The Simpsons, Sally Rooney and spirituality

I often think about a scene in The Simpsons Movie (2007): a terrifying dome comes down on Springfield, and its citizens are thrown into disarray.

In the panic, we see the church and Moe’s Bar emptying out, the congregants and the drinkers standing outside the respective buildings, looking up in horror.

A split second later, everyone from the church runs into the bar - and everyone from the bar runs into the church.

It raises a searching question: when push comes to shove, how many professing Christians, for all their external religiosity, would turn to a worldly source of comfort? And how many outsiders, who never darken the door of a church, might we see turning to God?

Novelist Sally Rooney: Is her popularity earned?

With that vignette in mind, I want to consider the writing of Sally Rooney. The young Irish novelist has been fêted as the voice of her (and my) generation, holding a mirror up to the Millennial experience.

Her debut novel Conversations with Friends (2017) and her hugely successful Normal People (2018) have both been adapted for television, and Beautiful World, Where are You (2021) and Intermezzo (2024) testify to her ambition and thoughtfulness as a writer.

There are some aspects of her work that immediately locate her outside "the bar", as it were: her novels feature lengthy, graphic and sometimes gratuitous sexual scenes (for which reason alone I couldn’t recommend them to everyone), and its characters ponder the evils of capitalism with Marxist critiques that, at times, veer into the dogmatic.

Rooney’s work is not, however, reducible to these concerns, nor is her popularity unearned.

Her novels speak perceptively of, and powerfully to, questions of human identity, relationship and flourishing. Her prose can be lyrical, even ravishing; she is deft in capturing the cut-and-thrust of conversational exchange (in person or, as in contemporary life, on various messaging platforms), and there are moments of psychological insight that only a brilliant novelist can accomplish. Her work invites and sustains deeper reflection, and each of her novels could easily be the subject of a much longer piece.

But given that many of us (and still more of our friends) will have read her, I want to share some broader thoughts. Though we might initially position Rooney outside the bar, might she be one of those scurrying into the church?

Is there a greater depth to Rooney's work?

The cast of a Rooney novel quite often ranges across several disparities: of wealth, of age, of class, of educational background. As the characters relate across these disparities, they - and the narrator - are acutely aware of, even anxious over, the tensions that result, not least in terms of imbalances of power, and the mercenary possibility of being used to getting what you want.

Rooney knows the critical theory which raises these stakes and sharpens these dilemmas, and her work is marked by the standard political orthodoxies one expects from our cultural elite (witness her professional refusal to endorse an Israeli translation of her work). At times, this results in her characters trotting out ideological bona fides in ways that fall flat, like overhearing smug undergraduates trading in the superficial and anodyne.

At other times, Rooney’s treatment of these themes is grounded more interestingly: holding the right opinions doesn’t automatically produce virtuous character (just like life, her novels are full of people with the ability to say the right things and at the same time to do the wrong things), nor does it make life easier. If anything, it leaves one with painful questions, revealing our complicity in wider networks of injustice and exploitation.

As T.S. Eliot once asked, "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" One senses that Rooney sincerely believes in the rightness of some of these critiques - but is aware of their limitations, as well.

Rooney’s work addresses a largely post-Catholic Ireland, but, to play on the trope of "Catholic guilt", it goes to show that once the Catholicism is taken away, the guilt still remains.

This is evident in Rooney’s ambivalence around wealth: money sustains the beauty and culture which Rooney (and her characters) appreciate. She writes with a sensual appreciation of the finer things in life: a French villa, the sights of Rome, the opulence and elitism of Rooney’s alma mater, Trinity College Dublin. These are things her characters enjoy, but at the same time feel guilty over.

In this vein, one might consider the success of TV shows like The White Lotus, in which extraordinary wealth is simultaneously lusted after and recoiled from, and in which the audience can have our cake and eat it, both enjoying the visual splendour wealth affords, and at the same time decrying its corrupting effects as a moral consolation prize, since most consuming this media won’t ever enjoy the lifestyle on display.

Both thinking and overthinking underpin much of Rooney’s work.

Sex: The secular sacrament

Sex and sexuality feature prominently: as already mentioned, this might be good reason for some of us to avoid her novels. But some of the ambivalence we’ve already registered is present here, too.

On the one hand, her characters partake of the post-sexual revolution freedoms that the Millennial generation has "enjoyed": sexual performance can be valued as such, apart from any meaningful sense of committed communion, and even offered on a transactional basis (as with Intermezzo’s Naomi, selling images of herself online, and, it is intimated, more than images in person).

The traditional boundaries are considered no longer fit for purpose, and a life without sex seems scarcely worth contemplating in Rooney’s world.

On the other hand, more than anything, Rooney’s characters want to be wanted; sexuality without tenderness is a nightmare some of her characters embrace in moments of self-loathing, but it is no less of a horror for being chosen. There is a revulsion at pornography and the extremities to which it descends, and it is clear that Rooney’s characters crave a wholeness and a mutuality in sex that proves painfully elusive.

In fact, in the Rooniverse, everyone longs for sex to deliver something transcendent.

It becomes a secular sacrament, signifying and sealing the love which her characters think will complete them. Often, this is experienced as something disruptive, even destructive - sexual desire is a powerful force, warping and threatening to overthrow the boundaries and order that shore up the characters’ lives.

It is as if her characters are confronted with a wager: could this relationship be worth ruining your life for? Might this person be able to give you what nothing else - not political virtue, or gainful employment, or even current relationships - seems able to deliver? Chasing after it leads her characters to risk everything, not least their reputation.

As Intermezzo’s Peter experiences it, it’s a choice between spiritual death and social death; the former the result of settling for someone "normal", and the latter the result of stepping beyond those norms.

"Normal" is a charged word for Rooney: on the one hand, it represents something too conventional, too vanilla, to be glamorous or interesting; on the other, it is an unattainable goal for those whose choices or personality have placed them outside what is acceptable.

In this connection, it is noteworthy that absent and inadequate parents litter Rooney’s oeuvre, and there are queasy moments where the disparity in age and experience suggests that surrogates for this are being sought after in sexual assignations.

Rooney's literary exploration of faith

Perhaps unexpectedly, Rooney thinks deeply and persistently about faith. For all that she writes in a post-Christian (specifically, post-Catholic) Ireland, the figure of Jesus and the presence of the Church are not shallowly dismissed.

In her first novel, the possibility of God is entertained as "a shared cultural practice so widespread that it came to seem materially real, like language or gender". So far, so Marxist - but Rooney’s interest deepens over her novels, and in her more recent works, God is the source of much deeper reflection, and Rooney is too wise to pretend that we can deny God and hold onto what matters most.

Take this moment from Beautiful World, Where are You: Felix scoffs at Simon’s Christian faith as deluded, and Alice defends Simon as being able to believe that there is a difference between right and wrong. When Felix protests that he believes that, too, Alice’s response is penetrating: "Oh, you are deluded, then, she said. If we’re all just going to die in the end, who’s to say what’s right and what isn’t?"

Indeed, Alice and Eileen’s email exchanges are unabashed in treating overtly theological themes. In one, Alice writes movingly of her love for Jesus as qualitatively different from her love of any literary character, and in another, she ponders God as the ground of beauty and the bedrock of ethics:

"I suppose the point I’m making is that there’s no end of fun to be had once you get into the Christian mindset. For you and me it’s harder, because we can’t seem to shake the conviction that nothing matters, life is random, our sincerest feelings are reducible to chemical reactions, and no objective moral law structures the universe. It’s possible to live with those convictions, of course, but not really possible, I don’t think, to believe the things that you and I say we believe. That some experiences of beauty are serious and others trivial. Or that some things are right and others wrong. To what standard are we appealing? Before what judge do we argue our case? (Beautiful World, Where Are You, p. 232)."

These are exactly the questions we ought to ask, and we ought to pray for Rooney’s readers to pause and ponder them.

To return to the Simpsons vignette, what keeps Rooney from rushing from the bar into the church?

There are flashes of spiritual understanding and even longing in her work. One could argue that her novels are partly animated by this question: what do you do when what you love, and what matters most, ends up being on the wrong side of a sacred-secular divide?

Jesus: The Truth

I suppose, in closing, we ought to note one aspect of the Christian mindset that is undiscovered territory for Rooney’s characters, and perhaps for their author.

While Rooney is eloquent in presenting the aesthetic appeal of God (and the character of Jesus), and penetrating in setting out the ethical implications of dismissing Him, at no point does the truth claim of Jesus bear out.

If we take the classical triad of universals, Rooney sees how beauty and goodness cohere in God - but not yet truth.

Unless and until we reckon with Jesus’ claim, in John 14v6, to be the truth - not just the life in all its beauty, or the way in all its moral perfection, but also the truth that secures all reality - we will always be on the wrong side of the divide, looking longingly but hopelessly across at the things that matter most.

On the other side, as Alice puts it, there’s no end of fun to be had: there is life to the full, and eternal pleasures at His right hand.