Religion was frequently absent from the critical accounts of the Victorian novel offered in the second half of the twentieth century. When religion was mentioned, it was usually positioned as the losing contestant in a battle with secularism. For the influential critic George Levine, the novel is an inherently secular form, with theological explanations supplanted by the material and everyday concerns of the modern world. Levine was far from alone in his view. But as we will see in this module, religion is not so easily removed from our critical histories. Drawing on theorists such as Charles Taylor and Talal Asad, who have helped us think about the relationship between the sacred and secular in a more sophisticated manner, and an array of twenty-first century literary critics, historians, theorists and theologians, the module will explore the different ways in which religion and modernity co-exist throughout the pages of the Victorian novel.