Across the Pond by Terry Eagleton

Author:Terry Eagleton [Eagleton, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Norton
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

FOUR

America the Dutiful

A Very Fine American

Unlike Americans, the British are a notoriously godless bunch. They treat their religion rather like alcohol. It is when religious faith starts to interfere with one’s everyday life that it is time to give it up. The odd weekly drinking session, like the weekly visit to church, does nobody any harm, but bingeing on the Almighty is as bad for your health as getting smashed on vodka. God is a splendid chap, but there is no point in letting him go to your head. Brood on him too long and before you know where you are you will be breaking down bedroom doors and dragging adulterers out of each other’s arms. It is imprudent to take things to extremes. Religious faith may have caused Jesus to be crucified, but that was in another country, and a long time ago. One should find a way of worshipping him which is compatible with support for the monarchy and the odd luxury cruise in the Mediterranean.

Elsewhere in the Western world, sport has largely replaced religion as a weekly ceremony in which ordinary men and women worship superior beings. In the States, the two forms of liturgy continue to exist side by side. If sport is so vital to American life, it is because it writes large the qualities most valued in everyday existence: strength, heroism, glamour, spectacle, self-discipline, stamina, recklessness, a winning spirit, a consuming desire for wealth, and ferocious competitiveness. It is as though it incarnates the very essence of American life, rather as a man with a beret, an accordion and a string of onions round his neck signifies Frenchness. I was once crossing the campus of a university famous for its football team when I was suddenly assailed by a small posse of security guards, who held me back as though I were an enraged crowd about to storm an embassy. On a signal from one of the guards, a line of football players, each one a precious commodity on legs as thick as tree trunks, plodded slowly from one field to another and disappeared from view. I was then allowed to proceed. Americans are religious about sport, and in this are like many other nations. Most other nations, however, are less religious about religion.

In the United States, Christianity needs to be sanitised, modernised, de-Judaised and Americanised, a project which is known among other things as the Mormon Church. The scandal that Jesus was a scruffy, unhygienic Jew from a part of the globe sorely bereft of bath tubs and chocolate chip cookies must somehow be rectified. So must the fact that he is even more remote from us in time than Gary Cooper. His message must be streamlined and updated, translated into the mission statements of business schools. Such schools usually run courses on business ethics, a subject which a cynical observer might regard as falling into the same category as research into unicorns. In a world of swindling financiers and chief executive gangsters, there is a sense in which Centers for Business Ethics are urgently necessary.

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