Christianity in the Twentieth Century by Brian Stanley, Princeton, 504pp, £27
A cynical old priest of my acquaintance, long dead, and so politically incorrect as to be, perhaps, scarcely quotable in 21st-century print, once said to me: “I never take much comfort from those who tell us that the Church is flourishing in Africa, even if it is declining in Europe. All this suggests to me is that when the Africans reach our level of prosperity or educational advantage, they too will become secularised.”
It is politically incorrect, but is it true?Sociologists of religion in the past decades have been divided between those who believe that secularised Europe is a “special case”, and that humanity goes on being essentially religious, and those such as the late Bryan Wilson (no relation of mine, though a friend) who – to quote Brian Stanley – “hold that Europe exemplifies the secularised default setting to which the modern (or at least the modernised) world is generally heading”.
Which is true? This is the central question that surely confronts Stanley in his Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History. Without wishing to spoil it for you, he does not entirely make up his mind.
This is partly because, kind, modern person that he no doubt is (I do not know him), he would shrink from the suggestion that, with the growth of widespread educational or economic advantage, it was inevitable that humanity become more “rational”. Still less does he wish to suggest that Western Europeans are in any way more sophisticated than those Muslims, Hindus, animists or Christians who continue enthusiastically to practise their faith in less prosperous areas of the globe.
Rather than telling the story purely chronologically, Stanley selects various themes – the aftermath of war, the growth or shrinkage of missions, the result of secularisation in places as different as France and Soviet Russia, the effects of liberation theology – and he gives as much space to little-known Christians as to the supposed big names. From his very first sentence, Stanley shies away from a Eurocentric view of history.
Nevertheless, there are certain figures, and events, which make it impossible to avoid a European concentration of attention, and supreme among such moments was surely the election of Karol Wojtyła in 1978. Yet overwhelming as this event was in its effect upon the secular Soviet power, and its immense significance in Eastern Europe, the overall effect of Pope John Paul II is harder to read.
The growth of the evangelical movements in Korea and South America would have happened without his pontificate, and his personal qualities of intellect and holiness did little to reverse the catastrophic decline in Mass attendance and belief in Western Europe. In the lands that gave birth to Christianity in the Middle East, Christianity looks pretty close to extinction.
Precisely because it reaches no easy conclusions, I strongly recommend this book to anyone who thinks they understand the subject – whether they are atheist triumphalists who think that tomorrow belongs to them; whether they are optimistic Christians, who think that the tide will turn eventually in favour of the faith once delivered to the saints; or whether they are wistful pessimists who think there is very little sign of Christian revival in any of the areas which, in the past, have nurtured the faith, or left behind great memorials of it.
Despite little pockets of success, the religious life seems to have gone into irreversible decline, with almost all religious orders, for either sex, dwindling. It is decades, perhaps centuries, since there has been any great Christian architecture, or, arguably, literature on the scale of Dante Alighieri.
As for the great decades of Christian music in the 20th century, especially in France, they do not get so much as a mention in this book. No Vierne, Poulenc or Messiaen – though for many of us, it is when listening to Christian music that we feel closest to faith.
For many historians, the most dramatic shift in Christian history during the 20th century was the change in attitudes to sexuality. From the time of John the Baptist, for example, until the end of the 20th century, Christians of all complexions were united in insisting upon chastity or monogamy. But in the mid to late 20th century, we find the phenomenon of Christians, including Anglican bishops, who apparently consider the practice of homosexuality, or the remarriage of the divorced, as permissible.
Stanley does not exactly investigate how this enormous shift in viewpoint occurred. Whether this phenomenon is a sign of secularisation, or the movement of the Holy Spirit, will presumably depend on the reader’s general outlook. The author would seem to be a liberal, but he gives equal space in his book to those of opposing viewpoints on these confusing matters.
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