Beyond Belief

The Today Programme, Radio 4. Recently. Another of those perennial laments about how Britain is an increasingly secular nation (made, as customary, by a venerable selection of bearded men who skirt credibility somewhat in wearing frocks so much of the time). Avoiding the instinctive response of, 'well what's so bad about that, then?', the thing that really occurred to me was that, on the contrary, there is in fact an awful lot of belief going on out there. Think about it. More people than not decide that it's actually worth getting up in the morning (managing to disregard poor BBC sitcoms, the "music" of James Blunt, Hazel Blears, sprouts, The Daily Mail, and that nagging fear of inevitably dying at the hand of bird-flu); nearly 1.5 million Britons bought The Da Vinci Code in the firm conviction that it was worth spending hours of their lives upon and that it was not, as Stephen Fry put it, 'loose stool-water of the highest order' (I myself make no judgement here); even Virgin Trains' customers still arrive on time at their chosen railway station in the charmingly sweet belief that there may be, despite all empirical evidence to the contrary, an actual train on which to depart (hopeless romantics all).

So clearly then, there's belief. Lunatic, optimistic, eccentric, necessary, thoroughly individual & so wonderfully human, it is belief nevertheless and it functions to bind us all together into a ramshackle, free, generous, liberal, diverse and, generally on-the-whole, pleasant nation to be. It's just that for these bearded men in frocks, who let us acknowledge here, generously set aside so much of their valuable time to visit radio and TV stations for their lamenting on our behalf, it's the wrong kind of belief that we as a nation are all engaging in. In other words, not theirs. Hmm. I think their slips are really showing there.