Explanatory essays - The Power of Knowle: Essays That Explain the Important Things in Life - Sykalo Eugen 2023

Comparative Analysis of Religious Themes and Motifs in Literature
Comparative literature and cross-cultural analysis

God Is in the Gut Punch: How Religion Warps, Haunts, and Frees the Characters We Read

I keep coming back to that scene in The Brothers Karamazov—you know, the one where Ivan and Alyosha sit down in that grimy tavern and Ivan’s basically like, “Here’s a child getting tortured in front of her mother. And now tell me your God still makes sense.” It’s like watching someone set a holy icon on fire with a cigarette and dare you to put it out with your bare hands. Which is to say: Dostoevsky didn’t believe in neat little moral fables. He believed in moral hemorrhaging. And the church? A theater. A morgue. A place where belief and disgust sit at the same communion table.

But okay. That's Russia. What happens when you leave that icy Orthodox shadow and head toward, say, the arid spiritual ambivalence of Camus' Algeria, or the brutal desert rituals of The Waste Land, where even the gods are dehydrated? What happens when you read religion not as a system of belief but as a texture, a smell in the air, a sickness or salvation that keeps reappearing in books like it’s got unfinished business? Because here’s the thing: religion in literature rarely behaves. It doesn’t stay in the temples or the synagogues or the meditation halls. It leaks. It infects.

Religion as Background Radiation

There’s this moment in Toni Morrison’s Beloved—okay, actually there are about seven hundred moments, but go with me—where Sethe justifies killing her baby daughter because “otherwise they’d have her.” They, as in the white men. And what’s devastating is how that horror wraps around the very structure of Christian sin and sacrifice. She kills out of love. The cross is maternal. The resurrection? No. Morrison refuses that. The baby haunts instead.

You want to talk about religion? Try talking about the kind that’s baked into American soil like arsenic. A crucified Christ who is also a runaway slave, a mother, a ghost child. Morrison doesn’t need to say Christianity is corrupt—she makes it bleed out of every decision Sethe makes. It’s spiritual trauma as ambient noise. The holy is never neutral.

Same goes for Things Fall Apart. Chinua Achebe didn’t write a cautionary tale about missionaries so much as a goddamn funeral for an entire cosmology. The white man’s church doesn’t just bring religion; it brings bureaucracy, dismemberment, neat little rows of pews where the spirits used to dance. Okonkwo doesn’t just hang himself—he becomes the final sacrifice to a world that no longer exists.

And the book knows it. It’s not subtle, but it’s also not preachy. Achebe weaponizes religious conversion, turning it into a scalpel. You want the civilizing mission? Here’s your civilization: a broken man dangling from a tree because the gods are dead and no one is allowed to mourn them.

Saints, Sinners, and the Terminally Conflicted

Religious motifs in literature have this special kind of rot. Not the kind that smells bad. The kind that seduces. The kind that makes people strap on hair shirts and write poetry. I’m thinking of Graham Greene’s whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory, who is so full of guilt and shame he becomes, ironically, the most Christlike figure in the novel. And he's pathetic. He drinks. He runs. He doesn’t even want to be good. And somehow that’s exactly what makes him so goddamn compelling.

This is what I mean when I say religion in books functions like a blacklight on a motel bedspread. It reveals stains you didn't know were there—and then dares you to sleep anyway.

And then there’s Flannery O’Connor, the Southern Gothic sadist who turned grace into a bullet to the head. Literally. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”? Try A Good Man Will Murder You If You’re Lucky Enough to Find Him Before You Die of Your Own Self-Righteousness. O’Connor’s theology is violent and sneering and wildly non-consensual. Her characters don’t get redeemed so much as ambushed by redemption, like spiritual mugging victims.

But what makes her stuff weirdly addictive is that she never lets belief off the hook either. She knows salvation isn’t pretty. It's ugly and sticky and it usually involves someone screaming in a ditch.

The Bad Vibes Gospel

Let’s fast-forward. Like, way past Job and Milton and even Joyce (who, let’s be honest, turns religion into aesthetic fireworks but still kind of sounds like he wants to sleep with the Holy Ghost). Today, we’re in the era of what I’d call spiritual malaise fiction. The novels where God is maybe there but has unfollowed you on every platform.

Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation might seem godless on the surface—it’s pills and nihilism and a protagonist who is basically human taxidermy—but if you squint, the whole thing reads like a monastic ritual gone extremely off-script. She’s trying to cleanse. She’s seeking a kind of death, a kind of resurrection. Her sleep isn’t just escape; it’s penance. That novel is dripping with postmodern mysticism—like a desert hermit wandered into a Duane Reade and decided, yep, this is where I’ll achieve enlightenment.

Or take Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. It’s the opposite texture: lyrical, soaked in Catholic imagery (without being about Catholicism), and constantly asking whether love—familial, queer, linguistic—can be a kind of prayer. Not the kind that gets answered. The kind that hurts to say aloud.

Which is maybe the most 21st-century religious vibe of all: not having a god who speaks, but still speaking to one.

When Religion Becomes Aesthetic (and That’s Not a Bad Thing)

There’s also this fascinating trend—especially in BookTok land—where religious language is being stripped for parts. Crosses become cool again. Angelic motifs flood poetry. Not because people are going to church more (they’re not), but because religion is, paradoxically, the best way to describe feelings we otherwise can’t express without sounding cringe.

Like when people say, “This book made me believe in God,” they don’t mean the Nicene Creed. They mean it shocked them out of apathy. It made them feel. And that’s what good religious literature—hell, good literature full stop—does. It breaks the fourth wall of your soul.

You’ll see it in cult-favorite novels like Lanny by Max Porter, where the forest is alive, the language is liturgical, and the boy at the center might as well be a saint—or a sacrifice. You’ll see it in The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki, where grief takes on its own voice, and belief is less about doctrine than about survival.

And you’ll definitely see it in the TikTok-fueled resurgence of The Secret History, where ancient rites are reenacted by rich kids who think they’re above it all—until someone’s bleeding in the snow and no one can remember the reason why. It's not about belief. It's about power. And loss. And spectacle.

No Altars, Just Aftershocks

So what does a comparative literature take on religious motifs actually do in 2025? It doesn’t ask, “Which god is right?”—because who even talks like that anymore? The better question is, “Why does religion still frame our fear, our love, our violence, even when we don’t believe?”

The answer is personal. It’s cultural. It’s inconvenient.

You read The Kite Runner, and you see how Islam functions as both salvation and punishment, how it binds and shames and ultimately—maybe—frees. You read Life of Pi, and you feel this aching desire to believe something, anything, even if the whole story is a lie. You read The Satanic Verses (yes, that Satanic Verses) and realize literature can get you exiled—or worse—just by poking at sacred symbols.

Religion in literature isn’t always reverent. Sometimes it’s petty. Sometimes it’s cruel. Sometimes it’s petty and cruel and transcendent, like a Taylor Swift bridge turned into an exorcism. What it is, consistently, is a kind of mirror. And like all good mirrors, it doesn’t flatter.

It shows you your gods. Or your ghosts. Or whatever’s left after the rituals stop meaning what they used to.

And that’s why we keep reading. Not for clarity. Not for closure. But for the awkward, dissonant, skin-crawling moments when a story accidentally steps on your soul and says: this? This is what holiness feels like.