Faith in Britain 50-50

An article in yesterday's Telegraph raises the specter of dying Christianity in Britain. Well, not just dying, but nearly dead in another generation or two. Of course, given the growth of Muslim populations in the West, will Islam eventually dominate and overshadow a believing Christian minority? The grim news:

Organised religion is in near-terminal decline in Britain because parents have only a 50-50 chance of passing on belief to their offspring, a study claimed yesterday.

By contrast, parents without faith are successful in producing a new generation of non-believers, it said.

The report identified institutional religion as having a "half-life" of one generation, as children are only half as likely as their parents to say that it is important in their lives.

The generational decline is too advanced to reverse, the report suggested, as the proportion of people who believe in God is declining faster than church attendance.

Dr David Voas, who oversaw the study at the University of Manchester, said religion would reach "fairly low levels" before very long.

Christianity is not exactly robust in Britain even now. The fact is that many Europeans just gave up believing quite some time ago, even if they didn't completely discard the ritual of baptizing their children and getting married in the church. Why? Secularism, yes, but that's just a circular argument. I have wondered to what extent two World Wars on the continent of Europe, mostly involving "Christian" nations, have contributed to the decline of faith. No wonder drug usage in the British Isles is so high. I suppose it numbs the pain of living in a meaningless culture.

Where are the Saint Patricks, Saint Columbas, Saint Augustines of Canterbury? Instead, the Dean of Lincoln Cathedral, the Rev. Alec Knight, thinks filming the Da Vinci Code in the cathedral will present a golden opportunity for the Gospel. I wouldn't even give him 50-50 on that one.

Will the time come--or has it already-- when more parents (and children) will have read The Da Vinci Code than have ever read through an entire Gospel?

Comments

[Gene Godbold]

People like Phillip Jenkins, who study religious demographics, aren't despairing of Christianity vis-a-vis Islam. In fact, one can view the hyper-religiosity of Muslim radicals as a last-ditch reaction to a crisis brought on by the apparent "victory" of Christian culture. Personally, I'm not worried about being one of a minority of people with allegiance to the Lord Jesus. (In any case, I suspect He might have 7000 people in a cave somewhere that haven't bowed the knee to Baal.)

[Gabriel Sanchez]

Before I toss my $0.02 into the bag, I will say that George Weigel's latest essay-book The Cube and the Cathedral does a very ample job of assessing the state of Christianity in Europe along with making some general predictions of where it may leave the region in the very near future.

I believe the German-born philosopher Leo Strauss did the best in identifying the "crisis of the West" as its loss of confidence in its twin pillars--reason and revelation. Since the Enlightenment, German thought as a whole has come to historicise and critisise all upon which Western society was built, including Christianity. It simultaneously removed faith and allowed reason to conqueor, only in a very emaciated form from what the ancient or the medieval minds excercised. The pursuit of truth was replaced with the assertion of fact from which no value could be drawn and religion has become not a source of teaching about the highest goods in the human life, but identified instead (through Marxist criticism) as an element of oppression the ruling class in society use to keep the lower stratas in check.

Such thinking really found its culmination in the thinking of Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger and played out in practice in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. The dark irony--as Strauss identified--is even after its defeat in practice, the Western mind still found itself yoked with the weight of German thought and it has not freed itself ever since.

History is now viewed as a great pyramid upon which we now stand triumphantly at the apex looking down the slope at what came before--Judaism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, Christianity, and so forth. Even the ideas championed by the Enlightenment itself have become passe. It is little wonder to me that the outsourcing of such thought--that is, post-war Europe--would be the first to display its logical byproducts of a godless society with an increasingly temporal outlook whose grounding is neither truth nor even a hope of truth, only nihilism.

I too have asked myself where the modern day manifestations of the great evangelists of old have gone and I have not, as of yet, been able to produce a satisfactory answer. My fear is that there are few among us--as the larger body of Christians in the world--who have the faith and confidence of those great men and women. Whether we like to admit it or not, we have been taught from a tender age to respect the views of others under the maxim, "Everyone has a right to their opinion." While it may have opened up the door to greater levels of discourse, its glaringly negative effect has been to stifle the modern conscience in compelling us to do nothing. Our faith has become our opinion and we flee at the possibility of having to declare it loudly so not only others can hear, but so they too may follow, lest we endure the could sholders, mockeries, and humiliations our Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ felt.