I’ve been watching the HBO show “Carnivale” for the past couple weeks. I’m hopelessly behind on all the intricate plot twists and back-story, but I’ve found that that hasn’t kept me from getting a little hooked on it.

Which is good. The classic HBO hits like “Sopranos” and “Six Feet Under” have gotten me in the habit of watching a thought-provoking (if graphic and sometimes nerve-shattering) show on Sunday night. I’ve given up on “Six Feet Under” after I realized that the characters were never going to change no matter what happened to them, and I think we’re still a couple months away from the new season of “Sopranos” — and so there’s “Carnivale”.

With “Sopranos,” the hook — the thing that’ll grab you and keep you watching — is graphic mobster violence and what it does to people’s lives. With “Six Feet Under” it’s human dysfunction. With “Carnivale”, it’s just plain weirdness. Weirdness ought to get a prime spot in the credits at the end. I don’t think they could do the show without it.

To give a little of the plot — what little I know — the scene is mid-America during the Depression. Ben, a young man of about 20, is our protagonist. He is on the road with a traveling circus, which is peopled (as one might expect) with some world-weary sideshow acts and a lot of hard-bitten workmen. A parallel plotline features Ben’s evil alternative, the show’s anti-hero — an evil Revival Tent-style preacher named Brother Justin. Both Ben and Justin have visionary powers. Ben occasionally uses his to aid him in his crusade to find his father. Brother Justin uses his, and his considerable powers of manipulation, to help build his own private empire. Both characters are being taken somewhere by the events of their lives. You get a feeling it will be very bad for everyone if Brother Justin gets there before Ben.

That’s it at its most basic. But what I’m leaving out is the sheer amount of weirdness the show manages to cram into one hour. It’s not just the sideshow freaks that are bizarre, and it’s not only the tough guys that are vulgar. Ordinary things aren’t ordinary. Visions and horrors come from nowhere, and sinister omens constantly bode an ill wind.

The show intrigues me, because I think that secular people are telling us again about life the way they see it. It’s been my observation that artists, actors, musicians — storytellers of all kinds — will always tell the same story, given enough time and a big enough canvas. It’s the only story any of us really can tell. Perhaps the only difference between Christians and non-Christians is that at least we have a box of paints — we have a vocabulary and a context. Non-Christians struggle. They don’t want to believe in the spiritual realm as we describe it, and yet that doesn’t exempt them from podvig (spiritual struggle). They see things, but they don’t know what they are. They have rejected the Christian interpretation of life and the world, but they’re making a slow and heart-breaking crawl toward their own kind of epiphany. Forty years ago, a rationalistic existentialism was in vogue. Atheism was the ideal, and it didn’t need to offer anything in place of the beliefs it sought to abolish. Now, quasi-religions spring up everywhere because even the most hardened of secularists is starting to find that you need to believe in something after all.

But believe in what? In Christianity? Certainly not. Ben has powers, and so does Brother Justin. There is, after all, a very tentative concession that there is … something. Hymn-singers, fundamentalists, preachers, people with Bibles — (I’m assuming these are the images of Christians that come to the secular mind) — they do, after all, know something. But they’re evil. All of their good words hide hate and depravity.

This is the usual fare, of course, from our nation’s story-tellers. Christians in this country have gotten used to it, really, and my point isn’t a rant about the anti-religious bent of this community. We already know it.

But it’s just interesting to see the world from their point of view. Christians are too horrible to be borne, and yet, I see things that remind me of what they say. There are flashes of insight that come from I don’t know where. I’m on a quest. I have to find someone. I’m on a journey. All of life around me is somehow false, and it’s hideous. It’s all surreal, like a dream I can’t wake up from. Others don’t see it — I’m the only one. I can’t tell them what I see, and they can’t help me. They seem happy with their lot, with wandering forever through this Dust Bowl as if there’s really anyplace we have to get to or anytime we have to be there. But I’m not happy. I have some kind of power, but I can’t control it. There are meanings to occasional words, glimpses, conversations, chance meetings, but I never know what they are.

There’s a tremendous longing that runs throughout these shows, and a terrible loneliness. It spells out more of the condition of the non-Christian’s podvig than a hard-hearted woman like me can bear. Your own soul can be a terrifying thing, if you don’t believe in souls. And Destiny or Fate — or any of the other myriad epithets that secular people employ to describe what is, for them, indescribable — must be the most frightening thing of all.

Non-Christians look at us and see ogres. They think that we judge them or hate them or are afraid of them. Sometimes they might be right. But the hardest thing of all — probably for us and them — is when we love them.