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This article examines the portent of religion in Purple America by Rick Moody, a novel that opens and closes on excerpts from the Gospels according to John and Mark. While it appears to follow the Modernist and Postmodernist tradition of “a dead God” and the foundation of a religion guided by guilty and sacrificial sons (Freud), it also seems to offer a fictional version of Levinas’ “atheist theology” and ethics of sanctity based on responsibility and the “epiphany of the face.”