Big in Britain! (Part II)

As mentioned in my previous Big in Britain! post, I’m selling five times as many copies of A&O per capita in the UK than in the US. To get to the bottom of this, I decided to take a week-long investigative trip to London. (Plus, I desperately needed a vacation (or “holiday”, as the Europeans call it). And I’ve never been to Europe.)

Before my trip, I assumed Britain was far more secular than Christian America. Since England was roughly 800 years older than young pup America, I believed it had gone through its heated religious adolescence centuries earlier. And now, while the US was going through its own religious fervor, the UK’s had long since cooled into a detached secularism.

And my trip seemed to confirm this. God, religion, or spirituality never entered into my conversations with Londoners. And though I came across many majestic cathedrals in the London megalopolis, all were centuries old. And most were crumbling.

So I still don’t know why Christian apocalyptic A&O sells so well in the mostly godless UK. I may need to follow-up with another month-long vacation—er, I mean fact-finding mission.

For me, this picture (which I snapped in Dublin) captures the state of religion in the British Isles: An old steeple in disrepair, against the backdrop of a shiny futuristic spire piercing the heavens.