The modern mind takes such small flights. --E. M. Forster in his Commonplace Book The desire to think in binary terms seems to be a part of human nature with respect to belief: we see things--or want to see things--in black and white, yes or no, either/or terms. We want people to believe or not, to be religious or secular, to appeal to revelation or reason. This, in turn, drives us toward monolithic models of subject and linear narratives of conversion or religious loss: we think of conversion, following Augustine, as a turning of whole self to a state of belief. Historically modernity equated with wholesale religious loss, and secularity with unbelief and facile theory of a search for surrogates. As a side-effect, itself becomes defined in terms of pre-modern institutionalized Christianity, and there a great reluctance to approach new modes of potential modern religious engagement. In approaches to literary modernism, symptoms of this problematic approach manifest most clearly in kinds of questions we ask about authors and works with respect to religion religion (if we ask them at all): when did so-and-so lose their faith? does such-and-such work evidence belief? if so, in what? These questions reduce things back into simple binaries, monolithic models, and linear narratives--the very structures that we work so hard to dismiss in our attention to broader issues in modernity in favor of models of fragmentation and higher complexity But new debates about how we conceive of secularization--coming largely out of sociology religious studies, and philosophy--suggest new modes of thinking about religious engagement in modernity that can perhaps lead us in a better direction. These models, in turn, suggest a new sort of question as a starting point for talking about belief not is there belief?, but what does it mean to say 'I believe' (or 'disbelieve') in modernity? By tracking critical reception of belief in a work that debatably modernist and in an author who debatably religious, my hope to show by example how this new thread of questioning might offer a way out of our usual mode of thinking about religion in modernity, and how it can produce fresh readings of an old subject. This thread may seem to lead into, not out of, a maze--away from clarity nicely supplied by usual narrative of religious loss in modernity--but critics will, I hope, agree that this new and more complex model better fit for its subject. E. M. Forster and faith E. M. Forster lost his faith, according to his own belated 1959 account, quickly and quietly over course of his early years at King's College, Cambridge (1897-1900). The process occurred through [his] friendship with Hugh Meredith, who already disbelieved, and partly because of general spirit of questioning that associated with name of G. E. Moore. He abandoned Church dogma--first Trinity, then Incarnation because it hinged on doctrine of Original Sin, which he had never accepted. He also rejected personality of Christ. Although Christ offered that appealed to him--his personal warmth, his suffering in Passion--Forster saw another, uglier side of Christ's message that he couldn't reconcile with his own developing humanist values: away from worldliness and towards preaching and threats, so emphasis on followers, on an elite, so little intellectual power (as opposed to insight), such an absence of humor that my blood's chilled. I would on whole rather not meet speaker, either at an Eliot cocktail party or for a quick Quaker talk, and fact that my rejection not vehement does not save it from being tenacious. And so, as he puts it, the debunking of Christianity was effected with comparatively little fuss. By end of his third year at King's he disbelieved as much as he would at age eighty (Prince's Tale 313-39). …