The world rejoices in a newly popular faith: the cult of heritage. To be sure, heritage is as old as humanity. Prehistoric peoples bequeathed goods and goals; legacies benign and malign suffuse Homeric tales, the Old Testament, and Confucian precepts. But only in our time has heritage become a self-conscious creed, whose shrines and icons daily multiply and whose praise suffuses public discourse.

Regard for roots and recollection permeates the Western world and pervades the rest. Nostalgia for things old and outworn supplants dreams of progress and development. A century or even fifty years ago the untrammeled future was all the rage; today we laud legacies bequeathed by has-beens. Once the term patrimony implied provincial backwardness or musty antiquarianism; now it denotes nurturance and stewardship.

Devotion to heritage is a spiritual calling “like nursing or being in Holy Orders,” as James Lees-Milne termed his own career of rescuing historic English country houses for the National Trust. A successor's verbal slip as he spoke with me, “When I joined the Church—I mean, the Trust,” echoed the analogy. The Trust's supreme tidiness recalls those Victorian restorers who scraped medieval churches and cathedrals clean of the debris of time and neglect, so as to perfect their divinity. The English, however, are not the only such devotees; heritage awakens piety the world over. Australians are said to “spend more of their spiritual energy” in quests for enshrined symbols of identity than in any other pursuit; “worship of the past in Australia [is] one of the great secular religions.”