Religion: who needs it?
NS Special Issue
Bryan Appleyard
Monday 10th April 2006
We live in times where the power of religious belief can often appear terrifying. Yet in many countries religion is declining as dramatically as it is thriving in others. In this special issue we ask how important religion still is in the modern world - and can it survive in a future where science and technology are the gods? Bryan Appleyard begins in Britain - and finds the church in trouble
British jurors are offered an alternative when they are sworn in. Either they can swear on the Bible or any other holy book or they can "affirm". The latter option is plainly for atheists or the secular-minded. During a recent spell of jury service at the Old Bailey, I saw one woman affirm. All of the rest - a sample, in my presence, of perhaps 40 people - swore on the Bible.
And yet we are, seemingly, a secular nation. Church attendance is at a historic low - just over four million - and falling at a steady 2 per cent a year. On this basis, the figure will be roughly 2.5 million by 2020. By then, fewer than 250,000 will be under 20, implying an even more vertiginous drop thereafter as dying churchgoers are not replaced. There are important nuances and exceptions hidden behind these figures to which I shall return. But the broad picture is irrefutable: the church in Britain is on its deathbed.
So why did we all pick up the New Testament and swear in the name of God rather than affirm in the name of ourselves? The obvious answer is that we saw ourselves as "cultural Christians". Most people in Britain do. In sharp contrast to church attendance figures, something like four out of every five people say they feel an affiliation with an established church and 72 per cent say they are Christian. This probably just means that, seeking some way to mark births, marriages, deaths and the proceedings of justice, we turn to the most generally accepted form of external authority.
It certainly seems to amount to little more than that, for not only do the British not go to church, they also don't seem to have a clue what Christianity is. A Reader's Digest poll last year found that only 48 per cent of us know that Easter marks the death and resurrection of Christ. In such a context, even describing ourselves as "cultural Christians" is going too far. Perhaps we should simply say that, once in a while, being mildly stricken by a need to assent to some form of belonging which, at least in theory, transcends our atomised, consumerised lives, we turn to the fusty institutions of what somebody once said was our national faith and, having done so, at once turn away in embarrassment.
Enough said? Well, no. First, let me deal with the nuances and exceptions to those figures. The black churches are booming. Although black people represent only 2 per cent of the population, they account for two-thirds of the churchgoers in London, and 7 per cent across the country. In Plaistow, in the East End, Glory House, founded by Nigerian immigrants in 1993, attracts congregations of 2,000 or more. Black church membership as a whole has grown by almost a fifth in recent years. In the Birmingham area, there are around 150 black-majority churches serving some 30,000 followers.
Indeed, immigrant and minority communities tend to display much greater religious devotion. Poles and Portuguese pack their local Catholic churches and crowds flood out of the Ukrainian Cathedral in London, mingling with the shoppers at nearby Selfridges. It is white British Christianity that is specifically in decline; in other racial and national groups the faith is thriving. This disparity can be globalised; religion is thriving in third world countries and declining in most of the first world.
In response to the British problem, there have been various initiatives to revitalise our native faith. There is Faithworks, led by Steve Chalke; this organisation first lured Tony Blair into coming fairly clean about his faith during the last election campaign. He has since come even cleaner by saying he will be judged by God for his conduct of the Iraq war. Most famously - and controversially - there has been the Alpha course. This originated and is still based at Holy Trinity, a C of E church immediately behind the Catholic Brompton Oratory in London. There it attracts the wealthy young consumers of Knightsbridge, though now it is a global enterprise. Alpha people are well trained in the black art of public relations and the course has, as a result, become a media standby for all discussions about the decline of religion and the enduring conflict between God and Mammon.
But what is most interesting about Alpha is not, in the context of British observance, its religious orthodoxy, but its transatlantic, neocharismatic style. Alpha originated in a practice known as the Toronto Blessing, a frequently violent and always emotional conversion or initiation procedure which, to Anglican eyes, looks more like American hot gospelry than quiet British observance. It appeals to the senses and to immediate experience rather than to prayer and meditation. For all Alpha's success - two million Britons have completed its courses - this measure alone can do nothing to stem the decline in UK church attendance. But it does demonstrate the gulf between what might work in an affluent, distracted, ill-educated society and what is being offered by the mainstream churches.
This in turn points to the real issue of the British and, for that matter, western European decline in formal religious observance. Is it an inevitable accompaniment to increasing affluence? This is the most important nuance to the figures because it calls into question the exact meaning of the gaps between a "cultural" faith that might just make us pick up a New Testament in court, full-blooded faith, and thoroughgoing atheism. Is cultural faith merely a transit camp on the way to secularism or is it a temporary lapse from which we can be saved by a suitably energetic evangelical movement or, indeed, by a sufficiently dire external threat? In this last context, how many of us can be sure we would not utter a prayer if we knew a nuclear strike was incoming?
America is the big problem for both sides in this debate. Secularists, who argue that affluence as well as scientific and technological progress will inevitably banish religion from the world, have to deal with the awkward fact that the US, the richest and most technically advanced nation on earth, is also among the most religious - though secularists may reasonably respond that religion does not seem to make the US an especially moral nation.
America is crucial, especially for Britain, which is always seen as a mid-Atlantic nation, halfway between Catholic Europe and Protestant America. In this context, it is important to understand that both the secular and religious views of what is going on there seem to require the same thing: a rationale for social cohesion. Religion in the US has long been seen as the sine qua non of the stable society. Equally, the postwar European settlement has been based on an ideal of secular, cultural integration as the only way of escaping from the nightmares of the past. There is, it is thought, a common European culture that transcends the blood-soaked religious and nationalistic divisions of the past.
The British seem to want neither American religiosity nor further integration with Europe. What, then, do we want?
Maybe full-blown secularism, but the evidence is against this. The first exhibit is history. There has never been a fully secular society and, after the failure of communism's attempt to extirpate religion from Russia and China, it is hard to imagine there ever will be. Japan is often quoted as the most secular country in the world, but only by people who don't understand the tight links between its national identity and its religion. You don't need faith in Japan to be religious; you just need to want to belong, and many Japanese do so through some degree of observance of Buddhist and Shinto rites. The evidence in Europe is more complex but far from clear. Secularity undoubtedly has a firmer grip here than anywhere else, but Christianity, even if only in its cultural manifestation, is still a potent presence. Large parts of eastern Europe, of course, remain firmly and explicitly Christian.
The second exhibit is the actual behaviour of the British. The baby-boomer middle classes are displaying unease with their children's religious ignorance. Atheist parents are sending their children to Sunday school, and there is a generalised anxiety about our ability to pass anything on to our children if all we share is a condition of absolute disbelief. If T S Eliot was right and our culture is an expression of our religion, without religion we must be without culture. This may seem absurd to the secular-minded, but they have yet to come up with a response in the form of a persuasive notion of a post- or non-religious culture.
The real behavioural evidence, however, is nothing to do with the half-hearted pursuit of orthodoxy. It is the increasingly desperate pursuit of any kind of transcendence. The Alpha course is an aspect of this. It presents Christianity as therapeutic and self-actualising in an attempt to appeal to precisely those values that most preoccupy the modern imagination. Yet it does so in the face of enormous competition. Alternative medicine, New Age beliefs, counselling, psychotherapy, self-help books, popularised philosophy and countless other phenomena all attest to the contemporary desire to do something other than get, spend and, occasionally, vote. Anomie, the condition of normlessness and alienation first defined by Émile Durkheim, is real, as is the corresponding desire to escape its clutches. In the self-centred society, the escape into useful community action does not work. Instead, we escape into a variety of ersatz spiritualities.
To say that none of this constitutes a religion in any organised or coherent sense is to miss the point. Religion, in my view, can only be properly understood as something like emotion: an innate condition of our existence and a form of our perception of the world. When its expression is denied or refused in one direction, it will simply find another. An inability to grasp this explains the deep and abiding failure of the secular imagination to grasp the dynamics of the post-cold war world in which religion has come to play such a huge part.
I would guess that at the Old Bailey we mostly swore by God because, in the face of all that sombre ceremony, we quietly accepted the demand - however unreasonable - that we belong to something larger than ourselves. I'd like to say it was a fleeting thing, scarcely worth mentioning: a mere habit, a reflex, perhaps even an embarrassment. I'd like to, but I'm afraid I can't.
Bryan Appleyard writes for the Sunday Times. [http://www.bryanappleyard.com]
Faith by numbers
Fewer than two million people regularly attend Church of England services; the number who say they are C of E has dropped 40 per cent since 1983
72 per cent of Britain's population
consider themselves Christian. However,
48 per cent do not understand that Easter marks the death and resurrection of Jesus
The largest non-Christian religious group is Muslims: 1.6 million in Britain
34 per cent of British Muslims are under the age of 16
36 per cent of Britons aged 18-34 define themselves as atheist or agnostic
Among the over-65s only 11 per cent say they are non-religious
The population of the north-east of England includes the largest percentage of Christians (80 per cent); London's has the lowest (58 per cent)
Twice as many British women as men aged 20-29 are regular churchgoers
More Britons believe in ghosts than own a Bible
Research by Kathy Haywood
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