Watch Out

But then along comes science and offers a new rationality. The sun does not rise and the stars do not wheel, the Earth moves. Legs and flowers are the product of billions of years of mindless natural selection. The material world has its own internal logic, it does not need God to drive it forward. Charles Darwin, as Richard Dawkins puts it, made it intellectually respectable to be an atheist. Religion had, apparently, lost all physical evidence for its truths. Only faith remained to shore up the church spires.

The assumption, reasonably enough, was that faith would prove too weak to endure against the onslaught of science. The Victorian poet Matthew Arnold heard “the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of faith as he stood on Dover beach. At the end of The Origin of Species, Darwin tried to soften the impact of the time bomb he had set ticking beneath the edifice of faith by insisting that “there is grandeur” in the view of life embodied in evolution.

In fact they needn’t have worried. Arnold’s sea rushed back up the beach like a tsunami and Darwin’s bomb went off in only a few western European countries. Indeed, in Hindu or Buddhist cultures, Darwinism appears as little more than an unremarkable footnote to faith. The cult of secularism has, from a global perspective, failed miserably.

Christianity is thriving, and not only in America: Islam, though deeply divided, is stronger than ever. Remember it was Saddam Hussein who was the secularist in Iraq; the democracy that, with luck, follows can only be religious.

Even in religiously casual and apparently materialist Japan people are still born Shinto — shrines are everywhere — and die Buddhist. In India, Hinduism is at the heart of resurgent nationalism and in China the communists are trying and failing to suppress religious revivalist groups. In the Middle East, people still fight and die for their respective Gods over the old blood-soaked stones.

In Russia, of course, nothing more completely exposes the intellectual and human failure of the 1917 revolution than the way, after 1989, the native faith forced its way back into the centre of national life after 72 years of savage oppression. In Nigeria 98% of the people believe in God and in Indonesia 90% say they would die for their religion. And so on.

Now even ruthlessly secular Hollywood has had to take note. The success of Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ stung studio heads where it hurts most, in their wallets. “Who will want to see a film like this?” Gibson was asked before it was released. “Everyone,” he replied and he was more or less right. It grossed $600m globally and sold more DVDs than Spider-Man.

Now a Christian comedy, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, is a surprise cinema hit in the States and Disney, in spite of a long history of religious neutrality, is promoting its versions of CS Lewis’s Christian allegory The Chronicles of Narnia to religious groups. This all amounts to a radical new step for the highly secular-minded American entertainment industry.

All of which is to say that the truth, to which the British have been blinded by their contemporary myth, is that there is only one beleaguered and threatened faith in the world today and that is secularism.

This puts us, as minority believers in this minority myth, in a very odd position. We can still say, of course, as many do, that we are the future, that the process whereby scientific reason conquers religious faith is still in its infancy and that, in time, the world will succumb to our rationality.

We may even say that the progress of liberal democracy will be the political leading edge of this process. The problem is that there is absolutely no evidence that this is happening; in fact all the available evidence is that it is not. Advancing secularism as the creed of the future is a statement of pure faith, a wishful-thinking elevation of our own local cult to global significance.

And, oddly enough, despite all our reflex secularist responses when stopped in the street by opinion pollsters, it isn’t even happening here. Of course the decline in church attendance and the ignorance of the Christian story are undeniable demonstrations that something has changed, and our delight with the treasures of materialism — what the poet Frank O’Hara called “movies and laughter, sex and fun” — is palpable.