Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

Hawthorne was a profoundly Christian writer:

Nathaniel Hawthorne is often considered a profoundly Christian writer. He found pride the root sin. Faith in nature was only easy optimism. What he did best was to translate the heavy moral burden of life into the substance of his imagination. Personally, I think that it would be fair to consider Hawthorn a Christian writer with many characteristics seeing in humanist writers. There could be a fine line, but if we take into consideration that the base of his writing comes from a puritan background, Hawthorn's writing goes far more into the moral struggles within a society than the Christian struggles or soul saving.

Hawthorn was an American novelist and short-story writes who was a master
of the allegorical and symbolic tale. He was raised by a puritan family. Per information found in Britannica.com: "He was descended from one of the judges at the Salem witch trial. He recognized that his ancestors were too blinded by their zeal to see their own wickedness, and expressed remorse for them and constantly acknowledged their wrong." Growing as a writer, Hawthorne lived in a time when progressive theology had reduced Christianity from being all about salvation to being all about morality. His picture of moralistic Puritans has more reference to Victorian Christians than to his evangelical forebears. The true Puritans believed works played no role in salvation, and their reputation for morality is only evidence that faith in Christ alone really does bear fruit in good works. We can see these in his writings.

Many of Hawthorne’s writings, including his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, focus on enduring moral and religious questions, as they emerged in the life of the Puritans and their New England descendants.
His marvelously crafted stories take us deeply into the American soul, with its dark motives, conflicting aspirations, and moral struggles. The Scarlet Letter tells the story of two lovers kept apart by the ironies of fate, their own mingled strengths and weaknesses, and the Puritan community’s interpretation of moral law, until at last death unites them under a single headstone. The book made Hawthorne famous and was eventually recognized as one of the greatest of American
novels.

It is no secret that Hawthorne’s greatness in writing is his moral insight. He inherited the Puritan tradition of moral earnestness, and he was deeply concerned with the concepts of original sin and guilt and the claims of law and conscience. Hawthorne rejected what he saw as the Transcendentalists’ transparent optimism about the potentialities of human nature. Instead he looked more deeply and perhaps more honestly into life, finding in it much suffering and conflict but also finding the redeeming power of love. There is no romantic escape in his works, but rather a firm and resolute scrutiny of the psychological and moral facts of the human condition. Still leaves the direct points of Christianity to the side.

In the last fifteen years of the twentieth century, as Leland S.
Person points out in his chapter, “Hawthorne and History, ” an abundance of New Historicist scholarship has focused attention on Hawthorne's engagement with contemporary social and political contexts, and the result has been a more worldly Hawthorne than the Great Artist admired and explicated so well by the New Critics. Readers have been made aware of the subtle ways in which Hawthorne's writings respond to his own times as they draw upon the past. 'The Scarlet Letter', for example, though set within the Puritan world of seventeenth-century Boston, reacts to a number of mid-nineteenth-century developments, such as the European revolutions of 1848, the Women's Rights Movement, and the growing controversy over slavery in the United States. The novel, in other words, is product and producer of the culture surrounding
it.

We can see that Hawthorne understood original sin-that inner evil that lurks deep inside the human heart-in a profound way. What I think is missing, though, is the other pole of Puritan spirituality: the grace of God, who forgives sin through the atonement of Jesus Christ. Hawthorne understands the law, but he leaves out the gospel. And this is why in my opinion he uses his Puritan background and beliefs but I don't see him as a direct profoundly Christian writer.