A Voice in the Wind

The city of Rome is filled with statues of gods and goddesses, tributes to a pagan, deific hierarchy. They decorate public spaces as well as private villas. Phoebe offers daily tributes to her household gods, at first as a matter of rote ritual but later as a sincere attempt to cure her ailing husband. They are both religious iconography and aesthetic statement, inviting the artistic critique of Marcus and Arria. Hadassah, however, sees something quite different. She sees a society in thrall to false gods and headed down a path of self-destruction. Hadassah’s perspective echoes Rivers’s, herself a born-again Christian, that an empire built on worshipping false idols, no matter how vast and powerful its reach, is doomed to failure. The beginnings of social and political decay are evident as Rome becomes a bifurcated society between elites and plebians, relying on the labor of enslaved people and the blood of the games to pacify the mob. The decline of the empire, the narrative implies, can be traced to its hedonism and worship of false gods—strikingly similar to the hedonism and false worship of the Jews wandering the desert after their liberation from Egypt. That course of destruction can be distilled in the singular symbol of the stone idols.

An implicit motif running through A Voice in the Wind is the similarities between ancient Rome in the early stages of its decline and the current United States. The parallels are numerous: Rome and the U.S. were both founded as republics with both governments built around a tripartite system with three branches of government. Both societies value wealth. Both have utilized the labor of enslaved people to build much of their economic power. Finally, both have embraced multiculturalism. As Rome expanded its borders, it incorporated those diverse cultures that it conquered, just as the United States is often touted as a “melting pot” of its various immigrant cultures. The narrative, however, also suggests that, as Rome suffered from internal decay, similar problems beset the U.S. While never stated explicitly, it is difficult to miss the parallels. Decimus bemoans that Romans are outsourcing their labor to enslaved people rather than doing the work themselves. It is often noted that immigrants do much of the dirty work in the United States because they will work for less and these are jobs many other Americans will not do. Marcus boasts about Rome’s tolerance for other religions, but that tolerance, the narrative implies, extends far beyond religion to all sorts of sexual and social depravity. In the book’s view, a society that tolerates sex outside male-female marriages and abortion is a society that has lost its moral compass and cannot survive; the Rome of A Voice in the Wind is intended as an allegorical warning for Christian readers.

Marcus and Hadassah’s relationship is marked by mutual desire but obstructed by the eternal debate between faith and reason. While Hadassah insists that the Christian god is the one true God, the assertion lacks empirical proof. Marcus, a secular character with no time for idle—or idol—worship, argues equally forcefully that Hadassah’s “unseen God” is a creation of desperation and imagination. It is a debate that can never be resolved. When the answer to the question, “Why would a merciful God allow innocent people to suffer?” is “He has a divine plan, and I am not to question it,” there can be no reasoned argument. More than once, Hadassah is mocked for her faith by her arrogant captors, asking where is your god now? These are valid questions, but ones which defy answers. Despite these challenges, however, Hadassah’s faith is unshaken because she knows the truth in her heart. She is a fundamentalist in the strictest sense, convinced her truth is the truth without supporting evidence. However, that is the age-old conflict between faith and reason. One relies on the truth of the mind while the other relies on the truth of the heart.