The Corpse in the Water and the Funeral We're Still Planning

James Morrow published *Towing Jehovah* in 1994, though the copy that found its way into the stacks here arrived under the alias "Mordor Towing Jehovah by Unknown," a garbling so perfectly absurd it could have been one of Morrow's own jokes. The novel's premise is blunt and literal in the way only the best theological satire can afford to be: God is dead, His two-mile-long corpse is floating in the Atlantic, and a disgraced oil tanker captain must tow it to the Arctic before it rots. Nietzsche's madman finally got his logistics problem. What Morrow understood, writing in the mid-nineties, was that the death of God would not arrive as a philosophical epiphany but as a waste management crisis — a problem of preservation, bureaucracy, and competing stakeholders. Thirty-two years later, this reads less like satire and more like a procedural manual for how institutions respond to the collapse of their foundational myths. The Vatican sends formaldehyde. Feminists see the male body as a patriarchal weapon. The crew defaults to Kantian ethics as a stopgap. Everyone argues about the corpse; nobody mourns. We have spent the 2020s watching analogous scenes play out around democratic norms, scientific consensus, and the social contract itself — vast inherited structures whose decay everyone acknowledges and nobody agrees on how to inter.

The book's prescience is sharpest in its treatment of what we'd now call narrative capture. Cassie Fowler's fear that a literal male God-body will be weaponized to reinforce patriarchal authority anticipates, with startling specificity, the way religious iconography and gender politics have become fused battlegrounds in the culture wars of the last decade. Morrow saw that the physical evidence of God would not settle debates but inflame them — that every faction would conscript the corpse into its own argument. This is the logic of social media epistemology before social media existed. What he could not have anticipated is the degree to which the factions would stop caring about the corpse at all, preferring the argument to the evidence. The metafictional "Director's Cut" chapter, with Moses critiquing his own cinematic portrayal, now reads as a dry rehearsal for our era of deepfakes, revisionist mythmaking, and the collapse of any shared text. Morrow thought the problem was censorship and selective reading. The actual problem turned out to be that no one reads the same thing at all.

Where the novel shows its age is in its environmental subplot. Van Horne's ecological guilt over the oil spill that opens the story is handled with a nineties earnestness that assumes guilt is a meaningful category for environmental actors. In 2026, after decades of corporate greenwashing, carbon credit shell games, and the systematic externalization of climate costs, the idea that a single captain's conscience might be the moral fulcrum of an ecological disaster feels almost quaint. Morrow's blind spot is not that he cared about the environment but that he imagined individual moral reckoning as the site where environmental ethics would be contested. The real contest turned out to be structural, algorithmic, actuarial — fought in boardrooms and emissions databases, not in the souls of sea captains. Similarly, the novel's angels and Vatican operatives assume a world where institutional religion still commands enough cultural authority to organize a covert global operation. The actual trajectory has been the opposite: institutional religion's logistical capacity has eroded precisely as its political belligerence has increased.

*Towing Jehovah* sits in a lineage that runs from Voltaire through Twain's *Letters from the Earth*, through the bitter theological comedies of Vonnegut and the speculative blasphemies of Philip José Farmer, and forward into the New Weird and the philosophical horror of writers like Thomas Ligotti. Morrow's particular contribution was to insist that the death of God is not an abstraction but an engineering problem — and that the engineering problem is, itself, the theology. The novel gave permission to a generation of writers to treat sacred premises with material seriousness rather than mere irreverence. You can see its fingerprints on everything from Christopher Moore's comic scripture to the grounded theological crises in *The Leftovers*. What distinguishes it from its descendants is its refusal to let anyone off the hook: the believers, the atheists, the feminists, the bureaucrats — everyone is complicit in the grotesque comedy of trying to preserve what has already died.

One question the book raises now that it could not have raised in 1994: If the corpse of God were discovered today, floating verifiably in the Atlantic, confirmed by satellite imagery and DNA sequencing and live-streamed to seven billion phones — would it change anything at all?