Religion is here to stay

Everybody knows there’s a significant decline in religious practice among Christians, but anybody interested in this phenomenon also knows there’s marked growth in the intensity of the faith espoused by those who believe, especially among the young. Similarly, while we might expect the general culture to be less Christian than ever before, a great many social issues simply can’t be understood in secular terms any more — from populism to the culture wars to battles over identity and nationhood.

Christians have been rediscovering their own traditions anew, much less accommodatingly and fearfully than prior generations.

Then there’s the fact of what might be called Christianity’s “cultured admirers” — commentators hugely impressed by certain elements of the faith, but only some of whom actually practice it. Such people are non-believers who are not in any sense “secular”- that is, not having a secular view of the world or of human society — yet in some cases not having faith either. In short, people are less likely to be religious today — but today is also a time which is less secular than any period since perhaps the immediate post-war years.

Added to all this, there are occasional issues where Christian and non-religious concerns interplay and overlap. The most obvious example is the resistance to gender ideology, where pre-trans-style lesbian activists have found common cause with the Christian faithful, in ways that were unthinkable just over a decade ago.

The discourse about the Terminally Ill (End of Life) Bill, due to be debated in parliament this Friday, can perhaps be considered another point of overlap — albeit without anything like the same level of controversy and threatened social ostracisation. Maybe this sort of alliance of viewpoints between, say, Diane Abbott or Wes Streeting on the one hand, and Edward Leigh or most faith leaders on the other, is particularly intimidating to those who yearn for the old “religious vs secular” paradigm — and this is why the very fact of people having religious concerns at all has itself been criticised as something unacceptable.

The Observer ran a piece which went for a sort-of guilt-by-association-with-other-causes approach, such as is commonly levelled at gender critical feminists. The piece alleged that anti-euthanasia campaign groups were hiding financial links to conservative Christian groups, who also oppose things like “abortion, sex education, gay marriage and broader LGBTQ+ rights”.

Humanists UK sprang into action to report on that story, but dropped by the guilt-by-association bit simply to criticize the groups mentioned for allegedly hiding their religious links, with their chief executive Andrew Copson saying “it is worrying that the concealed agendas of some others may mislead MPs and undermine the deliberative democratic process”.

Earlier this month, the Cardinal Archbishop of England and Wales, Vincent Nichols, spoke out against Dame Esther Rantzen for complaining about people having religious motivations at all — even when expressed openly — after she said that Nichol’s being guided by faith shouldn’t mean he can “impose his faith on those who do not share it”. Rantzen was backtracking to the old secular paradigm, where religion itself is always a problem when it ceases to be mere private choice.

There’s no need to rehash the private choice vs public religion debate here. What interests me is how unsustainable it has become, in a short space of time. In a postsecular age, the assumption that a religiously neutral sphere is somehow transparently rational and “safe” simply can’t be easily maintained. The Covid pandemic and the Cass Report put paid to all that. Neither can relational and communal facts of life — things like family, marriage, education, community, and nationhood — any longer be lazily extricated from the Christian roots which all of these things inevitably bear in a Western context. Idolising individual choice gave birth to an anti-any-norms-at-all movement that has led people to rediscover the origins of these things afresh.

It is now much harder for people to disambiguate faith from reason. Liberal democracies have come up against a set of what Christopher Lasch described as “oppositional dispositions” characterised by “permanent discontent, bitterness, and regret” on both sides. The naïvely secular attempt to deify reason as some transparent faculty which can pronounce authoritatively upon ultimate things has almost entirely collapsed.

In lockstep with this collapse, Christians have been rediscovering their own traditions anew, much less accommodatingly and fearfully than prior generations. They are thus finding the locus of a faithfully-ordered reason — most obviously in the natural law tradition — has rich resources for helping societies find their way out of today’s deadening impasses. It is also this rediscovery which puts paid to any allegations of believers “imposing” their views on others, insofar as everybody “has” reason — it’s what you do with it that counts.

No-one can claim to know what 21st century Christianity is going to look like in the coming decades, but as it stands there’s good reason to suggest it is could take-on new and unforeseen forms; promising to right an approach to reason which has gone terribly awry, drawing in new converts and fellow travellers from unexpected quarters, offering an approach to Western self-understanding which is more accurate and compelling than the common state-mandated narratives, and maybe even resurfacing from the decay of our cultural moment less timid, less accommodating to worldly mores, and much less fatalist about an inevitably godless future.

Religion is here to stay
A new spirit of confidence and fearlessness characterises those who continue to believe

By Jacob Phillips
ARTILLERY ROW
November 27, 2024

Our current moment has a strange interplay of apparently opposite attitudes to Christianity which don’t fit easily into the pre-existing categories of “religious” vs “secular”. There are contradictory ways in which Western societies are becoming both less-religious and more Christian at the same time, suggesting Christianity in this century might look rather different to the last.