In the English speaking world, Christians are becoming fewer and fewer, and older and older. Certainly in the UK, census figures released last month showed that less than half the population identified themselves as Christian; for young people, the figure was barely one in three. The same phenomenon is evident in the US. As Stephen Bullivant reports, people who say they have “no religion” – the so-called “nones” – amount to about one in four of the population, almost 60 million adults.
About 70 per cent of this group used to have a religion. Prof Bullivant calls them “nonverts”, that is, the opposite of converts, those who go from having a religion to no religion. Of them, 16 million of them say they were once Catholic; 7.5 million are ex-Baptists; two million each of ex-Lutherans and ex-Methodists; and a million apiece of ex-Episcopalians and ex-Presbyterians. Another two million nones were brought up in non-Christian religions, just over half of whom were raised Jewish. So, there are 41 million nonverts: an extraordinary development.
There is a similar trend elsewhere in the Anglosphere and in western Europe. It was identified early by Pope Benedict, who gave a great deal of thought as to how best to address an increasingly secular world.
This is a gravely worrying phenomenon, but we should not despair. Elsewhere in this magazine, we have an interview with Bishop Robert Barron, a US bishop who refused to accept that Christianity is set for inexorable decline. Before he became a bishop he had already begun online evangelisation, because he felt that he could do better than talk to already committed Catholics in a small room. He was an early adopter of YouTube, where he has been astonishingly effective. He presented an uncompromisingly intelligent series on Catholicism for public service television. His online site, Word on Fire, presents the faith reasonably, cogently and attractively. It is an example of effective evangelisation.
What Bishop Barron does is engage with people who do not necessarily agree with him. In one online forum he bills himself as a bishop who enjoys talking with atheists and agnostics. St Paul would have identified him as one of his own. This internet ministry is the equivalent of the travels of the earliest missionaries of Christianity to pagan territory, though of course, he is ministering to Catholics and Christians as well as to the non-aligned and hostile.
It is worth considering what he thinks important for this ministry. “Do not underestimate the intelligence of the young,” he says. Well-meaning people warned him at the start not to be pictured in front of books, to simplify the message in order to make it comprehensible. As he has observed, no one seeks to dumb-down physics in order to make it attractive to young people; and young people want their intelligence respected. They are quite frank in surveys about why it is they are leaving the faith, and one reason they give is that the presentation of Christianity is unintelligent. Bishop Barron presents the faith in a way that appeals to rational, thinking individuals, a tradition of apologetics that has been largely neglected in the modern Church.
Another aspect of his appeal is that he does not start with the so-called hot-button issues such as gender, sexuality and abortion. He certainly does not duck those questions, but he doesn’t start out with them. For one thing, it can put people off. For another, these questions are not the essence of Catholic belief; for that, we should start out with the Creed. What we need now are ways to express our belief in the God who made us and loves us and who, in Jesus Christ, died for us. We need to convey who Christ was. Of course we must assert our values, especially when it comes to the life issues, but it should not be where we begin to engage with other people.
Then there is the question of how we, as Catholics, come across to other people. Bishop Barron observes that Catholics can present an unlovely spectacle online: in squabbling with ourselves, in uncharitable point-scoring, rather than looking out to the world. That is a formula for decline.
His work is the equivalent of the ministry of Archbishop Fulton Sheen, another brilliant American communicator, in the age of radio and television. Not every bishop will want to do the same, but it is a way of reaching non-believers as well as believers. Bringing nonverts back to faith, and making it attractive to those who have never known a Church, is a challenge. But the stakes are high: nothing less than the salvation of souls. We must all play a part; that is partly why we have set up the Catholic Herald Institute in New York. Bishop Barron shows us one way to go about it.
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