The supernatural is as British as fish and chips

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.

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. Naturally, I can’t begin to; they’re the same people who voted for Bush, after all, which I find a far more mind-boggling proposition. But before British readers get too cocky, let it also be remembered that last year a poll showed that 22 per cent of Britons believe in creationism; 43 per cent believe in telepathy and 36 per cent believe in ghosts. This pales, to be sure, against the 79 per cent of Americans who evidently believe in angels, but taken together these statistics suggest not only the persistence of supposedly dying forms of faith, but also a culture that dreams of power and of solace.

This impression is reinforced by the recent renaissance of immensely popular stories on both sides of the Atlantic concerned with the supernatural — a surge that includes a wave of bestselling nonfictional investigations into the existence of God (such as those by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens). The fact that these books repudiate the existence of higher powers by no means suggests a comfortably secular society: if we were certain, or disinterested, these books wouldn’t have become bestsellers. Moreover, we have recently been inundated by fictional stories in which ordinary people wrestle with supernatural forces: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, X-Men, His Dark Materials, Lost, Heroes, Harry Potter, to name just the most prominent, all concern apparently ordinary people who discover that they have extraordinary powers and extraordinary fates. In none of these stories is destiny easy; power remains a poisoned chalice.