Time & Perspective Quote by Polly Toynbee

Toynbee’s question isn’t really a question; it’s a polite ambush aimed at the modern, secular professional who likes to think they’ve outgrown religion. By framing “history, art or literature” as impossible to parse without religious literacy, she turns faith from a private belief system into public infrastructure: a shared visual and narrative code that underwrites museums, novels, political rhetoric, even the calendar. The tactic is slyly journalistic. Rather than defending religion on spiritual grounds (where it’s easy to opt out), she argues for it as basic cultural competence, closer to knowing Shakespeare than saying your prayers.

The subtext carries two anxieties: first, that multicultural societies can’t hold a serious conversation if citizens can’t recognize each other’s references; second, that elite education has quietly swapped depth for a thin, technocratic fluency. “Stories and iconography” does a lot of work here. She’s not asking for doctrinal commitment, just the ability to decode a Madonna and Child, a Pieta, a flood myth, a martyrdom, an Exodus, a Ramayana. It’s the difference between seeing “a painting” and seeing a civilization arguing with itself.

Context matters: postwar Britain, where established Christianity has faded while religious pluralism has grown. Toynbee is staking out a pragmatic middle: you can be nonreligious and still insist that ignorance of religion is a form of illiteracy, one that leaves people vulnerable to caricature, culture-war panic, and bad history.