Would we recognize a modern-day messiah?

Reading American Saint is like reading one of the Gospels as it’s being developed. It tells the story of Gabriel Romero, a young man from Albuquerque, New Mexico, who starts his own church. He gains widespread notoriety, first for his miracles and then for political activism. The book’s epigraph is a dictionary entry for hagiography: “1. :the biography of a saint / 2. :a pejorative term, used to describe a biography that stretches the truth to idealize its subject.” It’s unclear which definition more closely fits the account that follows.

Gabriel’s story unfolds through first-person testimony by people who know him. Among the witnesses are his mother, a former lover, a follower, a friend, and a rival. Is Gabriel a saint or a sham? Is he a true believer or a heretic? A miracle worker or a con artist? These questions are hard to answer, which makes the book a compelling read that illuminates the complexity of faith.

There is no reliable narrator, just these witnesses, whose accounts build a tangled web of overlapping contradictions and confirmations. Just as contemporary readers of the Gospels cannot pull out of them an unfiltered portrayal of Jesus, there is no single picture of the protagonist in American Saint. What each witness tells us about Gabriel reveals as much about their own biases, personal agendas, and personalities as it does about him.