A Grain of Faith

Abstract

During and after the Second World War, religion informed British literature and culture. Leading writers contributed to discussions about faith and spiritual life, inside and outside organized religion. Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, and Barbara Pym incorporated miracles, evil, and church-going into their novels, while Louis MacNeice, T. S. Eliot, and C. S. Lewis gave radio broadcasts about the role of Christianity in contemporary society. Certainly the war revived interest in aspects of Christian life: salvation and redemption were on many people’s minds. The Ministry of Information used images of bombed churches to stoke patriotic feeling, and King George VI led a series of Days of National Prayer that coincided with crucial events in the Allied cause. After the war and throughout the 1950s, approximately 1.4 million people converted to Roman Catholicism as a way of expressing their spiritual ambitions and solidarity with humanity on a world-wide scale. Eminent intellectuals, such as Paul Tillich, Ronal Niebuhr, Jacques Maritain, and Simone Weil, gave concerted thought to religion and statehood, often at the same time. The mid-century turn to religion offered ways to articulate statehood, not from the usual perspective of nationhood and politics, but from the perspective of moral action and improvement of the lot of humankind. Religion provided one way for writers to answer the question, ‘what is man?’ It also afforded ways to think about social obligation. Instead of being a retreat into seclusion and solitude, the mid-century turn to religion is a call to responsibility.