Not Decline but Transformation: Three Layers of Religion in In the Beauty of the Lilies

Abstract

John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies has often been interpreted as a lament for the decline of institutional Christianity in twentieth-century America. Instead, in this essay, it is argued that the novel dramatizes the metamorphosis of the sacred across four generations of the Wilmot family. Based on Updike’s conviction that divine presence endures beyond the walls of the church and through literary and cultural analysis grounded in sociological theory, the narrative shows that what appears to be the retreat of institutional religion is in fact a return to its primal ground in private faith. From Clarence’s crisis of belief to Teddy’s communal–private devotion, Essie’s narcissistic yet spiritualized stardom, and Clark’s restless searching, the novel traces diverse expressions of private religion in modern life. Film, above all, emerges as the communicative form that replaces the authority once vested in institutional churches, becoming the most pervasive medium through which transcendence is imagined and experienced. Far from depicting religion’s disappearance, Updike presents its reconfiguration into subtler and more pervasive forms of grace. In doing so, In the Beauty of the Lilies becomes a literary meditation on how religious meaning persists, adapts, and finds new representatives in a modern, media-saturated world.

1. Introduction

John Updike repeatedly returned to the theme of religion in his fiction, treating it much like Cézanne’s lifelong study of Mont Sainte-Victoire. As he explained, “My model in this is somebody like a painter like Cézanne, who painted those apples and Mont Sainte-Victoire over and over again. You know, there’s always something new by looking at essentially the same human adventure” (Plath 2016, p. 224). Like Cézanne’s persistence, Updike’s novels circle back to the problem of belief. Many critics (Johnston 1977; Farmer 2015; Bhattacharya 2018; Billings 2003; Webb 2008; Pasewark 1996; Hess 2008; Wall 1996) read works such as The Centaur, Couples, Roger’s Version, Rabbit Redux, and In the Beauty of the Lilies as chronicling the decline of institutional religion in American life. Yet this emphasis on decline often overlooks the deeper structure of his religious imagination.

Beneath these narratives of loss lies Updike’s abiding conviction that faith remains a human necessity. In one interview, he confessed, “I get anxious at 4 a.m.… I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings. Life without religion seems to me to lack a dimension. You may say that dimension’s an illusion, but in some ways it’s what people have done through these two millennia and many more millennia before that” (Campbell 2008, p. 9). For Updike, the necessity of Christianity is expressed in unabashedly personal terms: it is a way to resist death, to go on “being a self forever” (Updike [1989] 2012, Self-Consciousness p. 228). Thus, even as his novels stage the decline of institutional faith, his own reflections insist on the persistence of religion as an existential need—expressed most essentially as private religion, the inward and experiential faith that grounds all religious life, and as communicative religion, the cultural mediation of transcendence through modern media such as film.

To understand this tension between fictional decline and personal belief, it is essential to recognize the layered quality of Updike’s religious sensibility. As he himself suggested, “being something up there” is as “layered” as the world in his eyes (Updike 1975, Picked-Up Pieces p. 502). His short story “Varieties of Religious Experience,” published in The Atlantic in November 2002,1 illustrates this awareness of multiple strata of religious life and the diverse ways people encounter the sacred.

This sense of layering also helps explain why God in Updike’s fictional world often appears “absent yet present,” leaving behind “traces of himself for humans to find” (Schiff 2006, p. 51). For Updike, religion cannot be reduced to fixed doctrines but unfolds as a dynamic interplay of visible and invisible forms. He could imagine loving “its Maker whether or not signs of Him were visible in or behind ‘the beaded curtain of Matter’” (Updike 1969, Midpoint p. 5). Such metaphysical ambiguity lies at the heart of what he called a “layered” vision of both the world and of belief (Updike 1975, Picked-Up Pieces p. 502). Taken together, these images highlight that Updike’s religious imagination is not static but continually shifting across registers—sometimes material, sometimes hidden—yet always holding open the possibility of transcendence.

At the heart of these layers, James Yerkes identifies “the transcendent value of the subject and the subjective” as central to Updike’s religious imagination—what he calls the “heart of [his] existentialist affirmation about religious consciousness” (p. 22). Yet, as Robert Milder observes, the very term “transcendent” is ambiguous: it may mean the supernatural, a reality beyond experience, or even a structure of experience shaped by the mind itself (Milder 2024, p. 24). In this paper, the terms “transcendent,” “transcendent meaning,” and “transcendence” are understood in the sociological sense developed by Thomas Luckmann (1967) and further elaborated by Kelly Besecke (2005). They refer to a cultural conversation about what ultimately matters, whether expressed in theological, existential, or secular terms. This definition moves beyond doctrinal belief to include any shared orientation toward ultimate concerns, even in non-religious contexts. Such a framework helps clarify how Updike’s fiction depicts faith not only through explicit theology but also through art, culture, and the rhythms of daily life.

Although critics have explored particular aspects of this layering—Larry Taylor on the pastoral, Edward P. Vargo on ritual, Elizabeth Tallent on the erotic, and Ralph C. Wood on priapic imagery—these analyses often isolate single strands (Taylor 1971; Vargo 1973; Tallent 1982; Wood 1988). What is needed is a developmental reading that traces how Updike’s layers of religion interconnect and evolve over time. Some scholars have pointed to this broader transition: Yerkes notes that In the Beauty of the Lilies “offers a panoramic investigation of the pathetic consequences of the transformation of a theocentric into a humanocentric world” (p. 157), while Thomas Haddox interprets it as dramatizing the move “from nineteenth-century post-Calvinist Protestantism into the twentieth-century mass culture of stardom” (Haddox 2013, p. 118). Together, these perspectives highlight how Updike situates his narrative within a larger cultural shift, one in which traditional religious frameworks are not erased but reshaped by modern forms of meaning.

Building on these insights, this essay distinguishes three recurrent yet transitional layers of religion in Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies: institutional (churches, rituals, traditions), private (inward spiritual experience), and communicative (mediated or cultural forms such as film). These categories are not rigid compartments but overlapping planes through which Updike reconfigures the sacred. By following the four generations of the Wilmot family, the novel dramatizes how transcendence shifts from institutional frameworks to private experience and finds new cultural representation in media, especially cinema.

2. Updike’s Three Layers of Religion: Institutional, Private, and Communicative

Updike’s conception of institutional religion aligns with traditions, communities, and liturgies but always remains secondary to private religious experience. As Yerkes notes, “Religion in the institutional sense consists of the human traditions, symbols, liturgies, and communities that help interpret, celebrate, and propitiate this personal sense of Sacred Presence” (Yerkes 1999, p. 12). For Updike, however, institutional religion—though visible in “churches, public prayers, mottos on coins” (Updike [1989] 2012, Self-Consciousness p. 218)—dissolves upon closer encounter, “as fog solidly opaque in the distance thins to transparency when you walk into it” (p. 218). What persists is not the stability of institutions but the undercurrent of subjective religious experience that animates them.

In contrast to Thomas Luckmann’s emphasis on the privatization of institutional forms, Updike reverses the causal relation: “humanity’s personal religious experiences have given rise to the Institutional forms, and not the other way around” (Yerkes 1999, p. 12). His memoir Self-Consciousness articulates this vividly: “Like the inner of the two bonded strips of metal in a thermostat, the self curls against Him and presses—God is a dark sphere enclosing the pinpoint of our selves” (p. 219). Such metaphors underscore the primacy of inward experience. As he explains, religion can take “the form of any private system, be it adoration of Elvis Presley or hatred of nuclear weapons, be it a fetishism of politics or popular culture, that submerges in a transcendent concern the grimly finite facts of our individual human case” (p. 214). This passage shows that private religion encompasses both theistic devotion and secular passions, provided they orient the individual beyond the finite. As Updike concludes, “our subjectivity, in other words, dominates, through secret channels, outer reality, and the universe has a personal structure” (pp. 214–15). In this sense, spirituality in this paper refers to the way subjectivity itself becomes the ground of transcendence: a primacy of inward experience that is not confined to church doctrines or institutions but expressed in everyday practices, desires, and cultural forms that help people move beyond the limits of ordinary life.

The third layer is communicative: religion refracted through cultural media and collective experience. For Updike, cinema above all becomes the representative form of private religion in the modern age, offering not only entertainment but a sacred arena where transcendence persists after the decline of institutional authority. As Greiner observes, “He was a life-long moviegoer. Beginning as a child in Depression-wracked Shillington, Pennsylvania, and continuing throughout adulthood, he watched movies both eagerly and keenly. More important, he wrote about films and actors, bringing to his observations the same knowledge and shrewdness he brought to his essays on novels and writers” (Greiner 2012, p. 175). For Updike himself, the movie theater was a sacred site: “We worshipped in those spaces… For Americans, it was our native opera, bastard and sublime.” Debellis confirms that “Updike has filled his works with references to films and film personalities in his fiction, poetry and essays. They record nostalgia that modulates into symbolic and psychological revelations. Updike early found in movies a ‘moral ideal,’ and a model of ‘debonair grace’” (DeBellis 1993, p. 2). Together, these insights show that film was not a marginal pastime for Updike but a central medium through which he imagined transcendence in modern culture.

This lifelong devotion to cinema finds direct narrative expression in In the Beauty of the Lilies. Updike’s detailed inclusion of biblical allusions in popular films aligns with Calhoun’s view of the public sphere as “a product of communicative action” (Calhoun 1992, pp. 32, 37). Here, media, particularly cinema, become tools of communicative action, bridging sacred and secular domains. Movies like Adam’s Rib and Blade Runner serve as vessels for mediated communication, embedding religious themes within secular narratives and engaging diverse audiences in a shared cultural conversation (Updike 1996, Lilies pp. 174, 242, 312, 356). As Schiff notes, “Updike turns his focus toward the ways in which contemporary songs, slogans, headlines, movies, television programs, products, and information, via media, enter the consciousness of an individual living in a small town and connect him or her to a larger, collective American experience” (Schiff 2006, p. 137). In this way, media function not merely as cultural artifacts but as the modern successors of religious ritual, sustaining a shared sense of transcendence in a secular age.

Film theorist Vivian Sobchack provides a useful framework for understanding this phenomenon, arguing that the experience of “ek-static transcendence” in cinema is not necessarily derived from religious content but is embedded within the medium’s technical and visual apparatus itself (qtd. in Spencer-Hall 2018, p. 18). The camera, with its unfiltered, unblinking access to visible reality, and the projection screen, serving as a canvas for human drama, together create a space where viewers surrender themselves and enter an “elsewhere” beyond the material. This insight resonates with Siegfried Kracauer’s account of film’s power to “display its ‘raw material,’ excavating and restoring reality” (Kracauer 1960, p. 303). By drawing spectators into immersive perspectives and allowing them to inhabit alternative worlds, cinema cultivates a mode of transcendence that bypasses doctrinal belief yet evokes awe and sublimity. Updike himself admitted to experiencing a form of “liberation” from the monotony of daily life through this immersive quality of film, a gateway to “a different, enchanting realm of existence” (Updike 1999, More Matters p. 643). In this sense, the cinematic experience, though not institutional, can be inherently religious in its capacity to reveal hidden dimensions of reality and to generate moments of transcendence.

To resolve the apparent contradiction between the recurring theme of religious decline in John Updike’s fiction and his own lifelong insistence on the necessity of faith, it is argued in this essay that In the Beauty of the Lilies dramatizes not the disappearance but the metamorphosis of religion. By tracing four generations of the Wilmot family, the novel stages the retreat of institutional Christianity in Clarence’s crisis, the quiet persistence of private religion in Teddy’s communal service, the psychologized spirituality and narcissistic transcendence in Essie’s stardom, and Clark’s restless quest through the spiritual marketplace of drugs, sex, and sectarianism. These trajectories collectively reveal what Updike himself called the “layered” nature of belief: institutional, private, and communicative dimensions that shift but do not vanish. The choice of In the Beauty of the Lilies as the focus of this paper is deliberate, for it serves as Updike’s most panoramic meditation on the fate of religion in modernity, a text that integrates popular media including cinema and secular culture into its theology. The novel suggests that transcendence endures beyond church walls as a return to its primal ground in private religion, which then finds new expression in communicative forms such as film and media. The significance of this reading lies in showing that Updike challenges surface narratives of secularization by staging literature as a medium where faith, even in its most eccentric or mediated guises, continues to pulse. What seems to be declining is, for Updike, the ongoing reconfiguration of religion into subtler but no less vital forms: not institutional dogma, but private faith and its communicative representatives.

3. When Churches Crumble: Clarence’s Crisis and Religion’s Retreat in a New Era

John Updike’s novel In the Beauty of Lilies begins with Clarence Wilmot, a minister in Paterson, New Jersey, who loses his faith in God on a warm afternoon in 1910. His sudden crisis of faith, while deeply personal, can be seen as symbolic of a broader shift in American society during the 20th century.

Clarence’s loss of faith in In the Beauty of the Lilies emerges as a central moment in the novel, and Updike carefully shows that it is not the product of a single cause but of overlapping pressures. His doubts arise from three interconnected fronts: the church’s corruption through its entanglement with wealth and power, the absence of Christianity from pressing social struggles, and the institution’s inability to meet the inner needs of individual believers. Illness and intellectual challenges deepen this crisis, but the decisive force is a growing disillusionment with institutional Christianity itself. What once seemed pure and transcendent now appears compromised, reduced to something mundane and material.

One major source of Clarence’s disillusionment lies in the church’s entanglement with wealth and power. As the twentieth century unfolds, he sees industrial progress eroding the sanctity of religion. In a church building committee meeting, he rails against plans for Sunday schools and church expansion. To him, these proposals are not acts of devotion but signs of financial waste and a betrayal of worship’s purity. He interprets them as the product of clerical rivalry, the hunger for success, and even the schemes of investors hoping to control the Fourth Presbyterian Church for profit. In Clarence’s eyes, religion is being used to pacify the poor while enriching the powerful. Watching clergy drift away from orthodox Christian values into secular utilitarianism, Clarence reaches his devastating conclusion: “There is no God in the world” (Updike 1996, Lilies pp. 37, 41, 64). For Clarence, the corruption of the church becomes inseparable from the collapse of belief itself, turning institutional decline into a personal crisis of faith.

Beyond the church walls, Updike also situates Clarence’s crisis in a wider cultural context, where Christianity appears absent from major social struggles. In the depiction of the 1913 Paterson silk strike, Christianity is conspicuously absent from the workers’ cause, reflecting its retreat from progressive social and political engagement in the early twentieth century. Whereas earlier clergy like Reverend Joshua Gallaway supported workers’ rights, the predominant ecclesiastical view now aligned with owners like Reverend Snodgrass, who preached that “the worker’s side was generally fairly conducted by the owners of industry” (p. 86). With the societal influence of Christianity in retreat, the strike descended into violent police crackdowns, the jailing of labor leaders, and desperation, as seen in workers begging scabs for relief, lamenting “no money for food” (pp. 104, 91). The church, once an ally of the oppressed, no longer stood by their side.

Updike further illustrates the church’s inadequacy through the spiritual plight of individual believers. The tragedy of Mr. Orr poignantly demonstrates how institutional Christianity, even when outwardly active, fails to meet the deeper spiritual needs of its adherents. Despite his unwavering attendance, Orr’s profound spiritual dilemmas remain unresolved. He grapples with the concept of damnation, questioning, “How can you be saved, if you can’t be damned?” (p. 46). This reveals a disconnect between the teachings of the church and the personal spiritual quests of its members. Orr’s doubts about ever experiencing the living Christ, despite his religious commitment, further emphasize the institution’s inability to address the inner yearnings of believers (p. 45).

Taken together, Clarence’s disillusionment with corrupt church practices, Christianity’s absence from social justice, and the unresolved spiritual longings of figures like Mr. Orr all underscore Updike’s larger point: institutional religion in early twentieth-century America was losing its authority. In its retreat from both public responsibility and private depth, it left figures like Clarence with little reason to continue believing, making his declaration of God’s absence both personal and symbolic of a broader cultural shift.

Furthermore, Clarence’s spiritual void leaves him searching for new forms of transcendence, and it is here that film quietly assumes the role once played by the church. After he abandons his faith, cinema becomes an unconscious form of salvation, offering what the church no longer can. He discovers in film a reservoir of “incandescent power” that provides a temporary yet intoxicating escape from his spiritual void (p. 104). Though he has ceased to believe in the God of sermons and sacraments, the dazzling allure of the silver screen functions as a surrogate liturgy: a luminous portal through which he fades from his bleak, faithless reality into captivating illusions and imaginative possibilities. In this sense, the movie theater becomes a sanctuary, a site of communicative religion where the disenchanted and disillusioned can still experience ecstasy, renewal, and transcendence without realizing they are practicing a new form of faith.

Therefore, Clarence’s crisis of faith can be read as emblematic of the broader decline of institutional Christianity in early twentieth-century America. Yet for Updike, this decline does not mark the extinction of religion but its relocation to its primal ground in private experience, where the sacred is encountered less in the authority of church structures than in the immediacy of daily life, relationships, and cultural forms. Transcendent meaning does not dissipate but reemerges in new guises, as the subsequent generations of the Wilmot family make clear. Teddy embodies a communal–private faith rooted in service, Essie transforms narcissism and performance into a private–communicative religion shaped by cinema, and Clark pursues a restless private religion of seeking. Together, their stories illustrate how what once seemed to be the erosion of institutional religion is, in Updike’s vision, its reconfiguration into transformed modes of belief.

4. Delivering the Divine: Teddy’s Profound Spiritual Engagement Through Community

Shaped by his father Clarence’s spiritual downfall, Teddy distances himself from church and explicit religious faith, carrying forward the legacy of disillusionment while seeking meaning in less institutional forms. After Clarence’s death, Teddy only shows up in the pews in pivotal moments of his life, like his marriage to Emily and the baptism of his daughter. Yet his occasional appearances in church during significant life moments and engagements with the community as a mailman hint at an intricate, albeit subconscious, dance with private religion. Teddy’s life is intrinsically imbued with transcendent meaning through his engagement in community rituals such as marriage and baptism. He lives in a parish where physical and spiritual realms intertwine, a phenomenon underscored by Janowitz, who asserts that “the residential social organization is the locus within which the stages of the life cycle are given moral and symbolic meaning” (Janowitz 1978, p. 268). This intimate intertwining is articulated by McGreevy, who asserts that “the individual came to know God, and the community came to be church, within a particular, geographically defined space” (p. 24). The rich tapestry of Christian life, woven through sacramental rites, serves as a conduit, connecting Teddy to a profound, spiritual odyssey. Rahner eloquently underscores this symbiosis, stating, “Communities became Church in the context of the liturgy, just as Christ became specific, and corporeal, in the celebration of the Eucharist” (McGreevy 1996, p. 24). In this sacred dance, the church and local community are inextricably linked, affirming the spiritual tapestry that lends Teddy’s existence its profound, transcendent meaning.

Beyond the church, Teddy’s path to becoming a mailman, where he finds a transcendent meaning within the communal, is a winding one. Early in life, his “papery fascination” with stamps, a trait “descended to him from Father” (Updike 1996, Lilies p. 127), hints at his future career. As a teenager, he experiences the indescribable satisfaction of delivering the Morning Call in the commune, a part-time job undertaken to support his family (p. 108). These early interactions with delivery, including the daily mail run at Mr. Addison’s drug store (p. 151), sow the seeds for Teddy’s eventual career as a mailman, where the blend of solitude and community engagement offers him a unique, fulfilling experience.

Teddy’s role as a postal worker was not just a job; it was a covenant of service, a lived experience of his unyielding commitment to his community—the breadth of the town, “a walking route in town, including the colored shantytown in the west end, along Bever Road” (p. 203). His footprints were imprinted on every pathway of Basingstoke, a town where each resident was not just a recipient of mail but a neighbor, a part of Teddy’s extended family. In a letter penned with affection and nostalgia to his grandchild, Clark, Teddy recounts the time when, in his day, they “gave everybody personal service and often delivered letters without an address, just a name” (p. 340), indicating the extent to which Teddy knows his “neighbors.” In turn, to people in Basingstoke, Teddy was more than the town’s postal worker; he was actually a familiar face that evoked smiles and greetings, as recollected by Essie, “She felt such pride seeing her father out in the town in his blue uniform; everybody knew him and said hello, he was like the king of Basingstoke visiting his subjects” (p. 187). Therefore, well known to each other in Basingstoke in the symphony of these human connections, Teddy was not just a postal worker; he was a neighbor, an integral thread weaving the fabric of Basingstoke’s community.

In millennia of interpretation of sacred texts, the notion of “neighbor” extends beyond geographical or familial ties. It is not confined to individuals living nearby or within the same vicinity. The command “love thy neighbor” has evolved from specific prohibitions and duties in Jewish law to a universal precept of divine commandment, embodying an essence of universal love and inclusivity (Rosenblum 2016, p. 116). These sentiments were echoed in America’s foundational scripture, John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity,” composed amidst the nascent moments of the New World in 1630. Winthrop invoked the command “love thy neighbor as thyself,” setting a precedent that would shape the moral and ethical landscape of the nation. This universalist reading of the New Testament is blind to distinctions, lines, and borders; it’s a universal call to compassion and empathy that recognizes no particularities or exceptions. It also recalls Kierkegaard’s perspective, where the “neighbor” is not a physical entity but a spiritual specification, a universal designation that embodies “all people” (Kierkegaard 1962, pp. 52, 89). In this light, Teddy’s service to Basingstoke is not just a professional duty but a lived practice of this universal commandment.

Teddy’s embodiment of the “neighbor” is, in essence, a spiritual journey as much as a physical one. As a mailman, every letter delivered and every encounter along the streets and alleys of Basingstoke becomes a quiet act of faith, echoing the scriptural command to love one’s neighbor in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Though removed from organized religious practice, Teddy enacts a private religion of service in which the mundane merges with the transcendent. His vocation turns routine connections into sacred trust, and in his silent, unassuming way, he becomes living proof of universal love. For Teddy, the divine is not encountered in grand temples but in the ordinary rhythms of daily life, where the bonds of shared humanity themselves take on spiritual meaning.

5. The Sacred Self: Essie’s Narcissism as a Form of Faith

While Teddy’s life embodies a quiet religion of service rooted in neighborly bonds, his daughter Essie (later Alma) represents a strikingly different form of faith. Where Teddy encounters transcendence through community, Essie locates the sacred within the self. Her spiritual impulses merge with narcissism, turning self-admiration and the hunger for attention into a psychologized spirituality that channels transcendence through performance and self-display.

From the start, Essie exhibits key traits of narcissism, including exaggerated self-worth and an extreme desire for admiration. Updike establishes her supreme confidence in her physical appearance, noting that “her lean athletic body was a gift she trusted” (Updike 1996, Lilies p. 226). This unshakeable faith in her superior looks reflects narcissism’s inflated sense of self-importance. He also depicts her relentless craving for attention and stardom: “She felt her stirred-up nerves craving the tickle of attention, the armoring pressure of self-display” (p. 226). Her insatiable hunger for the spotlight underscores narcissism’s excessive need for validation and acclaim.

As her acting career flourishes, Essie’s narcissism intensifies and becomes explicitly linked to her fame. Updike remarks, “Being a star makes you very narcissistic” (p. 309), and Essie revels in the privileged status this confers: “It is a star’s privilege to be the still center which the supporting actors swirl about, generating the action” (p. 267). This delight in being the center of attention shows how her narcissistic sense of entitlement is reinforced by stardom.

Yet Essie’s narcissism functions not merely as a psychological flaw but as a form of psychologized spirituality. As Parsons observes, modern spirituality is “highly individualized, psychological, and rooted in an innate inner divinity” (Parsons et al. 2008, p. 98). This insight echoes Christopher Lasch, who even diagnosed America in this era as having a “culture of narcissism”.2 In this light, her self-centeredness becomes a spiritual journey, where narcissism operates as a vehicle for transcendent meaning and private religion outside institutional norms. The self becomes a sacred site of convergence between the human and divine. In this narrative, her longing for validation turns into a pilgrimage toward transcendent meaning.

Beneath her self-confidence, however, lies an inner void that drives her quest for transcendence. Essie’s childhood reflections reveal how the absence of her grandfather was “a small flaw in her world, a corner missing” (p. 170). Her unspoken yearning for her “dead, unearthly grandfather” (p. 205) suggests that her narcissism masks a deeper hunger for connection and meaning. The relentless pursuit of external validation, while characteristic of narcissism, often leaves her unsatisfied and only intensifies her spiritual longing.

This longing finds expression in performance and cinema, where Essie discovers mediated forms of transcendence. The stage becomes her sanctuary, enabling her to transcend ordinary life and enter “a keener and more efficient” existence (p. 267). Her mystical bond with the camera similarly elevates her, each click affirming her as the universe’s center (p. 214) and offering “a cosmic attention” that lifts her above the earthly plane (p. 266). In the movie theater, she experiences an even broader imaginative expansion: “within the darkened, cathedral-like ambiance,” she feels hidden yet profoundly connected to the unfolding human drama (p. 183). The camera’s omniscient eye unveils hidden facets of life, granting her a kind of divine voyeurism and revelation. For Essie, cinema becomes “a magical lens” through which she can explore the mysteries of humanity and existence, turning artistic recognition into portals of transcendence. In these moments, she is not just an actress but, as Updike notes, “a celestial entity, navigating the liminal spaces between earthly recognition and divine validation” (p. 267), a vision that underscores how her narcissism and spirituality intertwine in the mediated space of film.

Essie’s spirituality also appears in her prayers, which merge genuine yearning with self-affirmation. Her plea to “make me again the young mother I was” reveals both her desire to pour love into Clark and her fixation on her idealized maternal self-image (p. 392). The request that God “heal our lives and take us back and make us all perfect” intertwines spiritual and narcissistic impulses (p. 392). Likewise, her childhood prayer cast God as an audience for her piety, as she imagined herself “broadcasting a beam of pleading” to her grandfather beside God (p. 206). Before performing, she prayed for “poise” and “radiance” (p. 211), treating spirituality as a means of ensuring perfection. Even when she falls back into “the vocabulary and near-nonsense of the little girl praying” (p. 392), her persistence reflects a deeply personal, if self-focused, connection to the divine.

Taken together, Essie’s life demonstrates how narcissism, far from being a mere psychological construct, becomes subsumed into religion. Each act of self-admiration, every appeal for validation, and every cinematic or performative moment functions as a sacred ritual of personal spirituality. Essie’s narcissism is transformed into a private–communicative religion, where the self is both the site and the spectacle of the sacred. In this intimate interplay of psychology and spirituality, Updike illuminates how transcendence survives in modern culture—not through churches but through the mediated, sacred self.

6. Seeking the Sacred: Clark’s Quest for Transcendence in a Spiritual Marketplace

Clark comes of age amid the tumultuous cultural transformations that defined the Baby Boomer generation. This generation, described by Roof as shaped by a “quest culture” and a fluid, self-examining approach to spirituality (pp. 13, 23), navigated a “spiritual marketplace” in which traditional beliefs coexisted and competed with new religious networks and workshops promising self-discovery and inner truths (Roof 1999, p. 101). While Teddy discovers transcendent meaning in his communal role as a mailman and Essie’s spiritual journey is intertwined with narcissism, Clark roams this spiritual supermarket with a restless spirit—always reaching yet never grasping the transcendent meaning he seeks through drugs, sex, film, and the Temple. His quest adds a complex layer to the novel’s exploration of privatized religion.

At the root of Clark’s restlessness lies a void created by Essie’s emotional absence, which deepens his hunger for validation and meaning. At St. Andrew’s, he encounters philosophies ranging from Machiavelli and Plato to Byron, Camus, and Nietzsche—each one challenging his vague childhood assumptions about God. The lunar expeditions of the 1960s, symbolically stripping the heavens of their mystery, only intensify his sense of dislocation and existential anxiety (Updike 1996, Lilies p. 335). His search is not just intellectual but profoundly private, driven by an unmet yearning for the religious certainty he associates with his mother’s Basingstoke upbringing—a faith he feels was never passed on to him. Visits to his grandparents to inquire into Essie’s early beliefs and his superficial baptism in Hollywood provide no secure spiritual moorings. As Updike captures, Clark remains adrift, painfully aware of mortality yet unable to conceive of his own nonexistence: “He didn’t know what to believe; he only knew that he was going to die someday, and that was unthinkable” (p. 335).

This terror of death becomes the defining horizon of Clark’s spiritual search. The thought that life might end with “everything going out like a light bulb” is unbearable to him, while his nightly vision of a “charred and leaden eventuality” reveals his dread of annihilation (p. 335). To fill this void, he turns desperately to alternative frameworks for transcendence. Substances like LSD and cocaine offer him fleeting experiences of escape and illumination. Updike’s vivid depiction—“Could taste all the salt from the margaritas and his septum stung from the two lines of coke he had done on a toilet seat in the Golddigger’s men’s room” (p. 304)—shows both the raw physicality and the intensity of his search. Roof notes that Baby Boomers often held a “passionate belief in the power of personal experience to transcend the historical and societal constraints” (p. 234), and Clark embodies this conviction through his painful yet ecstatic engagement with drugs. As Owram suggests of the psychedelic age, “the old ways would die amid the bright new colors” (p. 209), echoed in Updike’s portrayal of Clark’s LSD-induced “bright little movies sometimes ran without his asking” (p. 293). Lifton describes this inner turbulence as “a world forever being reshuffled in the mind” (p. 43), while Wuthnow illustrates psychedelics’ spiritual power in accounts like Tim’s LSD trip, where he felt himself “floating twenty-five feet above the street and looking down on himself” (p. 135). Clark’s drug use thus symbolizes both the chaos and the transcendence pursued by his generation.

Clark’s sexuality, too, functions as a desperate attempt to touch the divine. His encounters are not reducible to youthful lust but serve as fleeting escapes from existential dread (pp. 335, 359–61). Each sexual act or moment of self-pleasure becomes a dance on the edge of the abyss, illuminated by a brief “inner light” before collapsing back into darkness. The women in his fantasies—including the unsettling Oedipal associations with his mother—become symbols of a profound yearning for primordial unity, a return to a state where existence’s haunting questions are silenced. Yet every orgasm and every moment of ecstasy is transient. In these scenes, Clark is not merely a body in pleasure but a soul in crisis, reaching through the flesh for the divine.

Alongside drugs and sex, cinema offers Clark another avenue of transcendence. For him, film becomes not just entertainment but a spiritual exercise, reflecting the interplay of sacred and profane in his life. Updike shows how visual media—especially television and film—become sanctuaries where characters like Clark seek meaning (pp. 359–61). Roof describes the Baby Boomer as a “spiritual omnivore” (p. 79), and Clark exemplifies this as he absorbs films as potential revelations. So deeply ingrained is this experience that “bright little movies” continue to replay involuntarily in his mind (p. 316), leaving lasting imprints of their transcendent allure. In this way, cinema becomes for Clark a ritual through which he navigates his inner labyrinth, experiencing involuntary moments of transcendence through the visual poetry of film.

Despite these pursuits, Clark remains unsatisfied. His search for transcendent meaning eventually turns toward the Temple of Actual and Real Faith, which seems at first to offer a more enduring sanctuary. Rooted in conservative Protestant traditions, the Temple emphasizes strong personal faith and commitment, presenting itself as “the real thing” (p. 381). To someone adrift like Clark, such authority offers temporary anchorage. Yet the Temple, like drugs, sex, and film, ultimately fails to answer his deepest questions. Jesse’s charisma and promises provide belonging, but the underlying emptiness persists. In the climactic fire, Jesse’s manipulation is exposed, and his death shatters the illusion of the Temple’s sanctity (pp. 406–8). Clark emerges from the smoke to find that this supposed stronghold of faith was only another transient haven, another mirage of meaning (p. 327).

Clark’s unresolved yearning, poignantly echoed in his uncle Danny’s remark that “there’s never an end to needing” spiritual fulfillment (p. 411), encapsulates the paradox of his generation. As Roof notes, Baby Boomers were “seekers,” caught between the desire for certainty and an openness to endless exploration (p. 46). Clark’s odyssey through drugs, sex, film, and the Temple embodies this restless search: he assembles a bricolage spirituality without ever attaining the stable transcendence he longs for. His story reveals both the possibilities and the limits of privatized religion in the modern era. Suspended in uncertainty, Clark remains compelled to continue seeking—a figure whose restlessness mirrors the unresolved longings of his time.

7. Conclusions

John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies offers a compelling meditation on the evolution of transcendent meaning in twentieth-century America. Through a layered exploration of institutional retreat, private spirituality, and communicative religion, the novel dramatizes a generational shift in how transcendence is negotiated. Clarence’s collapse of faith, Teddy’s lived religion of service, Essie’s narcissistic yet spiritualized stardom, and Clark’s restless quest in the spiritual marketplace together reveal that what appears to be decline is in fact transformation: religion persists, but in new guises. Film emerges not simply as cultural scenery but as the central vehicle of transcendence, opening new spaces where the sacred can be experienced.

In this light, the novel shows how the decline of institutional religion is accompanied by the rise of communicative religion, where the discourse on sin is refigured through cinema and media spectacle. What was once construed as a breach of divine order becomes reinterpreted as “civil sin,” a societal contamination to be purged (Schultze 1993, Civil Sin p. 234). In this shift, media generate symbolic enemies—whether political, cultural, or religious—through which American society redefines evil in secular terms. Updike’s novel thus highlights how modern culture relocates transcendence into mediated forms, translating religious categories into the language of spectacle, morality, and national identity.

The significance of this transformation extends beyond Updike’s novel. It shows how modern societies preserve the structures of transcendence even after the retreat of institutional authority, translating them into mediated forms that speak to private anxieties and collective identities alike. Yet Updike also gestures to the risks of this reconfiguration. Private religion, though primal, may drift into solipsism, as Essie’s narcissistic spirituality reveals, or devolve into endless seeking without resolution, as Clark’s restless pursuit demonstrates. Communicative religion, while pervasive, risks reducing transcendence to spectacle, turning faith into a matter of images and performances rather than enduring commitments. Thus, In the Beauty of the Lilies presents not only the resilience of religion but also its fragility when severed from institutional anchors. By reading the novel in this light, we see how literature functions as a diagnostic tool for faith in modern culture: illuminating both the persistence of transcendence and the dangers inherent in its translation into private and communicative forms.