While Matthew Arnold is credited with suggesting that poetry was about to replace religion in the 19th century, some eighty years later T.S. Eliot deplored "that the whole of modern literature is corrupted by what I call Secularism, that it is simply unaware of […] the primacy of the supernatural over the natural life" ("Religion and Literature", 1935). Under the impact of New Criticism, literature was indeed increasingly understood and taught in the light of "secularism", while "religious" interpretations were disparaged as signs of hopeless backwardness. In the last 30 years or so, however, greater attention has been paid to the spiritual dimension of literary works, to their overt or residual religious content or "message", and to the question to what extent this post-secular turn, as it came to be called, reflects new or reawakened social sensibilities or, in the terminology of our Conference, significant social-cultural transformations. Ian McEwan's novels offer an excellent opportunity to examine this shift in perspective. This paper will deal with four of his novels since the 1990s: Black Dogs (1992), Atonement (2001), Saturday (2005) and Lessons (2022). In all four of them, the focus will be on whether, and to what extent, they exemplify a change towards the spiritual, and whether they confirm, question or even subvert the advent of the post-secular in fiction.