Randolph Hughes's Religion: Anti-Christianity and the Cult of Beauty

Abstract

This paper deals with the religious beliefs of Randolph Hughes, an Australian literary figure of the first half of the twentieth century. A student of Christopher Brennan, Hughes violently rejected Christianity and adopted his own philosophical/aesthetic religion based on the primacy of creativity. His religious beliefs led him to support Nazism during the 1930s. This paper examines his religious ideals, his criticisms of Christianity and the connections between those ideas and his view of the nature of European civilisation. It concludes that his attempts to find a substitute for Christianity in a religion of beauty led Hughes to a narrow and intolerant dogmatism that could be described as fundamentalist in nature.