Reimagining Faith in the Secular Age: Cultural Theology and the Genealogy of Post-Religious Thought in Father Ted, Philomena, Chocolat, and Fleabag

This paper explores the “cultural echoes” and forms of “post-religious theology” of faith within the secularized context of contemporary Anglo-American audiovisual texts. Drawing on John Dewey’s conception of art as “social experience,” Niklas Luhmann’s theory of “religious system communication,” and Charles Taylor’s reflections in A Secular Age, it argues that although religion’s institutional authority has declined in modern society, it has found new modes of expression and existence through film and television culture. Through close readings of Father Ted, Philomena, Chocolat, and Fleabag (Season 2), this study reveals the transformation of religious belief from doctrinal and institutional discourse to cultural and affective experience. Father Ted employs satire and demystification to deconstruct ecclesiastical authority, opening space for secular self-reflection on religion; Philomena reconstructs faith’s ethical dimension through personal confession and pursuit of justice; Chocolat metaphorically reconciles religion and human nature through sensory pleasure, proposing a “theology of the senses”; Fleabag dramatizes faith’s internal rebirth through desire, confession, and solitude, completing a shift from “God’s gaze” to “self-scrutiny.” These audiovisual texts together form an imagistic genealogy of “cultural theology,” replacing doctrinal preaching with narrative, and reviving theological inquiry through human experience. This “post-religious theology” is not oriented toward transcendence but centers on understanding, empathy, and existential authenticity, marking religion’s regenerative mechanisms and new grammar of faith within modern culture. In an age of “God’s silence,” audiovisual art becomes a new form of prayer—rearticulating faith’s possibilities through laughter, tears, sweetness, and silence.