Almost the only thing that your columnist has in common with that man of the moment Kim Jong-un (for he is my superior in every way, reliably reported by North Korean media to be a man of towering intellect and with god-like bowels and bladder that mean he never has to go to the lavatory) is that we are both atheists.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
Missile-rattling Kim Jong-un is presently on all our minds for obvious reasons. Now faith and atheism, too, are in the news with this week's release of findings by a UK research body.
It emerges that Britain the home of Anglicanism, of the Church of England, is seeing the same abandonment of formal religious belief that is going on elsewhere in the well-to-do world. It is happening in Australia, the 2016 Census showed, and is even trundling along in the notoriously pious United States where what sociologists call "religious nones" now make up a quarter of the population.
In Britain the process is dramatic. The Economist, reporting, says that "According to the latest annual snapshot by the National Centre for Social Research the share of Britons who call themselves Anglican has plunged from 40 per cent in 1983 to 15 per cent last year. The generation gap is massive. In the 18-24 age bracket, just three per cent identify with the established church. Over a human lifespan, Anglicanism has lost whatever claim it had to being the national default mode."
But, as in Australia, what The Economist calls "the mass doffing of conventional religious labels" is not necessarily something for evangelical rationalists to rejoice about. Britons, like Australians, are now very likely to report something to the effect that they are SBNR, Spiritual But Not Religious.
The Economist enlightens us that "In a report published in May on British religious nones, a sociology professor at St Mary's University found that about a quarter of these unaffiliated folk say they sometimes pray. About the same share admit to being somewhat religious, and around 20 per cent say they are open to the existence of God".
As discussed a few weeks ago in another of my never-to-be-forgotten columns, it is often the case that those who no longer believe in a God up in Heaven turn to even sillier ideas. In the USA studies show that a belief in alien beings that are in control of our everyday lives is far stronger in people who no longer believe in an almighty God. For lots of us loss of orthodox religious "affiliation" leaves a spiritual void we seek to fill with other sorts of quasi-spiritual fillers.
As a lapsed Anglican (and I was born into and lived until my late teens in the utterly Anglican England The Economist is now reporting as the Olden Days) I'm afraid I have a spiritual void the size of the Grand Canyon.
I'd love to fill the canyon with something else (and in this New Age there is a smorgasbord of mumbo jumbos) but my razor-sharp, university-honed, ever-inquiring mind just won't let me do it.
For the Anglicanism I grew up with was such high-quality mumbo-jumbo, such exquisite tripe that nothing else can compare with it and replace it. Anglican churches and cathedrals (even today I find my atheistic feet taking me to them wherever I am in the world) are so often marvels of architecture and treasure troves of history and art. The great Christian hymns, although written to glorify a God who doesn't exist and so cannot tune His or Her almighty ears to them, are often masterpieces of the finest composers and writers.
Even though I went to a government school for the Lower Classes (our curriculum was all about equipping us to have dirty but useful trades, like grave-digging, mole-catching, swineherding or journalism) these were such Anglican times that every school day began with an Assembly that was also a Christian service.
What classy masterpieces of hymnody we urchins warbled. Some hymns and choruses were so comforting. "There's a friend for little children/Above the bright blue sky" us little children used to trill, glad that a white-bearded, grandfatherly God was up there, guarding us.
Then we would trill "Jesus wants me for a sunbeam/To shine for Him each day."
It was wonderful, then, to feel needed to be a sunbeam. It was surely the most fulfilling employment any of us have known in our lives. To find out, later, that we weren't needed for sunbeamism after all, was a blow.
Try as I may nothing in the New Age/SBNR curriculum (no, not even Finnish Neopaganism, or Ashtanga 'Eight-Limbed' Yoga, or membership of the Greens) makes up for being a religious none, a redundant sunbeam.
