Swedish research has established that professional footballers [soccer players] are considerably more intelligent than the rest of the population.
Not in terms of conventional IQ but in ‘executive function’ – that is a combination of creativity, cognitive flexibility, processing speed & working memory.
But, as evidence of a footballer’s possession of what, in this country at least, is considered to be ignorance, if not stupidity, Tom Whipple in The Times quoted David Beckham, who once said of his firstborn son: “I definitely want Brooklyn to be christened, but I don’t know into what religion yet.”
From which I deduce that Tom Whipple is a young man who has grown up in an era when the English reserve use the word religion to apply to a greatly reduced number of very broad categories, and not to subdivisions, factions or divisions of the major faiths.
The time is not long gone when you might well find yourself in a situation where your religion was ascertained & routinely recorded by bureaucracy – admission to hospital or prison, giving up your child for adoption, for example.
Even in school, where the ‘denomination’ of religious education could still be a contentious issue, even though nobody thought such lessons should cover anything other than Christianity & the Bible.
The default – even for those who did not consider themselves religious – was usually what most people said & wrote as C of E, but there were many other possibilities.
Roman Catholic (RC) of course, but also Methodist, Congregationalist, Baptist, Quaker, Plymouth Brethren, Christadelphian (always muddled in my mind with the Mormons) were all represented in the small town in which I grew up. As children we had vague ideas of the differences – for example the fascinating fact that Baptists did not christen babies but practised the total immersion of white-robed adults instead.
The term ‘mixed marriage’ referred to one between partners of a different faith, especially Catholic or Jewish with Protestant, and were often looked upon as every bit as hazardous as inter-racial marriage.
Conventional IQ tests cover a lot of things that you learn or absorb from school or the culture which surrounds you. David Beckham, who is certainly not unintelligent in this sense, is also quite old-fashioned, & was using the word religion in this old fashioned way, as interchangeable with the more nuanced & flexible denomination
