Nobody in this poem says what "getting religion" means, and that silence is the point. The phrase is an old idiom for a sudden conversion, the kind of thing a sinner does at a revival meeting. Dave Bonta attaches it to a poem in which nobody is converted and nobody prays. A speaker simply moves through a wet day and reports what he sees: a nearly empty church, a coffee-house, a pair of prostitutes, his own front door. The central idea, as I read it, is that the poem goes looking for religion where people actually gather and finds performance and commerce instead. The speaker is not exempt from either.
The construction is bare. Four unrhymed couplets, no punctuation, no capital letters except the pronoun "I". The poem reads like notes jotted on the move, and the flatness is deliberate. Feelings are never named. Instead of saying the church is dying, the poem says "hardly ten people in church" and lets the number do the lamenting. The opening, "rain all morning", sets a damp, grey mood without a single adjective, and "all morning" suggests a long, dull stretch of waiting.
The second couplet is the only place where the speaker offers a judgment: the coffee-house is "like a theater / where the play is not well acted." Because it follows so closely on the church, the comparison seems to spill backward. A half-empty service could be a badly acted play too, with its rehearsed gestures and an audience that has come to watch. That is an inference, since the poem never makes the link explicit, but the verdict comes in the language of a theatre review, not of a believer. People who watch a performance and grade it are spectators, not worshippers.
Then the poem turns. The speaker is "on my way back through the alley", and the alley is the back route, the unlit one. It is also where the first person finally appears. The first four lines contain no "I" at all, only a detached observer. "My" arrives in the fifth line and "I" in the seventh, as though the speaker becomes implicated at the moment he meets "a couple of pretty whores." The phrasing is careful. "A couple of" is casual, the way you might mention pigeons. "Pretty" is the appraising word of someone who has looked. "Whores" is blunt, with no euphemism and no scolding. The poem neither condemns the women nor sentimentalises them. Against the badly acted play, they may be the one thing in the poem that isn't pretending, though the text only hints at this.
The last couplet is the poem's most interesting stroke: "I go into the house / as quiet as money." Money is not obviously quiet. Coins clink, and the proverb says money talks. So the simile has to mean something stranger. Perhaps money is quiet in the sense that it never tells where it has been, passing from hand to hand without comment. Perhaps the speaker slips home carrying something unspoken, whether guilt, temptation, or a transaction. The poem does not say, and the ambiguity is the point. Money also quietly connects the earlier scenes: the collection plate, the price of a coffee, the price of company. Everything the speaker has passed has a cost, and none of it is discussed.
The sound of the ending suits its meaning. The final line is among the shortest, five syllables or so, and it closes on "money", a word whose last syllable is unstressed, so the poem seems to trail off into the house and shut the door. After the blunt nouns of the middle ("church", "whores"), the soft, hushed "quiet" and "money" feel like a lowered voice.
The poem matters because it does so much by arrangement alone. The title promises a spiritual event, and the text delivers a tour of three kinds of public life, sacred, cultural and illicit, with the same flat gaze for each. Readers have to decide whether the speaker is a sharp-eyed critic of hypocrisy or a participant in it. Perhaps "getting religion" here means getting a wry, secular awareness that belief, art and desire all rely on a kind of acting, and that the real faith, in the end, is faith in money.