Melville presents the readers with an aversion to Christianity, presented frequently throughout the text by the relationship between Queequeg and Ishmael. Starting all the way back in Chapter 3 with the line, “Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian” (26), he spends much of the chapters proceeding it focusing on the kind of man that Queequeg is and the way that he treats Ishmael as well as others surrounding them. Despite having three chapters focused on the importance of religion and practices, they are still dotted with the presence of Queequeg and internal dialogue such as “but Faith, like the jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope,” (42).
Christianity is painted as opportunistic, almost parasitic in the way that it prays on the fears, doubts, and hopes of the sailors and their families in New Bedford. “…few are the moody fisherman, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the (Whaleman’s Chapel). I am sure that I did not” (39). Each person is compelled to attend the weekly sermon, one way or another, and not even Ishmael is able to avoid it. Yet later, when he is observing Queequeg, he makes another startling statement: “I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy” (57).
Perhaps there will be a time when we understand Ishmael’s continued heretical talk against the religion that he claims he was born into (58), but as of now Queequeg is painted as an innocent, sweet man who is alien to the culture he lives amongst yet willing still to respect and attempt to understand it – which is more than can be said of Christians in relation to religions outside of their own.