Neil MacGregor: why Britain stands alone when it comes to religion
by Anita Singh, Telegraph:
Britain is trying to become the first society to function without religious belief at its core, according to the former director of the British Museum.
In his new BBC Radio 4 series, Living With The Gods, Neil MacGregor traces “40,000 years of believing and belonging”.
The 30-part programme, broadcast daily over six weeks, will feature objects drawn from the British Museum archive to explore how religion has shaped society.
Religion provides a “narrative” that explains our place in the world, MacGregor said, and it is the rituals that bind people together.
Its decline is “a striking phenomenon across Western Europe” and nowhere more so than Britain, where Christianity has been on the wane for decades.
“In a sense, we are a very unusual society. We are trying to do something that no society has really done. We are trying to live without an agreed narrative of our communal place in the cosmos and in time,” MacGregor said.
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