Secular Britain is reviving Christianity’s rituals
Much of what used to offer people a sense of identity has gone, but we retain a yearning for meaning
World Refrigeration Day, Rat-catcher’s Day, Day of the Armed Forces of Azerbaijan and the feast day of St David the Dendrite, who hid in an almond tree to escape unwarranted religious enthusiasm. Each of these commemorations falls next Sunday. However, if you’re not intending to mark any of them, there’s another option available. Prue Leith, Stephen Fry and other celebrities are backing a new event to remember lost loved ones – “Celebration Day”, billed as “the one day in the year when we can all take a pause in our busy lives to reflect, remember and celebrate the lives of people no longer here”.
Their motivation is understandable, and some will find solace in taking part. The last couple of years have forced us to talk about death as we have rarely done in living memory, while the authorities’ unthinking Covid response cruelly stripped away many of our usual mourning and grieving rituals.
Yet though Celebration Day might be a new innovation, the idea behind it isn’t at all.
All Souls’ Day is already a fixture of the Christian calendar, when churchgoers remember “the faithful departed” by lighting candles, visiting graves and holding special services. Interestingly, it was almost never observed by Anglicans between the Reformation and the end of the First World War, when mass national grief propelled it back into English Christian life. Now, once again, our inability to think and talk about death as a natural part of life has compounded our trauma. A society with a more formalised culture of grief might not have tolerated the horrors of death over Facetime and Zoom funerals in the first place.
Yet Celebration Day is also part of another trend, visible not only in matters of life and death, but also in the mundane. The secular world is hoovering up elements of Christianity all the time, often without realising it. A few Sundays ago, I attended a spin class followed by a church service, and noticed some curious similarities between the two. Spinning, for the uninitiated, isn’t some medieval fabric-weaving exercise but a group fitness class (or a sophisticated form of torture, depending on how fit you are).
The instructor sits on a raised platform, from which they cajole and instruct faithful attendees in the best way forward. This isn’t just a matter of physical direction, either – there is usually some explicitly emotional angle to these instructions; “be the best you can be”, “use your inner strength” – think St Paul crossed with Joe Wicks. The class begins with an invitation to greet those on nearby bikes, akin to the request to parishioners to offer one another the sign of peace in church. There are even different denominations. The one I happened to visit, Soulcycle, is a recent import from the US and, perhaps for that reason, of a happier-clappier bent – the equivalent of an evangelical church featuring rock bands and Kingsway Thankyou Music.
Another example is the sheer number of national days we are invited to celebrate – a roster which has undergone galloping hyperinflation in both length and quantity recently. Pride has morphed from a weekend parade into a branded month-long holiday which now competes with the likes of Black History Month, International Women’s Day, Autism Awareness Day, even Pansexual Visibility Day, for resources and attention. The secular calendar increasingly resembles the medieval one, with a saint’s day every day – but shorn of much of its meaning.
In Parliament, MPS scramble to observe these rituals, usually with some matching flag or lapel pin, but many would struggle to tell you anything of substance about the rationale behind them. International Women’s Day, dominated by elite #girlboss feminism and questionable stats about the gender pay gap in the West, doesn’t feel very international anymore. Under the Pride banner, multinationals burnish their credentials with vapid statements of support that often take a rather different line to their outfits in less enlightened parts of the world – or else they just use it to sell you things.
Marking time according to the priorities of ideology is nothing new. The French Revolutionaries also tried this, establishing a Year Zero calendar, beginning with the storming of the Bastille. They abolished all royalist and religious observances in favour of earthier themes; celebrating household objects instead of saints’ days, including the shovel, mule, artichoke and my personal favourite, the watering-can. In the event, the Revolutionary Calendar only lasted 10 years.
Who then is pushing for this latest attempt to redraw our calendrical boundaries? For the less benign examples, much of the blame must surely lie with HR departments, the activist missionaries of the new religion who, whether intentionally or not, are more responsible than anyone for appropriating the customs and language of social justice and enforcing them zealously in workplaces.
In his brilliant polemic on corporate virtue-signalling Woke, Inc., Vivek Ramaswamy argues that much of what used to offer Western societies a sense of identity – faith, patriotism, work ethic – has receded in the public consciousness, yet we retain a yearning for meaning. This may explain why so many other causes are attempting to fill the gap and the trend shows no sign of letting up. Until it does, perhaps the only thing for it is to follow St David the Dendrite’s example and take refuge in the nearest almond tree.