The Catholic literary canon saved my faith—and, I believe, my sanity.
I mean both these statements quite literally. In the crucible of past culture wars that rocked both my college years and my turbulent first decade of parenthood, the broader, calmer, more capacious view of life offered by Catholic literary authors kept me grounded and (mostly) out of various mimetic crises—not by spiritually bypassing those crises, but by offering a more comprehensive vision of the here and now than what could be offered by any of the increasingly shrill and tribalistic voices flooding online spaces.
As we all know now, most online voices are out purely for their own agendas and remain quite ready to dismiss, dissect and discard any person who will not advance those agendas. I found precious few that resonated with the overtones of the one who said that his own would know his voice and he would know them.
Among the books of the past and present, I found many such resonances. This is why, for me, what we talk about when we talk about a Catholic literary revival is nothing less than a lifeline in this world that can help us keep ties to the next. This is why I am passionate about generating, guiding and guarding the Catholic literary work of the future.
Lest we confuse ourselves by talking in vague terms about “the literary revival” and “the last literary revival,” losing our hold on history, here is my quick history of Catholic literary revivals in modern times. There have been at least three major waves, and they have tended to travel westward.
The first, which took hold in France, flourished from the early decades of the 20th century through the Second World War and succeeded in giving us major influences such as Mauriac, the Maritains, Bernanos, Bloy, Peguy and Claudel. The second flourished in England in the interwar period—the 1930s and ’40s—and featured writers as different as Caryll Houselander (who published in modest numbers with the confessionally Catholic house Sheed & Ward), Evelyn Waugh (who took the mainstream by storm) and Graham Greene (notorious good-bad boy and self-hating Catholic who loved to push the envelope with readers, whether they were believers or not). The Inklings are no doubt also part of this U.K.-based second wave but are best understood on their own terms, rather than on standard terms of literary convention.
The third wave, which began to rise in the United States around the end of World War II, is the “revival” most American readers have in mind when referring to Catholic literary work. It encompasses the American writers we in the United States tend to have heard the most about—Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy—as well as minor but important figures who are often forgotten, like Caroline Gordon, Betty Wahl, Edwin O’Connor and J. F. Powers. Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, both lapsed Catholics, have an underexplored relationship to this third revival, whose relationship to the mainstream of 20th-century American literature is in turn less well understood than it might be.
A Fourth Turning?
But a fourth revival, now underway, is a global one, and it will encompass not only English-speaking and Francophone authors but an overwhelming preponderance of those whose first language is either Spanish or a non-Romance tongue. Central and South American writers will take the stage. Writers from Nigeria and other countries in Africa where there is a significant Catholic presence will also feature prominently. The unique experiences of Christian believers in Asia and the Middle East will be closely attended to and better understood. Canadian and Mexican, Scandinavian and Japanese, Filipino and Australian works will play significant roles.
A good deal of mingling of influences will occur. German Catholic writers of the 20th century—their works nearly lost because they were critical of and suppressed by the Nazi regime—will be rediscovered. European and American Catholic texts will continue to serve as cornerstones for new literary constructions, but the finished effect is likely to be, as Evelyn Waugh says of the Brideshead chapel, “something quite remote from anything the builders intended.”
These Catholic writers and readers of the global revival are fortunate in that, while we have our own productive tensions to navigate, we no longer have to face the same kind of opposition that affected the mid-century writers of the earlier American revival. For one thing, most Catholic readers of that time tended to be provincial (by which I mean switched-off, gated-in, downward-eyed and yet self-dismissive) rather than parochial (by which I mean stable, sturdy and local, sensitive to the concerns of the world beyond their walls but also confident in the validity of their own perceptions). They tended not to understand the writers their own tradition produced, whereas today, Catholics number among the most vocally eager to embrace our own in the literary sphere.
At the same time, Catholics are now gaining a certain acceptance and respect in publishing spaces, where in the past these same writers, who may have felt misunderstood in their parishes, also often faced a certain kind of friendly fire from within their profession.
What this friendly fire amounted to was the accusation that Catholics who really believe what Catholics must believe are by that token ideologues, unable to see what is true because they are in receipt of certain verbal formulas to which they consent. Flannery O’Connor had a rejoinder for that: Doctrine served her as a pair of spectacles that clarified vision rather than distorting it.
O’Connor’s well-known stance is rooted in François Mauriac’s book-length essay “God and Mammon,” whose upshot O’Connor boils down to “purify the source” but which deserves to be read in its entirety. In it, Mauriac wrestles a bad angel who accuses him of working in bad faith and wearing blinders (and which itself happens to be wearing the earthly form of André Gide). In looking at Mauriac’s resulting self-portrait, which serves as a kind of icon, practicing Catholic writers can see some of our own problems neutralized.
Lexical Shifts
We should not pretend this fourth revival will meet with no problems. If we want to understand the different, more freewheeling, but in some ways equally vexed position of the writer of faith today, we must first dwell on the state of general culture, in which language and literacy themselves are in upheaval. We can no longer assume that we share vocabularies and associations on which both large and subtle effects in literary art depend. Any two people may hear the same word but carry a wholly different set of associations for it.
We are in a moment of rapid and unpredictable lexical shifts: changes in the received meaning of words. Some feel that lexical shifts implicitly prove that no language has meaning other than its ability to make someone do something, or that all meanings are assigned and arbitrary expressions of power. This view is itself, however, often a mask for other motives. If at times it rightly warns about the agendas of the powerful, it at least equally often serves as a means of rendering impossible any kind of conversation that could establish shared parameters of perception or a shared search for truth. Language in these cases cannot rise to the level of art, as it has been instrumentalized to serve not the needs and perceptions of the human person but instead the purposes of ideology.
Before we establish that all true art is by nature anti-ideological (which does not necessarily mean that it avoids articulating or wrestling with ideas), it is worth noticing that the word ideology itself is undergoing a lexical shift and has been for some time. Mark Shiffman, a writer and scholar in San Francisco, traces the development in a recent essay, “What Is Ideology?”
Shiffman’s arguments are eloquent, precise and yet wide-ranging, but it may help the present conversation about literature to distill and expand on some of his conclusions here. An ideology, he says, in the modern sense is not simply, as the word is sometimes lazily used, a set of coherent ideas. Rather, it is a totalizing oversimplification of complex reality, whose proponents seek to take control by means of sweeping and overstated claims about the ideology’s ability to solve perennial problems: or, in Shiffman’s words, “an intellectual scheme that is full of enthusiasm and confidence about its imagined benefits, but which suffers from a lack of any clear vision of relevant practical realities.”
Ideology in this sense seeks not to explain reality, but to melt down and re-forge reality; not to appeal to conscience, but to replace conscience. Ideology does not inspire or create or sustain art; ideology is opposed to real art. Ideology poses the greatest single challenge the fourth wave of Catholic literary revival is facing, because it is the greatest single challenge all literary artists are presently facing.
Ideologies call for sweeping, drastic, urgent revisions of human language and behavior. They may start as attempts to redetermine truth by majority vote, but if once they grab hold of the tools of power, they prove to have little concern for the subtlety, complex honesty and necessary generosity of disposition needed to preserve a successful democracy (or any other form of polis, for that matter). Above all, ideologies are inherently totalitarian. They promise easy solutions to all problems if we will just reinvent ourselves according to their revisionary demands.
But ideologues lie. And artists cannot countenance lies. The lie of ideology, like all lies, costs too much and promises what it cannot deliver.
By contrast, nonideological thinking seeks to trace the contours of things as they are and to account for experience in all its vast complexity. Nonideological practices of community formation and guidance create steady, sustainable, transformative change as they encourage prudence, practice subsidiarity and cherish truth. Only where truth is valued and freedom is real can art flourish; as St. John Paul II said, “Truth and freedom either go together hand in hand or together they perish in misery.”
An authentically Catholic approach to truth and freedom strengthens our vision and brings daylight into murky situations, where ideology offers smoke and mirrors—often in the form of occlusive, overheated verbiage.
The centuries-long, hard-won wholeness of vision offered by Catholic Christianity, made present in its art and its successful examples of common life, is anything but ideological. I would make the bold claim that Catholicity is instead the most faithful available description of reality. The reinvention, the transformation Christ offers our souls through his church is not human-made or bootstrapped, but rather God-given, graced.
Where our faith’s boundaries block movement in the direction of the times we live in, this is because they pull us back in reality’s direction in an unreal age. How could this not be true when God is the ground of all reality, the most real of all the realities we ever encounter, the ultimate source of every other experience we have that has anything at all good in it?
Pope Benedict XVI said that if what the church proposes is true, the evidence will be in her art and in her saints. How much are we doing to cultivate one or the other—or both at the same time?
Taking Sides
The “culture war” is over, and everyone has lost. We have lost the ability to know, understand and hear each other. We have lost a context where seeking common ground was considered common sense. What we have in its place now are twinned and monstrously doubled ideologies locked in agonistic struggle. If not stopped, they will rage on until, like mythic dualist gods, they have destroyed each other and everything else—including us. And all we have to stop them with are the nonideological modes of thought, conduct and relationship that alone can restore a culture of life and a civilization of love.
We are going to have a hard time stopping them, and a hard time repairing the destruction they have already wrought, because both of the monstrous doubles have assiduously sought to swallow up good, true and beautiful influences that they now claim as their own sole property. Because all of the labels given to these monstrous doubles are now not only shopworn but vacuous, reducing our collective intelligence each time they are used, I am going to call these evil twins neo-Puritanism and neo-Nietzscheanism—but let’s hold those terms lightly lest they distract from the central point.
Even the act of positing alternate terms, and the immediate shrinking reaction some readers will experience to those terms—“Wait, does that mean my side?!”—reveals much about the decayed state of language and conversation. Because for an ideologue, any suggestion that the ideology may not be perfect and can be described in ways it didn’t envision is considered as evidence of insufficient conformity to its goals of upheaval and disruption. For the ideologue, anyone not sufficiently conformed must undergo struggle and renounce their recalcitrant (read: human) desires before they can be accepted into the Party and frog-marched into a “glorious” (read: dystopian) future.
In order to resist, rebuild and restore, we do not need to disengage from efforts to stay informed, to stay involved, to do what good we can in the secular realm. Very much the opposite: We cannot afford to renounce these efforts. And while it is true that no human city will be able to make possible the perfect fulfillment of every human potential, we must not make some cultural goods the enemies of others, or waste our vanishingly brief time arguing about whether the cultural goods I pursue are better or more worthy of attention than the ones you pursue.
Casting Out Into the Deep
If the perceptual ground on which I had built my belief in God and the church Christ founded were sourced from the reduced and flattened bitstream of internet commentary about God and the church, I would not still be a believer. My faith has its roots in encounters with God in Scripture, tradition and the Mass, but it has also been profoundly nourished by reading the work of authors who had also experienced direct encounters with grace and whose scale of humane values had been built in reference to those experiences.
The books I spend my time talking about were to me the fishing net that pulled me out of a sea of felt meaninglessness and into the realm of what Henry James calls “felt life.” Fiction writers like Sigrid Undset, François Mauriac, Shusaku Endo and (yes) Flannery O’Connor, and in our own time Margaret Ogola, Jon Fosse, Alice McDermott, Edward P. Jones, Ron Hansen and Christopher Beha, among others, have successfully resisted the reductive pressures of their own cultural moments in order to cast out into the deep. What they have caught is me, and thousands of readers and would-be writers who are, like me, on fire to do what they did: to dispel the mist of lost illusions, to set out in search of lost souls, to get real.
The writers and curators who make up the fourth wave already know their business. To do it, they need only to ask God continually for new courage and fresh hope. To everyone who may be now concerned about the goods and the future of human culture, I issue a challenge: Let us do what we can to build a culture worth having—not only to preserve the goods (and leave behind the evils) found in its past, but also to renew and hand on whatever we have found good and worthy of keeping. In this spirit, may we swear off despair and take up our part of the hard but necessary work of restoration.
This article appears in October 2025.
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