| I DON’T KNOW how it is in a well-organised home, but in my house good magazines pile up in drifts before being read; so I often find myself thinking that there is something perfect for this column before noticing it is six weeks old.
But anything thought-provoking enough can survive a wait like that, and Hilary Mantel’s piece on New Age belief in The London Review of Books for 24 January contained one passage about religious belief which struck me as very wise indeed:
“In fact, if you hang around the anomalous long enough, you see that most people within its range have an unexpressed but quite sophisticated sense of ambiguity. They go to a ‘psychic fayre’ in a spirit of temporary suspension of disbelief.
“It is just as if they had picked up a novel. For a limited time, events unfold around them as a powerful second reality. They read the story, or listen to the dead talk in a public hall; two hours pass; they close the book or rise from their seat, they shut down that other world, run out into the high street and go looking for a pizza.
“In Britain, where mainstream religion is dwindling into a mix of apathy and superstition, alternative views are not part of the counter-culture but part of popular culture, with its extensive TV spooks programming and Mind-Body-Spirit events held every weekend in sports halls up and down the country: the ineffable now smells of stale sweat and hot feet.”
She goes on to be disobliging about American fundamentalism, by contrast, but I am not sure that this is worthy of her, since all the indications we have are that American belief is approaching the same condition.
TAKE the long piece on Beliefnet.com in Saturday’s Financial Times magazine. As this is the FT, there is quite a lot about the site’s financial success: it was nearly bankrupted when the dotcom bubble burst in 2002, but was sold last year to Rupert Murdoch for about $40 million.
The FT’s explanation of the site’s success does give some credence to the idea that the firm contours of American Protestantism are dissolving into a New Age soup. During the depth of the company’s problems, it was kept going by the revenue raised not from the sale of devotional material, but from ads for vitamin pills and diet supplements. These were profitable because the readers clicked on them, which suggests the important part that hypochondria plays in popular spirituality.
Later, the site moved into an acronym new to me: “what marketers refer to as ‘Lohas’ (Lifestyles Of Health And Sustainability). This is a catch-all movement devoted to everything from community agriculture and corporate social responsibility to Pilates and ecotourism.
“Whether or not it is a good thing for religion, it has certainly been good for business. Lohasians are now the second-largest group on Beliefnet after Evangelicals. . . They have not only increased traffic, but also helped to expand the site to a new category of health-and-wellness advertisers.”
This is apparently what attracted the papal knight Rupert Murdoch to the site. He already owns Zondervan, the Evangelical publishers, and has a special division of HarperCollins devoted to faith-based books. Beliefnet would allow Fox Entertainment to expand the penetration of its DVDs into a new market.
In the light of some of Rupert Murdoch’s other media properties, it is hard to see him as a particular campaigner for any sort of morality. None the less, the FT does worry a little that News Corp “could throw its marketing muscle behind particular religions or preachers in the same way they promote blockbuster films”.
THE IDEA that you can shift your beliefs as easily as your preferences among films might arise only in the United States, but it is a really important feature of the landscape there. It would become one in Europe if ever the American model of religion were to spread here.
In an article for the Boston Globe, reprinted in the International Herald Tribune, Professor Alan Wolfe observes: “The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released this week the most comprehensive survey of the American religious landscape ever conducted. We can now say, with reasonable certainty, that almost half of Americans switch religious affiliation in the course of their lives, and that only slightly more than half (51.3 per cent) identify themselves as Protestants.”
The survey was large enough, with 35,000 respondents, to be pretty reliable, even when it dealt with small groupings. It was here that some of the real surprises were concealed. Who would have guessed, from its portrayal in popular culture, that there are just as many Mormons as Jews in the United States, and slightly more Buddhists than Muslims?
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