Don DeLillo is a profoundly religious writer. He is a religious writer because of the questions he asks rather than the answers he finds. He is a religious writer because of how he depicts characters wrestling with moral problems, not because of how those characters emerge victorious from such battles. He is a religious writer because his work is persistently drawn to sacred encounters with the numinous, immanent, and transcendent, even though such moments may prove illusory and are always transient. This chapter traces the evolution of critical perspectives on DeLillo as a religious writer, beginning with postmodern critiques of his metaphysical preoccupations, to defenses of DeLillo’s redemptive moral vision, through post-secular reassessments of his enduring reverence for quotidian mystery. The chapter then examines specific manifestations of spirituality in several DeLillo works, particularly White Noise, Libra, and Underworld. DeLillo raises religious questions and offers responses ranging from parodic skepticism to partial faith. He features religious meditations which glow with quotidian mystery yet remain enveloped by an impenetrable cloud of unknowing.

Religious ideas experienced a relatively brief literary renaissance following the war. Soon however references to religion were used as a means of problematizing high literary claims to promise meaning. Developments in the Federal Republic differed significantly from those in the GDR, although in the 1970s the question of literature and religion was strongly politicized in the Federal Republic too. From the 1970s onwards ‘coming to terms with the past’ (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) and related moral and aesthetic questions played an important part in the presence of religion in literature. In other respects religious forms of writing and thought were taken up in order to represent the inwardness of the New Subjectivity and to rethink the possibilities of art. Especially in drama we find a powerful engagement with ritual, and this became an important point of reference for modern ‘post-dramatic’ theatre. Finally, literature of the last few decades reflects the indeterminacy of a ‘post-secular’ age in which the modern understanding of religion and of its—marginal—place in modernity is put in question.