Better are the stories in which religion catches the characters, the author and the reader by surprise. In Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” a man getting drunk with a blind stranger puts the man’s hand on his own and traces a cathedral for him on a grocery bag after they overhear a TV program about the Middle Ages. In Denis Johnson’s “Beverly Home,” a recovering drug addict spies on a woman through a window as she showers and dresses. He sees a truly spicy scene: a ceremony in which her husband — they are Mennonites, she with head scarf and he with beard — seeks her forgiveness for some unspoken violation by falling to his knees and washing her feet.

These stories are not “about” belief. But they suggest the ways that instances of belief can seize individual lives. “Cathedral” has the efficiency of a parable: with the drunk leading the blind, the old Christian edifice comes skeletally into view. In “Beverly Home,” the addict in recovery is a proxy for the reader: a peeping Tom, a voyeur of other people’s beliefs, he discovers that those beliefs, strange as he finds them, join him to the believers in a way that changes him, for they suggest “that there might be a place for people like us.”

“Cathedral” was published 30 years ago, and Carver’s successors make him seem a Solzhenitsyn of explication. Take David Means. In his story collection “The Spot” (2010), Means handles religion like the sludge in the Kalamazoo River, powerful enough to be toxic in anything more than trace amounts. The seminarian who becomes involved with the insurance adjuster in “Reading Chekhov” doesn’t have a belief in his head; the ex-preacher in the title story who once undertook to baptize a young woman in the Kalamazoo waxes eloquent about how he went about it, but the naked waif he baptized is as blank and passive as a porn character. “Go on, do it to me, make me clean or whatever,” she says, and he proceeds to drown her ­uneventfully.

This refusal to grant belief any explanatory power shows purity and toughness on the writer’s part, but it also calls to mind what my Catholic ancestors called scrupulosity, an avoidance that comes at the cost of fullness of life. That — or it may show that the writer realizes just how hard it is to make belief believable. So it is in “The Gospel of Anarchy,” a 2011 novel by Justin Taylor. The book is set at a commune in Gainesville where some young Christian anarchists pursue religion and sex without borders, inspired by one Parker, a lost boy and prophet. Parker’s gospel suggests a slacker’s Kierkegaard, and his friends’ professions of faith are clunky, too: “Was it possible then that it was our yearning itself that delayed him? Was the force of our longing acting as a barrier instead of a draw?” The novel uses multiple points of view, but the one that matters most — that of its narrator and part-time protagonist, David — is the least credible. Where his conversion away from online sex is a perfect piece of realism, it is hard to imagine that he (or anybody) would go in for this Anarchristian stuff.

Randall Jarrell ruefully remarked that when it comes to poetry, you can get a conversation started around just about anything: the lives of the poets, the state of poetry, the craft of poetry — anything but a poem. In American fiction, belief is like that. Belief as upbringing, belief as social fact, belief as a species of American weirdness: our literary fiction has all of these things. All that is missing is the believer.

“It’s really something,” the Carver narrator tells his blind friend, as he ponders the cathedral he’s drawn. Maybe that “something” is enough. But if you think, as I do, that we look to literature to understand ourselves and our place on earth, then belief hasn’t been understood until the serious writers have had their say.

So you keep looking for the literature of belief. You find it where you can. In journalism like Eliza Griswold’s “Tenth Parallel,” where Christians and Muslims encounter each other in acts of geopolitical soul-to-soul; in “House of Prayer No. 2,” a memoir in which Mark Richard, going over the trail of a bizarre life, sees signs from God here, there and everywhere. In “The Children’s Hospital,” Chris Adrian’s fable about an offshore world as religiose as our own; in James Wood’s essays about unbelief as belief’s shadow and echo. In “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” where Dave Eggers’s account of his father’s Catholic funeral suggests why he cares about The Believer. All the while, you hope to find the writer who can dramatize belief the way it feels in your experience, at once a fact on the ground and a sponsor of the uncanny, an account of our predicament that still and all has the old power to persuade. You look for a story or a novel where the writer puts it all to­gether. That would be enough. That would be something. That would be unbelievable.