Hard on the heels of Bush’s re-election and the pervasive sense that religious America is on the march, I had mixed reactions to a series of religious irruptions into UK cultural life which I observed over the festive period.
Christmas Day itself on BBC1 saw an interesting progression through a devout and traditional midnight mass at a Roman catholic cathedral, a strongly religious broadcast by the Queen in mid afternoon, and then the irreverent Dawn French comedy, the Vicar of Dibley, in the evening.
The midnight mass was, as ever, a powerful reminder of the institutional and nostalgic attraction of religion. All those carols, the choirboys piping the descant to the famous tunes, the cathedral, the sombre but reverent priests, the pews filled with an observant congregation, seemed to echo through the ages and to represent a kind of significant institutional authority and continuity in the UK’s cultural life. The cosy symbolism of this religious ritual, with its suitably anodyne and goodwill-to-all-men sermonising, devoid of moralistic haranguing or proselytising zealotry, bolsters the lingering image held by a secularised nation of Christian religion as essentially a benign and warm part of our cultural heritage, and somewhat like the monarchy in being outdated and irrational but still somehow fulfilling an important sacral function in the self identity of the nation.
The following afternoon, on cue, we had the Queen’s Christmas Day broadcast, which she devoted entirely to the theme of the importance of religious values and the need for religious toleration. Her message was a fine example of the “woolly Anglicanism” of a certain nostalgic, anglo-centric mindset. The rituals and homely moralism of the Church of England are definitive for her of a certain idealised image of British society, and she indulges the quaint fantasy that the religions of Sikhs, Moslems, Hindus and other new immigrant groups are much the same thing as her own Anglicanism. For her, the essential values of all religions boil down to “respect”, and, although she does not articulate this, to cultural conformity and docility within their communities. Her idealisation of a modern multi-cultural Britain is where every community has its own religion-lite, inducing this conformity and docility but not lighting any fires of proselytising or theological confrontation (aka “fundamentalism”). I particularly enjoyed the nicely symbolic coda to her message which showed a multi-ethnic choir of schoolchildren singing a blatantly Christian carol about a warm and loving Jesus. Christianity was symbolised as itself being the most multi-culturally inclusive religion, and that behind the veil of the appeal to religious toleration was the idea that Christianity trumped other religions because it is less strongly identified with a specific cultural identity in the UK, and hence it can more effectively embrace all of these different ethnic identities. In other words, toleration is fine as long as Anglicanism, with its capacity for incorporation and theological soft-soaping, is the dominant religion in the UK, which is the least you would expect from the Queen as the titular head of the Anglican church after all !
In the nature of television, these two traditional but markedly partisan presentations of religious practice were broadcast without any direct counter-presentation, but in the strange alchemy which is contemporary culture this counter-presentation did not wait long and was manifested in the form of the peak rating prime-time comedy of the evening, the Vicar of Dibley, which has become a Christmas broadcasting institution to rival the Queen’s own broadcast. It ought to fall foul of any blasphemy laws that remain on the statute books, but its irreligiosity is served up in such a “loveable” way by bumbling characters, devoid of any edge or seriousness, that any outraged reaction would itself be seen by the British public as an example of poor taste and, worse, a sense if humour failure. The local church is presented as the preserve of the retired or the unworldly, where sexual licence is the staple element of the comic narrative, without any condemnation, while religious themes when they are touched upon, which is rarely, are always done so with distinct irreverence.
I don’t want to be too portentous in analysing a sit-com, but I think the religious vacancy and irreverence at the heart of the Vicar of Dibley says something significant about the secular state of modern British culture and represents a powerful riposte to the midnight mass and the woolly pieties of the Queen. The serious content of any religious message in the UK today elicits at first embarrassment and then simply refusal on behalf of most people. But millions find amusement in the soft subversion of religiosity in the bumbling parish of Dibley, and the only thing that would shock them would be the suggestion that as a consequence of its evident blasphemousness it might somehow be considered offensive and under existing laws probably ought to be censored.
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