An Anti-Hero Predicts the Future in Graham Greene&#8217;s Classic <em>Brighton Rock</em>

Graham Greene is one of those authors who can easily feel inextricably bound to a specific time and place. His novels’ geographical settings range from Vienna to Haiti to Argentina, but their chilly, distinctly midcentury British style feel hard to replicate in 21st-century America, like the old joke about Mountain Dew killing a pilgrim.

Or at least, that’s what I would have thought a few months ago. Now, however, I find myself thinking about my favorite of Greene’s books, Brighton Rock, and its reflections on Catholic morality, the nature of evil, and the point at which youthful impulsivity becomes sociopathy. Like a lot of Greene works, its setting is vital—the beach resort town of Brighton, later notorious as the site of the IRA’s attempted assassination of Margaret Thatcher. What transcends that is its protagonist, the vicious teenage gangster Pinkie Brown. 

There’s nothing unusual about either a Catholic Greene character or a Catholic villain in fiction, but what makes Pinkie such a singular character is the intersection of his Catholicism with his hormonal teenage impulsivity divided by his evil nature. Anyone raised Catholic can relate to the interplay of the first two—I certainly can—but Pinkie’s Catholicism is also the opposite of a moral framework, serving instead to make him more nihilistic. Pinkie already takes his damnation for granted—it may be the only thing he believes in—and it frees him of any obligation to humanity. “Heaven was a word—Hell was something he could trust,” Greene summarizes. He takes it even further when a member of his gang asks what he believes as a “Roman,” and Pinkie replies “credo in unum satanum,” Latin for “I believe in one Satan,” a play on the opening words of the Nicene Creed.

Pinkie thinks of redemption in similarly abstract terms—he repeatedly ponders the idea of last-second repentance “between the stirrup and the ground,” a cheat code rather than any actual change of heart. 

Pinkie’s religion is in sharp contrast to the local woman who suspects him of murder, Ida Arnold. Ida, an alcoholic and (implicit) sex worker,  has a secular personal moral code that Pinkie can’t seem to understand.“I know one thing you don’t. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn’t teach you that at school,” Ida chides Pinkie’s would-be love interest, Rose.

Pinkie’s warped morality leaves him confused by Ida—and by the idea that she might be a better person than him simply because she’s, well, not a murderer. But Rose, young and innocent, is easy to string along. “You believe in things. Like Hell. But you can see she don’t believe a thing,” Rose tells Pinkie, referring to Ida. He later echoes this back to her, when he tries to keep Rose from accepting Ida’s help, assuring Rose that she is “good,” while Ida is “nothing.” But Ida’s care for Rose tells another story.

In contrast to Pinkie’s visions of hellfire, Ida’s credo offers bruised optimism: “It’s a good world, if you don’t weaken.”

Catholic themes saturate Greene’s literary work like The Power and the Glory, set during Mexico’s Cristero rebellion against suppression of the church, or The Heart of the Matter, about a devout British military man’s moral turmoil over the sin of his extramarital affair. Brighton Rock, however, uniquely straddles his two worlds–plotwise, it’s a thriller, in the vein of his largely irreligious works like The Third Man, the postwar mystery later adapted with an iconic Orson Welles performance. But Greene makes Pinkie’s Catholicism part of the thriller–Pinkie seems largely incapable of feeling moral guilt, but his upbringing and his fear of getting caught combine to create an approximation of Catholic guilt as processed by a sociopath.

All of this might seem very distant, geographically and chronologically, from America in 2025. But as the fringe of the American right becomes its core, the spite that drives them has become increasingly central to their politics–and as many of them embrace a specific brand of conservative Catholicism on top of trolling-as-praxis, the result is something Pinkie Brown could be proud of, even though pride is a deadly sin.

It’s difficult to revisit Brighton Rock without thinking of current TradCath influencers—the kind of people who tweet things like like “having sex with women is gay,” which is on some level intended to be deliberate provocation for the amusement of watching people take the bait. But isn’t it also reflective of a sincere hatred of women? Much like Pinkie, who is nominally heterosexual but hates sex and women too much for it to matter. After the November election, one in particular tweeted “your body, my choice, forever,” another bit of intentional button-pushing that nonetheless reflects an earnest desire to control women without ever having sexual or romantic connections with them. 

The only other real practical vector for Pinkie’s faith is his phobia of sex, which when compounded by standard teenage horniness makes him a virulent misogynist; the text specifically notes that he has never so much as kissed a girl. The plot of the book revolves around his attempt to romance the young waitress Rose, an inadvertent witness in a murder he committed, only in order to neutralize the threat she presents by marrying her and securing spousal privilege. Pinkie bonds with Rose over their mutual Catholicism but is repulsed by her infatuation with him. “She loved him, whatever that meant but love was not an eternal thing like hatred and disgust,” Greene narrates. As the walls close in, Pinkie decides Rose is a liability and tries to manipulate her into a suicide pact, confident that he can coerce a fellow Catholic into a mortal sin. Rose, despite her religious convictions, believes with equal conviction that Pinkie is worth her damnation, a one-sided Juliet. It’s easy for Pinkie to isolate her into doubling down on this idea due to a combination of her neglectful parents and the fact that Ida, the one person with her best interests at heart, is telling her the opposite of what she wants to hear. 

Despite exploiting it as something they have in common and something that makes Ida an outsider (he notices her rosary beads as a conversation starter), Pinkie hates Rose for the naive sincerity of her faith, even as they prepare for their wedding: “She looked like one of those small gaudy statues in an ugly church. A paper crown wouldn’t have looked odd on her, or a painted heart. You could pray to her but you couldn’t expect an answer.” When he briefly finds himself sexually attracted to her, Greene writes, the feeling “disturbed him like a sickness.”

The intersection of Catholicism and far-right politics is not a novel development–Francisco Franco’s Nationalists ruled Spain for nearly four decades, and in America, the Christian Front, a gang of predominantly Irish-American Nazi sympathizers, terrorized Jews in Boston and New York in the 1930s. All but one of the six conservative Supreme Court justices who have taken a chainsaw to women’s rights, labor rights and environmental protections in recent years are Catholic. 

What’s far more contemporary is the smirking, “triggered?” ethos that TradCaths bring to it, all the way up to JD Vance, the nation’s first millennial vice president, who recently invoked the theological concept of ordo amoris to argue against immigrant rights. The subtext of Catholicism as a cudgel became text—literally—during a dispute on the right over the use of the slogan “Christ is King” to taunt Jews. At its heart, the dispute defines what being Catholic means to these people—its words are not for prayers or rituals or comforts, they’re for fuck-yous.

The modern age has also seen growth among so-called Traditionalist Catholics, defined by their rejection of the reforms of Vatican II and, in many cases, specifically its rescission from Catholic doctrine of holding Jews responsible for the crucifixion of Christ. That movement, which once counted Mel Gibson’s Holocaust-denier father as its most prominent ambassador, has since seen an influx of right-wing influencers, adding the incentives of the attention economy to the equation. 

These issues have been simmering beneath the surface against the backdrop of America’s rightward political turn, but they’re bubbling over now with the death of Pope Francis, a target of immense ire for much of the American Catholic right in particular. Francis largely maintained the status quo on women’s and LGBTQIA rights but was particularly outspoken on issues like the climate crisis, the devastation of Gaza and the failures of capitalism. On the last day of his life—Easter Sunday—Francis met with Vance, whose interpretation of ordo amoris he had rebuked months before. Conservative Catholics frequently mock “cafeteria Catholics” who selectively believe Church doctrine while affirming LGBTQIA or reproductive rights, but Francis held up a mirror by reminding them of the doctrine they themselves ignored. 

I grew up with a lapsed-Catholic father and a mother who practiced enough at least to take my brother and I to Mass every week. As a result, I had one of those Catholic upbringings where I couldn’t necessarily recite the Nicene Creed from memory but I still internalized certain key values, like “God is with the poor and the oppressed” and “no matter what you’re doing right now, you should feel vaguely guilty.” So to see people approach Catholicism–and their relationship to the world–from the opposite direction is a troubling sign in already troubling times. What makes Pinkie frightening is that his interpretation of Catholicism doesn’t restrain him, it abets him—and the idea of being ruled by men with that mindset is more frightening still. Because as with Pinkie, that path can only end at the bottom of a cliff.