G eo ffrey Ashe’s column sol G.K. CHESTERTON (whom I have quoted before, and shall again) said that when people ceased to believe in Christ­ ianity, they would not believe in nothing, they would believe in everything. That prophecy is now fulfilled. Western society has entered a phase of complete mental permissiveness. Anything goes. Any religion, any occult doctrine, any theory about ancient astronauts or modern extrasensory wonder-workers, is now OK. And so is the total denial iterated by those who call themselves humanists or agnostics. But the notion that these are some sort of enlightened vanguard steadily conquering ‘superstition’ is long since exploded. They do little more than coexist with those whom they sneer at.

Is anything positive likely to emerge from this ferment? To be more specific, what are the prospects for an event which many seem to expect —the dawn of a new religion in the west, perhaps in Britain?

I don’t know. But it seems to me that a few predictions might be made about such a religion, what sort of thing it will be if it does outdistance the present minicults, and also what it won’t be.

First then. Wherever it begins i t will be native to the soil. I t will not, even in its derivation, be an exotic transplant from somewhere else.

In other words, it will not be a direct follow-on from the more obvious recent trends. Most of the new cults of the past decade have been, in various guises, ‘the Wisdom of the East’ brought to the west. The Maharishi brought Transcendental Meditation, which is a kind of Instant Vedanta. Swami Prabhupada brought the worship of Krishna, or a somewhat limited version of it. The Guru Maharaj Ji b ro ught. . . well, he brought himself. All the resulting movements have had their value for a circle of western devotees. None is remotely likely to blossom out into a full-scale religion, a western NeoHinduism or whatever.

Asia of course has been turning the tables here, after four hundred years of Christian chauvinism; and it is worth recalling what happened when the tables were the other way round. Throughout the age of Europe’s expansion its Christianity was on the offensive, its missionaries were carrying the white man’s religion throughout the world. But on its own merits, Christianity never made much impact outside the countries of its European establishment. In the early years when Catholics set the pace, the only missionaries to have any real success were a few Jesuits who studied the local cultures and tried to translate Christian doctrine into local terms, with full respect for their audiences. Other Catholics’ bigotry and racism blotted out their work. The nominal conversion of Central and South America was achieved by Spanish power, weaponry and technology. Few missionaries accomplished 2

anything except in that context, and those who did, notably the Jesuits in Paraguay, were soon thwarted by their fellow-Christians.

Here then was one of the world’s major religions, ardently preached by thousands of able men; yet where it came as a foreign import, its success was always limited and it seldom made any serious progress except through force. Later, when Protestants became more active, the greatest missionary was perhaps David Livingstone. Yet throughout his career he made only one convert, who lapsed. More perceptive than his colleagues, he saw that his Christianity was irrelevant to African tribal society. His reaction was not to give up, but to argue that tribal society must go. Europe, meaning chiefly Britain, must commercialise and colonialise Africa. Black people would embrace the white people’s religion only when they were integrated into the white people’s scheme of things - not as equals, but as willing dependents with no resources of their own. Livingstone was right, after his fashion, and through most of Africa Christianity followed the flag. By itself it was powerless. Missionaries attached to the British Raj in India proceeded on the same lines. They taught Christianity in their colleges as part of an.educational package designed to mould Indians to the western system. In so far as they converted anybody, it was not because their religion genuinely appealed, but because the western system was dominant and could convince many Indians of its superiority. With the collapse of empires, Christians have belatedly learned their lesson. Where Christianity is effective today among nonEuropean peoples, it has become so by shedding its European character and turning into a ‘theology of liberation’ adapted to Third World needs. Purely as an alien transplant it never flourished and does not flourish now.

Nor, I believe, will the present transplants from Asia to the west, such as Krishna Consciousness. They can attract a certain number of followers, but in the absence of the sort of pressures that helped Christianity, they will never branch out above the coterie level or inspire anything bigger than themselves. If a new religion takes shape in (for example) Britain, it will not have been initiated by missionaries from other cultures, nor will it use their terms. To say this is not to insist that it must be completely home-grown. It could well be partly a creation of people from outside, fertilizing and catalyzing. Its roots, however, will be in the mythology, the traditions, the spiritual geography and holy places of Britain itself. It may spread beyond by radical adaptation; it will grow, in the first place, from the soil of its birth. That applies wherever it starts. If it starts in France, it is more likely to develop from a re-appraisal of the Druids of Gaul than from the theories of Cambodian gurus-in-exile.

This brings us to a second quality which I think any such religion will have to possess. I t will not be a leap forward into total novelty, ignoring or rejecting the past. In whatever society it begins, it will take up something which that society has preserved fo r many generations, but has obscured or perverted or forgotten, and will reinstate this with new meaning and immediacy. Most of the great religions, and many revolutionary and national movements, have shared an attitude to the past which, though not nostalgic, is not crudely progressive either. They appeal to an ancient glory or promise which has been lost, but not hopelessly, and they claim to revive this as the point of departure for a fresh start. The move forward is not simply a birth but a rebirth, with intervening corruption swept away.

Sometimes the lost glory is beyond history. In orthodox Christianit/ it is Eden: Adam and Eve fell, but now through Christ the human race can be restored. Sometimes it is historical, or allegedly so. In the Refprmation, Protestants maintained that the pure primitive Church which once existed had been corrupted by Rome, and professed to be building it anew. Mohammed treated Christianity itself as a corruption, and said he was bringing back the true faith of Abraham. Krishna (since Krishna has been mentioned) declares in the Bhagavad Gita that he has come to reestablish the holy Dharma which reigned in a past golden age but has since decayed.

If we turn to revolutionary and nationalist politics, the pattern persists. Rousseau taught that human beings started their career in a state o f natural virtue and were spoilt by civilised institutions. The ideal revolution would transform the institutions so as to restore natural society. Indian nationalism never got off the ground so long as it was a westernised, liberal-parliamentary movement; Gandhi brought it to life by condemning westernisation as a blight, and preaching the rebirth of the true ancient India it had ruined. Zionism perhaps the most effective of all such movements, considering the strength of the opposition and the wild improbability of its programme —was based on the long-preserved Jewish vision of ancient Israel, the people in their Godgiven homeland, from which they had been dispersed and to which they must be ingathered again.

In Britain, up to now, the pattern has tended to occur as myth rather than ideology. It is the return of King Arthur, or, in Blake’s symbolism, the awakening of Albion from the sleep into which he fell aeons ago. I am not sure whether a specific meaning could be given to such images. I am quite sure they reveal the same tendency. We don’t really believe in progress; not, at least, in straightforward up-and-up progress. We are haunted by a sense of loss, of a far-off rightness buried under corruption, but recoverable. It has taken many forms, most of them in sober terms, dubious —daydreams of golden ages and ideal communities in a never-never past. Yet I think'there are profound psychological reasons for it, though there is no room to discuss them here. We ignore the archetype at our peril. If a new religion arises, a major part of it will be a diagnosis of what we have lost and what we need to regain, and a re-winding of the psyche for a fresh start in keeping with that. £2