The Holocaust looms large over the events of City of God, as do the horrors of war in general, and a driving conceit of Thomas Pemberton’s crisis of faith is his growing belief that his conception of God does not adequately account for injustice on such a scale. Everett’s friendship with Pem and eventually Sarah Blumenthal leads him to write several narratives that revolve around documenting the awful suffering that has occurred in the 20th century: a retelling of Sarah Blumenthal’s father’s experience in a Jewish ghetto, his own father’s experience as a signal corps member in World War I, his brother’s experience in World War II, and a fully-imagined narrative of a Vietnam veteran responding to Everett’s other narratives that notably points out how those other wars had a sense of justice as an end goal. Everett’s writing also imagines a retired reporter who is determined to end the lives of war criminals who have escaped justice. In each of these stories, horrible injustice is treated as an inevitable end result of humanity that will naturally turn toward conflict.

The novel offers up several possible answers to the question of how God fits into the modern world.