“Man is born to believe. And if no church comes forward with its title-deeds of truth, sustained by the tradition of sacred ages and by the conviction of countless generations to guide him, he will find altars and idols in his own heart and his own imagination.”
    (Benjamin Disraeli, quoted in the novel The Wicker Man
     by Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer)

The Wicker Man, directed by Robin Hardy (1973), is a rather fantastic film. Unravelling a nightmarish mystery in broad daylight, the film is as much a product of its times (the grain of Polanski, Fellini, and musty old early-70s British low-budget, handheld novelties like Nuts in May spring to mind), as a bold, daring, deeply controversial document of sexual and religious reassessment. It is a horror movie which is more pagan than gothic, more libidal than romantic.

One of the things that struck me, watching this gem, was how religion could simply be described as a by-product of its socio-economic context. We are introduced to the people of the remote Scottish island of Summerisle – 20th century heathens, who have shunned the Christian faith of British state religion – they returned to this historically more basic state of religious belief in the 19th century as the sole life goals of the islanders became to yield sufficient crops during some particularly bad years of hardship. On Summerisle, paganism lives on, because it served them and, perhaps even more so, it played in the hands of their revered leader as a way to maintain a form of status quo on the wee island.
When Christianity forcefully steps in, in the shape of Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward), this acts as a reminder of how powerful this state religion has been in enforcing not only corporeal restriction of the libido and flesh, but also industrial organisation of labour as we have come to know it. The Sergeant finds it hard, even impossible, to tolerate the islanders’ spiritual mind-wandering and gobbledygook, when questioning them over the alleged murder of a young girl. The very British, very civil goings-on of investigating crime require a belief system of individual duty and guilt, something which we all know the Christian faith has perfected (with many violent examples) throughout the years.

The clash of the two religious paradigms at the end of the film is one of the strongest attempts in cinema history to my knowledge, to deal with the concept of the absolute: We are faced with a conflict which is impossible to concede. No compromise can be made; it is either the death of the Sergeant and the (however risky) continuation of the island faith, or it is the survival of the Sergeant and the sudden questioning and possible shattering of the island faith. Ironically, both sides – as fervent and fundamentalist they might be – do have certain rights on their side. The paganism of the blue-eyed islanders is perfectly logical, given their micro-social setting of the survival of the collective over the individual, yet the staunch Christian beliefs of the Sergeant make perfect sense too, in the context of bringing Western values to the island, like the fundamental right to human life, fair trial and a sense of certainty and link between cause and effect.
During the last decades, Christianity has recieved a lot of criticism in the West – but here we see, played out on reel and (quite literally) in the flesh, the obvious reasons for it to have gained ground in the first place; an ethico-moral irrevocability of “you’re either with us or against us”, a non-compromise with the quaint ways of the old. This is a glimpse into a battle that was fought a thousand years ago, and by which our society has been shaped and ethico-morally hard-wired.

So, why is this relevant now, in 2006?
The centrality of death in The Wicker Man is not incidental. The prime source of religious reasoning is connected with the ways in which we deal with death as an everyday occurence and material fact. Christianity has served hand in hand with the industrialisation of death: war as a death-by-proxy; modern medicine as a way to increasingly keep death at bay, and isolate the dealings with it to a select societal group; lawmaking as a way to police and punish the corporeal, and protect the primacy of right to individual life. As history has taken a complex, multi-layered shift into what many authors label the post-modern, these institutionalisations of death has virtually removed it from the sphere of the everyday to become something most people mainly deal with through fiction, speculation and narrative. Parallel with this shift there has been a vast decline of institutionalised religion. We have seen this gradual shift in the Western world during the last 50 years (ironically, after the worst periods of mass extinction in human history), spawning a condition which could be labelled a “post-religious” one, parallelled by a forceful diversity of existing world religions co-existing mainly peacefully but sometimes at conflict with each other, coupled with heterodoxy and a renaissance of individually customised spirituality.
I would like to argue that the critical phases of this shift was seen by the baby-boomer generation in the 50s, 60s and 70s – The Wicker Man itself being a great example of the very questioning and reassessment taking place during this period – and that my generation is the first one to actually have grown up in a world marked by this condition. To millions of young Westeners, religion now serves a diferent purpose now than it did before; interestingly, the here and now seems marked more by a positive absence of religion rather than by a negative presence (that the film shows us the disastrous consequences of). Still, people need to believe, and to live in a world which makes sense. The post-religious: maybe we simply don’t have a name for it yet?

Historical period	Dealings with death	Religion
Hunter/gatherer --> farmer	Death close part of everyday life. Reincarnation as merging part with the greater whole of nature.	Paganism
Pre-industrial --> industrial	Death close part of everyday life, but distanced (warfare, medicine, courts). Resurrection as a salvaging and continuation of the individual soul	Christianity
Post-industrial	Death not as much a part of everyday life; chiefly dealt with through fiction, simulation and narrative.	“post-religious” (?) religious diversity/conflict heterodoxy/new, individualised spiritualism

By the way, the Wicker Man soundtrack – as ultra-soft as ultra-soft ballad folk rock can be – is a hidden treasure, especially if you dig songs about corn rigs, barley rigs, bonnie lasses, the landlord’s daughter and maypoles.