The central fact about religious faith in the modern West is that it became optional. For most of European and American history, belief in God was the default condition — not always fervent, not always orthodox, but structurally assumed by the culture, the law, and the social order. Beginning with the Enlightenment and accelerating through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that assumption eroded: Darwin, Marx, Freud, the higher biblical criticism, two world wars, the Holocaust, and the general expansion of secular explanatory frameworks made unbelief not only possible but, for many educated people, the path of least resistance. The question that runs through the literature below is what happens to faith under these conditions — what it means to believe when belief is a choice rather than an inheritance, and what resources faith offers (or fails to offer) for confronting the political and moral crises of the modern period.
The question is not primarily about the existence of God, which is a philosophical problem, but about the practice of faith — prayer, worship, community, moral commitment, the orientation of a life toward something beyond the self — in a culture that no longer organizes itself around it. The thinkers and writers gathered here answered in very different ways: Kierkegaard with the leap, Bonhoeffer with martyrdom, Merton with contemplation, Day with direct service to the poor, King with nonviolent resistance, Gutiérrez with liberation theology, O'Connor with fiction so violent it forced the reader to confront grace. What they shared was the conviction that faith, to be serious, had to reckon with the world as it actually is — not retreat from it into nostalgia or abstraction.
Annotated bibliography
The crisis of belief
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (1843) and Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) — Kierkegaard is the starting point: faith is not a comfortable inheritance but a leap made in the face of absurdity, a "subjective truth" that cannot be reached by rational argument. His attack on the Danish state church — for making Christianity easy, respectable, and therefore meaningless — anticipated most of the twentieth-century critique.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880) — the Grand Inquisitor chapter is the most powerful literary statement of the case against God (Ivan's) and the most powerful literary response (Alyosha's kiss, modeled on Christ's). Dostoevsky believed, but he gave the strongest arguments to the unbelievers.
Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life (1912) — Unamuno's argument that the desire for immortality is the deepest human hunger, that reason cannot satisfy it, and that the resulting tension — faith against reason, neither able to defeat the other — is the condition in which a serious person lives. Not a comfortable book.
Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (1952) and Dynamics of Faith (1957) — Tillich redefined faith as "ultimate concern" and God as "the ground of being" — formulations that made theology possible for people who could not accept traditional theism but were not satisfied with secular materialism either. His influence on mid-century Protestant intellectuals was enormous.
Faith against fascism and totalitarianism
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (1937), Letters and Papers from Prison (1951) — Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor, was executed by the Nazis in April 1945 for his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler. The Cost of Discipleship distinguishes "cheap grace" (forgiveness without repentance, the Christianity of the comfortable) from "costly grace" (grace that demands everything). The prison letters, written in the last two years of his life, ask what Christianity means in "a world come of age" — a world that no longer needs God as a working hypothesis.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1947) and Waiting for God (1951) — Weil was a French Jewish intellectual drawn to Christianity but never baptized, a political activist who worked in factories and briefly fought in the Spanish Civil War, and a mystic who starved herself to death in solidarity with occupied France. Her writings on attention, affliction, and the absence of God are among the most demanding spiritual texts of the twentieth century.
Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism (1936) and Christianity and Democracy (1943) — Maritain, a Thomist philosopher, argued that democratic pluralism was not a concession to secularism but a genuine development of Christian political thought. His influence on Catholic social teaching — including Vatican II — was substantial.
Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (1946) — Frankl's account of Auschwitz and his argument that the primary human drive is the search for meaning. Not conventionally theological, but the question — whether life has meaning even under the worst conditions — is a religious question whether or not it is framed in religious language.
The Social Gospel and Christian realism
Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) and A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917) — Rauschenbusch argued that the Kingdom of God was not an otherworldly hope but a demand for social transformation in the present — that Christianity required the abolition of poverty, exploitation, and inequality. The founding texts of the Social Gospel movement.
Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) and The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941–1943) — Niebuhr's "Christian realism" was a critique of the Social Gospel's optimism: individuals can be moral, but groups (nations, classes, races) are driven by self-interest, and the demand for justice must reckon with the reality of power. Niebuhr influenced a generation of American political thinkers, from George Kennan to Martin Luther King to Barack Obama.
H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (1951) — the five-model typology of how Christianity relates to the surrounding culture (Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, Christ transforming culture). Still the starting framework for the question.
The contemplative tradition in modernity
Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), New Seeds of Contemplation (1962), Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966) — Merton entered a Trappist monastery in 1941 and spent the rest of his life there, but his writing engaged increasingly with the world outside — racial justice, nuclear weapons, Vietnam, interfaith dialogue, Zen Buddhism. The trajectory from monastic withdrawal to political engagement is itself the argument: contemplation, for Merton, was not escape from the world but a way of seeing it more clearly.
Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (1949) — Thurman's short, essential book on what the religion of Jesus has to say to people "whose backs are against the wall" — the poor, the oppressed, the disinherited. A direct influence on King. Thurman argued that Jesus was himself a member of a despised minority under Roman occupation, and that his teaching must be read from that position.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath (1951), The Prophets (1962), God in Search of Man (1955) — Heschel, a rabbi and scholar of Jewish mysticism, was also a civil rights activist who marched with King at Selma. The Prophets reads the Hebrew prophets as radical social critics whose anger at injustice is an expression of God's pathos — God's suffering at human suffering.
Liberation theology
Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation (1971) — the founding text of liberation theology: the argument that theology must begin not with abstract doctrines but with the experience of the poor, and that the Gospel demands a "preferential option for the poor." Gutiérrez wrote from Peru; the movement spread across Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
James Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (1969) and The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011) — Cone argued that a theology that does not speak to the experience of Black oppression is not Christian theology. The Cross and the Lynching Tree, written late in his career, draws the connection between the crucifixion and the American practice of lynching — two forms of public execution of the despised.
Óscar Romero, homilies and pastoral letters (collected in various editions) — Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador, was assassinated in 1980 while celebrating Mass. His transformation from cautious ecclesiastical moderate to outspoken defender of the poor is documented in James Brockman, Romero: A Life (1989).
Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (1952) — Day's autobiography; her conversion to Catholicism, the founding of the Catholic Worker movement, the Houses of Hospitality, the practice of voluntary poverty and direct service. Day is not usually classified as a liberation theologian, but her insistence that Christianity requires solidarity with the poor places her in the same tradition.
Faith and nonviolence
Mohandas Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927–1929) — Gandhi's account of developing satyagraha (truth-force, or soul-force) as a method of political resistance rooted in the Hindu, Jain, and Christian traditions. His influence on King, Thurman, Day, and the global nonviolence movement is well documented.
Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom (1958), Why We Can't Wait (1964), Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967) — King's nonviolence was grounded in the Black church tradition, in Gandhi, in Thurman, and in the Niebuhrs. The synthesis — prophetic Christianity, Gandhian method, American democratic idealism — produced the most consequential religious-political movement of the twentieth century in America.
Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (1949) — listed above under the contemplative tradition, but equally important here: Thurman provided King with the theological framework for nonviolent resistance. King carried the book with him during the Montgomery bus boycott.
Faith and the novel
Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood (1952), A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), The Violent Bear It Away (1960) — O'Connor, a Catholic in the Protestant South, wrote stories and novels about grace breaking into ordinary life through violence, grotesquerie, and shock. Her fiction is the opposite of pious; it insists that the encounter with God is terrifying, not comforting. Her essays and letters (Mystery and Manners, 1969; The Habit of Being, 1979) are the best commentary on her own work.
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1961), The Message in the Bottle (1975) — Percy, a Catholic convert and a physician, wrote novels about the spiritual malaise of the modern American South — the feeling that something is missing in a life that has everything. The Moviegoer is his best novel; The Message in the Bottle collects his philosophical essays on language, semiotics, and the human condition.
Shūsaku Endō, Silence (1966) — the novel about Portuguese Jesuit missionaries in seventeenth-century Japan, forced to watch their converts tortured and killed, and finally to apostatize. The question the novel asks — whether God is silent in the face of suffering, and what faithfulness means when it causes the suffering of others — is unanswerable, which is why the novel works.
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004), Home (2008), Lila (2014) — Robinson's Gilead trilogy, set in a small Iowa town, is narrated by an aging Congregationalist minister and is the most sustained fictional exploration of Protestant faith in contemporary American literature. Her essays (The Death of Adam, 1998; When I Was a Child I Read Books, 2012) defend the intellectual seriousness of American Calvinism.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880) — listed above, but it belongs here too: the novel is the tradition's central text, the one in which faith and doubt are given their fullest literary expression.