Like Cormac McCarthy’s other work, Child of God reimagines biblical themes and narratives in the modern world. Specifically, Child of God explores what it means if evil and violence are endogenous to humanity, the sentiment expressed by 2 Esdras 4:30 “For a grain of evil seed was sown in Adam’s heart from the beginning, and how much ungodliness it has produced until now, and will produce until the time of threshing comes!” (NSRV). In Child of God, this divine reckoning (“time of threshing”) never comes—and indeed symbols of the recurrence of violence suggest that it never will. The Appalachia of Child of God (and of McCarthy’s other two Appalachian novels, The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark) is a world without divine grace, without salvation. This foreclosure of the possibility of salvation raises the issue of fate: How, if humanity is indeed sown with an evil seed, can it rise above its inherent violence? Lester’s fate—and the return of similar violence augured by his entrails and doppelgänger—indicates that humanity is fated to be eternally violent.

Child of God suggests that if Sevier County is not godless, it’s at least godforsaken. With its allusion to the biblical flood, the flood of Sevierville and its environs connotes divine anger.