Belief and beyond
In a BBC Radio 4 interview last month Imran Khan, cricketer and politician, described his family as living their religion – Islam. He went on to make a distinction between living a religion, which he did as a child, and holding a set of beliefs which he does today as a practising Muslim. For much of history, many communities have, like the traditional Pakistani society in which Khan was raised, lived the religion of their families, neighbourhoods or nations: a detailed code of behaviour, learned in early childhood, governed their everyday lives – from food and drink to education and work – and framed their relationships with the wider world.
In many parts of the world religion exerts far less of an influence on people’s lives today than it did in the past. In the UK, for example, a tiny trickle of people turn up each Sunday to worship in the huge parish churches built in mediaeval times in the wool-rich counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. Put crudely, materialism has replaced religion at the heart of our existence in the developed world. In 2007 a television documentary brought a group of forest-dwelling Papua New Guineans to the UK. Stunned by the glittering buildings of the City of London, one of the PNG men remarked that the famous spirit house (St Paul’s Cathedral) pointed out to him by the film maker was dwarfed by some of the big banks: this would not be allowed in his village.
Despite a long-term decline in numbers of worshippers and a long period of indifference, religion has once again become a contentious issue and is never far from the headlines. While mainstream religions have lost their appeal, there has been a worldwide rise in the numbers of people embracing charismatic and fundamentalist beliefs. These groups, though a minority, are highly vocal, and better organised and more committed than followers of mainstream religion or non-believers. The development of these new strands of religion in the midst of a secularised society has long fascinated Cambridge academic Dr David Lehmann who will give a public talk on the topic of Contemporary revolution in religious life at the Festival of Ideas on Tuesday.
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