by A 1900s literary scholar finds the Trump-Pope culture war structurally identical to Butler
By Violet Woolf
Violet Woolf Reads About the Meme Messiah and Thinks of the Edwardian Novel
Samuel Butler spent most of his adult life writing a novel about the violence of Victorian religious authority on the individual conscience. The Way of All Flesh was published posthumously in 1903. The novel’s argument: institutional religion imposed without consent produces damage that takes generations to undo. Butler would have found the Meme Messiah versus the Pope situation familiar in structure if not in medium. The medium is the interesting part. Butler wrote long dense Victorian prose. The current cultural argument is conducted in image macros. The content, who controls the sacred register, who gets to invoke divine authority, is identical to 1903.
The Irish Dimension
I follow Irish political commentary because Ireland has spent two centuries negotiating its relationship to religious institutional authority in ways the English literary tradition has largely avoided. The Irish novel, from Edgeworth through Joyce through Banville, is full of the consequences of this negotiation. The Trump-Pope dynamic lands differently in an Irish reading: not abstract comedy but a reminder of how recently institutional religious authority was coercive. I write about this at The London Prat because literature is how a culture processes what it cannot otherwise articulate. Bohiney and The London Prat are doing in contemporary form what Butler was doing: noting, with precision and some wit, the gap between what the powerful say and what they do. Butler could not publish it in his lifetime. We publish it immediately. The gap between statement and reality, however, remains the same size.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/meme-messiah-vs-the-bishop-of-rome/
Originally posted 2026-04-09 11:03:04.
