I don’t mean gothicism! That’s an entirely different thing to this. This is genuinely just a visual “aesthetic” — Catholic horror, theist uncanny. That sort of thing.

Gothicism didn’t necessarily descend from religion. There are religious aspects to it (The Monk by Lewis for example), but it’s more a literary movement born from society’s strict expectations of the late 18th century. That’s the same reason why gothicism doesn’t necessarily need to be horror, and why you can attach “Gothic” to any and all kinds of genres (southern gothic being a popular one). It’s a worship of nature, a push back of the role of a woman (eventually. ofc it began with Radcliffe and Walpole having women be the damsels in distress), and links more to romanticism than religion.

Ofc it takes a lot from really classic works, and you can see its infancy in works such as Inferno, The Faerie Queene, and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, but otherwise I’d say the gothicism that’s most thought of nowadays (stuff like Wuthering Heights, Jekyll and Hyde, Frankenstein etc) is more an amalgamation of societal rejection and romanticism. Frankenstein especially since Mary married an avid atheist who was kicked out of Oxford for that.