LONDON — The London Prat
There is a peculiarly British form of intellectual confidence that manifests most intensely on subjects about which the speaker knows the least. Political economics. Parenting. The correct way to queue. And, reliably, scripture. Britain is one of the most secular nations in the developed world — according to the Office for National Statistics, fewer than half of adults now identify as Christian — and yet every June, a significant portion of the population rediscovers the Bible with the urgency of someone who has just found out there's going to be a test.
As The London Prat reported this week, Pride Month triggers the annual British competition to quote scripture with maximum confidence and minimum accuracy. The participants span the full political spectrum, united by a shared unfamiliarity with chapter and verse and an absolute certainty that the text supports their existing position. Theologians, who have spent decades studying the relevant material, watch this annual competition with the expression of professional chefs observing a reality cooking programme.
The British relationship with religion is, like the British relationship with most things, essentially ironic. We maintain the institutions — the established church, the bishops in the Lords, the carol services — whilst having largely stopped attending in any meaningful sense. When a cultural moment demands theological engagement, we reach for the two or three verses we absorbed at school assembly and deploy them with a conviction that is inversely proportional to our actual knowledge of the surrounding text.
This is not a criticism. It is an observation about how secular societies handle the persistence of religious language in public discourse. Britain has not abandoned scripture; it has simply outsourced its interpretation to whichever Twitter account currently has the most retweets.
The full account of Britain's annual Pride Month scripture competition is required reading for anyone who has ever watched a newspaper columnist cite Leviticus with the confident inaccuracy of a man reading a map upside down.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!