UK "haunted by religion"

Rowan with a memorable turn of phrase: "'I don't believe we are living in a secular society and I don't believe we are living in a deeply religiously divided society. I believe we are living in a country that is uncomfortably haunted by the memory of religion and doesn't quite know what to do with it ... a society which is religiously plural and confused and therefore not necessarily hostile.'"
I think he may be right. The 'religiously' plural' and 'not necessarily hostile' are actually a product of the Christian heritage where neighbour-love and respect for the other are part of what is taken for granted as a sine-qua-non of spirituality whatever else may be added to the mix. Now, this may not be well thought out and suffer from the sentimentalisation that arguably bedevils our culture, but it does have Christian roots. Interestingly we find this informing the way that non-Christian elements are taken into people's spiritual mix: love is taken to be a defining characteristic of the Divine. Even given that, for example, a Buddhist take on life, the universe and everything is ultimately impersonal (remember Francis Schaeffer's 'He is There and He is Not Silent'?) And I recall an Ida Glaser review of a book on Islam written by a British convert in which she pointed out that the author's account of God is not properly Islamic, being informed ultimately by the Christian view that 'God is love' which would not be an Islamic way of viewing God's nature. It also seems to me, connecting this up with my experience of New Age and neo-Pagan discourse, that the idea that Ultimately Reality is (or should be) Love is well-embedded in our cultural consciousness.

Let's recall that ancient Paganism had gods that were capricious and on the whole did not care much for humans, let's recall that ultimate reality in Buddhism is impersonal, that God in Islam maybe beneficent and merciful but loving is not really in there, that only now neo-Paganism is beginning to explore non-personalism more fully ...

So is this a clue to mission in post-Christendom Britain? Can we help people connect the religious haunting to the Holy Ghost in a positive way? Or would it be a downer to our mission in the longer term to be pointing out that the idea of a loving God is actually Christian and doesn't necessarily 'work' with other views of ultimate reality? It might well be; in politics negative briefing tends to be viewed as potentially self-defeating (though it's still done).

Of course, it does beg the question of why the idea of a loving God should be so persistent and seem so self-evident? Is it culture only? Or is this a concept that has deeper resonances in the human psyche? And if it is the latter, is that part of the god-imagedness of humanity?
UK haunted by religion, says archbishop | UK news | The Guardian: