Introduction: Believing and Belonging Living with the Gods is about one of the central facts of human ex­istence: that every known society shares a set of beliefs and assump­tions - a faith, an ideology, a religion - that goes far beyond the life of the individual, and is an essential part of a shared identity. Such beliefs have a unique power to define - and to divide - peoples, and are a driving force in the politics of many parts of the world today. Sometimes they are secular, most obviously in the case of nationalism, but throughout history they have most often been, in the widest sense, religious. This book is emphatically not a history of religion, nor an argument in favour of faith, still less a defence of any particular system of belief. Looking across history and around the globe, it interrogates objects, places and human activities to try to understand what shared religious beliefs can mean in the public life of a community or a nation, how they shape the relationship between the individual and the state, and how they have become a crucial contributor to who we are. For in deciding how we live with our gods we also decide how to live with each other. Belief is back After the end of the Second World War the Western world basked for decades in a prosperity without precedent in history. The United States offered most of its citizens--and its immigrants--what appeared to be endlessly rising standards of living.

In 1957, the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, famously told the British public that they had ''never had it so good''. They agreed, and he comfortably won the next election. Across Western Europe and North America, economic growth was the norm: peace had on the whole led to plenty. In the rest of the world, the Soviet Union and the United States were locked in bitter conflict, sometimes military, always ideological, competing to win new recruits for their preferred systems of Marxist state communism or liberal democratic capi­talism. As both are essentially economic propositions, the debate increasingly and unsurprisingly centred not on their very different notions of freedom and social justice, but on which system could provide the greater material benefits for its society. There is a striking example of this elision - equation - of ideals with their material outcomes on the US dollar bill, or, more precisely, on two dollar bills. Even though most of its population was Christian, the United States had been founded on the explicit basis, enshrined in the Constitution, that the new nation should not have an established religion. But in 1956, in an effort to dis­tinguish itself even more sharply from the atheist Soviet Union, Congress resolved to make greater public use of the long-familiar motto ''In God We Trust''.

In a gesture rich in unintended sym­bolism, it was decided that the words should appear not on pub­lic buildings or on the flag, but on the national currency. They have been printed on dollar bills ever since, and on the ten-dollar bill they hover protectively over the US Treasury itself. The ironic phrase the ''Almighty Dollar'' had been circulating since the nineteenth century, warning against the conflation of God and Mammon. Now, however, one of the defining American beliefs was to be expressed on the most revered manifestation of its success: its money. On the face of it, it might seem that the new wording on the dollar bills was an assertion of the supremacy of God in the US political system, a twentieth-century American version of the letters DG - Dei Gratia , ''By the Grace of God'' - which accom­pany the portrait of the sovereign on British currency, or the Qur''anic texts on the coinage of many Islamic states. In fact, it was almost the reverse. This striking combination of the financial and the spiritual, far from being a step towards theocracy in Washington, was symptomatic of a wider change in the balance between ethics and economics. On both sides of the Atlantic, the role of organized religion in public and private realms alike was receding.

Society was becoming increasingly secular - more swiftly in Europe - and fewer and fewer were attending traditional religious services. The ''revolutionaries'' of 1968 argued in terms of economic injustice that hardly mentioned God, let alone putting their trust in him. After the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, the consensus almost everywhere was clear. The battle of ideologies was over: capitalism had won, communism had failed, religion had withered, and if there was a faith - a set of assumptions shared by almost everybody - it was now in material well-being. As Bill Clinton memorably put it in the US presi­dential election campaign of 1992: ''It''s the economy, stupid.'' Few disagreed; and, like Macmillan before him, Clinton was elected leader of his country. Twenty-five years later, to the surprise or bewilderment of the prosperous West, organized religion is, all around the world, once again politically centre stage. To an extent rarely seen in Europe since the seventeenth century, faith now shapes large parts of the global public debate.

The competitive materialisms of the Cold War have been replaced. The whole of the Middle East is caught up in murderous conflicts that are articulated and fought not in economic but in religious terms. The politics of Pakistan and Israel, both founded as explicitly secular states, are increasingly confessional. In Indonesia and Nigeria, Myanmar and Egypt, communities are attacked and individuals killed on the pre­text that the practice of their faith makes them aliens in their own country. India, whose constitution enshrines the state''s equidistance from all religions, is convulsed by calls for the government to assert an explicitly Hindu identity, with grave con­sequences for Indians who are Muslims or Christians (Chapter 25). In many countries, not least the United States, immigration policy - effectively the case against immigrants - is often framed in the language of religion. Even in largely agnostic Europe, the Bavarian Prime Minister urges the presence of the cross in official buildings as the marker of a Catholic Bavarian identity, and the French gov­ernment bans the public wearing of the full-face burqa (Chapter 28). In Switzerland a referendum is held to ban the building of minarets (Chapter 9), while thousands march regularly in Dres­den to protest against alleged ''Islamization''.

The most populous state on earth, China, claims that its national interests, the very integrity of the state, are threatened by the exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, the Dalai Lama, a man whose only power is the faith he embodies. The Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, deeply shocking to the secular world, and which at the time appeared to be push­ing against the tide of history, now seems instead to have been the harbinger of its turning. After decades of humiliating intervention by the British and the Americans, Iranian politicians found in religion a way of defining and asserting the country''s identity. Many since then have followed the same path. In a way that could hardly have been imagined sixty years ago, the reassuring politics of prosperity has in many parts of the world been replaced by the rhetoric and politics, often violent, of identity articulated through belief. One of the arguments of Living with the Gods is that this should not surprise us, because it is in fact a return to the prevalent pattern of human societies. Living in stories ''We tell ourselves stories in order to live.'' Joan Didion''s famous sentence opens a collection of essays she wrote around her experi­ences in the secular America of the 1970s.

It is not a reflection on religion, but it speaks to exactly that compelling need which we all have, for stories that order our memories and hopes, and give shape and meaning to our individual and collective lives. We begin where the oldest surviving evidence begins, in the caves of Europe at the end of the Ice Age. We shall see in Chapter 1 that a society with a belief in something beyond itself, a narra­tive that goes beyond the immediate and beyond the self, seems better equipped to confront threats to its existence, to survive and to flourish. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim argued that without such overarching stories, what he called ''an idea that it constructs of itself '', there can in fact be no society. Those stories, the ideals they illustrate and the ceremonies in which they are enacted constituted for Durkheim the essential elements of any system of communal belief: and, in a sense, the stories are the society. If, for whatever reason, we lose or forget them, in a very real way we, collectively, no longer exist. Systems of belief almost always contain a narrative of how the physical world was created, how the people came to be in it, and how they and all living things should inhabit it. But the stories and associated rituals usually go far beyond that.

They tell mem­bers of the group how they ought to behave to one another, and crucially they also address the future - those aspects of the society that will endure as succeeding generations perish and pass. They embrace the living, the dead and those still to be born, in one continuing story of belonging. The most powerful and most sustaining of any society''s stories are the work of generations. They are repeated, adapted and transmitted, absorbed into everyday life, ritualized and internalized to such a degree that we are often hardly aware that we are still surrounded by the tales of distant ancestors. They give us our particular place in a pattern which can be observed but not f.