Like the speaker of “Aubade,” Philip Larkin found little solace in organized religion. Larkin referred to himself wryly as “an agnostic, I suppose, but an Anglican agnostic, of course,” but journalists have pointed out that his expressed sentiments hovered closer to atheism. He was raised by an atheist father who had a negative view of organized religion, and in 1948, he stated, “I am one of the first generation never to believe that Christ was divine, or that each man has an immortal part, at any stage in their first twenty-five years.” “I have been brought up to regard the gospel story as untrue, as silly, and, perhaps subtlest, as something which only a conventional and not-overly-intelligent man would credit,” he continued. He dismissed the Bible, which he read later in life, as “absolute balls. Beautiful, of course. But balls.”
Larkin’s poem “Church Going” is perhaps his most famous take on religion, and it provides a more nuanced view of Christianity. In the poem, the speaker sneaks into an empty church and explores it “in awkward reverence.” The speaker’s first impulse is to declare that the church wasn’t “worth stopping for,” but he concedes that he did stop at it, and in fact often does at churches. He begins to ponder the end of religion, asserting that “superstition, like belief, must die,” and wonders what the last religious person will be like—devout, or fascinated by the spectacle of Christmas, or simply an ignorant but curious observer like the speaker himself? Finally, the speaker realizes that he appreciates the church as a place dedicated to asking serious questions about life and acknowledges that even if organized religion becomes obsolete, this philosophical urge will remain.
Yet Larkin was careful to dismiss claims that “Church Going” is a religious poem. “It isn't religious at all,” he said. “Religion surely means that the affairs of this world are under divine surveillance, and so on, and I go to pains to point out that I don't bother about that kind of thing, that I'm deliberately ignorant about it.”
