Discuss the Pope's attitude towards religion in The Rape of the Lock. What are its implications for his social critique?

The Rape of the Lock demonstrates Pope’s anxieties concerning the state of religious piety during the early eighteenth century. Pope was Catholic, and in the poem he indicates his concern that society has embraced objects of worship (beauty, for example) rather than God. His use of religious imagery reveals this perversion. The rituals he depicts in the first and second cantos equate religion with secular love. During Belinda’s toilette, the poem imbues the Bibles and billet-doux (love letters) on her dressing table with equal significance. The Baron’s altar to Love in the second canto echoes this scene. On the altar—itself an integral part of Christian worship, in particular Catholic Mass—the Baron places “twelve vast French romances, neatly gilt” to honor Love, rather than gilded Bibles (38). Pope symbolizes this equation of religious and erotic love in the cross that Belinda wears. This central symbol of Christianity serves an ornamental, not religious function, adorning Belinda’s “white breast” (7). The cross remains sufficiently secular that “Jews might kiss” it and “infidels adore” it (8). Of course, Pope leaves ambiguous the implication that the Jews and infidels are admiring Belinda’s breasts and not the cross. This subversion of established principles of Christian worship critiques the laxity of early eighteenth-century attitudes towards religion and morality.