Churchgoing is good for you (even if you don’t believe in God)

Few people, don’t you find, are as irritating as those who define themselves as Spiritual But Not Religious? There was a riveting  piece in the Sunday Times ‘Style’ magazine last week about them, featuring people who were both fabulously stylish and spiritual. Among the names checked was a shop called Celestine Eleven (‘when you buy a new dress, you’re buying into a beautiful piece of energy’) and a website called Numinous (motto: ‘material girl, mystical world’). So, you can be spiritual and design-conscious, as in Pamela Love’s pentagram ring, £1,500.

What this Gwyneth Paltrow-style combination of spirituality and consumerism involves, apart from the absence of any kind of discernible doctrine, and certainly nothing that might interfere with a full sex life, is the possibility of focusing perpetually on yourself. As opposed, that is, to engaging with the rest of the community as you might, say, at a coffee morning after Mass, where all comers descend on the free tea and biscuits, especially the lonely and the broke. Muriel Spark observed that ‘the irreligious environment of modern Europe embraces large numbers of intelligent aspiring souls who are nevertheless looking for a “religion” which offers all things beautiful and demands nothing practical.’ The seekers have since discovered that they’re spiritual instead.

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So I was delighted the other week to hear Tom Shakespeare coming out as a member of the opposite tendency, viz, those who self-define as Religious But Not Spiritual. He’s an atheist Quaker. That makes two self-declared RBNSs I know of — the other being Julie Burchill. (I’ve always assumed Hilaire Belloc was one too; he loved the Catholic church but thought Christ was a milksop.) They are an under-studied group so far as sociologists are concerned, possibly on account of the difficulty of doing longitudinal studies on a group you can count on the fingers of one hand.