Why do so many men find God later in life?
by Elizabeth Oldfield, UnHerd:
Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw are following a well-trodden path.
On this day in 1927, 29th June, T.S.Eliot was baptised. The colossus of modernist literature, who wrote one of the greatest nihilistic poems of all time, shocked many with his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism just five years after it was published. It happened behind locked doors because he said, with characteristic acerbity, that he hated “spectacular conversions”. A few years later, W.H. Auden followed a similar path, returning to the Christianity of his childhood.
For both, it was partly an intellectual homecoming. Auden had slowly lost his liberal belief in humanity’s innate goodness thanks to the rise of the Nazis. He also felt that Christianity gave him a way to account for both human darkness and human potential. Believing that Jesus’ command to love our neighbours as ourselves was the defining ethical call, Auden valued the structure and rigour that the church offered. Eliot, says Richard Harries, also ‘wanted more than a vague mysticism…a self-sufficient moralism…something more solid than the individualism, relativism and emotionalism that he thought was rotting Western Civilisation.’ Both came to believe that the erosion of an objective moral realm was eroding the foundations of social and political order.
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