Cults, Martyrs and Good Samaritans by Crossley James;

Author:Crossley, James;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

Not (always) doing God

What can we say about such Barrovian understandings of Christianity and the Bible? Whenever an obvious reference to the Bible turned up (e.g., ‘Hard work? What, thou shalt work hard?’, ‘David and Goliath’, ‘scapegoat’, ‘scales fell from his eyes’) it held a low-level nostalgic power with an ironic distance from what was an occasional cultural resource, much like Furness Abbey but probably not as popular. In this sense, they were minor examples of David Crystal’s argument about the cultural survival of the language of the Bible (partly) through a witty use of idioms and a draining of anything perceived to be too ‘religious’ (Crystal was referring to the language of the King James Bible but the point stands).36 This, as I have argued elsewhere, is evidence of an understanding of the Bible without context or content, deprived of any malignant properties as it continues to survive (and only just in this sample from Barrow) in Western cultural contexts, striving to come to terms with secularism, nationalism and global capitalism.37 As a physical cultural artefact in a place like Barrow, the Bible was most likely to be received as a gift at christenings (one of the rare occasions where the Bible and Christianity might openly feature in public life) before being consigned to a life of gathering dust on the shelf.

As Barrovian sentiments revealed different subjective class assumptions so they revealed a blunt disjunction between a quasi-official Bible of the ruling class (or at least its politically authoritative interpreters) and the Barrovian sample (recall sentiments such as ‘a load of bollocks’, ‘bullshitting’, ‘absolute bullshit’, ‘stupid’, ‘what?’, ‘eh?’, ‘he said that?’, ‘debateable’, ‘I don’t think he knows what he is talking about’, ‘hypocrite’, ‘do they really relate that to the Bible?’), with all the accompanying puzzled looks, laughs, and untypically long pauses. One Leave voter who clearly had no such sentimental attachment to Christianity and the Bible, asked (as did others) whether Cameron got ‘a lot of hassle for that?’. With such examples in mind, which appeared to be in line with national trends, Alastair Campbell’s fears may not have been unfounded when he shut down an interview with Tony Blair using the famous phrase, ‘we don’t do God’. The British electorate, he also claimed, do not ‘want their politicians banging the Bible all the time. They hated it, I was sure of that.’38 It might be an understatement to claim that Campbell’s view would resonate among at least some of the Barrovian electorate. As one Remain voter put it, she did not ‘appreciate politicians using religion to sell us something’.

Such views would not, therefore, have been restricted to Barrow and they would have resonated well beyond. An important point of comparison here is Matthew Engelke’s ethnography of the Bible Society between 2006 and 2009 with reference to Swindon and Greater Manchester. As he showed, the Bible Society, who were well read in academic literature on religious affiliation and beliefs in the UK, increasingly viewed the problem of ‘credibility’ in promoting an ever-more marginalised Bible from the 1990s onward.

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