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Saturday 22 November 2008

Bad manners

Melissa Kite lives a Real Life

On the way out of the stadium the overheard conversations were bizarre. ‘Well,’ harrumphed one woman to her female friend, ‘I suppose they think if they convert one person it’s worth it.’ This was convoluted logic. The singer was playing to a crowd of sixty-something white people from the Midlands. I don’t suppose it even entered his head that they might be in need of conversion to his way of life. It was not as if he had rocked up at Birmingham central mosque and tried to brainwash the city’s Muslims by sneaking some Judaeo–Christian scripture into ‘Thank The Lord for The Night Time’. It probably didn’t even occur to the boy from Brooklyn that the sort of people who go to pop concerts in this country are now overwhelmingly godless. And I don’t think I had fully grasped it either. When did we collectively decide that God was an acute embarrassment never to be mentioned in polite company or rock stadia for fear of putting people off their night out?

I know we don’t want to go to church any more and I sympathise. Religions have never done the man upstairs any favours. The last time I went to my local they were still singing the Latin Mass and a priest in a black tassled hat spent most of the service telling the children in the front row that they were going to hell. It was terrifying. I kept looking round expecting to see Gregory Peck standing in the doorway as the choir struck up a chant of ‘Ave Satani’!

And it’s not just we Catholics who put people off faith. My great-aunt Wynne was a Christian Scientist. She was very taken by the idea that it was impossible to get ill. This worked all right for her, until her son Karl contracted measles. The school rang to tell her he was in the sanatorium covered in spots. She was furious. ‘How dare you! My son does not have measles. Can you imagine God with measles?’ The headmaster assured her that, irrespective of whether he could envisage the Almighty in a state of rubellic fever, her son was in quarantine covered in red blotches and would remain there until she kindly came to pick him up. Poor Karl never did get his measles treated. And Aunt Wynne went on giving God a bad name long after she emigrated to Australia to spread her message of impracticality and unnecessary suffering there.

But, given a choice, I think I still prefer even her brand of rigidly unyielding belief to no belief at all. Especially now we’re facing recession. After all, who perfected the art of being happy without material possessions? That’s right. We’re all going to be needing a way of life which makes sense of having nothing soon. Good job He doesn’t bear a grudge.

Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.

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