Locating Christians

A few weeks ago we touched on Will Self’s reasons for going to church, and this morning on the magic wireless journalist Sara Wheeler decided to share hers – ‘not because a bearded old man lives in the sky or because I want to hear a sermon of the “dearly beloved” variety’, whatever she means by that, but because church supplies ritual that ‘helps me cope with anxieties about the gas bill’. Repetitive symbolic behaviour, Ms Wheeler speculates with the aid of Emil Durkheim, is about imposing structure on essentially structureless experience and so reducing anxiety; ‘public telling of morally-charged stories’ helps us understand ourselves; and being aware that you’re doing the same things as others have done before you and will do after you puts your own experiences into a longer, and more realistic, perspective.

Clearly not every ritualised action will carry out these personally and socially worthwhile functions, although you can see shades and reflections of them in everything from the Brownies to golf clubs. Religion is a bit more all-embracing in its explanatory narratives, and has that element of pointing to eternity which is harder for the Brownies to manage. But although many of us may not find it a sufficient reason to engage in religious practice or to persuade others to do so, for others, perhaps lots, it will be enough. You don’t have to believe to get something out of it.

Most of modern evangelistic practice is focused around belief, about bringing nonbelievers to the point of believing, and making sure people who are already in believe harder, as it were. Now, there have to be some who believe in order to make the whole thing work, which is why clergy have to make vows and are encouraged to sharpen and hone their spiritual lives, but perhaps we ought to be less fixated about belief as such. Experience seems to be that people who develop what you might call a dogma-based faith are recruited from the larger number of Will Selfs and Sara Wheelers who have a practice-based faith, and always have been: they ‘catch’ it as a result of doing it. We seem to need more of the latter to generate the former, and not the other way around.