Faith & Spirit Quote by Kingsley Amis

Belonging as a negative space: Amis sketches a man whose Catholicism exists mostly as an absence on a Sunday morning. The line lands because it treats “faith” not as conviction but as a kind of administrative category, the spiritual equivalent of a default setting you never bother to change. “Chiefly” is doing sly work here, shrinking a supposedly total allegiance down to a technicality. The punch is in “currently did not attend,” which implies the nonattendance is not even principled; it’s situational, temporary, almost polite. He’s not an ex-Catholic heroically rejecting Rome. He’s just busy.

Amis’s intent is comic, but the joke bites. It’s a dry portrait of postwar British religiosity where denominational identity often functioned as class marker, family inheritance, and tribal tag more than an active metaphysics. Catholic, Anglican, nothing at all: these can be social facts first and beliefs second. The man’s “faith” becomes something like an address on a form, not a relationship with God.

Subtext: the character wants the comfort of belonging without the inconvenience of practice; he keeps the label for the occasions when labels matter (marriage, funerals, parents, respectability, even a faint sense of moral insurance). It’s also a quiet jab at how institutions can persist as cultural property even when the pews are empty.

Contextually, Amis is in his element: puncturing English pieties with a single sentence that sounds offhand, almost tossed away, yet precisely calibrated to expose hypocrisy without melodrama. The comedy is his scalpel.