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have been indoctrinated in it during their service in the Armed Forces.
It may well be that Common-law morality is the answer to the
question:
can a culture maintain itself without a positive religion?
The English, without any noticeable loss of culture, are approaching
the anthropological condition of the Masai herdsmen who, I am
informed, have no theological preoccupations whatever but, after a
severe coming-of-age ritual, find sufficient emotional outlet in cat–
tle-lifting and lion-hunting. A nation can exist well enough without
a positive religion so long as it preserves its ritual; and the English
have taken great care to discard as little as possible of their tradi–
tional public pageantry-especially that of the Crown. Not only is
the King the titular head of the religiously moribund Anglican
Church, but he presides at the Cup Final and the Final Test Match,
and periodically confers knighthood on prominent sportsmen when
they retire.
Totalitarianism is not the antonym of Christianity, as the ques–
tionnaire suggests-the Spain of Philip II was both totalitarian and
Catholic; and so is General Franco's Spain (which is where I live),
though commendably courteous to free-thinking foreigners. It so
happens, however, that the English-speaking peoples have long en–
joyed a two-party government in religion: the mystical Catholics and
the moralistic Puritans. This well-balanced opposition keeps either
party from dominating the other and so permits liberty to every
sort of individual opinion. Whether these two parties can unite in a
gentleman's agreement to keep the totalitarian atheist out of power,
while regretfully continuing to regard each other as damned, is the
political problem of the Holy Year of 1950.
Such is the general background against which we must assess
the so-called religious revival among English-speaking intellectuals.
The recent much publicized conversion of a few well-known writers
to Catholicism does not suggest to me any change in religious con–
viction; I can see no evidence that they have decided to sell all that
they have and follow Jesus, which is essential Christianity. Neither do
they evince any particular anxiety to save souls; only a certain satis–
faction in being members of an ancient and quaintly sinister interna–
tional organization. I cannot speak with first-hand knowledge of
American converts, but reading
The Heart of the Matter
by Graham
Greene and
Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh, both of whom
