RAH! Podcast Episode: A Short Introduction to Bad Religion and Episode Transcript

Listen to the third episode in our new RAH! Podcast mini series – A Short Introduction to…

In this episode, Dr Ellie Beal will be giving us a short introduction to Bad Religion, in Gothic texts.
In particular we will explore:

• How religion is portrayed in the Gothic
• How depictions of religion have changed as society has become less religious and more secular
• And why religion in the Gothic is still relevant today

Read along while you listen! Find the full episode transcript below.

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the RAH! Podcast belong solely to the speaker, and are not necessarily reflective of the views of Manchester Metropolitan University, or the speaker's employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.

RAH! Podcast Episode Transcript: A Short Introduction to Bad Religion

RAH! Opening Jingle

Lucy: Hello, and welcome to the RAH! podcast at Manchester Metropolitan University, and to our third episode in our new mini series. In this episode we will be speaking to Ellie Beal about her research in Bad Religion in Gothic texts. We will cover how religion is portrayed in the Gothic, how depictions of religion have changed as society has become less religious or more secular, and why religion in the Gothic is still relevant today. So let's get into it.

RAH! Mini Jingle

Lucy: I'm here today with Ellie Beal, who listeners might recognise as one of our regular presenters and we're here to talk about one of Ellie's main research interests, which is Bad Religion. And so Ellie, would you like to introduce yourself?

Ellie: Hello, my name is Ellie Beal and I work here at Manchester Metropolitan University in the Department of English literature, where I also teach in film. And today I'm going to be talking about Bad Religion. And some of the reasons why we should still be interested in the religious in the Gothic because a gothic is certainly still fascinated in religion.

Lucy: Could you tell us what you mean by this kind of concept of Bad Religion?

Ellie: I think when you asked me to do this, I kind of instinctually came up with bad religion as a sort of topic piece. But I guess really what I'm interested in sort of more specifically, or probably a better way of describing it really, is sort of dark faith or the way in which religion and faith in the Gothic is often turned towards a kind of belief in darkness, rather than a belief in lightness. So I think my research interest is kind of looking really at the way in which religion is a kind of fascination for the Gothic. Even though we might think of ourselves as being in more secular or enlightened times now. The Gothic and horror is still very much fascinated with those subjects. And I think my-  my research interest is kind of looking or tracing the way in which different individuals or different communities express that friction between the kind of secular and religious.

Lucy: Have you got any kind of examples of that in key books or films to kind of illustrate really what you mean by bad religion or this battle between light and dark?

Ellie: The early Gothic got very established quite quickly as kind of Protestant, British, and anti Catholic. So my interests are kind of in the contemporary horror and Gothic and the way in which religion kind of plays out and the frictions between the religion and secular pays out and kind of later Gothic.

I mean, if you start from sort of like beginning late 17th to 18th century you can't go far wrong with looking at The Monk. I think it’s actually the first book that has a directly villainous monk in it. I also recommend looking at you know, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, famous for its kind of exploration of not only science, but theology. It patterns itself in a kind of inversion of the Genesis text. It has a creature who becomes humanised through reading theology.

The Gothic did start as a kind of Protestant text. It was very anti Catholic. Even as we secular readers read the Gothic now, the Gothic presents demons, murderous nuns, religious kind of contacts, on the assumption that we're looking at it from a kind of Protestant viewpoint. So I quite like texts that aren't Protestant. So I'm quite into things that Catholic authors like Flannery O'Connor, as kind of secular, or protestant readers, you can't really quite get your head around her because her Catholicism looks at the Gothic and looks at horror from very different perspective.

And I'd recommend Donald Ray Pollock. He's a great contemporary author, who does kind of Southern Gothic satires on religion. And I think he's particularly interesting because there is a definite pattern in the way in which people come to religion in his texts. It usually starts off With a death, and it's usually a husband, who somehow has to go through the grieving process or the understanding of life through a kind of revisiting of some kind of obviously horrifying ritual related to religion. And there's a conversation in that author's texts about what it is to kind of suffer in the context of both religion and secularism. So that'd be another author, I would recommend.

Lucy: For me, what's kind of coming to mind is a lot of kind of contemporary horror films that definitely kind of deal with demons and stuff like that. And in particular, kind of what came to mind was The Exorcist definitely. And also things like Paranormal Activity right into kind of, you know, the last the - last few years, I guess. And do you think the way that Bad Religion has been dealt with has changed over time? And how do you think it's kind of different now maybe to how it was back in, you know, the 18th century?

Ellie: Yeah, I think it has changed. One of the bones of kind of contention around the gothic is whether or not it is religious or whether or not it's secular. From the sort of early Parts of the Gothic comes from sort of very Christian ideas. And it patterns itself really, I think, as a kind of literature trial. So you often have characters who have to go through periods of struggle, great strife, they've often got religious settings, they often have a middle class heroine who must leave behind all these Catholic trappings and these murderous monks and endures these trials to a kind of reasoned enlightenment value at the end.

But I think beyond this actually does change quite a lot. I think to the 19th and 20th century, you have much more - horror tends to be focused not so much towards specific institutions like Catholicism, or the idea of kind of superstitious past, although that is still there. It becomes much more inward. And actually what the horror is, is it becomes a horror really around self awareness.

And then that sort of changes again, I think towards our period now really the late 18th to early 21st century. The kind of - On the one hand, institutional religion is still a monster. And on the other hand, so is secularism and enlightenment. So, institutional religion is something to be fled from, it is an entrapment. But then on the other hand, secularism and the enlightenment hasn't worked as well as people thought it would. Reason isn't the answer to everything. And you have a kind of character that has to navigate now these two monsters.

And the interesting thing I think about the 21st century is a term called secularism, where you have characters that have incredibly modern secular sensibilities on the one hand, yet are still trying to kind of understand their religious impulses on the other. So they navigate these two monsters somewhere in the middle. It doesn't necessarily end in either religious enlightenment, or secular enlightenment, but something in between, something negotiated by that character.

Lucy: I think that's really interesting. Have you got any kind of examples of that?

Ellie: Yes absolutely, Stephen King, of course, oscillating as he does, even in his personal life in interviews between religious belief to - to anti religion, exploring evangelical Protestant religion. The religious has always been part of his - his modality. But I think it's more contemporary texts like Desperation and Revival are really interesting, because they are revisiting the idea of where religion fits now, in kind of modern day society. Is it harking back less to kind of ancient evil as kind of understanding what our learning of religion has kind of where it's kind of brought us to within kind of modern day.

James Herbert is also great. He's a Catholic author. What happens in this book, The Shrine is there is a religious miracle, but he's also exploring, like what would happen if a miracle happened in modern day? How would that be handled by things like the media and our secular ideas?

And if I was to make a final recommendation of a kind of modern author who I think is dealing with the complexities of spiritual belief, it'd be Clive Barker. He is an incredibly lapsed, and anti Catholic author who nevertheless has quite Catholic standpoints and viewpoints embedded within his own literature. And I also think he's really interesting because he is a queer author. His anti Catholicism comes from the fact that he does not fit in to their doctrine and he's very outspoken about it. But on the other hand, he consciously adopts Catholic ideas in order to explore actually quite theological concepts like the idea of the outsider, or the monster, as actually being innately saintly because of their outsider-ness, because of their queerness. They are somehow more holy or saintly than the institution that resists them.

Lucy: So far, we seem to have covered Christianity largely, do you think that there's other kind of traditions in other religions that are kind of dealt with in a kind of Gothic way and maybe texts from different religions of different parts of the world?

Ellie: Yeah, absolutely. So I think from the beginning, you know, there are certain assumptions that are made by the Gothic or especially early gothic comes from a kind of Western standpoint, or a kind of Christian Western standpoint. But I think one of the kind of interesting things is the way in which religion is kind of like othered in the Gothic. So the devil is always some other religion, some other some other belief system in the Gothic. So there is a suspicion of other people's folklore, other people's rituals, other people's practices. You also have, you know, a myriad of other people's religions and spiritualities kind of monstrified in western perspective, Gothic. From the other perspective, you have a huge amount of kind of religions being represented or religious perspectives being represented.

One of the authors that I'm been really interested in is Wilson Harris, who explores kind of theology from the perspective of a kind of Ghanaian author, who has been through colonialism. So his spirituality is often exploring ideas to do with not only with Christianity which was imposed upon his country when it was colonised, also the way in which those have now become intermingled with native and traditional religions. So you have a myriad of kind of ideas being explored within the Gothic.

Lucy: So why do you think then that's the study of religion and the Gothic more generally is important and useful, and which I think it can tell us kind of today?

Ellie: I think it's important. And I think it's useful because I think one of the things that the Gothic does very well, it's really kind of exploring our internal worlds. The Gothic and horror is incredibly interested in ideas about human condition and human trial. It does tackle still, where things like your spiritual impulse fits in a society that no longer has space for it, that no longer has a language for it. It came about during a time when we were moving from a more religious thought to a more secular thought. And in doing that, it kind of conveys our pattern of movement from suspicion to secularism. But actually also what is kind of became is a kind of vehicle for all of our religious impulses. That actually that's where it gets fed to now is into our art and into our literature. And the Gothic is one part of that because it is something that works with the irrational, the supernatural. I'd say it's neither a secular nor religious literature. It is a numinous form of literature, in which it can kind of inflame and hold interest in the kind of philosophical and the spiritual questions of life. It sounds deep, doesn’t it! Sorry, I feel like this was supposed to be more lighthearted! But um, but yeah, gosh! I think for me that the reason that we should be interested in it because it's one of those literatures that still holds weight around the religious that it uses to kind of hold intentional friction with the secular. They police each other's boundaries in interesting ways in a gothic and I think that's why we should still be interested in understanding it.

Lucy: That's great. Okay, well, thank you Ellie, for joining us on the RAH! podcast.

RAH! Mini Jingle

Lucy: Thanks for listening. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter for future podcast updates. You can find us @MMU_RAH. For more information on all the research and events we discussed in this episode, please go to the RAH! website for full links. Tune back in soon for more episodes.

RAH! Closing Jingle

Lucy: This episode of the RAH! podcast was produced, edited and presented by Lucy Simpson and mixed by Julian Holloway.