The Gospel According to DH Lawrence

‘I have my own religion’, wrote DH Lawrence, in a letter ‘which to me is the truth.’ Remembered as a prophet of the sexual revolution, Lawrence was also, in his own words, a ‘passionately religious man’, whose novels were written ‘from the true depth of [his own] religious experience’. Bertrand Russell compared him to the prophet Ezekiel; Katherine Mansfield to Saint Paul; while gaunt and bearded, he was often likened to Christ. He died in 1930, but remained a writer of spiritual intrigue. WH Auden spoke of ‘cars of women pilgrims’ who descended upon his New Mexico memorial shrine, while a bishop spoke in his defence at the posthumous obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. But can he help us make sense of spiritual belief today?