Britain’s first Faith Museum, which has recently opened in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, faces three problems. First, “religion” is an explosively controversial subject on which it’s almost impossible not to stir up anger. Yet it’s also a subject that a great many modern British people find baffling and laughably irrelevant to their lives. Finally, there is no such thing as “religion” or “faith” in the abstract – only specific faiths in actual people’s lives.
However, it turns out that a museum is the ideal solution to all these problems. A museum cannot be about abstractions such as faith, belief and religion. Rather, it is about actual objects, each with a specific history, gathered in a specific place, being looked at by specific human beings. All of which provides a rare opportunity to set aside your preconceptions about faith and just look.
