Incredible

It's the middle of the marking period (a phoney war: so many have extensions that there will be No Summer For Vole) and I'm immersed in a PhD thesis that's frankly proving quite a struggle, so obviously my mind is wandering all over the place while I lie awake at night. Yesterday's musing was prompted by the memory of a (rare) text from my dear old mum, demanding to know why I'm not on WhatsApp. My reply ('I'm not 13') was deemed unsatisfactory and resulted in an absolute and unanswerable zinger: 'neither am i im in a group with 4 nuns'.* I do worry about old peoples' literacy sometimes: give them a phone and they think all the rules go out of the window. 

Presentational quibbling aside, it did make me wonder what life looks like from the inside of religious belief. It must be so very different. I should point out that I'm an atheist, and a Catholic atheist at that. I was brought up firmly within church life - serving on the altar, singing in the choir, attending multiple services that protestant atheists might not have even come across - benediction, decades of the rosary and more (never an exorcism, sadly). Sometimes my parents reminded me of Homer Simpson looking for an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet, driving round until 3 a.m. looking for More Mass, preferably in Latin. I'm not sure I ever had - or even understood - what it meant to believe in a deity and the specific one I spent so much time ritualising, but my subsequent lack of belief definitely has the Catholic version as its reference point - incense, music, fabrics, elaborate architecture. Part of my research is Welsh literature, which of course deals with chapel protestantism and its influence to a degree. It's fascinating, and I can see the bones of an entire culture delineated in the spare, austere chapels and their cultural products, but the post-Calvinist atheists nor the C of E ones are like me either. I've always been drawn to the deeply-democratic elements of reform - the Quakers and the swirl of dissenters around in the seventeenth-century - but also repulsed by the purism and what some of them became - just look at Northern Ireland's Free Presbyterians, the Westboro Baptists, or the Protestant group that heckled and picketed me and my church's trip to Walsingham shrine because we were Doing It Wrong, as if jeering an eight-year old from the roadside is the way to elucidate the finer points of theology. 

I also often wonder what the social experience of belief must be like. Imagine being a Christian in about 500AD - yes, your friends and family might occasionally be carted off to the slave pits or be amusingly murdered for the entertainment of the local in-crowd, but presumably there was some sense of being in on the ground floor of something big like holding on to Apple shares in the late 1990s or buying an early Tesla. Later of course, they got to share the imperial pomp of late-medieval and early moderns Catholicism - now it's your turn to burn the splitters, invade vast swathes of the world and generally lord it over everybody, all while cosseted by the finest art, architecture, music and literature available.** Good times. What's it like now though? Being in a congregation of 30 in a building designed for hundreds? Does the fire of belief and knowing you're right keep you warm, or do you wonder where everyone's gone and whether they're right to be jogging or watching TV? Perhaps the last adherents to the Roman gods felt the same way. 

Of course this all assumes that religious belief and my former brand of it is in decline - perhaps this is a white European perspective, and perhaps only applies to Catholicism and the more organised splinter groups like the C of E - I confess I don't understand the post-religious spiritualists among us either. I can't stand the smug, aggressive Dawkins and Co brand of atheism, but I do wonder how crystal healing, for instance, survives when basic science explained well is available at the click of a button for free. I think I understand the decline of religion and the rise of post-religious spiritualism as a product of the Higher Criticism, Victorian science, psychology and the post-Enlightenment collapse, but I just don't have a gap in my psyche that belief would fill. My library is stuffed by genuinely great works fuelled by belief; I'm listening right now to Leighton's Mass For Double Choir and it's thrilling but I have to assume I'm getting a partial experience because what feels like the numinous is purely aesthetic for me. In a way I regret having a poor-quality Latin A-level: I can understand just enough of the words to stop the music washing over me without getting annoyed by the attitudes contained within. 

Mind you, I don't get Tamagotchis, SUVs, jeggings, sunbathing, royalism, Subway or Ariana Grande either, so maybe it's just me. I do like ironing though. Maybe that's my church. 

*I'm friends with several actual clerics and the philosophical gulf between us just adds to the pleasure. It helps that they have a degree of doctrinal flexibility I don't recall the stick-wielding monks and nuns of my childhood displaying. 

** Yes I'm aware that religious impulses have fuelled great acts of charity and education. But I've read enough Kant to know that one shouldn't need a big man in the sky judging you to make you feed your fellow creatures.