“We are exceptional. It’s important to know that we are different,” former British Museum director Neil MacGregor said about Britain last week. “We are a very unusual society. We are trying to do something that no society has really done.” Get off the fence, Neil! Are you for Brexit or against?

He wasn’t talking about Brexit. I mean, he’s bound to be against, isn’t he? If Neil MacGregor is pro-Brexit then all bets are off and it probably turns out David Attenborough has a personalised numberplate and Paris Hilton collects Toby jugs.

Brexit wasn’t what he was talking about. He was speaking at the launch of his Radio 4 series Living With the Gods, an artefact-led programme on the A History of the World in 100 Objects model, which charts “40,000 years of believing and belonging” through the beautiful and wacky items we humans have fashioned over the centuries – Zoroastrian tiles, mammoth-ivory lion gods, John Paul II bottle openers that play a tune, etc – to honour whatever impossible things any given culture was in the habit of believing before breakfast.

Religion, then. MacGregor believes that in western Europe, and nowhere more than in Britain, society is extremely unusual because it really doesn’t have an overarching shared religion. “We are trying to live without an agreed narrative of our communal place in the cosmos and in time,” he said. “Our society is, not just historically but in comparison to the rest of the world today, a very, very unusual one in being like that.”

More and more of us cobble together our own belief systems in spare moments while holding down other jobs

That sounded quite grand. I was impressed with us: ooh, get Britain! Living without a shared religious narrative! All cynical and dubious and sceptical and multicultural – getting through life without any agreed view regarding the undisprovable void that lies at the end of it. It felt valiant and pioneering and futuristic, like the Crystal Palace or Concorde or trying to get by without owning a printer.

Is it true, though? To me, Britain in the early 21st century feels normal, not unusual. Then again, it’s the only society I’ve ever lived in apart from Britain in the late 20th century, to which it displays striking similarities. Though there’s a bit less striking.

But it certainly doesn’t seem very religious. Many people are religious but it feels like an opt-in. It’s a not particularly unusual quirk about a person, like an allergy or a nose ring or Camra membership. “Is it a family thing?” you ask, hoping so, as that’s a less unsettling explanation than “No it’s a something-I’ve-concluded-in-my-head thing”, which advances the unavoidable implication that they think you should have concluded it too.

Personally, I haven’t definitely not concluded it. I always say I’m agnostic because I’d like there to be a God – a nice liberal one – but I can’t be sure there is and the idea of regular religious observance unnerves me because it would be unusual in my peer group. Not a very well thought-through philosophy, I know. But in the absence of family or societal pressures, in a context of almost complete religious freedom, many of us rely on similar back-of-an-envelope answers to eternal questions, because adopting the answers thousands of full-time ponderers have come up with over thousands of years feels like squandering that freedom.

It’s strange. We live in a world of increasing and intensifying specialisation and industrialisation. We don’t grow our own food, make our own furniture or cut our own hair – some of us don’t even plan our own parties or select our own music collections. Yet more and more of us, maybe most of us, cobble together our own belief systems in spare moments while holding down other jobs. And it all leads to vacuous assertions of being “spiritual” and record sales of wind chimes and yin and yang symbol tea towels.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration by David Foldvari.

But is it, as MacGregor claims, very unusual? What about all the communist countries of the 20th century? They were avowedly atheist, while Britain ostensibly has a state religion. Then again, communism fulfilled the role of a religion – it was an “agreed narrative”, publicly at least. And I suspect more conventional religious observance is at a higher level in those places post-communism than it is here.

What about America – the land of the free and constitutionally guaranteed religious liberty? I don’t know why I even bothered posing the question. It’s clear that being religious, and predominantly being Christian, is still the orthodoxy there. Even the Simpsons go to church; it’s quite a big part of their lives and it’s absolutely not represented as odd – everyone seems to go except Apu. In a British comedy, someone becoming Christian might be a storyline, but there would never be an assumption that everyone is.

So I think MacGregor must be right. And that really is massive. An enormous deal has been made over various significant changes in the UK over recent decades: decimalisation, joining the EEC, leaving the EU, privatisation, Aids, etc. I even remember a bit of a flurry when they closed down Ceefax. In comparison, our collectively sliding, in a historical heartbeat, from being a religiously oriented country, like every other human society there’s ever been, to the first one without a shared religious standpoint, has been unmarked. There wasn’t even a leaflet.

Only a bigot would deny the advantages of freedom of religion, and irreligion, and of a society in which the evidence of science, and comparative lack of evidence of God, are no longer suppressed. It’s a development that’s both caused by and causes greater understanding, justice and compassion.

But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t cost us something. The vast majority of humans throughout history have grown up in contexts where questions like “Is there a God?” and “What happens when people die?” were answered with the same confidence with which a teacher today would explain gravity, and those answers were reassuring. I know in my heart that had I been brought up in such a setting – say, in Anglican Victorian England – I wouldn’t have quibbled with those answers and would’ve been comforted by them. I’d have puffed away at what Karl Marx called opium and felt enormously relaxed.

To change so quickly from a society where most people took comfort from the establishment telling them, loudly and clearly, that death is not the end, to one where many proclaim that it is, and few are totally convinced otherwise, will have had an incalculable impact on our state of mind. It’s not a development I regret, but it’s a more persuasive explanation than smartphones or commuting of why we feel so stressed.