Conundrums facing minority Christian Britain
Good Lord! In what, at the Daily Telegraph, they used to call a “marmalade dropper”, fewer than half the population identifies as Christian according to the latest census.
Nobody is quite sure what that means. Shorn of nuanced options, people have been unable to declare themselves quite keen on Midnight Mass at Christmas, a hatch ‘em, match ‘em and despatch ‘em hat wearer, or a right up front when Songs of Praise is filming type of Christian who at other times believes the Almighty needs a lie in on Sunday morning just like the rest of us.
These seem long to have been the default mode for most. A sort of amateur dabbling in which the Church of England, the national and established faith has, it might be suggested, been complicit.
As Jeremy Paxman said in his book The English: “The most characteristic English statement about belief is ‘Well, I’m not particularly religious’, faintly embarrassed by the suggestion that there might be something more to life. It sometimes seems the Church of England thinks God is just the ultimate ‘good chap’.”
This requires an equally clubbable Devil. ‘Or Toby’, as Rowan Atkinson dubbed him.
And while I doubtless defame a packed church somewhere from which Jerusalem thunders forth fit to wake the crypt, a Scottish kirk or a Welsh chapel redeeming greatly, cut it any which way you like, church attendance has been in long term decline in Britain.
Still, we are invited to be shocked. Though in much the same way as we lament the decline of the local pub, we sort of hope someone else will nip in and buy a pint to keep it open.
Screeds will be written invoking GK Chesterton’s claim that “when man ceases to believe in God he believes not in nothing but in anything”. Tomes more on the new secular religion replete with apocalypse, heresy, institutional evangelism and leaps of faith which have converted the West and, brooking no dissent, replaces excommunication with cancellation. All of which probably proves Chesterton’s point.
From those in whom religion provokes ire, there will doubtless be gleeful vindications of the view the man is not to be trusted with the divine as everything from paedophilia to papal infallibility, martyrdom to the Magdalene Laundries must surely prove. They’d thank God, if they could, that the nation has finally got off its knees.
None of which seems to ponder why Christianity finds itself, like Christ taunted on the cross, a god unable to help itself. It seems so at odds with the modern world, a thought that seems first to have gained widespread currency during the First World War when the Almighty dodged the call-up for the mechanised mayhem of the Western Front.
“God likes to watch!” as Al Pacino’s Devil’s Advocate yells at a horrified Keanu Reeves, “He’s an absentee landlord!..Who in their right mind could possibly deny the 20th Century was entirely mine?”
Paradoxically, in the aftermath of the war, the afterlife and its promise of being reunited with the lost was a paradise for charlatans. Mediums abounded and the lure of spiritualism enticed even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of that most scientific of detectives, Sherlock Holmes, into advocating its powers of consolation.
Doubtless this combat between our post Enlightenment minds and our desire not just to live on but live on in the company of our loved ones can be explained by Richard Dawkins but its comfort remains expressed on a million tombstones and at a million eulogies, not Christian of origin but part of its hopeful offering. Or its sales pitch.
Perhaps then, Christianity’s decline lies in the ‘sky fairy’ argument that medical science, longer lives and historically unparalleled material comfort have cured us of desperate prayers into the Great Silence. Famously though, there are no atheists on a crashing aeroplane, so scratch that.
This leaves us looking at a third option. The fault line between God and the Western liberal mind. You see, individualism, identitarianism and our notion of rights at some point run into moral judgement. On which God rather insists and of which we’ve rather lost the knack because it hurts. And one or other of us is hubristic enough to believe that we know better.
This leaves us with a number of conundrums.
First that it deprives society of a moral compass and that tends to mean getting lost.
Secondly, that there are vast numbers of people whose worldview is unclouded by the moral ambiguities of the West and for whom God, by whatever name he goes, is something of a trump card.
A sort of global Eric Liddell defying the King and the British Olympic Committee and declining to run on a Sunday.
Now, that can mean anything from vive la différence to the notion that our society’s mores, which remain Christian in tradition at least, are decayed and effete to the point where they can be ignored or ridiculed or even attacked.
Thirdly that our tendency to ignore the old Roman dictum that one honours the local gods and to wander the world handing out moral lectures is fatally undermined. Unable to honour our own, we fall back on flaccid gestures and are amazed to discover that our armbands and our pieties carry no force.
God may be dead but, notwithstanding his talent for comebacks, we’d better find something to replace him, even in broken Britain.
Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life