“The Book of Nora”: Sentimental Secularism, or Good Religion, in The Leftovers

In the final episode of HBO's series The Leftovers Nora Durst states, "I don't lie." In this spirit, let me begin with a triune disclosure: 

I suppose this trifecta is why I latched on to the show's final episode for this essay — perhaps upon re-viewing it I could synthesize my divergent responses (annoyed disinterest with genuine weeping). Here it is, then, up front: The last episode of The Leftovers, entitled "The Book of Nora," underscores that religion is genre; and that, for good or for ill, the sentimental form holds the secular world together. 

In a series filled with strange happenings and upendings, in a world that has transformed before everyone's eyes, the very concept of "religion" remains startlingly stable. The place of religion in the series never confuses viewers. In fact, its presence is presumed completely natural; of course people turn to religion when faced with death, suffering, or the inexplicable. Even the Guilty Remnant, a cult that uses cigarettes in place of speech to proclaim its nihilistic faith, is clearly religious. The Leftovers follows characters on existential quests for meaning in the face of a great epistemological rupture that stirs tumultuous religions and challenges faiths, but that break does not fundamentally alter the structure of secularism. Because the show knows (and never really questions) what religion is, we root for our two lovers, and we come to cheer for and to know what true religion is, versus bad forms of belief, through the marriage plot. The ideal viewer might even express this knowledge through her tears. 

As a robust body of scholarship has made clear, secularism is the background through which religion appears as a category. As Talal Asad argues, secularism is not an ideology opposed to and emptied of religion;  it isa disciplinary mechanism that launches divisions and keeps them in play — not divisions between science and religion or the religious and the nonreligious, as one might think, but between religion and bad belief. What is the defining difference? Religion aligns with the values of liberalism (and as such can be recognized as religion) while bad belief does not and is instead disciplined as fanaticism, zealotry, or radical fundamentalism. Not the space left behind when religion goes away, secularism, as Charles Taylor theorized, is characterized by what he terms the "nova effect" — a multiplication of religious forms in the wake of the fragilization of belief (the sense that no one belief in relation to immanence or transcendence is self-evident, incontestable, fills the whole sky). Though Taylor's is an argument about the long historical unfolding of this process, and not a sudden rip in cosmology, The Leftovers explores a world where fragilization of belief accelerates and all kinds of religious practices erupt. Much of The Leftovers, then, concerns itself with fending off bad belief. From the senior Kevin Garvey to Holy Wayne to the Guilty Remnant and the cults at Miracle, the series abounds in different subsets of religious practices, with those that most interfere with the hetero-nuclear family (and its attendant whiteness) suffering the most dramatic consequences from the U.S. government. In contradistinction to all this chaos, the series ends not with the new messianic Book of Kevin, which is now a pile of ashes, but with the Book of Nora, a quiet, heartfelt testimony to the purpose of suffering and a mother's love — not written, but spoken at the dining room table to her suitor.   

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When Nora finally tells her story at the end of the episode, it is what the local nun once told Nora when confronted with dissembling about her own illicit love affair in the convent, "just a better story." I'm not so much concerned with whether it is true — nor is the series. The series seems invested in it being a true story for her that can enable Nora and Kevin to connect and move forward — as it turns out in an idealized Australian small town reminiscent of an American West where they can suture a meaningful world back together through marriage. Instead, I want to highlight how sentimentalism and its attendant marriage plot, the "better story," maps on to secularism's promotion of liberal forms of religion against "bad belief."  

The final episode itself begins with questions of genre and belief. It highlights the importance of the form of a story and its relationship to both the small everyday feelings of human connectedness and to the large social structures of religion, science, economics, and law. The opening scene features Nora recording a video statement to release the company from liability before they try to "irradiate" her into a parallel universe where they claim the Departed reside. A doctor off screen responds by saying she doesn't believe Nora. Nora, who stoically reads the liability script like she had once read questionnaires for insurance claims, becomes angry and firmly states, "I don't lie." Dr. Eden coaxes her into a more convincing statement by asking her to name her children. This first scene highlights Nora being trained into a genre: a sentimental testimony of a mother's love unto death for her children that is simultaneously an advertisement for the company and a release from liability. Nora's ability to create a believable second take so easily reminds us that this training was already underway when she viewed these "testimonials" in an earlier episode while researching the company; she was already deeply enmeshed in this genre that made sense to her at the guttural level. Following Kathryn Lofton's treatment of neoliberal business culture as modern religion, it's worth pointing out that this scene is not just a company borrowing sentimental testimony, performance of belief, and ripe with religious allusions (Dr. Eden, reconnection to passed ancestors through rebirth in womblike transports), but is itself a form of religion (and most likely not the good kind since it, too, is on the run from the government). 

The second scene puts an exclamation point on the importance of genre and its embeddedness in how we make sense of, and survive in, the world. It is one of the most endearing scenes between Nora and her brother, loud and fervent preacher and prophet Matt Jamison, who against his better judgement accompanies his sister to the procedure. The two siblings bond over a round of "Matt Libs" — Mad Libs that Matt created when they were children and sent to Nora, "the bravest girl on earth," in letters while she was away at what she dubbed "Hell and Damnation Camp" ("Camp of the Holy Spirit," according to Matt). This time, as they sit outside awaiting her departure into the unknown, he creates a Matt Lib to write Nora's obituary. Mad Libs are a recognition of genre's structure; they are only humorous to those enmeshed in the language and form on which the Mad Lib riffs. The scene highlights that we live and die in language and in genres — the rift in the cosmology caused by the Departed requires the re-establishment of stories that feel right, that can be lived (and died) in. And despite the doctrinal differences between the two siblings, they are participating in the same structure — albeit from "opposite" perspectives signaled by different words for church camp. Given the structure of secularism, and its production not only of religion per se (and a lot of it) but distinguishing between good religion and bad belief, what is it that makes this scene so powerful — and Matt so human in it? An endearing Matt questions the answers he preaches, is humbled before his own death and limited knowledge, and places his relationship with his sister and what she desires before any other demands of the gods. In other words, he places his zealotry on hold as he wrestles with his individual importance and private belief in relation to his family.  

Family is not a new theme here — it is the focus of what gets torn apart by the Sudden Departure (forget about supply chains, governmental implosions, healthcare). Babies are everywhere from Matt and Mary's miracle child to Holy Wayne's many messianic babies, and of course, an embryo that departed from Laurie Garvey's own womb. Perhaps most importantly, the frame stories for each season feature babies and separation from mothers — the opening scene of the entire series (even the first sound) features a crying infant (Sam) who suddenly disappears from a car seat, and his mother subsequently screaming for him. Seasons 2 and 3 begin with different historical moments that highlight stories of familial separation. The first features a pregnant cavewoman who leaves her clan inside a cave to give birth during which an earthquake buries them and leaves her and her newborn alone to their fate (a stranger saves the baby after the mother dies). The second follows a nineteenth-century Millerite woman who does not abandon her sect after failed end-of-the-world prophesies and thereby loses her husband and children. Our heroine, Nora, whose husband and children departed, represents the most overwhelming loss. As Mayor Warburton, who introduces her at the beginning of the series, says, "All of us were touched by the events of Oct.  14, 2011 but no one more than our honored speaker, Nora Durst."

The Millerite woman frame story distills intricate political, theological, and social developments into a simple arrangement and choice: marriage or nihilism. According to Claudia Stokes, nineteenth-century sentimental literature was deeply sectarian and intervened in complicated contemporaneous religious issues in substantive ways. In regards to the ubiquitous marriage plot, Stokes reminds us that theologies of the future perfected world regularly hinged on marriage as its inaugural moment. This was primarily through a large swath of nineteenth-century Christian millennialist thought that was not apocalyptic (sudden ending of the world), but an almost unnoticeable optimistic progress of history toward perfection. The Leftovers invokes the pessimistic strain through the apocalyptic prophesies of William Miller who calculated the exact day of the second coming of Christ. It then links this nineteenth-century Millerism to the Guilty Remnant (who believe the earth has already ended) by fading from Millerites sleeping on the floor of their church after another failed prophesy into a scene of sleeping Guilty Remnant members. Two sides of the same coin, failed or successful apocalypse, both disrupt the nuclear family.

Nora finds the right kind of secular religion; she becomes the alternative to the nineteenth-century Millerite woman and her pessimistic Guilty Remnant descendants who reject promises of motherhood, domestic bliss, and the optimistic slow progress of the world toward perfection. Before the Departure, Nora's husband was disengaged and cheating on her; Nora, herself, proclaims at a job interview that she wants the position because "she need[s] something for [her]self" and wants to "use [her] brain again for more than figuring out what juice box is certified organic." After the Departure, Nora reforms. Nora's religion becomes her children, and she finally goes through a ritual that looks an awful lot like rebirth to follow them. There is nothing cinematically recorded of Nora's years of wanderings among the Departed — what we might imagine would be the focus of a holy text akin to Matt's now burned Book of Kevin. Even so, the episode "The Book of Nora" is buzzing with Biblical references from the wedding banquet to the scapegoat. Though Nora prefers to think of the Departure as a natural disaster with a scientific solution — to the point of trusting her life to a machine to facilitate her naturalistic departure—the imagery of the series makes explicit connections between her and the Millerite woman. Like the Millerites, Nora dons a white robe before her departure, climbs a ladder (into the truck and then later onto her own house looking for the lost pigeons), and finds herself in the end "a ghost" to her family. The prolonged final shot of the series highlights Kevin and Nora at the dining room table while the ladder still leans against the house. Yet, for the first time in a series filled with images of empty (actual and metaphorical) domestic and church spaces, the house feels full, like it will be enough, that this truly is where meaning lies. 

It might seem that we have finally risen above The Leftovers' chaotic world of religion — that Kevin and Nora have left religion behind. But the tear-inducing triumph of Kevin and Nora's love story is fundamentally secular only in the sense that scholars of secularism and post-secularism have come to define it — as an endorsement of good religion. When we finally hear about Nora's quest, she proceeds carefully with a pacing that sounds like she could be reading from a page of a book. (That Kevin says he believes her at the end echoes back to the first scene when she delivers her lines to immediate disbelief). Even far off in a distant universe, it is a familiar story. Didn't you know she would stand outside and watch the house from behind a tree even before she said it? And see her grown children come out the door and realize she was not part of their world any longer and must disappear to ensure their happiness? Pointedly, the sentimental tale of a mother who has lost her children answers the question of theodicy — in this case, why this unusual suffering happened to her (and by implication to everyone else). This most honored figure set apart as the most worthy of empathy, a mother who lost her entire family, gives the final account of why "bad things happen to good people" and it is that her great suffering ensured less suffering for those she loved — in her own words, "we are the lucky ones." She is committed to the hetero-nuclear family and to its story that explains evil in the world. Nora's book is one of theodicy that justifies the world as it is through the greater suffering that would result if it were otherwise. Nora comes to recognize herself as a metaphorical scapegoat for her departed family; by extension she underwrites, in Peter Coviello's summative description of secularism, "the racialized theodicy of hegemonic liberalism."1 The idealized white hetero-domestic bliss upon which the series ends beckons the viewer to join with Kevin. I believe you, in you, in this story of the messianic mother, a mother so powerful that even in her absence her loss ensures the success of the family unit in the truly demolished world of the Departed. The Leftovers entertains the dissolution of the world as we know it, but it does not dissolve secularism, which means it ends with the right religion firmly in place. Nora's story is posited as an explanation for all the suffering that matters. Above all, the ending confirms that genres make meaning, and that there is no world-splitting catastrophe that sentimental forms will not suture. If, as Durkheim famously described, religion is the organization of the social, then genre is religion. There is no escaping it even if you want to call it (or especially when you call it) by another name.

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Wendy Raphael Roberts is Associate Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY and author of Awakening Verse: The Poetics of Early American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2020), which was awarded the 2023 Early American Literature Book Prize.

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