‘The strange juxtaposition between empty churches and full art galleries was there right in front of me, and the more I examined the way in which we attend galleries, museums and other forms of cultural undertaking, the more it occurred to me that in a largely humanist and secular culture: these were our forms of devotion.’

Will Self is quoted above, talking from the exalted dais that is Radio Four. It makes you so excited when you hear a sentence like that, doesn’t it? I happened upon it by chance. I was trawling through the big newspapers’ websites looking for something interesting to read to accompany my cup of tea. It would have accompanied a Muller corner, but I’ve run out. Anyway, I was sifting through articles – in the e-columns of broadsheets and best-sellers – reading gobshitery of the highest order.

Before this particular foray onto the internet I had no idea that an auction was being held from which Dr. Who fans get the opportunity to purchase Billie Piper’s pyjamas. Neither did I realise that Timbaland was enjoying being a dad. Neither did I realise that anything, anything at all, could worm its way into the popular press.

And so, I retired dejected to Radio 4, and the very first words I heard were those quoted above. An advert for Radio 4’s Lent Talks, the first of which is given by Will Self. And he is sooo right, isn’t he? Sorry to keep on with the rhetorical questions but it seems fitting.

God is nothing in London any more. The fair city, the place of my birth is – by the grace of God – Godless. And I don’t mean that in a way that it’s full of heathen, bloodsucking creatures of the night who live to steal from children. I mean that it has advanced into the perceptive space left by the enlightenment and shed all the laboured trappings of ‘Worship.’ And, if we are to believe Will, it has replaced Christianity’s satisfaction of the natural human yearning to be in ‘awe’, with culture.

And what better way to do it. Culture is the educated person’s way of understanding the world. We, as human animals, better comprehend the world when we are mentally stretched, and are forced into reconsideration. Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Darwin, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Wilde, Marx, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Freud, Eliot, Camus: They didn’t inspire through giving the masses what they already had, did they? We are beings that learn ravenously, it is how we survive.

Thereby theatres, galleries, museums, cinemas, concert halls: their ability to inspire, to tease the mind into questions and to draw tears to the most unwilling of eyes renders them perfect new art-forms for our idolatry. And why are these alternatives better than organised religion? Because they do not ask for your soul as a deposit, promise you the scientifically unattainable, and in return provide a life of indoctrination and – admittedly – fine architecture.

If you go to the National and watch ‘Love The Sinner’, Will Self’s words will turn to ash in your mouths as the African preachers explain to their western counterparts that as they live in a world where there is plague, pestilence and poverty the Bible stories appear real to them. And it’s ‘cultural undertakings’ like that that make me realise that God – to be honest – is still quite a big thing in London.

When you’re up town on a Saturday morning the masses that throng from the synagogues is impressive. I do not usually see London on a Sunday but I suppose that the reaction for the Christian Sabbath is not dissimilar. God is still around, whatever I, or Will Self says. Admittedly, there are no bible tracts on the sides of our buses like those I saw in Scotland, but he ain’t dead – Sorry Nietzsche.

However, does the religious dominion and the cultural world join hands, or are their lands separate? I don’t overly care. It’s an issue for Will to deal with on the wireless. However, if you are a Ruskinite and think that all art leads to God then, by Christ, read some Pater before you go to bed.

Talking of going to bed, it is presently 1.26 on a Thursday morning, and I am writing this…God give me strength.

N.B. All blasphemes are steeped in irony. Please listen to the radio.