We've turned our backs on faith and now 'times are tough' is the new 'the gods are displeased'
Do we live in a "godless age"? Opinion is divided. Ask someone arriving for an appointment at the abortion clinic to find a picket of human mothballs warbling bits of the Old Testament at her, led by an angry 1970s sitcom character with poor megaphone technique and a faraway look. Yeah, ask her. She'll probably say no, sadly we don't live in a godless age.
Ask someone arriving for early Sunday communion to find the churchyard's consecrated ground littered with pizza boxes, empty bottles of peach schnapps, muddy pants and rudimentary crack paraphernalia. He'll probably say yes, sadly we do live in a godless age and would it really be too much trouble for people to put their rubbish in the bin that is clearly visible a few yards away?
When we say godless, though, we mean Godless. Over the past half-century there has been a steady and inevitable decline in the influence of Christianity over our lives. Traditional certainties have evaporated. Few people now own a Bible, or think it wrong to buy alcohol on a Sunday, or believe the cosmos to be the dominion of a Billy Connolly lookalike. Those who defer to a Christian God are resigned to being minority weirdos, defying a harsh secular Antarctica in a diminishing huddle. The Last of the Anglican Penguins.
For a snapshot of religion as a niche activity, go to an 8am Book of Common Prayer service in an Anglican cathedral. There'll be maybe a dozen people. Specks of plankton in a stone whale built to hold a congregation of thousands. Most will be old. Once in a while, a pilled-up student will blunder in on his way home, slump into a pew and gaze with mumbling awe at the trippy sunlight going all, like, fractal through the stained glass.
OK, parish churches might be heaving during family services later in the day but there are variable factors here, boosting the numbers. Accessible prayers in contemporary language, for instance, with all that awkward poetry and beauty ironed out. Autotuned pop hymns performed by proto-Gagas. The affiliated junior paramilitaries of Cubs and Brownies attracting doting atheists. Hip young vicars doing edgy standup from the pulpit. Proximity to a desirable faith school with excellent Ofsted results.
Let's park God for a moment. What about lower-case "gods"? Classical gods. Zeus and Hera and Aphrodite, that lot. The heavenly 1% in their togas, flopping about on beanbags made of clouds, looking upon us with derision and contempt. Hurling down random miseries on the human race, casually, for sport. "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods," observed Shakespeare, the will.i.am of his time.
See, I think the old gods are back. We all seem to have accepted that divine forces, capricious and spiteful, are once again shaping our destiny. Politicians these days present themselves not as leaders but as priests – interpreting signs, attempting to appease, offering sacrifice and obedience in a bid chiefly to placate wrathful Economos, the god of capital. "Times are tough" is the new "the gods are displeased". Economos seems a bit of a bastard, to be honest. One day he's all smiles, bathing the Earth in golden money sunbeams and a gentle rain of perpetual equity. The next he's got the right hump about being taken for granted and has pished down a hurricane of vengeance that's circled the globe, leaving everything in stinking ruins like a deserted Glastonbury field full of smashed-up chemical toilets.
Cutbacks, austerity, the erosion of our public realm, the denigration of the young, the poor and the disabled. Every time that prolapsed smirk of a chancellor stands up to announce some new spiteful turn of the screw, he seems to glance skywards, shrug and silently indicate the sky, from where Economos gazes down approvingly and chuckles along with his horrible fellow gods: Porno, god of the internet; Narcotica, goddess of the black market; Troll, god of social media.
Apparently, the gods conspire to make life as unpleasant as possible. And we collude. "What can you do?" we say. "It's the spitegeist …" Oh yeah, the spitegeist. It's how the government is able to foment mob rage against anyone outside the aspirational vector of hard-working families/striving middlers/Forty Shades of Taxpayer/whatever it is this week.
As Zoe Williams so brilliantly argued recently, the coalition is happy to reward disabled means-testers Atos and security people-farmers G4S, not in spite of the spite they attract but because of the spite they attract. We're under new management now. Private contractors are the bouncers on the big society door. If your names's not on the spitegeist list, you're not coming in. Temporary, careerist ministers talk tough and deflect blame, as insulated from the consequences of their spiteful actions as a drone pilot tipping death from the sky of another continent.
The only possible explanation for our acquiescence in this spitegeist is that we believe in pre-destination, that we have collectively decided we just have to ride out some supernatural strop. Wait for the gods to be in a better mood. But for the time being, having validated our own irrelevance in a world defined by cruel hierarchy, we harden in their likeness.
What should we sacrifice next, to the gods of the spitegeist? Postwar society's first-born, the NHS. Unless – and here's a blasphemous thought – the gods don't exist.