The shift in religious and Christian allegiance within the population was always predicted to arrive around about now, and here it is. Suddenly, numbers, being implacable as they are, tell us that those who identify as Christian are fewer than 50 per cent of the population according to the latest census.
There is no earthquake, no civil unrest, no torching of churches and murdering of priests as there was in both Spain in the 1930s and France in the 1780s, when a more intense repudiation of religion erupted in Europe. But the tipping of a balance can be just as dramatic a shift, even if it takes longer to work its way into the bloodstream of the body politic. How serious then are the implications of this shift in the balance of belief and unbelief?
They are very serious. They contain the same level of societal threat as an individual being told their cancer is terminal. Unless the Churches suddenly grasp the moment in a fervour of counter-cultural confidence it is not only the Church’s future that is under threat, but the whole civilised edifice built on Christian foundations. The building is battered, nearly empty and the foundations are being steadily eroded.
There are two parts to this shift of balance between belief and unbelief. One is to do with the Established Church of England, and the other is to do with the prospects of a society based on the rule of law, human rights and the freedom of conscience.
Regarding implications for the establishment, there was indeed some excitement in the media. There was secular outrage against the idea of an Established Church supported by so few people in practice, maintaining so many undeserved privileges. What causes most resentment is the tenacious exercise of unearned political power in retaining twenty seats for Anglican bishops in the House of Lords.
Some have taken the view this is a more confected outrage than a real revolt against a serious political injustice. The C of E bishops are not particularly politically potent. The speeches the Anglican bishops give express a kind of Liberal-Democrat smooth, secularised orthodoxy and have little to do with faith or representing their congregations.
The contributions of these bishops has very little direct effect. Their voices are not lifted to defend pre-born children in the womb or the civil rights of evangelists in the public square. They do little, if anything, to protect the Christian conscience in the workplace where belief that marriage between a man and a woman should be the norm can cause loss of employment. But the political symbolism that faith is now minority matters; and it severely rankles the secularists.
The presence of bishops in the Lords infuriates the National Secular Society in particular. The volume of their complaints intensifies as the number of Anglicans who go to Church on Sundays falls (it is now 1.2 per cent or 560,000 out of a population of 56,000,000(C of E Statistics for Mission 2019)). Since the justification for their presence was buttressed by the not entirely cogent claim that they represented all believers across the religious spectrum, the fact that belief has fallen below 50 per cent removes the persuasiveness of what was a thin argument already stretched too far.
But the rage will remain. There is no way of dealing with it.
There is very little that can be done about disestablishing the Church. It has for example the most serious consequences for the place of the monarchy in our organically grown complex unwritten constitution. It makes untying the Gordian knot look simple by comparison. Since the government can’t even find the legislative coherence or energy to confront the migrant crisis on its beaches, it is unlikely that it would have the resources to deal with the legislative complexity of disestablishing the C of E.
And that is not going to help the growing secular frustration and sense of injustice.
Although if Catholics in this country are serious, as they ought to be, about reclaiming Mary’s Dowry, they should begin to contribute to the national debate unrestrained by the fear of usurping an incoherent and largely impotent Established Church.
The Church of the nation will soon become the Church that behaves and acts as the Church of the nation. Now that C of E has capitulated to a quasi-unitarian spiritual department of woke-ism, there is a gaping space in our national life for a confident, articulate Christian voice. And there is no down side to a church invigorated by the sense of responsibility of regaining an influence the state forcibly robbed it of after a thousand years of nation building.
But the second dimension to the implications of the shift in numbers is even more serious. It has to do with the threat to the stability and coherence of our post-Christian society.
Christian culture, already energetically attacked for over half a century, has at a stroke been deprived of its demographic majority and claim on society. Yet it alone has given us the sacredness of each human person, the protection of the integrity of the individual conscience, and the whole interweaving of human rights that holds society together in a form of virtuous mutual accountability.
The slippage from faith to secularism is no mere change of fashion in world view. It is like a man sitting on a branch attached to a tree, and sawing through the branch oblivious that he will come crashing to the ground with the branch. Secularism may be in revolt against the spiritual vision that birthed the society it grew out of, but it has no agreed values of its own to replace the sanctity of every life, beyond self-interest and an almost superstitious veneration of the “nice”.
There is an intense battle for the human soul represented by a love of power and hedonism on one side, and compassionate love and self-sacrifice on the other taking place. If secularism, the former, overcomes Christianity, the latter, society will slip inexorably towards a brutalised form of totalitarianism that lacks mercy. Already we have seen the that cancel culture known no forgiveness. Science and rationality have melted before the assault of twisted imaginations and disturbed dogmas that woke-ist ideology has started to impose.
The new atheists have begun to celebrate becoming a majority in our society and are keen to rid themselves of irksome Judaeo-Christian ethics and restraints.
But they have yet to understand the implications that flow from undermining the foundations of a society they neither conceived nor built. In his latest book Dominion, Tom Holland has tried to tell the unwelcome truth that secularism may be paradoxically completely dependent on the Christian culture it is busy destroying:
“If you recognise that something like secularism or something like human rights is culturally contingent, something bred of Christianity, then the risk is that just as you stop believing in God, so you stop believing in human rights as well,” he warned an Irish audience in a recent lecture.
In another exchange on Twitter he repeated: “Human rights aren’t objectively true! They derive from profoundly Christian theological presumptions. They are quite as culturally contingent as a belief in Christ’s resurrection.”
Holland has issued the stark warning that the glue that has held the best elements of our society together, the sanctity of human life, the belief in human rights, the intuition of the existence of a difference between Good and Evil, are all provided by Christianity. They are unknown in ether neo-paganism, or the totalitarianism of both Left and Right.
Catholics ought to attend to both the teaching of the Church and the wisdom of fellow travellers like Tom Holland to remind them that what is at stake is the very existence of civilisation itself. So much is at stake that we need to begin to rediscover a passion to save not only the souls of our neighbours, but also recover the apprehension of the importance of the sacred and the holy as a buffer against the decadence of the unholy and the profane.
There is no human right that guarantees the rule of law and protection from anarchy or totalitarianism. All the values that hold them at bay are Christian in origin. The loss of moral mandate that becoming a minority entails leaves us without traction at the top of a dangerous slippery slope at the bottom of which is the loss of all that is precious to humanity.
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