THERE has been much discussion of the Bible Society’s report of a “quiet revival” of churchgoing, particularly among young men (Features, 15 August). James Marriott, in The Times on Saturday, is one of a number of commentators to suggest that this is a symptom of a wider disaffection with cultural secularism. The new generation are much less likely than the baby-boomers, or even the millennials, to describe themselves as atheists.
Secularism may have driven Christianity to the margins, but its current status as a sub-culture seems to be making it more rather than less attractive. The casual atheism that held sway at the millennium was linked to a widespread belief that the world was improving and that each generation would be more prosperous and happy than the last. But, for the rising generation, that progress seems to have ended, or even gone into reverse. Many young people now experience the world as a troubling, enigmatic, and sometimes dangerous place.
It is the Pentecostal and Roman Catholic Churches that have the most appeal to potential converts. In the C of E, this translates to Charismatic and Anglo-Catholic congregations. I suspect that this is because both traditions are, in essence, other-worldly. Pentecostalism makes the supernatural visible and tangible through signs and wonders, prophecies, and tongue-speaking; Catholicism through ritual that evokes the paradox of how God can be both utterly “other” and yet wholly present.
Both suggest that there is more to life than material progress, and that faith, far from being an escape from reality, is a resource for resilience in this vale of tears. This is “full-fat” Christianity, and those of us who preach and teach in more middle-of-the-road settings need to pay attention.
The truth is that the well-meaning Christian liberalism of the kind that still permeates much of the C of E no longer seems to cut the mustard. Pulpit moralising about attitudes to, say, immigration and climate change does not always come across as good news to distressed souls looking for anchorage “amid the changes and chances of this fleeting world”. And, although HTB-style worship has made gains, I am not sure that the Alpha course, for all its success, has the depth or resonance to meet the needs of those drawn into faith from nowhere. Alpha tends to appeal to those who have a residual knowledge of Christianity from childhood, less to those who have never had anything to do with the Church.
What is needed for them, and perhaps all of us, is a new kind of apologetic: a way of interpreting scripture which addresses both the mystery of suffering and the hope of heaven, a new valuing of beauty in nature, but also in architecture, music, and art; and a new ethic that does not scold us for wrong attitudes, but shows us what it means to repent, change, and, above all, to endure.