GIVEN its historical profile and geographical reach, Christianity counts as the foremost expression of human culture. The faith continues to expand at a global level: tens of thousands of fresh converts are registered every day in Africa alone. Pentecostalism, the Christian counterpart to Islamic revivalism, has long been spreading at exponential speed across the global South and in East Asia.
A trend on this scale confirms claims that secularisation has gone into reverse in many places. A record of faith-based political groups would include Vishwa Hindu Parishad, in India (which sowed the seeds of Hindu nationalism reaped by the BJP during the 1990s), the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan, Hamas in the Palestinian territories, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Nahdlatul Ulama in Indonesia, Pentecostals across the regions already noted, and, in the Catholic world, an array of forces including European Christian Democrats, Opus Dei, and the newer religious movements.
Faith communities are also forging remarkable transnational capabilities, appealing to foreign governments and international bodies judged supportive of their aims.
Whether one views these phenomena with gladness or unease (or with mixed feelings), a conclusion reached by two prominent American sociologists, Timothy Samuel Shah and Monica Duffy Toft, is fair: “The belief that outbreaks of politicized religion are temporary detours on the road to secularization was plausible in 1976, 1986, or even 1996. Today, the argument is untenable. As a framework for explaining and predicting the course of global politics, secularism is increasingly unsound. God is winning in global politics. And modernization, democratization and globalization have only made him stronger.”
ALTHOUGH these points should serve to qualify my main pitch, none discredits claims of a Christian recession. Whatever is happening on other continents, the faith overall falters in its Middle Eastern and European heartlands. Ancient communities with roots in the apostolic era in some Arab societies are being crushed through active persecution.
Europe’s path is plainly very different. The older generations are often residually attached to beliefs imprinted in childhood. But residues are apt to fade away by definition. The middle-aged are usually far less connected to the Church than their parents, having long since cast aside the fairy story (as they see it) taught at Sunday school, without exploring it further. The young, accordingly, do not even have something to kick against. Christianity is thus a blank slate to a high proportion of millennials and members of Generation Z.
Britain’s most recent Census bears this out. In November 2022, the Office for National Statistics released figures confirming that the proportion of people identifying as Christian in England and Wales had fallen below half for the first time (News, 2 December 2022).
The figure was 71.7 per cent (37.3 million people) in 2001, 59.3 per cent in 2011, and 46 per cent in 2021. Nearly four-fifths of senior citizens ticked the box marked “Christian”; among twenty-somethings, only 30 per cent did. The Census also showed that 10.8 per cent of people in the same territory adhered to other faiths, up from 8.4 per cent in 2011. The proportion of Muslims rose from 4.8 per cent of the population to 6.5 per cent (3.9 million people). Scotland’s position broadly matches that of its southern neighbours.
No one in the UK has processed the data more meticulously than Clive Field, of the University of Birmingham. Among much else, his indispensable book Counting Religion in Britain, 1970-2020, records the scale of decline across the denominations.
In 1924, 3.5 million people were registered on the Church of England’s electoral rolls. There were only 900,000 by 2019. Roman Catholic candidates for confirmation fell from 72,000 in 1971 to 24,000 in 2019. The Methodist Church had 617,000 members in 1970, but only 164,000 half a century later.
Looking over the same time frame, Field records a fair estimate that church membership declined from 7.7 million to 3.9 million. The figure is especially telling given that the population almost doubled during this period.
Side by side with all this, a further finding of the Census seems significant — and curious by comparison with the figures just listed. Of those who ticked the “No Religion” box, only half said that they did not believe in God at all, and one fifth of non-believers expressed confidence in some form of afterlife. The reality is thus perhaps messier than one might suppose.
BEYOND statistical information, one principal corollary that I draw from clear evidence of decline is that Britain and other parts of Europe are impaired by a neglect of their church roots.
How so? A credible answer concerns the sobering implications of believing (say) that we are just animals wired up to the struggle for survival, or that meaning, mattering, and the quest for transcendence — a higher dimension of reality embodying more exalted values — are illusions.
A related reply would be that secular liberalism lacks secure philosophical underpinnings. As an alternative to the solid nourishment offered by grown-up, self-critical Christianity, a creed such as humanism presents an imperative to be kind.
The grounds for all this appear shaky. When humanists are asked to show without recourse to metaphysics why we should be kind, the answers they give often lack coherence. And we live in far-from-kind times, anyway. Quite apart from the climate crisis, ours is an era of infotainment, an obsession with celebrity and blaming, complaining and shaming, colossal cynicism encapsulated by the term “post-truth”, unprecedented family breakdown, moral relativism, scientific as well as religious fundamentalism, and a polarised public conversation.
The New Testament scholar Tom Wright transposes this awareness into a related key. Noting that nature abhors a vacuum (philosophical as much as physical), he argues that three pagan deities from antiquity — Mars, the god of war, Mammon, the god of money, and Aphrodite, goddess of erotic love — are still venerated in fresh guises: “ . . . our society, claiming to have got rid of God upstairs so that we can live our lives the way we want . . . has in fact fallen back into the clutches of forces . . . that are bigger than ourselves, more powerful than the sum total of people who give them allegiance — forces we might as well recognise as gods.”
FROM a Christian standpoint, of course, the main reason for paying serious attention to church teaching is that it purports to disclose with special authority the truth of our being. The “greatest story ever told” is about love’s mending of wounded hearts.
Core parts of this perceived revelation could be summed up as follows. God’s outreach is mediated in creation, which, over time, our Creator patiently allows to yield its own true character. This process operates through worldly agencies, including human beings, who are all made in the divine image. And, in and through everything, the Holy Spirit is seeking to recreate and transform, a process realised crucially in God’s identification with the world in Christ.
Wherever Christians look, whether inside or outside the visible Church, they are likely to find evidence of divine gift, and should thus identify the “other”, especially the outsider, as bearing God to them. The Creed, therefore, provides the strongest available foundations for values including the sanctity of life, the dignity of the individual, and human responsibility for the environment.
Moving from the province of faith to more empirical factors, Christians could also say that the Church is the world’s single largest source of social capital, mainly in unsung ways. They might re-emphasise that, while our culture draws on some aspects of a secularised theology, it too often overlooks the deepest strands of all in the Christian repertoire: grace, forgiveness, solidarity, and reconciliation. In brief, Europe’s historic faith deserves a more serious hearing than it usually receives from the mainstream.
Rupert Shortt is a research associate at the Von Hügel Institute, University of Cambridge. His new book The Eclipse of Christianity and Why It Matters is published by Hodder at £25 (Church Times Bookshop £20); 978-1-3998-0274-1.
He will be speaking about the book at the Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature, to be held in Winchester from 28 February to 2 March 2025. faithandliterature.hymnsam.co.uk