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Still Standing: A Spiritual Classic, Monumental Racism, and the Iconographic Reception of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2025
Abstract
In The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) John Bunyan describes the Flatterer as a “man black of flesh.” This depiction sets the course for the reception and adaptation of his work as a spiritual classic to enact, perpetuate, and even deepen a racist vision. Alternatively, theological awareness of racism and racialization finds expression in critique and correction. The history of the illustration of the Flatterer raises particularly acute questions. Bunyan’s own scripturally informed concern for monuments allows illustrated adaptations, such as Little Pilgrim’s Progress, to be brought into conversation with Ryan Newson’s theological treatment of confederate monuments. Given that so many adaptations of The Pilgrim’s Progress come from within evangelicalism, both racist and racially aware representations of Bunyan’s work are weighed in light of Vincent Bacote’s race-centered, constructive critique of evangelical theology.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the President and Fellows of Harvard College
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1 I am grateful to former Talbot School of Theology Dean, Clint Arnold, for the grant of a partial research leave in which work on this paper was begun. Biola University undergraduate students, across multiple sections of my upper-level core curriculum elective Pilgrim’s Progress: A Spiritual Classic in a Selfie World, have commented on and interacted with this material in lecture, discussion, and written feedback.
2 Thomas S. Kidd, Who Is an Evangelical? The History of a Movement in Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019); Soong-Chan Rah, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009); Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2019); Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2021); Danté Stewart, Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle (New York: Convergent Books, 2021); Bryan Loritts, Insider Outsider: My Journey as a Stranger in White Evangelicalism and My Hope for Us All (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2018).
3 Vincent Bacote, Reckoning with Race and Performing the Good News: In Search of a Better Evangelical Theology (Theological Traditions; Leiden: Brill, 2020) 4 (italics in original).
4 Ibid., 11.
5 Jon Pahl, Empire of Sacrifice: The Religious Origins of American Violence (New York: New York University Press, 2010).
6 Bacote, Reckoning with Race.
7 Bacote offers many nuanced qualifications about the diversity of evangelicals, and the positive contributions and failings of Christian traditions outside evangelicalism while keeping his focus on dominant trends among dominantly white western shaped evangelical theology and church space.
8 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (ed. W. R. Owens; Oxford World’s Classics; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) 127.
9 There is an argument to be made about the popularity of Part II (1684) in America given that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s only quotations from The Pilgrim’s Progress in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) come from Part II, even as her overall plot alludes to Part I. Gayle Edward Wilson, “ ‘As John Bunyan Says’: Bunyan’s Influence on Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” American Transcendental Quarterly 1.2 (1987) 157–62. Part I remains the most popular among religious readers in the 21st century.
10 More could be said about ways in which revised and updated language versions adapt Bunyan’s language in the Flatterer episode. In brief, these show mixed success in strategies of dealing with this character and his racialized description.
11 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 127–28 (italics in original).
12 James F. Forrest, “Bunyan’s Ignorance and the Flatterer: A Study in the Literary Act of Damnation,” Studies in Philology 60.1 (1963) 12–22; Benjamin Myers, “Bunyan’s Gospel: The Theological Role of Mr. Ignorance in The Pilgrim’s Progress,” The Reformed Theological Reveiw 68.1 (2003) 29–38.
13 Jason Crawford, Allegory and Enchantment: An Early Modern Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) 186–88.
14 Margaret Sönser Breen, “Race, Dissent, and Literary Imagination in John Bunyan and James Baldwin,” Bunyan Studies: A Journal of Reformation and Nonconformist Culture 21 (2016) 9–32, at 10, 11.
15 Michael Davies, “Introduction: Bunyan’s Presence,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan (ed. Michael Davies and W. R. Owens; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) 1–18.
16 David N. Dixon, “The Second Text: Missionary Publishing and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 36.2 (2012) 86–90; Andy Draycott, “Pilgrim’s Missionary Progress: Contemporary Evangelistic Adaptations of John Bunyan’s Lingering Spiritual Classic for a Post-Secular West,” Missiology. An International Review 49.2 (2021) 149–62.
17 See the reissued Wesley Library edition, https://seedbed.com/required-reading-for-methodists-the-pilgrims-progress/, as well as the Reformed Ligonier Ministries, https://learn.ligonier.org/series/pilgrims-progress-guided-tour. Andy Draycott, “The Internet, and Contemporary Evangelical Reception of The Pilgrim’s Progress,” Bunyan Studies 24 (2020) 93–113.
18 Ryan Andrew Newson, Cut in Stone: Confederate Monuments and Theological Disruption (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2020).
19 https://www.reftoons.com/blogs/toons/live-in-the-bible. Spurgeon’s love of The Pilgrim’s Progress is well documented; Cox has written and illustrated a children’s adaptation of The Pilgrim’s Progress (more on which below). Bunyan’s book continues to be the subject of new editions in devotional series as well as discipleship and bible study guides, see Andy Draycott, “Evangelical Devotionals and Bible Studies of The Pilgrim’s Progress: Fidelity or Bibliolatry?,” Christian Education Journal 17.2 (2020) 264–82.
20 For a comparable observation, see Barbara Hochman, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction 1851–1911 (Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book; Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011) 4.
21 Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 115 (italics in original).
22 Ibid., 264.
23 Newson, Cut in Stone, 125.
24 Nathalie Collé-Bak, “Spreading the Written Word through Images: The Circulation of The Pilgrim’s Progress via Its Illustrations,” Bulletin de La Societe d’Etudes Anglo-Americaines Des XVIIe et XVIIIe Siecles [Supplement] (January 1, 2010) 223, https://doi.org/10.3406/xvii.2010.2490; Shannon Murray, “Playing Pilgrims: Adapting Bunyan for Children,” Bunyan Studies 18 (2014) 78–106.
25 Natalie Carnes, Image and Presence: A Christological Reflection on Iconoclasm and Iconophilia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).
26 Helen L. Taylor, Little Christian’s Pilgrimage: The Story of The Pilgrim’s Progress Simply Told (London: Wells, Gardner, Darton, 1889) v; Helen L. Taylor, Little Pilgrim’s Progress (Chicago: Moody, 2006) 5. Subsequent quotation from Helen Taylor’s book draws from the 2006 edition.
27 Taylor, Little Pilgrim’s Progress, 156–57.
28 Helen L. Taylor, Little Christian’s Pilgrimage (Redhill, UK: Wells, Gardner, Darton, 1947).
29 Isabel Hofmeyr has shown that illustrations adapted to African cultural settings could subversively affirm local identity over against missionary racialization (The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004]).
30 Taylor, Little Pilgrim’s Progress.
31 Ellen Drummond and John Bunyan, Pictorial Pilgrim’s Progress (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 1960).
32 Ibid., 219.
33 Ibid., 15.
34 Jacqueline Busch and Melvin Patterson, Christian’s Quest (Chicago: Moody, 2012).
35 Taylor, Little Christian’s Pilgrimage, 40.
36 Ben Judah’s Kai’Ro, originally published by Birmingham, Alabama based ministry Hands of Hur, tells a grittier narrative of black youths that begins in prison and is aimed at a teenage readership. Ben Judah, Kai’Ro: The Journey of an Urban Pilgrim (Chicago: Moody, 2013); Ben Judah, Kai’Ro: The Journey of an Urban Pilgrim (n.p.: Hands of Hur, 2009).
37 Anthony J. Carter, The Glory Road: The Journeys of 10 African-Americans into Reformed Christianity (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009) 178.
38 See also, Judah, Kai’Ro (2013).
39 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress: An Illustrated Christian Classic (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2019).
40 Rousseaux Brasseur, The Pilgrim’s Progress: A Poetic Retelling of John Bunyan’s Classic Tale (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2020).
41 Ibid., 166–67.
42 There is a whole other aspect of the iconic reception history of The Pilgrim’s Progress that trades on prejudicial and stereotypical depictions of Jews from European tradition in images of the Flatterer not explored here. This raises questions about Bunyan’s typological Scriptural reading, as pointed out in a paper, “Biblical Silencing in Bunyan’s Margins to The Pilgrim’s Progress,” delivered by Noam Flinker at the 2019 International John Bunyan Society conference in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The supersessionism of such typological readings is discussed in relation to the theology of race in the Western Christian imagination in Willie J. Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
43 Paul Cox and Stephanie Cox, The Pilgrim’s Progress: A Poetic Journey (Peterborough, Canada: H&E Kids, 2019).
44 Bacote, Reckoning with Race, 11.
45 Ibid., 13.
46 It would be hard to defend this quasi-gnostic account of Bunyan in his own dissenting, nonconformist social and political context, nor indeed the sociality that is mapped out in The Pilgrim’s Progress, and especially in his Part II.
47 Steven Case, This Road Tonight: A New Pilgrim’s Progress (Berkeley, CA: The Apocryphile Press, 2014).
48 Daniel Vaca, Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). Among evangelical presses, Eerdmans’ adaptation stands out: Gary Schmidt’s text tells us that Evangelist is tall with a white beard (3), then in Brian Moser’s full page watercolor illustration (39), Evangelist is rendered as a black man with a white beard, undoubtedly reconfiguring the visual imagination of readers (Gary Schmidt, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress: A Retelling [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994]).
49 This is also increasingly true in updated, or modernized, language versions. For example, Cheryl Ford eliminates mention of skin color for her Flatterer; John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress: Faithfully Retold by Cheryl V. Ford (2nd ed.; Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 2016) 155–56.
50 Helen L. Taylor, Little Pilgrim’s Progress (Chicago: Moody, 2021).
51 See David Pilgrim, “The Coon Caricature” (October, 2002) from the Jim Crow Museum, Ferris State University, https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/coon/homepage.htm
52 Bacote, Reckoning with Race, 15–18.
53 Carolyn Staley, From Grace to Glory: A Present Day Journey Through John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” (Port St. Lucie, FL: Solid Ground Books, 2019) 568.
54 Bacote, Reckoning with Race, 50–51.
55 See Natalie Carnes’s blog post, https://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2017/08/breaking-the-power-of-monuments.html, and, more extensively, Carnes, Image and Presence.