What’s your Religion?

Fiona Jones ponders the future of religion.   

Britain, according to various statistics, is the least religious country in Europe. Maybe the least religious in what we call the free world.

The statistics tend to be based on things like church attendance, affiliation with a denomination, or how you account for your own existence. Well, all of that does have something to do with religion, but the way I look at it, there’s probably about as much religion going on now as there ever was. And you’re probably just as religious as the lady who puts on her best hat and toddles off down the road to hear what the reverend has to say this week. (Such a lovely man! Doesn’t he look just like Moses?*)

What I mean is that, in our hearts, we all have a sort of altar with something that we adore/aspire to/expend our deepest abilities on. When I was growing up, we had a next-door neighbour who worshipped his car. Every Sunday he was out on the driveway, on his knees, faithfully loving and polishing it. We didn’t belong to his religion. Ours was a rusty old car, and seven of us had to stuff into it.

The cyclists’ cult is more of a group religion. Have you ever sat between cycling enthusiasts at the pub? They work up quite a fervour about their trilithium gears, warp drive chains, and the kind of suspension that almost eliminates the need for bad language on the downhill black route at Glentress.**

And don’t anyone try to tell me that football isn’t a religion. It is.

So is celebrity worship-a sort of aspiration towards tawdriness, made “real” by carefully orchestrated glimpses into the icons’ very, very non-stained-glass personal lives. It reminds me of nothing so much as the ancient Greek and Roman religions, which had a veritable soap opera of gods and goddesses getting in and out of all sorts of scrapes. What a difference a few millennia make.

Which reminds me of the millennial national census, which had a box for “religion”. So many thousands of people wrote “Jedi”, that Jedi had to be added to the official list of national religions. Now that was a great day for future historians to quibble over. Two hundred years from now, they will be getting their PhDs by arguing that we lived in a Dark Age of such hopelessness, ignorance and superstition that thousands of us had nothing better to believe in than a sci-fi prequel. They will compare it to whatever their religion will be, and pat themselves on the back for living in a progressive age.

I wonder what their religion will be like, and more importantly, what it will do for them. Because the big question is not whether you’re religious or not, but what does your religion do?

Does it make your life happier, healthier, more honourable? Does it help you look down on others who score lower on your value scale than you do? Does it help you to leave the world a better place than you found it?

*Real person, real comment. 

**Glentress: place of pilgrimage for mountain-bike acolytes in Scotland; main source of employment at its local A&E.

 

Fiona Jones is married to Robert Jones and has 2 children, Michael and Benjamin. Fiona sometimes works as a primary teacher or a proofreader.