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Our magic kingdom

The supernatural is as British as fish and chips

Sarah Churchwell

Wednesday, 29th August 2007

We’re all accustomed to stories about credulous Americans; as an American living in Britain I am constantly asked to defend the 43 per cent of my compatriots who believe in creationism.

In the middle of His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman has a scientist who used to be a nun say that she went into science to escape questions about good and evil; she is bluntly informed that what she is investigating — the dark materials — inevitably raise such questions. In a nonfiction essay called Darwinism, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Marilynne Robinson says something very similar: ‘The modern fable is that science exposed religion as a delusion and more or less supplanted it. But science cannot serve in the place of religion because it cannot generate an ethics or a morality.’ But religion cannot serve in the place of science, either, for the multitude who find the official Judaeo-Christian story of a temperamental creator whose claims of goodness seem radically inconsistent with his creation’s propensity for evil just as insufficient.

And so the search for transcendent explanations continues, mutatis mutandis; whether we find refuge in stories about God, or wizards waving magic wands, or cheerleaders who can save the world, we continue to wish for supernatural solutions to natural problems. The proverbial Martian descending to look us over would not, surely, consider ours a secular culture. In reality we face jihadist suicide bombers on their way to paradise; in our imagination we can fly, or survive apocalypse, or even defeat Jehovah himself. We are still wrestling with angels.

Sarah Churchwell is senior lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia.

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