This paper draws on Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse to suggest alter­native methods of viewing religion and secularism in Christian culture today. I address issues of binary and dogmatism in Christian culture by connecting current issues with those that Woolf’s Modernist style pushed against. A review of scholar­ship reveals Woolf’s connection to religion, feminism, and rhetorical modes that contrasted with those of the earlier Vic­torian period. I contribute an analysis of Woolf’s work with these themes in mind, suggesting productive ways forward from the supposed conflict between Christianity and secularism today.

Introduction

Songwriter John Collins explains in his “Hymn for the 81%”¹ why he left the Christian Church: “you weaponized religion / and you wonder why I’m leaving / to find Jesus on the wrong side of your walls” (Collins). He touches on varied and subtle truths in this line—he is leaving, separating himself from the Christianity he knows in order to seek new ways and places to practice faith. Yet, he is still in search of Jesus.

This quote acknowledges a double truth. For people like Collins, religion has become a weapon, and its dogmatism has had excruciating consequences for its victims. At the same time, the sustained presence of spiritual connection means that mass conversion to atheism is not the threat Evangelicals may believe it to be. Collins is one of a growing num­ber of people whose decision to leave the Church is motivated not by apathy but by active disagreement with Church practices. They leave because they have witnessed the consequences of a space without nuance: a space where there is always a right answer, where certainty is preached every Sunday without fail, and where those who come to the table with different epistemological tools are reject­ed.

Through an examination of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, I will apply her approach to spirituality to contemporary Christian culture, aiming to provoke reflection and accountability in any reader who may consider themselves spiritual. Virginia Woolf is not an obvious source of spiritual insight—she was not a Christian, and she did not believe in God. She is known for her anti-war and feminist politics visible in writings such as A Room of One's Own and Mrs. Dallo­way. To the Lighthouse tells the story of the Ramsay family’s beachside vacation home before, during, and after the first World War, entering the minds of various characters to explore the effects of war­time on daily life and relations. So, while this paper will not apply religious beliefs to Woolf that she did not have, it will engage with the root of why people like Collins are turning away from Christian institutions. I will argue that Woolf uses an epistemology that is not only different from Western and Christian ones but that is difficult to categorize as an epistemol­ogy at all. Rather than claim the solution to overly empirical ways of knowing is to arrive at truth through different meth­ods, she instead reveals that truth is not actually something that can or should be attained at all. She breaks down binary categories of spiritual belief in favor of recognizing the sacred outside the Church.

Terminology

Before going further, it is necessary to define and clarify the terminology that this paper will use to describe Christianity and the Christian Church. I am far more concerned with the wide-reaching cultural impacts of Christian belief on society than I am with the specific theological beliefs of any denomination. The focus of this paper is sociology, not theology. I will use the term “Christian culture” in following Jane De Gay’s scholarship to refer to the entire umbrella of cultural impacts of Christianity. This includes, but is not lim­ited to, purity culture and the construction of virginity; cultural homophobia, transphobia, and intolerance of sexuality and gender variance; assumptions about drug users, criminals, and incarcerated peo­ple; hyper-individualism; and the general monotheistic, patriarchal understanding of the divine.

Other terms, including “institution­alized” or “institutional” Christianity or religion, “Christian nationalism,” “The Christian Church” with a capital C, and “evangelicalism” or “American evangelicalism” come close to this same idea but carry connotations that may differ in the minds of reader to reader. I have intentionally chosen a broad term that does not include such incisive words as “institutional” or “nationalism,” despite the fact that these labels do pertain to this conversation and should not be entirely dismissed from the dialogue.

It is also necessary to acknowledge that there is great variance across Chris­tian denominations and sects. It would not be fair to apply the same judgment to a liberal non-denominational church as to a fundamentalist cult. The damage done on an individual and societal level is certain­ly more severe in the latter than in the former. Indeed, many people practice faith in ways that promote kindness, generosity, community care, and internal mindfulness and peace. This is not to say that all Chris­tians participate in the same harmful acts in the same ways. However, I am claiming that no church is exempt from the kind of deep examination and reflection that this paper will call upon them to do. To be liberal is not to be without sin. Explicit violence does not need to be present for a more hidden, pervasive type of pain to be inflicted. It is my hope that Christian read­ers can take these words as an opportunity for reflection as to how a faith community can better represent the values it claims to uphold, rather than an attack on the act of having and practicing faith itself.

Ages of Secularization?

Virginia Woolf was, and is, often classified as a purely secular author. She criticized Christian frameworks, especial­ly its patriarchal structure, blaming Paul’s New Testament writings for much of the misogyny present in Christian culture. The Modernist period in general was thought of as an age of secularization. Following the late Victorian period, during which faith declined and uncertainty skyrock­eted, it seemed that the period of mass Christian belief was ending. Scientific and technological advances were replacing the need for faith. A war more violent than ever before had shattered the continent. Nothing was too unprecedented to happen during the Modernist period, including a societal abandonment of the belief system that had dominated Europe for one thou­sand years.

This sentiment does not seem out of place today. Current trends reveal more and more people are leaving the Christian Church. In 2020, about 64% of Americans identified as Christian, while in 1970, 90% did. Younger people are more likely to disaffiliate, going to college and leav­ing Sunday morning attendance behind.² A December 2021 American National Family Life survey revealed over 30% of Generation Z identifies as religiously unaffiliated.³ Less empirically, one can notice thriving social media communities based in faith “deconstruction”—a term for the examination and dismantling of religious beliefs—where users describe damaging experiences in the Church, express feelings of confusion, anger, and dissatisfaction, and offer varying ideas for ways forward. Some have abandoned religious belief entirely; others advocate for movement towards more progressive and affirming churches. Most everyone in the deconstruction community cites homophobia, racism, purity culture, and other conservative cultural elements as their reasons for leaving churches.⁴

Yet, neither of these periods are as secular as they may seem. Stephanie Paulsell argues in Religion Around Vir­ginia Woolf that Woolf should not be considered detached from religion simply because she was not Christian. Because “belief is not the only way to engage reli­gion and to do religious work”⁵, it is inac­curate to jump from the true statement that Woolf did not agree with Christian ideas to the unfounded conjecture that she could not engage with Christian culture. To the Lighthouse is filled with spiritual and religious ideas that are rich in substance, despite not appearing as explicitly or traditionally Christian. Similarly, I believe the Church’s conundrum is not as simple as people deciding it’s more fun to party on Saturday nights than to pray on Sunday mornings. Amid a pandemic, partisanship, war in Europe, and economic failure, peo­ple are as desperate as ever for some sense of what is true. People are not abandoning spiritual belief. They are realizing, as if these events acted as a force pulling down the veil, that Christian culture is not pro­viding what they need. They are realizing that perhaps the Church’s dogmatic fixa­tion on binary is not a satisfying way to be in the world, especially this world. They are instead reflecting the ideas of Woolf’s fragmentation.

Fragmentation in To the Light­house

In the midst of tumultuous, painful political scenes, it becomes difficult to feel spiritually and intellectually satis­fied by clear-cut explanations of the way the world works. Knowing this, Virginia Woolf incorporates religious and spiritual ideas in her novel largely through the use of moments of being—moments during which a character encounters the sacred in an introspective and irreligious way. These moments involve a confrontation with some deep, human truth that often relates to the same ontological and meta­physical questions that religion addresses. The moments happen without the influ­ence of explicitly named religion and often while the character is alone. Pericles Lewis defines them as “the relationship between everyday, routine experiences . . . and the almost sacred moments in which experience enters the sublime”.⁶ Because the novel focuses so heavily on the interi­or lives of its characters, Woolf has craft­ed a structure that prioritizes and validates these moments of being. She elevates the introspective in a way that sets personal experience of the sacred above institu­tionalized religion. Through the novel’s structure, style of discourse, and focus on specific characters, she demonstrates that personal experience of the sacred can, and does, happen outside of the Christian church. She imagines alternatives to the binary of Christianity and secularism.

The most distinct example of a moment of being occurs when Mrs. Ramsay, the mother of the Ramsay fam­ily and emotional center of the narrative, concludes that there is no overarching meaning of life. Realizing that small moments of goodness have the power to be as sustaining and spiritual as Chris­tian claims to absolute truth, she thinks to herself: “What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps nev­er did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”⁷

Mrs. Ramsay’s experience of the sacred is not attached to Christian culture. She does not find her “illuminations” in a church service, or by praying, or by participating in sacraments. She finds the sacred in a random moment thinking to herself. She does not expect these match­es—they are struck in the dark, they are little, and yet they are miracles. Mrs. Ramsay has discovered that Christian culture could not provide the answer to the question of the meaning of life. Yet, Woolf is also explicit in her demonstration that Mrs. Ramsay has not abandoned all forms of spiritualism as a result. She still believes in illuminations, matches, little miracles, or whatever other language can express the nuanced ability to experience the sacred outside of any form of religious or irreligious dogmatism.

This moment notably takes place at the conclusion of a distressing moment of internal questioning for Mrs. Ramsay. She most explicitly engages with Christian culture when she comments that “we are in the hands of the Lord,” seemingly without consciously intending to invoke Chris­tian language.⁸ Stephanie Paulsell writes that she feels “encroached upon” by religion and “runs through all the reasons” that God cannot be real. This period of distress ends when Mrs. Ramsay sees the distant lighthouse and feels an “ecstasy,” no longer disturbed by her inability to an­swer metaphysical questions about God.⁹ Her claim “it is enough!” is to say that moments of being in the everyday world are enough to spiritually satisfy her.¹⁰ We see here an attempt to fully abandon spir­itual belief that ultimately fails because of Mrs. Ramsay’s attentiveness to sacred moments of being. She is unable to take up atheism as a satisfying solution to the issue of wrestling with Christian culture. While she does not arrive at the claims to absolute truth that Christian culture would offer her, she also does not entirely give herself to secularism in the way that leav­ing the Church is commonly portrayed.

The term fragmentation describes this rejection of binary. While Modern­ist writers like Woolf rejected Christian claims to absolute truth, which are heav­ily rooted in Enlightenment belief—the ability of human intelligence to achieve objective certainty—they also rejected Romantic ideas that there is an overarch­ing sublime, divine, or natural force that explains the same metaphysical questions about the world. Modernist fragmentation posits that this Romantic viewpoint makes the same fallible claim with certainty; it is only doing it through a different method. Rather than either of these options, frag­mentation supposes that we can glimpse at things—we can see moments of the spiritual through people, places, and experiences. Like fragmented shards of true knowledge, they offer us small insights that are nonetheless sustaining. Woolf’s fragmented writing style, which journeys confusingly through powerful glimpses of time periods and the minds of characters, resists the masculine, Western, logical structure of realist novels that preceded it. Logical because the book does not follow a clear plot arc. Western because it fails to use the characteristics of writing—clarity and brevity—that Western writing prizes. Masculine because, as is critical to under­stand, To the Lighthouse demonstrates the specifically female ability to listen and be in nuanced spaces that men in Western so­ciety are typically socialized away from. It is the women that locate the sacred, and it is the women who offer us the most valu­able alternative to the conflict in Christian culture today.

Feminism of Listening in Woolf's Context

Resisting binary is a task that Woolf intertwines with feminist thought, invok­ing the unique abilities of women to recognize nuanced spaces. There are notable similarities between Christian culture and patriarchy that lead to the rejection of nuance. Jane De Gay writes of the “mus­cular Christianity”¹¹ that infuses Christian beliefs with patriarchal values, creating a Christian culture that is oriented towards male patterns of listening. While patriar­chy has affected all of Christian history, it is most relevant to understand the effect that beliefs about gender during the Vic­torian period had on Woolf’s Modernist context. The Victorians relegated men and women into “separate spheres” in which men left the house to work and women remained at home to care for children and act as symbols of purity. The idea that men and women are so different that they cannot exist in the same physical spaces impacted Christian culture by encourag­ing rigid gender roles within the Church. Beyond matters related explicitly to gender, any type of thinking that involved an acknowledgment of paradox, an un­known, or an unstable, changing answer would conflict with the Victorian mindset of having achieved a clear understanding of the world. Liminality had little place in Victorian ideology.

Understanding this background, several consistencies can be identified in the workings of patriarchy and Christian culture. Both men and Christian culture impose control over women. The over­abundance of men in Church leadership explains this phenomenon, as well as (like Woolf herself understood), the patriarchal ideas present in Christian texts. Restrict­ing women from the public sphere and Church leadership limited women’s ability to participate in public discourse. The ide­ology of separate spheres also prevented women from exercising a vocation other than homemaking. Similarly, the ideology of the Protestant work ethic encourag­es belief in a vocation or purpose that a person is called to do. The Protestant work ethic helped fuel the enforcement of separate spheres by affirming the concept that women are intended for a specific vocation—the idea is applied to an entire sex, rather than individual people.

Finally, De Gay offers identical solutions to both of these problems: reconfigure space. In Woolf’s time, it was necessary to dismantle Victorian beliefs about gender and to “readjust women’s position in relation to the public and pri­vate sphere.”¹² Within Christian culture, the idea of reconfiguring space involves learning to value the sacred outside of the Church—outside of the physical space of church buildings and outside of religious contexts. It also requires value to be given to women’s contributions to the discourse. The structure of Christian culture cannot be meaningfully altered without hearing the voices of everyone who is a part of it.

The importance of women’s voices is not merely due to their representing a large portion of the population. Women’s contribution to Church discourse is crit­ical, especially because women come to the table with different, uniquely valuable ways of listening. Krista Ratcliffe calls this “rhetorical listening,” and explains that women are more likely to resist styles of rhetoric that neglect listening. Rhetor­ical listening is a “code of cross cultural conduct” that focuses on locating commonalities and differences between parties and promoting understanding of the self and others.¹³ The masculine logos that have been studied and promoted in male spaces for centuries do not value these things. We have gendered listening as fe­male and speaking, asserting, and arguing, as male.

Woolf applies these ideas at the end the novel with a depiction of Lily Briscoe painting while the men travel to the lighthouse. Lily’s choice to remain ashore is an example of her choosing to engage in a form of rhetoric that is less masculinely productive. For the men, arriving at the lighthouse is satisfying. James thinks that it “confirms some ob­scure feeling of his about his own char­acter” and contrasts himself with “the old ladies” who “went dragging their chairs about on the lawn.”¹⁴ James implies here that he believes his character has been strengthened by arriving at the lighthouse—by completing a practical, phys­ical goal. In contrast, he looks down at the ladies who do nothing but sit in their gardens. Yet, Woolf uses her depiction of Lily painting as a beautiful culmination of the novel’s themes. It is this section that contains the important rhetorical work of the novel. The men’s arrival at the light­house serves only to contrast with Lily’s experience painting and to reveal that it is this activity that is ultimately more satis­fying.

Rhetorical listening is why it is spe­cifically Woolf’s female characters who are able to resist theological binary and locate the sacred in moments of being. Mrs. Ramsay and her matches find an­swers in neither Christianity nor atheism. Lily chooses to remain on the shore and paint, thinking about the mystery and nu­ance of human nature. Contrastingly, the men in To the Lighthouse cling to the rigid certainty that Western rhetoric uses to define intelligence and successful commu­nication. The character Charles Tansley is literally referred to as “the atheist” by the narrator—he is so sure of his spiritual be­liefs, or lack thereof, that they are a part of his name and identity. Mr. Ramsay is also an atheist who is tormented by his failure to achieve enlightenment. He despairs over his inability to achieve a complete understanding of metaphysical questions, which he represents using a metaphor of the alphabet, expressing his desire to move from one insight to the next. If he could “get to Q”—i.e., accomplish enough understanding to move another letter down the line—he could rest easy, but he instead finds himself stuck on a letter and unable to settle the distress that this caus­es. The men cannot imagine alternatives to binaries. They cannot move outside of that stuck position in the same way that the women do. The importance here is not the fact that Charles Tansley and Mr. Ramsay are atheists, but merely that they are so sure about it. Lewis states this phenomenon eloquently: “What matters is the dogmatism” because “they brandish their claims to absolute truth.”¹⁵ In doing so, they prohibit themselves access to the fragmented spiritualism that Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe encounter.

Textual Feminism in the Modernist Style

Beyond the characters and events of the novel, Woolf uses an intentional style of writing to resist masculine patterns of discourse. Ratcliffe again contributes to the analysis of Woolf by applying a textu­ally feminist reading to her work. Textual feminism, she says, is a mode of writing that challenges the false divide between the cultural, textual, and personal. It prizes nuance by asserting that these things are not neatly sectioned off. It also “challeng­es the dominant discourse’s tendency to fetishize a distanced objectivity.”¹⁶ By blurring the categories of the cultural, textual, and personal, emotion and sub­jectivity are necessarily introduced to spaces where masculine discourse would claim them not to be. Other feminist and racial scholars, including Helene Cixous and Asoue Inoue, have emphasized the importance of awareness of dominant modes of communication. Works that are not organized in a “rational” way or that include emotion and personal experience in places where they “should not be” have the power to structurally disrupt and call greater attention to the meaning of some­one’s words.

To the Lighthouse accomplishes this disruption. It is an objectively confusing book that does not follow traditional plot structures. It breaks sharply from its Realist predecessors by abandoning chronological sequences and focusing instead on the interior lives of characters, taking on a shape that is more like a spiral than a horizontal line. It also makes use of free indirect discourse to further blur the reader’s understanding of what is happen­ing. There is little distinction between the subjective feelings of a character and the third-person narration of the novel. The reader never quite knows if a character is stating a fact or if they are expressing their own impression of what is happening around them.

The middle section of the novel, “Time Passes,” exemplifies Woolf’s unwillingness to center objectivity in her writing. The section narrates the passage of the first World War, yet spends very little time describing what most would consider notable events of the war. Woolf uses brackets to include dramatic, ac­tion-oriented information about the war, relegating them to the form of a short aside: “[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous].”¹⁷ The death of a soldier in battle is some­thing that the masculine logos would highlight far more prominently than Woolf chooses to. “Time Passes” includes these events only in passing, hidden within brackets, as if they are less important than the focal point of the section, which is the deterioration of the house. The house—the female, domestic space—takes on an elevated position as the most poignant and painful casualty of the war. Woolf centers the emotion in her prosaic descriptions of “weeds that had grown close to the glass” and the “silence” which “wove itself into the falling cries of birds.”¹⁸ One can also return to the final section of Lily Briscoe’s painting to support this theory of textual feminism. Because the text is constructed in such a swirly, introspective, non-linear way, it matches with the idea of Lily’s painting-in-progress. The text itself feels like a painting done by a passionate, human hand. Woolf’s writing feels like poetry. So, it is the composition of the text itself that works to bring legitimacy to the emotional, the personal, the subjective, and the moments of being. The loss of hu­man presence in a home is just as tragic, or even more tragic, than the death of a soldier on a battlefield.

Implications for Christian Culture

As has been demonstrated, To the Lighthouse offers extensive evidence that rigid religiousness is not necessary to meaningfully encounter the sacred. Exist­ing in the middle of or outside of tradi­tional binaries is not only a viable choice, but a choice that often leads to much greater senses of peace and understand­ing for the characters who choose to do so. Yet, “existing in the middle” is not an idea that Christian culture easily accepts. Political polarization and the alignment of Christian culture with the economic and social right have increased in intensity in the decades following Woolf’s career. Religious dogmatism and even extremism have become more common, even as more people leave church communities.

I stated in the opening of this paper that mass exodus from Christian culture is not due to lack of belief or lack of exam­ple, but rather from the Church’s unwill­ingness to abandon false dichotomies. I believe this problem is wide-reaching and affects nearly all Christian churches in America. Such concerns should be on the minds of all Christian churches because to defer blame towards “more extreme” churches only prevents productive change. Yet, to best demonstrate my points, I will be discussing an extreme example: the former megachurch, Mars Hill. Mars Hill was a Seattle-based church that operat­ed from 1996 to 2014 with 15 branches and 13,000 members at its peak and has become well known for the scandal that ultimately closed its doors. It took highly conservative views without appearing traditionally religious: it was located in the city, attractive to young people, and lacked hymns and formal clothing. Yet, the lead pastor Mark Driscoll espoused passionate adherence to literal interpreta­tions of the Bible. He promoted strict gen­der binaries by shaming men who failed to act as providers and relegating women to the “smoking hot wife” trope—producers of babies, providers of sex, and figures to look attractive on Sunday mornings. The church closed when Driscoll’s leadership became so tyrannous that other members of the congregation launched an inves­tigation into accusations of abuse, and Driscoll fled with his wife after reportedly having a vision from God telling him to do so.¹⁹

This narrative does not appear far-re­moved from the dogmatism described in To the Lighthouse. It is also a critical example of the potential of both the young and the old, the traditional and the new, to fall into these traps of binary. Mars Hill succeeded in part due to its ability to seem different from traditional religious settings. Its modern music, relaxed dress code, and young congregants were no accident: this church attracted people who were not already a part of more traditional churches. It was a new way to approach spirituality—except, upon more than a second of examination, its teachings promoted the same strict gender roles and condemnatory atmosphere as wider Chris­tian culture. Woolf offers with her depic­tion of both rigid religion and rigid athe­ism a solution to this pitfall that Christians so often fall into. Rather than swinging from one extreme to the other, Woolf extends a hand of grace, validating the sacred space of the middle. The middle is a space of paradoxical permanence. Those who occupy it remain in motion, never settling into certainty, acting like rocks rolling down hills in their resistance to spiritual stagnation. Yet, the middle is not a place to know as only a steppingstone. The narrative that uncertainty is accept­able only for newcomers brings condescension to a space that instead demands affirmation. The metaphor of rolling rocks fails in the sense that it implies an eventu­al arrival at the bottom of a hill.

There is no great revelation. That is, in itself, a great revelation. For people seeking an alternative to Christian cul­ture, the concept of not knowing as its own form of knowing is a radical diver­sion from Mr. Ramsay’s pained pursuit of the end of the alphabet. It is a solution that sees the uncontainable complexity of human nature and rejects the notion that it must be neatly understood. It is a margin in which women have thrived for centuries. Pushed aside by men with their logical rhetoric and all-encompassing philosophies, women find peace in the un­known. Women know how to listen. And it is the young people, the queer people, the Black and Indigenous people of color, the tired people, the hurt people, and the people who cannot, no matter how they try, abandon the tingle in their hearts that they first learned to feel at the pulpit, who most want to listen.

Bibliography

Collins, John. “Hymn for the 81%.” From Behind the Pulpit, https://revcollins.com/2020/01/22/hymn-for-the-81/