ANGLO-ANTI-GRAVITY:

America's deep Christian faith: Our correspondent gives a personal view on the importance of faith and religious belief in American life. (Justin Webb, BBC)

My wife and I do not believe in God.

In our last posting, in Brussels among the nominally catholic Belgians, unbelief was not a problem.

The Bush administration hums to the sound of prayer. Prayer meetings take place day and night.

Before that in London it was not remotely an issue. With the sole exception of one friend who is an evangelical Christian, I don't recall a single conversation with anyone about religious matters in the years I lived and worked in the capital.

Our house in London was right next to a church. We talked to the tiny congregation about the weather, about the need to prune the rose bushes and mend the fence. But we never talked about God.

How different it is on this side of the Atlantic. The early settlers came here in part to practise their faiths as they saw fit.

Since then the right to trumpet your religious affiliations - loud and clear - has been part of the warp and weft of American life.

And I am not talking about the Bible Belt - or about the loopy folk who live in log cabins in Idaho and Oregon and worry that the government is poisoning their water.

I am talking about Mr and Mrs Average in Normaltown, USA.

Mr and Mrs Average share an uncomplicated faith with its roots in the puritanism of their forebears.

According to that faith there is such a thing as heaven - 86% of Americans, we are told by the pollsters, believe in heaven.

But much more striking to me, and much more pertinent to current world events, is the fact that 76% or three out of four people you meet on any American street believe in hell and the existence of Satan.

They believe that the devil is out to get you. That evil is a force in the world - a force to be engaged in battle. [...]

Having made the decision to fight the good fight - and have no doubt about it President Bush has made that decision - the nagging doubts, the rational fears, the worldly misgivings - all those things felt so strongly by post-religious Europeans - can be set aside.

President Bush looks as tired as Prime Minister Blair sometimes, but never as worried.

Both are religious men but the simple American faith - with heaven and hell, good and evil and right and wrong - appears rather better suited to wartime conditions.

When you read stuff like this, you can't help but share Geoffrey Hill's despair for his native land:

DARK-LAND

Wherein Wesley stood
up from his father's grave,
summoned familiar dust
for strange salvation:
whereto England rous'd,
ignorant, her inane
Midas-like hunger: smoke
engrossed, cloud-encumbered,
a spectral people
raking among the ash;
its freedom a lost haul
of entailed riches.

and think of his poetic assertion in De Jure Belli ac Pacis:

Evil is not good's absence but gravity's
everlasting bedrock and its fatal chains
inert, violent, the suffrage of our days.

What good can come to a people who have ceased to believe in evil and ceased to at least wrestle with the question of God? Posted by Orrin Judd at March 15, 2003 9:59 AM