The Land Surveyor

Religiosity in the UK over the festive season – Bishops wringing their hands

The Observer on the Sunday before Christmas carried articles in different parts of the paper by two British Anglican bishops which were both remarkable in different ways.

Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford started by giving a standard apologia of how religion was an anchor for cultural identity in a world of uprooted drift to anonymous urban living.  But his terms were remarkably downbeat, saying ambivalently of how “for good and ill, religious leaders still command communal loyalty in many parts of the world”, and how the growth of “spiritualism” in Europe is some kind of compensation for the decline of Christian faith.  He also talked of some sincere but, as he admitted, marginal pastor-led peace efforts in Palestine and Iraq as though these were some crumbs of recompense that religion was making for its central role in these and other conflicts. Harries seemed then to recommend religion as little more than offering solace, tranquillity and a spiritual dimension to life, lamely adding the proviso that Christianity also believes that “eternal wisdom…took shape in a particular human life,” Christianity as spiritualism-heavy so to speak.  Harries seems to want to celebrate the new salience of religion that is everywhere talked about now, but he is struggling with the fact that it is all happening in the wrong place.  Where he and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, want to see a Christian revival is in the liberal, socially tolerant democracies of western Europe, not in the middle east or the conservative areas of the United States.  But the closest they can come to finding a revival of this tolerant, liberal religion is new age spiritualism which, even they are forced to admit, is not really religion at all.

Elsewhere in the paper, Richard Holloway, the ex Bishop of Edinburgh, gave an interview on his latest book.  It is pretty clear that he has lost faith in anything like the revealed truth of the Christian message.  When he is asked why he does not come out as an atheist he responds: “I still think of myself as Christian, because I want to expand the envelope of Christianity to include people who no longer hold the thing as referring to a supernatural sphere, but who see it as essentially a great poetical, metaphorical narrative that tells us deep things about ourselves.”  Holloway reduces religion to the impulse towards charity which he sees in both Christianity and Islam, and to finding meaning “in the ways in which we relate to one another in the short time we have, without reference to eternity.”  His vision is essentially a humanist one, but which wishes to keep a link to the emotional and narrative power of religion, and particularly the narrow moral certainty of the injunction to be merciful.  The embodiment of the end point of this ex Anglican bishop’s journey of faith is a quote from a Russian philosopher, from which he takes the title of his latest book: “All religions will pass, but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking in the distance.” 

What was striking to me about both the above articles was how lacking either of these bishops were in any kind of cultural or theological confidence in Christianity.  I know that both of these are members of the liberal wing of Anglicanism, but they are also amongst the most thoughtful exponents of attempts to defend Christianity to a contemporary, intellectually curious audience.  And just like Rowan Williams, they come across as terribly agonised, conscientious and well-meaning, but also as not at all persuasive in their defence of Christianity against the tide of secularism which has virtually submerged the Anglican church in England.

For me, the good take from this is that these hard-thinking Christians are lacking in such confidence.  The bad take, however, and it is one which any serious atheist knows well, is that the interesting conversations one has are always with intellectually curious Christians like these bishops, but these conversations are not the ones that matter in the current secular-religious culture war.  The Christians who are making cultural and political waves at the moment are the ones immune to the kind of reflection and doubt expressed by these bishops.  These reflections, however sincere and significant in terms of their assessment of what the Christian message can now stand for, will lie mustily in the archives of Episcopal libraries and the Observer and will make not a ripple on those Christians who now irrupt into our culture with increasing confidence.  My own lament, and many atheists will recognise it, is why these Bishops, whose doubts are so powerful and conclusive, cannot have the courage of their own consciences and make strong and forceful declarations of their apostasy.

Religiosity in the UK over the festive season – some Christmas Day TV

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.