Which British politician would quote Isaiah?

This religiosity, as we would describe it, suggests Americans consider themselves a chosen people

First comes the numbness, the mourning and the praying. In comforting the American people for the loss of the space shuttle Columbia with its crew of seven, President Bush turned to the bible, indeed to the Old Testament and paraphrased the prophet Isaiah: "The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today."

President Reagan had done the same when the Challenger exploded shortly after launch in 1986. He compared the shuttle's crew members with the great explorers of history and declared that they had "slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God". On Saturday, democratic leaders of the House of Representatives, who were meeting in Pennsylvania to plan strategy, immediately gave up their confabulations when they heard the news, and began to pray.

This religiosity, as we would describe it, suggests that in a way Americans consider themselves a chosen people. The British had the same delusion in the 19th century. But whereas we thought God had directed us to civilise the world, the Americans evidently believe themselves instructed to pacify it. This explains their astonishment that the rest of the world should fail to share their view of Iraq.

The open espousal of Christian values by politicians in the United States also contrasts strongly with the timidity of the average Brit in talking about religion or spirituality. The famous British reserve, which, so far as showing emotion is concerned, seems to be breaking down, is still absolute when it comes to the existence of God. In the face of national tragedy, we cancel sporting events but we don't immediately fall to our knees.

Nonetheless, we are no different to our American cousins when it comes to attending services in the aftermath of tragedy. The inhabitants of Soham in Cambridgeshire crowded into their local church to seek solace following the murder of two 10-year-old girls, Jessica and Holly. There were, too, innumerable services to commemorate the death of the Queen Mother.

After the seeking of spiritual comfort, the time arrives to lay the blame. Whose fault is it? This is not vengeance but a need to know. Knowledge completes grieving. And we start by confronting the paradox of accidents. They appear to come out of a clear blue sky, as was literally the case with the space shuttle, but it always turns out that the spectacular, dreadful event was the culmination of a long series of blunders and sometimes dishonesty. The 1986 investigation of the Challenger accident showed that faulty welds in a booster rocket had been concealed through falsified X-rays by a subcontractor seeking to avoid the cost of repairs. At the same time, Nasa had drastically reduced spending on safety testing, had misled Congress, had withheld documents and had violated federal codes.

Even the accident at Chancery Lane Tube station in London 10 days ago, in which a train jumped the lines, had been rehearsed. For we soon learnt that a similar, smaller-scale incident had occurred a few weeks earlier but had not been seen for the warning that it was. To take another example, when an oil rig in the North Sea caught fire some years ago, at first it seemed like a natural disaster. But the subsequent inquiry showed that a series of similar accidents, albeit on a smaller scale, had occurred in the preceding months.

At least nowadays God is blamed less often. The truly natural catastrophe is confined to claps of thunder, gales and the eruptions of volcanoes and the like. But when torrential rain causes rivers to burst their banks and to overrun villages and towns, we wonder whether the global warming we have caused isn't to blame and whether misconceived flood protection schemes haven't made things worse.

It might also be asked whether we haven't entered a new era. If the 19th and 20th centuries were the period of scientific progress, is the new century to be known by its disasters? It is 80 years since it was first noticed that everything was speeding up. Futurism, an Italian art movement of the second decade of the 20th century, emphasised the power, force and motion of machinery, worshipped speed and denounced the "static" art of the past. In the 1930s, the French historian Marc Bloch noted that contemporary civilisation differed in one particularly distinctive feature from those which preceded it: speed. And with this accelerated velocity has come a second feature, the accident.

That is the impression one receives from the flow of news: Chernobyl, Seveso and the twin towers have been massive events, but they have been accompanied by a rapidly accumulating number of smaller, man-made disasters. The political theorist Hannah Arendt said that "progress and catastrophe are the opposite faces of the same coin". And if speed once engendered an art movement, accidents may do the same. At the Fondation Cartier in Paris an exhibition organised by Paul Virilio is devoted to just this theme, entitled Ce qui arrive (until 30 March).

We mourn with the American people. We said prayers in our churches yesterday. We shall avidly follow the progress of the investigation. And more than that, perhaps, we shall begin to adjust our lives to a new feature; the age of the accident has arrived.