The ultra-manly but increasingly criminal Ray Donovan, played magnificently by Liev Schreiber? Or the narcissistic girl created and played by Lena Dunham? No doubt I’ve already skewed the question, not to say missed the point entirely, by asking who is the better person? A more appropriate or polite or sophisticated question would not doubt be more purely aesthetic and non-judgmental. But read on, if you please.

Peter Lawler argues for a conservative appreciation of “Girls” on the grounds that it shows the destitution of expressive individualism taken to the limit. When there are no serious moral boundaries, and hardly anyone even remembers when it was necessary to attack laws and customs that limited consensual gratification, then the hollowness of the purely anthropocentric worldview becomes fully apparent.

Does it matter that the author (Ms. Dunham) seems wholly oblivious to the moral-religious implications of her send-up of expressive liberalism? (Peter flirts amusingly with the possibility that Dunham, in her non-fiction self-presentation, is exercising an esotericism of the most rigorous kind, but I don’t suppose he expects anyone to see this as really plausible.) It does seem that “Girls” portrays the dead-end of purely secular liberalism in various manifestations that are surely not intended as attractive. (I am relying mostly on what Peter and Ross Douthat have written, because I’ve only seen an episode or two of the series.) But is there even the slightest hint of a moral judgment? We can see the defect of character education, but should we allow ourselves to hope that Ms. Dunham sees what we see? (If she did, would she be the utterly secular-permissive liberal that she is?)

No doubt “Girls” is susceptible to a kind of aesthetic appreciation of the inadequacies of a purely secular and naturalistic understanding of humanity. No doubt the send-up of superficiality indicates some slight opening to transcendence, some crash in the “Immanent Frame” of our liberal-progressive existence.

“Immanent Frame” is a term some will recognize from Charles Taylor’s huge, rich, sprawling, brilliant and self-indulgent A Secular Age. (Happily this unwieldy tome has recently been made more wielding in a fine homage authored by James K.A. Smith: How (Not) To Be Secular. Much to his credit, although the main point of the book is to praise Taylor and digest his ideas for a wider audience, Smith proves himself capable of hinting at and sometimes beginning to state a trenchant critique on a key point or two. But that for another post I hope.) According to Taylor, we moderns all live now in an “Immanent Frame,” the frame of secularism, and even those of us who want to be believers have to accept the historical fate of “believing” within and in response to this frame – believing almost as if we didn’t (my phrase, not Taylor’s or Smith’s). The most we can hope for is to pick up on certain “cross-pressures” that send ripples over the otherwise calm self-satisfaction of a purely secular age. These ripples must not be taken to point to some authoritatively transcendent reality, but only to disturb the surface of pure secularism and keep our sensibilities (if not exactly our minds) open to some undefined otherness, some dim possibility beyond the purely this-worldly.

These exquisite little ripples that politely disturb the surface of a massively secular age are represented by writers such as Ivan Illich and (for Smith) David Foster Wallace. But one can see how “Girls” as appreciated by Peter Lawler and Ross Douthat would fulfill the criterion as well: uneasiness with the absolute victory of the secular is suggested, but no alternatives are taken seriously – certainly not an alternative in which a religion with some moral teeth in it is reconsidered.

This is where I find Ray Donovan far superior (and these I have all watched, though with my video filter removing all nudity and F-bombs, the 52-minute episodes are reduced to a manageable 7 minutes, just the time I need on my elliptical machine). To be sure, Ray has gotten completely out of control in recent episodes, being sucked fully into the world of ruthless crime, whereas at first he seemed to be somewhat precariously on its margins. Ray is now a lost soul, and he appears on the verge of losing everything. But his attachment to a real family and even to his Catholic faith are not forgotten; nor is it transformed into an aesthetically interesting “cross-pressure”. When Ray is asked (by his lover!) if he loves his wife, the answer is a morally convicted “yes” (to be sure, this was before she … gave up on him). When Ray is asked if he is Catholic, there is more than aesthetic sensibility in his trembling: “I used to be.”

The real moral seriousness of the show comes out especially, though, in Ray’s brother Terry. You have to see the scene in the best episode, “Bridget,” when Terry goes to confess to a Priest. The Priest doesn’t even take sin seriously, and just wants to help Terry “get over it” – but Terry needs something stronger than a faint “cross-pressure” within an “immanent frame,” and he leaves the Priest in disgust: “You’re not helping me.” And then in the last episode, Terry is shown directly confronting the fact that he is “not a good person” – and forcing Ray to confront it, too.

Now this is a real “cross-pressure.” It frames the question of transcendence in terms of how we live, and not just in terms of aesthetic sensibility. This is “Ray Donovan” is not only much more morally serious, but also much more seriously open to transcendence than “Girls.” And yes, much more beautiful. If Lena ever asks whether she is “a good person,” then I’ll take her seriously.

The pre-modern tradition was right: moral seriousness and intellectual insight are finally inseparable. Amoral aesthetic spirituality is very hard to distinguish from conformist relativism and shallowness. A God who cannot in the slightest govern our sexual desires cannot really open up a dimension of transcendence.

And by the way: Thielism is incapable of resistance to this decadence, this relativism and shallowness.