Faith invaders: weekend worship takes off

The Prime Minister, who has previously described himself as someone whose faith comes and goes ‘like Magic FM in the Chilterns’, announces that we should be ‘more confident about our status as a Christian country’. Meanwhile, Ed Miliband is bigging up his ‘cultural Jewishness’, despite having had no bar mitzvah. ‘Sometimes I feel I missed out,’ he says.

Although to be Jewish is not quite the same thing as to be Christian — the latter isn’t an ethnicity — both leaders seem to be gesturing at something in common: the attractiveness in a post-religious age of a religious or tribal identity. They seem to say that if you don’t have a religion — be that down to the misfortune of a faulty spiritual radio aerial or having a Marxist academic as a dad — you can still lay claim to bits of one when it suits you.

In this, they are pretty well in tune with the electorate they hope to woo, and with London’s section of it in particular. We are a city of Faith Invaders. It’s not just that London is a multifaith city, which it is, it’s also that it is a city full of multifaith worshippers — people who consume religion like they consume street food at one of those posh farmers’ markets: a nibble here, a nibble there and ‘Ooh, I can’t resist, just a free sample of that’.

We non-believers are atheists when arguing on Twitter, agnostics when we go to carol services on Christmas Eve, dimly C of E when we’re invited to be godparents to our pals’ children. We are proud Sikhs with haircuts. We celebrate the end of Passover and wake up the next morning to a bacon sarnie. We burble on about chakras in our yoga class, study the Eightfold Path with our meditation guru and go to our kids’ primary schools for Diwali.

One 26-year-old writer born into a Hindu Brahmin family says: ‘My granny and grandpa said their prayers twice a day, fasted once a week and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of saints, gods and rituals. My parents took a more laissez-faire approach. These days the only time I turn up to the temple is on big festival days like Diwali, Navratri and Janmashtami, mostly because my mum wants someone to go with her. And they make great samosas.’

My friend J, the 38-year-old manager of a gardening centre, says his Jewish observance is in some ways ‘a social thing — there’s a whole set of rituals and things you do that you all have in common’, but that among his contemporaries it might be quite unexceptional to ‘go to synagogue on Saturday morning then jump in the car and drive to Spurs’. ‘I celebrate Passover,’ he adds. ‘I went without bread for a week, but I ate pork sausages with my matzo.’

There’s no question that we are drifting towards a national state of godlessness in the same way that the second law of thermodynamics describes the universe drifting towards a state of maximum entropy in which everything everywhere is sort of lukewarm. That’s how we’ll end up, as a nation, and I find it rather comforting. Lukewarm. Not fervently believing, like mad mullahs, or evangelically atheistic like Richard Dawkins, but equably agnostic, like the Church of England.

The point, I think, is just that lukewarmness. This state of agnosticism is not a direct rejection of our ancestral religions so much as a shift in our relationship with them. There may be a good reason why Rev has connected so strongly with TV viewers. Secular humanism, as theologians like to point out, is a post-Christian rather than a non-Christian position. The god in whom I don’t believe is definitely the Christian God, for instance, and the god in whom my Muslim friend doesn’t believe is Allah. We have a genial rather than an antag-onistic relationship with our former faiths. It’s like being on good terms with an ex-girlfriend — it frees you up to flirt with other people.

Even the establishment is getting in on the Faith Invading act. In the past, Prince Charles has indicated that on gaining the throne he would like to be known not as ‘Defender of the Faith’ but as ‘Defender of Faith’ or ‘Defender of the Faiths’. The previous Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, while indubit-ably a Christian, was one of such ecumenism that he could be mistaken for an agnostic.

And no consideration of this phenomenon would be complete without a mention of perhaps the most visible of the Faith Invaders: the ‘on your knees, avoid the fees’ brigade. In parish after parish, weary priests are locked in a struggle with pushy parents who turn up every Sunday with their three-year-olds in tow, hell-bent on the recommendation that will get little Timmy into the local church school.