Reports continue to emerge of a quiet resurgence of Christian faith, and of an even quieter renewal of the Catholic imagination in literature.
Dioceses in parts of Australia, as well as of Europe and the United States, are noting an unexpected rise in conversions – in contrast to the familiar reports of decline over many years: shrinking church attendances and priestly ordination rates, fewer Catholic marriages and funerals, vanishing religious orders…
A similar spiritual and literary rebirth last occurred a century ago. While its roots lay in the 19th century – notably in the writings of St John Henry Newman and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Francis Thompson – its most popular flowering took place in the first half of the 20th century. It was the time of G.K. Chesterton and an array of other writers, such as the historian Christopher Dawson, the priest-apologist Ronald Knox, and novelists such as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.
Reeling from the slaughter fields of World War I, Western society was driven by an anguished search for answers far beyond the palliatives of political and economic solutions. The horrors of the trenches exposed a spiritual desolation in the culture, which sapped its capacity to provide any uplifting sense of meaning and purpose.
The time proved ripe for a rediscovery of the vitalising roots of Western culture in Christianity. Between 1910 and 1960, for example, more than half a million people in Britain experienced conversion to the Catholic faith and those who led the Catholic intellectual and literary revival were themselves mainly converts.
A century later, it is again young adults who are challenging the patterns of decline. As Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP pointed out last year at a Sydney Catholic Business Network lunch: “Generation Z, the ‘Zoomers’ or ‘post-millennials,’ is the demographic group bucking this trend, suggesting a renewed interest in Christianity among young people. University campuses, long incubators of secularization, are now offering new Bible studies, ceremonies, and courses in apologetics.”
The phenomenon of conversions among university students is especially surprising, as the typical campus would not be presumed friendly to Christian belief.
A marked proportion of the converts is young men. The American writer Noelle Mering believes the main cause is the sexual revolution, for it has brought about “the sustained demonisation and disorientation of men.” She sees “an increasingly fatherless culture [that] made vicious behaviour easy, and recast virtue as repressive, effectively weakening men, hardening women, and stoking the antagonism of the sexes.”
It is hardly surprising that young adults, “fleeing the nihilism of hookup culture, yearning for beauty and transcendence, and responding to the disintegration of social and moral structures,” should be rediscovering Christianity.
While it would be tempting to exaggerate the extent of this Christian revival – and it would be premature to identify it as a movement – it is hard to ignore the comment of the English Catholic philosopher and writer, Sebastian Morello: “There’s something bubbling under the surface.”
The Catholic critic Joseph Pearce has noticed a further sign of these “underground stirrings” – namely, a Catholic revival taking place in the visual arts, music and literature.
In The Imaginative Conservative last year, he highlighted a range of literary works by new Catholic authors: on the one hand, murder mysteries, such as those of Fiorella de Maria (particularly her Father Gabriel Mysteries), Barbara Golder, and Lorraine Murray, and on the other, works of realist fiction, such as the novels of Glenn Arbery, as well as of Fiorella de Maria who is skilled in both genres.
Accompanying this revival is a continuing undercurrent of influence from established Christian authors, such as Marilynne Robinson, who recently added an impressive study of the Book of Genesis to her acclaimed novels such as Gilead (2004), and the Catholic poet and literary essayist, Dana Gioia, who has long witnessed to the value of faith-inspired literature.
But new authors are also making their mark – for example, the novelists, Joshua Hren, Trevor Cribben Merrill, and Katy Carl. They are responding creatively to a culture that is fundamentally at a loss as to what it believes. It searches anxiously for ways of satisfying its spiritual and existential longings, lurching from one substitute to another – a political cause here, a technological advance there – but failing to find any lasting truth to embrace.
Joshua Hren is a leading figure in the small but promising renaissance of Catholic literature. Interviewed by Lucas Smith for the Catholic Weekly in November 2022, he has continued to expand the publishing house he founded for emerging Catholic authors, Wiseblood Books. (Its name comes from Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel, Wise Blood, and thereby honours the Catholic literary tradition in America reflected in earlier writers such as O’Connor, J.F. Powers and Walker Percy.)
G.K. Chesterton was a striking embodiment of how the two approaches of philosophical exposition and literary depiction can be creatively blended.
In the same year as Orthodoxy, 1908, his classic unfolding of Christian belief, he published the novel, The Man Who Was Thursday, which made real the spiritual impact of evil and suffering and hope. It showed how the imagination in literature can enrich the mind in philosophy, deepening and illuminating the revelation of Christian belief.
Literature has this enriching effect by depicting, in story and character, the Christian experience. It can capture the lonely and desperate life a person faces when deprived of this experience. As the French Catholic novelist, Francois Mauriac, once noted: “To show the vast abyss that the absence of God has created in our modern world, one has only to picture the man of today in all his misery.”
As so often, Chesterton revealed a prophetic sense of the cultural environment confronting Christian authors. A century ago, he saw the rise of a “largely illogical faith in liberty,” which he thought induced people to run risks “for the sake of spontaneity and diversity.” These can now be seen as the psychological roots of what would become our culture’s preference for emotional choices, inverted perspectives, and an endless refuge in distractions.
Chesterton noted “the spectacle of small or originally small things swollen to enormous size and power,” which would have the effect of upending moral values. As he argued: “If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals”.
We have lived to see our culture embracing this contradiction – abolishing restrictions on abortion and euthanasia, while imposing bans on smoking.
If the quiet recovery of Christian faith gains wider traction, we might see another reversal of values, a movement of spiritual conversion that would pave the way for a cultural recovery. Solid convictions might come to challenge passing feelings, and major morals of substance overturn the minor morals of fashion.
Karl Schmude is a co-founder of Campion College and previously University Librarian at the University of New England in Armidale. He is a longtime contributor to the Catholic Weekly.
