My thoughts on Mark Brittain's "religion"

Are Mark Brittain’s religious antics a little overdone? Just maybe? He goes around giving the whole world a guilt trip, telling them that what they’re doing is not very Christian-like. The idea of having higher moral principles is all well and good, but does he need to go around convincing others that they are not living to his level of ethical standards? In every topic Ms. Lemry’s class discusses in Contemporary American Literature, he feels the need to relate religion to everything, to the point that Lemry has to call him out and tell him to lay off the religious angle, to which he responds by saying that the religious angle is all that should matter to him or anyone. He has his own followers to whom he has apparently “thrown the wool over their eyes” who think that Mark Brittain is infallible in everything he says and does and that Saint Mark is ALWAYS right. I would guess that the logic of his followers is that “Mark Brittain is so close to God, he MUST know exactly what God wants us to do, right?” He even has Vice Principal Mautz backing him, because Mautz believes that Mark has no character flaws and is the model young man for every other student to follow in his example (I think Mautz hopes that the juvenile delinquents of the school follow in his example so they straighten out and he will not have to deal with them, being that he is in charge of discipline in the school…) We come to find out later in the novel that the side show known as Mark Brittain is completely fake when his mistakes and errors that he thought he had “pushed under the rug” come back to haunt him. Mark Brittain takes criticism and humiliation way to personally and has little sense of humor, both of which really do him no good when he experiences his idea of religious persecution at school, on the street, or in the swimming pool. It would seem that Eric Calhoune and Steve Ellerby plot the demise and ultimate downfall of good ol’ Saint Mark, but I think they just do it to knock Mr. Goody-two-shoes back to reality so he can figure that he is not a perfect human being, nor anything close to it. Mark Brittain is very closed and intolerant of religions and ideas other than his own. Even well-meant and well thought out intentions and interpretations that don’t represent his religious beliefs are not acceptable to him, because he only listens when the views of others match his own. For the majority of the novel his heart seems to be hardened to the outside world, but we see it gradually soften toward the end of the story. The one (and considerably large) hole in the fortress known as Mark Brittain is that he feels that he is exempt from the necessity of doing the right thing in every instance. In other words, his philosophy is the idea that because he is so “righteous,” there is no obligation for him to have good behavior because he is already better than everyone else. He feels that he can bend the rules now and then because he follows them so closely every other time. That rather large character flaw will come back to haunt him as his past errors and sins revisit him as the novel progresses. We as the readers get to see into the life of Mark Brittain to see that a good portion of his so-called religious antics are really a charade and that his goody-two-shoes mentality is just a cover up for his problems at home and his pressures to perform that he feels his parents heap on top of him. At the beginning of the novel I had a large amount of contempt for Mark Brittain and found him to be very annoying in his religious persuasions. As the story went on I found some reasons to sympathize with him and I found that I really enjoyed his character toward the very end of the novel. His character was brilliantly done, because I think the emotions that I had for Mark Brittain were exactly the ones Chris Crutcher wanted me to feel. I applaud Crutcher for creating such a dislikable character and turning him into a very likeable one in such a short amount of time.