God is Dead? or...

The graffitto on the London wall declared: "God is dead - Nietzsche".

A different hand below added: "Nietzsche is dead - God".

Most of the movies I have seen in the last twenty years take the Nietzsche line, usually implicitly rather than by direct quotation. Michael Medved, in "Hollywood versus America", noted how unrealistic are most Hollywood movies in omitting the importance of religion to most Americans of all classes. Even when movie characters face desperate crises, such as terminal illness, recourse to religious support is the exception rather than the rule.

Hollywood is not the only offender. Any number of highly praised European films support the total separation of Church and Studio, as one wag described it. In " L'Enfant" ("The Child"), a superbly acted but deeply depressing Belgian feature, you would never guess that Belgium is allegedly 80% Catholic. The young unmarried couple have just produced a child in the post-industrial city of Liege in the east of Belgium. Admittedly, to someone used to the underclass areas of Reading, even downtown Liege looks reasonably attractive, which somewhat weakened this viewer's sympathy with the underclass Belgian pair. Plus, in the best Hollywood tradition, the desperate unmarried mother is so damn hot - in contrast to the chain-smoking sluttish young things wheeling their babies around Reading. But Liege might as well be in Stalin's Russia for all the visibility of the Church. When it comes to naming the baby, the mother reminds the infantile "father" that they have to go to the town hall to have him legally "recognised". There is not even a hint of having her cherished child baptised. The "father" denies that he is the biological parent and even sells his child at one point. The total practical atheism of all the characters' world views makes the experience even more gruelling than the raw material suggests. The same directors' equally harsh and equally praised "Rosetta", also set in Liege, had not a religious bone in its body.

I have just seen "Control" at Reading Film Theatre and it has to be the bleakest and grimmest view of a post-Christian Britain that you are ever likely to see. It makes Michael Caine's "Get Carter", also set in a hard-bitten Northern city, look like a bundle of laughs. It reminded me of Sartre's dictum that "Hell is other people". Well, probably people like this. It follows the short, sad and wasted life of Ian Curtis, lead singer of the punk group Joy Division. The very name of this group is about as crude, offensive and transgressive as you could imagine; it refers to the brothel inmates inside the SS concentration camps. I knew nothing and cared less about Joy Division and Ian Curtis and their music before I saw the film.

I still have no desire to hear any of their much-praised music ever again, but I was both enthralled and repelled. As when watching any film about the recent past, I had to keep reminding myself: "I was actually alive at that time". I had just seen the wonderful "No country for old men" and it is difficult to decide which was more foreign, alien and bizarre - 1980 Texas or 1978 Manchester, with its rough crowds of disaffected youths which thronged the bare halls where Joy Division performed. The fact that "Control" is shot in black and white further increases its remoteness from present-day Britain, less than 30 years later, as well as underlining the spiritual and material drabness of Curtis' world.

Ian Curtis was younger than my younger sister - until he committed suicide on the same day as my older niece was born, 18th May, 1980. He worked in the Civil Service at the same time that I did, in a separate, but closely related department - the Department of Employment (I was in the Department of Social Security). When Joy Division drive south for their first gig in London, they cram into a Ford Cortina (Mark 3) estate car; my first car was the sedan version. Ian Curtis may wear a jacket with the word "HATE" in huge letters on the back as he goes to work in the dreary government office (even less appealing than my DSS premises in the centre of Reading). But much of the time he does not come across as a hate-filled misfit; he seems a polite, considerate and gently spoken misfit. Unlike the hirsute rock stars in regular groups, he looks a typically well groomed junior civil servant, much like me around that same age.

The North-West part of England has long been its most Christian area. There are any number of thriving churches around Manchester, but they are invisible in "Control". The old quip about "Hatch, match and despatch" (Baptism, wedding and funeral) being the only time British people enter a church certainly applied here. There is a very fleeting glimpse of Curtis' wedding. A longer shot of his funeral focuses on the belching chimney of the crematorium. This was surely intended to evoke the Nazi concentration camp chimneys - the only way that most of the inmates left.

Even creepier was the casting of the excellent Romanian/German actress Alexandra Lara as Curtis' Belgian lover. Her unforgettable previous role was as Hitler's secretary in "Downfall". In that film, the only time God is mentioned is by Magda Goebbels, wife of the repulsive Nazi propaganda minister. When she writes to her oldest son explaining that she is going to murder her six youngest children, she declares that God will forgive her. You might have thought that, with the vengeful Russians closing in and one of the biggest battles of WW2 raging above their heads, even the inmates of Hitler's bunker might have said a prayer or two. But prayer is not shown in an otherwise superb movie. Contrary to the old saying, it looked as if there were nothing but atheists in this most desperate of foxholes. Like Ian Curtis, many of them kill themselves rather than face the post-Nazi world; unlike Ian Curtis, some also murder their families.

In the equally good U-boat movie, "The Boat", made a generation earlier, the tough submarine crew are shown to have religious feelings. As the boat plunges uncontrollably into the depths after being attacked by a British aircraft, a young sailor prays desperately in what he thinks will be his last few seconds before the hull is crushed like a matchbox. When the boat lands miraculously on a shallow spot, the captain declares "A merciful God sent a shovelful of sand to hold us up". In the 23 years between"The Boat" (1981) and "Downfall" (2004), you can sense a religious revolution as well as the political transformation of Germany.

All commentators on the punk phenomenon refer to the impact of 1970s industrial decline and unemployment fuelling the alienation and rage of the musicians and their followers. No one seems to refer to the parallel decline of religious life in Britain, ten years after the disintegration of much mainstream Christian teaching in the 1960s. What intelligent youngster could take any Church seriously when the Churches' own leaders were denying traditional Christian doctrines or abandoning beautiful centuries-old liturgies? Political commitment and action seemed equally unappealing, given the careerism of mainstream British party politicians and the flakiness and doctrinaire fanaticism of the fringe political movements. So what was left to fill the God-shaped hole except a brutish nihilism?

Yet nihilism is self-exhausting and the harshness of the atheist world view appeals to a minority of the human race. Most people seek some warm and comfort in a cold universe and world-wide it is very obvious that God is not dead. But in the thirty years since the birth of punk, the mainstream British Christian churches have continued their long-term decline. The end result of the "Decade of Evangelisation" by the Anglican Church in the1990s was that their church attendance slid below the psychological million mark. The Catholic Church has fared no better, with every vital statistic on baptisms, weddings and attendance heading south. The one contrast is the evangelical churches, with their firm Biblical teaching being rewarded by a steady increase in membership.

Their external enemies have been assisted by countless errors and misdemeanors by Church leaders and clergy. The latest gaff by the Archbishop of Canterbury resulted in the poor man receiving massive public vilification. It made the ferocious media treatment of Derek Conway, the corrupt MP I mentioned in an earlier post, look restrained and merciful in comparison. Most people tend to cynically assume that politicians are as bent as a straight banana, but still think that Christian leaders ought to defend Christian teaching and society. So when Archbishop Williams delivered a long and nuanced speech about Sharia law becoming part of British life, he was handled as gently as an antelope in the jaws of a hungry lion. Whatever carefully considered argument he wished to advance was lost in the gleeful parade of soundbites extracted from his speech, which could be twisted to suggest he was in favour of amputating thieves' hands and stoning adulterers. With leaders like him, you don't need Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens.

In an earlier post, I mentioned the impact of market forces on the practical teaching of Catholic and other clergy. The deficiencies of the mainstream churches and the basic human need for spiritual solace have created market niches for any number of new churches to flourish. Perhaps appropriately, some of the newcomers find themselves in commercial premises rather than conventional religious buildings. Reading Family church has its base in a shop/office on London Street.The New Testament Church of God (heavily West Indian) holds its worship in a former cinema in Caversham, a northern suburb. Another West Indian church makes its home among the warehouses and workshops of the Portman Road industrial estate.

Much of this activity is visible only if you walk - a further incentive to get out of the car. Walking along Wokingham Road on the east side of town, I was amazed to find that a large but unremarkable house had suddenly become a worship centre for a thriving independent Christian group. A pair of steel gates on Redlands Road in the University area looks like the entrance to a warehouse, but the Brethren community have a large building in there. The "ethnic minority" churches within a larger church are also near invisible. The separate Hungarian, Ukrainian and Sri Lanka masses are held in regular Catholic churches. The Greek Orthodox community shares the Anglican St Bartholomews Church.

Is Reading exceptional in all this activity? One commercial enterprise would suggest not. Like Des Moines, Iowa, Reading is regarded as THE typical town for market researchers checking out a sample of the national population. When it comes to marketing a new breakfast cereal, car or credit card, if enough people buy it in Reading, the country as a whole will buy enough. So you tend to get an astonishing number of smiling middle aged ladies with clipboards ready to catch your eye and ask you questions about your tastes in restaurants, teabags or travellers cheques. It suggests that Reading is most likely typical of much of Britain in religious behaviour.

Has anyone added up all these "little" churches separate from the mainstream Christian congregations to see what the active Christian population of Britain is? At least one website (www.vexan.co.uk/UK/religion.html) packs an awful lot of really awful religious statistical news into a relatively small space. It is compiled by an atheist from credible sources and offers many amusing reflections, such as "Do Jedi Knights count as atheists?" and the difficulty of counting Satanists. Even packing all the small churches into the headcount, it suggests that only 6% of the British population attend Christian churches regularly. Perhaps 50% of the population declare a belief in God, though that should not be interpreted, as it often is, as belief in anything resembling orthodox Christian teachings. It leaves a lot of people with no solid basis for ethical conduct and no consolation at times of greatest distress. No wonder the punkers enjoyed such success.