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Command <\/em>is Karen Witemeyer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s truth? Shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t we honor that?<\/p>\n That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a tough one to answer in some ways, especially since\u00e2\u20ac\u201das a matter of strictly technical, literary achievement\u00e2\u20ac\u201dAt Love\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Command<\/em> struck me as fairly typical of its subcategory, and if I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have this strong moral objection to its content, I might readily conclude that it was probably as deserving as any of the other finalists for the prize it (temporarily) won.<\/p>\n The thing is, though, that neither \u00e2\u20ac\u0153her truth\u00e2\u20ac\u009d nor \u00e2\u20ac\u0153your truth\u00e2\u20ac\u009d nor \u00e2\u20ac\u0153my truth\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is necessarily the<\/em> truth. I can recognize Karen Witemeyer as somebody who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s trying to articulate her views on our relationship with God, somebody who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s drawing upon the history of the United States and modern pop culture to make a case for how we should live in relation to God and to one another. At the same time, once she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s made her case, anybody who sees significant flaws in it should be able to discuss those openly, to say this<\/em> is where she got it wrong, this <\/em>is what she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s overlooking.<\/p>\n I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t fully know what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s in Karen Witemeyer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s heart. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think that she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s completely unconcerned about the genocidal brutality at Wounded Knee\u00e2\u20ac\u201dat the very least, she seems to think it was awful enough that it would make a decent man who took part in it feel guilty about what he did. That, however, is the problem: The novel shows infinitely<\/em> more concern with how Matt\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s role in Wounded Knee makes him feel than it does with the pain inflicted on the Lakota. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re whisked off the stage as soon as the battle is over; Matt might think now and then about how awful it was, but we never see how the Lakota struggle in the aftermath of his actions, because Witemeyer makes the authorial choice to never confront that aftermath directly.<\/p>\n As such, the pain of the Lakota\u00e2\u20ac\u201da very real, very visceral historical pain\u00e2\u20ac\u201dis effectively reduced to a convenient hook for a story. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not just disrespectful, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unnecessary. As I learned when I was looking up some of the historical context, Matt and his comrades could just as easily have served in the Johnson County War, a conflict between struggling settlers and wealthy cattle ranchers in Wyoming, just a few years after Wounded Knee. Heck, that setting actually suits her A-Team-inspired \u00e2\u20ac\u0153vigilantes for the common man\u00e2\u20ac\u009d theme better than Wounded Knee, and would make their willingness to fight for the economically disadvantaged more narratively coherent.<\/p>\n But, I suspect, it might be more \u00e2\u20ac\u0153dramatic\u00e2\u20ac\u009d for Matt to be haunted by the atrocities of Wounded Knee than disillusioned by the brutal class warfare of Johnson County. The more conspicuous the sin, after all, the more striking the apology. Or it may simply be that Wounded Knee was low-hanging narrative fruit. Again, I can only speculate.<\/p>\n Alongside my speculation, though, I can offer an observation: When you use the pain and trauma of a marginalized community as colorful shading for your protagonist\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s past, when you treat other characters as props in his emotional journey, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s neither empathy nor compassion. Matt\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s expressions of guilt and remorse may give him the illusion of emotional complexity, but they do nothing to address the pain they invoke.<\/p>\n As good as At Love\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Command<\/em> is from a superficial standpoint, I believe it falls short as an emotional and a moral document. It may well be the clearest expression of what weighs most heavily on Karen Witemeyer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s heart that she could create at the time of writing\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand, again, it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t hurt to be mindful of the fact that she made an effort. In attempting to write about how a man lives with sins that seem unforgiveable, however, I wish that she had been willing or able to give her attention to the Lakota, the victims whose forgiveness Matt needs the most to secure in order to demonstrate\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 well, not that he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s worthy of God\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s forgiveness, because we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re all worthy of God\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s forgiveness.<\/p>\n God, I believe, is patient with us, and doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want us to perish (2 Peter 3:9). At the same time, though, God is waiting for us<\/em> to show that we understand that everyone else is as worthy of God\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s love as we are. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s<\/em> why Matt needs the Lakota\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s forgiveness; that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s <\/em>why he needs to make amends.<\/p>\n That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the kind of story I would like to see. An even better story would be one that didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just acknowledge the Lakota perspective, but centered<\/em> it, shunting the repentant White character off to the margins. Maybe somebody is working a story like that. Maybe it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s you. If it is, I hope you keep at it. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not the only one waiting to read it.<\/p>\n This post was first published in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Destroy Your Safe and Happy Lives,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a newsletter I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been writing since 2018. If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d like to subscribe and get every new installment delivered to your email (free!), you can do that here<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When the Romance Writers of America presented an award for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Best Romance with Religious or Spiritual Elements\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to Karen Witemeyer for her novel At Love\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Command, several of the genre\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fans (including a number of writers) were extremely pissed at this decision, arguing that a former officer in the United States cavalry who had participated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1128],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4598"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4598"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4603,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4598\/revisions\/4603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}