Godlessness has doomed Britain
Oddly, this piece appeared in the Jesusalem Post:
Britain today has become one of the most godless societies on Earth. Its principle ‘religious’ exports today are thinkers who despise religion. From Richard Dawkins, who has compared religion to child abuse, to my friend Christopher Hitchens, who titled his 2007 book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, the British have cornered the market on being anti-God – at least the Christian and Jewish varieties.
While 92 percent of Americans believe in God, in Britain only 35% do and, according to Britain’s National Center for Social Research, 43% say they have no religion. The percentage of those affiliated with the Church of England dropped from 40% in 1983 to 23% in 2009.
In truth, though, if Britain’s Christian tradition is dying out, the leaders of the faith have only themselves to blame.
Europeans are in the habit of making fun of American evangelicals as backward religious knuckle-draggers who believe that Adam and Eve actually ate apples with a talking snake. But for all this condescension, evangelical Christianity in the United States represents the single largest voting bloc in the world’s main superpower. One out of five Americans identifies as a born-again Christian – something inconceivable in Britain. American evangelicals build mega-churches that draw thousands of worshipers, while British churches are empty. Leading evangelical pastors like Rick Warren and Joel Osteen enjoy vast cultural influence among millions of Americans, while in Britain no religious figure could even hope to compete with William and Kate in exciting the youth.
Tags: Christianity, Religion Society
July 6th, 2011 at 6:25 pm
What an interesting article. Perhaps because religion in Britain (and the rest of Europe) has been reduced to a feel good sentiment people no longer take it seriously.
July 6th, 2011 at 10:32 pm
” … the British have cornered the market on being anti-God – at least the Christian and Jewish varieties.”
Christians have to own up to their part in the subversion of the faith in the U.K.
Are they now pleading ignorance of their hypocrisy?
Was it not they whom aligned themselves with the Godlessness of equality politics, multiculturalism and left/right (neo)-liberalism? Abandoning and scattering the indigenous working and sub-working class congregation for the capricious and sentimental progressives of the political elite.
July 7th, 2011 at 9:11 am
Do something about Harry Potter, and people flock from all over to attend. Do something about Christianity, or something else that is relevant and meaningful, and there’s barely a flicker of interest these days. People have their priorities all wrong, nor have they been given the tools to research and critically analyse thoughts and ideas.
Stacy recently said this:
“As to philosophy, although most college students today don’t know what that word really means, the classical meaning of the word dating back to ancient Greece is a “love of wisdom.” In early universities, all reasoned discourse and knowledge was philosophy. Education is supposed to be about answering ultimate questions, the search for a worldview, the search to know the important things in life that we need to seek and to strive for as human beings. It is the development of the self in relation to what has come before, what comes after and all that exists in the present. “
To quote Peter Jackson’s adaption of The Wanderer:
“Where is the horse and rider,
Where is the horn that was blowing
They have passed like rain on the mountain
Like wind in the meadow
The days have gone down in the West,
Behind the hills, into Shadow…”
July 8th, 2011 at 2:58 am
As someone who has lived a life fairly immersed in Christian circles from my teens onwards (I’m now in my mid-40s) it is hard to believe that many people have little or no contact with religion. Many of my friends are practicing Christians (in fact three of my closest friends are Anglican priests: two Evangelical and one Anglo-Catholic – tho’ the latter is also the spiritual director of one of the former!) – several of my wider circle of friends are also either priests, ministers or connected to church life in some shape or form. Hence it is difficult to comprehend a ‘different’ worldview, but for many people religion or a religious worldview has no part in their lives.
Here’s a silly example: few weeks ago I was up north at a family funeral on the way back to my parents’, where I was staying, I made a detour to drop off my sister and her husband at their house. This entailed driving passed a small green – an oasis in a sea of Coronation Street type back to backs. My sister said: ‘Oh look, they’ve got round to taking the cross down.’ I asked about this – the local Anglican church had put a cross on the green at Easter. My sister went on: ‘It’s been there for ages, I don’t know why they didn’t take it down sooner, but it must have been removed yesterday.’ So I said: ‘Well it’s been there for Easter, Easter finished yesterday, on Ascension Day.’ ‘No, Easter was weeks ago, they just didn’t get round to taking it down.’ my sister replied. ‘No, liturgical ‘Easter’ lasts for forty days, from the Vigil Mass to Ascension Day.’ My sister began to argue – but my stock reply with arguments over religion in my family is ‘Who was a monk for three years, you or me? Who’s the one doing a PhD in theology?’ My sister is 58, and altho’ she went to Sunday School as a child, she hasn’t a clue about anything other than the very basics of Christianity – and many people have less of an idea than she does.
And that is the world we live in – the problem for Christianity is that it is fine to whine about a godless world, but secular, democratic society comes up with the goods: people have what they want (and a good deal of what they neither want nor need!). America may have 50% church attendance on a Sunday compared to 7 or 8% in the UK – but on the whole the UK has far lower rates of the social problems of the US (the US has the highest rate of single parent families in the Western world, high divorce rates, particularly in the Bible Belt states, high rates of teenage pregnancy, a large divide between rich and poor, high rates of violent crime and murder… the list of problems is depressing!). The overtly secular societies of the Scandinavian countries score even better on many of the social indicators of a wholesome society.
I would suggest the problem is that once people ‘have it easy’ they have no need of faith – nor do politicians have the need to place social problems within a religious context. And the very fact that overtly religious societies tend to suffer from greater incidences of the very social problems religion is suppose to curb, I think highlights that the public place of religion is contentious. Even the briefest look at history tells us that when religion played a more prominent role in European culture, there was also a good deal of hypocrisy and the lot of many people was much poorer. Whatever, it is certain there has never been some ‘religious golden age’, except in the minds of those who look backwards with rose tinted spectacles and a good deal of wishful thinking.
Perhaps the only way to really give religion a greater place in European society would be to make life a lot more precarious! But the very fact it is likely religious belief and practice would increase if there was not the various securities we enjoy in the west raises some interesting – and some would say awkward – questions as to what is the real role and function of religion in a society?
P.