Gilead has been recognized as a text that works to correct modern misconceptions regarding John Calvin, Calvinism, and the Puritans. Robinson said in a lecture entitled "The Freedom of a Christian," that she thinks "that one of the things that has happened in American Cultural History is that John Calvin has been very much misrepresented. As a consequence of that, the parts of American Culture that he influenced are very much misrepresented".[2] She expounds upon this idea in her book of essays, The Death of Adam. She writes that the Puritans should "by no means be characterized by fear or hatred of the body, anxiety about sex or denigration of women, yet for some reason, Puritanism is uniquely regarded as synonymous with the preoccupations."[8] Roger Kimball, in his review of The Death of Adam in The New York Times wrote, "We all know that the Puritans were dour, sex-hating, joy-abominating folk – except that, as Robinson shows, this widely embraced caricature is a calumny".[9] The common modern characterization of the Calvinists as haters of the physical world and joyless exclusivists is the stereotype that Robinson works to deconstruct in Gilead through a representation of what she considers to be a more accurate understanding of Calvinist doctrine that she derives mainly from the original texts, specifically Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion.
The novel has also been the focus of debates on Christian multiculturalism in literature. University of Victoria professor of American Literature Christopher Douglas claims that Gilead builds a "contemporary Christian multicultural identity suitably cleansed of the complexity of [...] 'Christian slavery'."[10] He contextualizes the work within the political resurgence of fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity in the last four decades.
Former President of the United States Barack Obama lists the novel as one of his favorites. On September 14, 2015, in Des Moines, Iowa, in a reversal of the usual journalistic convention, President Obama interviewed Marilynne Robinson for The New York Review of Books, and told her,
I first picked up Gilead, one of your most wonderful books, here in Iowa. Because I was campaigning at the time, and there's a lot of downtime when you're driving between towns and when you get home late from campaigning. … And I've told you this—one of my favorite characters in fiction is a pastor in Gilead, Iowa, named John Ames, who is gracious and courtly and a little bit confused about how to reconcile his faith with all the various travails that his family goes through. And I was just—I just fell in love with the character, fell in love with the book …[11]
