We believe in angels

Wednesday, 24th February 2010

Nearly 40 per cent of Brits and over 70 per cent of Americans think angels exist. James Walton explores the strange resurgence of faith in heavenly helpers

Yet, there are surely other primeval impulses at work as well. The last angel craze of similar size was, I’d suggest, the Victorian one that influences Christmas cards to this day. It, too, happened at a time when Christianity was under threat from science — and, as Emile Cammaerts (not G.K. Chesterton) pointed out, when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. In this context, the most harmless justification of the angel phenomenon might be that it offers all the nice bits of religion — life after death, protection, the notion that there’s more to the world than meets the eye — without any of the tougher demands.

At the same time, the mainstream churches have created a handy gap for the New Age version of angels to fill. Children at Catholic schools would once have been left in no doubt about the individual guardian angels looking after each of them. Now the Encyclopedia of Catholicism relegates this idea to ‘pious Catholic belief’, with a stern reminder that ‘it has never been part of Church dogma’.

So angels, it seems, fulfil a need, and if the churches aren’t willing to be the primary source any more, then other people — most kindly described as less theologically literate — will necessarily step into the breach. At the end of Dear Angel Lady, Jacky Newcomb briskly answers the most common questions she’s asked: from ‘What is the purpose of life?’ to ‘Are angels real?’ (For the record, the answers are ‘To learn and grow as a human soul’ and ‘Yes’.) One exchange, though, may be especially telling. ‘I want to teach others about angels and run classes. Do I need a qualification?’ goes one popular query. ‘No,’ Jacky replies.

Detail from Blake’s ‘Christ guarded by Angels’, Victoria & Albert Museum, London