Lawrentian Religion

In a letter dated 3rd December 1907 (when he was but 22 years of age), D. H. Lawrence revealed some of his religious precocity to the Rev. Robert Reid, a local Congregationalist minister and friend of Lawrence's mother:

"Now I do not believe in conversion [as found in Christian teachings] ... I believe that a man is converted when he first hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self. I believe that a man is born first unto himself--for the happy developing of himself, while the world is a nursery, and the pretty things are to be snatched for, and pleasant things tasted; some people seem to exist thus right to the end. But most are born again on entering manhood; then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitude of brothers. Then, it appears to me, a man gradually formulates his religion, be it what it may. A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification. So I contend that true Socialism is religion; that honest, fervent politics are religion; that whatever a man will labour for earnestly and in some measure unselfishly is religion."

"I have now only to state my position with regard to Christianity. At the present moment I do not, cannot believe in the divinity of Jesus. There are only the old doubts in the way, the old questions. I went through the lowest parts of Sneinton to Emily's to dinner when she lived in Nottingham--it had a profound influence on me. 'It cannot be'-- I said to myself 'that a pitiful, omnipotent Christ died nineteen hundred years ago to save these people from this and yet they are here.' Women, with child--so many are in that condition in the slums--bruised, drunk, with breasts half bare. It is not compatible with the idea of an Omnipotent, pitying Divine. And how, too, shall I reconcile it to a belief in a personal God. I cannot be a materialist--but Oh, how is it possible that a God who speaks to all hearts can let Belgravia go laughing to a vicious luxury, and Whitechapel cursing to a filthy debauchery--such suffering, such dreadful suffering--and shall the short years of Christ's mission atone for it all? I do not want them to be punished after death--what good then, when it is all irremediably done?...I do not wage any war against Christianity--I do not hate it--but these questions will not be answered, and for the present my religion is the lessening, in some pitiful moiety, the great human discrepancies."

--from The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume I: September 1901-May 1913, edited by James T. Boulton, Cambridge University Press (1979), 39-41.