Britain turns to rituals in tragic times
LONDON — A week after a terrorist bomb killed more than 20 and left scores injured, the people of Manchester will make their way through the streets of their griefstricken city in one of its most traditional and religious events: the Whit Walk.
This will be a moment where the old Manchester meets the new, when the Christian tradition of the walk, commemorating the Feast of Whitsun — or Holy Trinity — meets the secular rituals that have come to define public mourning since this increasingly irreligious nation said goodbye to Princess Diana, who died 20 years ago.
Then the people, as much as the churches, began to take responsibility for public mourning.
The 200-year-old walk Monday will begin at the cathedral just a few hundred yards away from the arena where a suicide bomber set off an explosive belt at the end of an Ariana Grande concert, with the seeming intention of targeting her young fans. The walk will make a stop at Manchester town hall, where thousands have gathered on recent evenings for vigils to commemorate the dead.
These vigils are a more contemporary, secular expression of ritual, with their ever-growing piles of flowers, candles and balloons left by people to honor the dead of the Manchester Arena atrocity. The laying of flowers and the lighting of candles do suggest Christian ritual, but they are the practices of people who are not necessarily members of a religion.
The Whit Walk, by contrast, is an overtly religious event. In most years — as Manchester Cathedral describes it, the walk is “all about celebration and joy. The watching crowds see Christians laughing, smiling, singing and some dressed in bright colors. It says to them that the Church is a welcoming place.”
It will be hard for the people of Manchester to express much joy this year, but the Whit Walk remains a collective experience that, like many others this week, has proved so vital to those who want to express their solidarity with the victims of the attack. But the walk is different from most of these gatherings, because of its religious nature.
Britain, with much of Europe, is an increasingly secular nation. A new survey on faith, traditionally defined by the Anglican Church here, shows that affiliation with formal religion, particularly Christianity, is in sharp decline. Now 49 percent of the population are “nones,” those who do not identify with a religious tradition. That compares to a quarter of Americans.
Yet the “nones” do have religious beliefs of their own, despite not belonging to a church, mosque or temple, said Stephen Bullivant, professor of theology and the sociology of religion at St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, and the author of the report. They believe in God and pray. It is these people, believes Bullivant, who are influencing the rituals of grief on display in Manchester.
“At least a quarter of the ‘nones’ do engage in prayer and you see expression of some kind of religiosity at times of horror and grief like this. When there is a pressure point, something religious comes to the surface,” he said.
How different this contemporary expression of grief is to the past can be seen in the news reports of what happened almost 60 years ago in February 1958 when Manchester faced another dreadful tragedy that cost young lives: the Munich air disaster in which eight players for the Manchester United soccer team were killed in a plane crash.
Then, there were no balloons in the city center. Instead Manchester waited for the funerals to pay its respects, with a six-mile long queue of traffic to the outskirts of the city for the funeral of one player.
The large-scale, quasireligious expressions of mourning now seen in Manchester — and elsewhere when tragedy strikes — began 20 years ago with the death of Princess Diana in a Paris car crash. In the week after her death, crowds flocked to her home in London’s Kensington Palace, and to where her body rested in the chapel of St. James’s Palace, bringing flowers and lighting candles.
“Diana’s death was the turning point. The immediate response was orchestrated by the people, rather than the churches,” said Linda Woodhead, professor of the sociology of religion at Lancaster University, who has studied these contemporary mourning rituals.
“What we are seeing now is people instinctively coming together to create bonds and express values.”
In their comments, the relatives of the dead are are informally religious. “She is singing with the angels,” said the mother of 15-year-old Olivia Campbell, who was killed in the explosion.
The families of victims Chloe Rutherford, 17, and Liam Curry, 19, said: “On the night our daughter Chloe died and our son Liam died, their wings were ready but our hearts were not.”
“Many of the people who do not have a formal religion do have belief in God, in souls going to heaven, and in angels. They like pilgrimages and candles,” Woodhead said.