Though philosophers such as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Sartre all argued that religion had little to teach people in the modern age, the decades after the First World War witnessed a tenacious revival of Christian thought. Christianity — and religion in general — had been on the defensive in intellectual circles since the Enlightenment. In the years before 1914, some theologians, especially Protestant ones, had felt the need to interpret Christian doctrine and the Bible so that they did not seem to contradict science, evolution, and common sense. Indeed, some modern theologians were embarrassed by the miraculous, unscientific aspects of Christianity and rejected them.
Especially after World War I, a number of thinkers and theologians began to revitalize the fundamental beliefs of Christianity. Sometimes called Christian existentialists because they shared the loneliness and despair of atheistic existentialists, they stressed human beings’ sinful nature, their need for faith, and the mystery of God’s forgiveness. The revival of Christian belief after World War I was fed by the rediscovery of the work of the nineteenth-
In the 1920s, the Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth (1886–
Among Catholics, the leading existential Christian was the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889–
After 1914, religion became much more meaningful to intellectuals than it had been before the war. Between about 1920 and 1950, poets T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, novelists Evelyn Waugh and Aldous Huxley, historian Arnold Toynbee, writer C. S. Lewis, psychoanalyst Karl Stern, and physicist Max Planck were all either converted to a faith or became attracted to religion for the first time. Religion was one meaningful answer to uncertainty and anxiety and the horrific costs of world war.