Christianity’s death-bed lesson from Islam
by Jules Gomes, TCW:
Congratulations! Cool Britannia has finally reached a common core of belief. We are unanimously agreed that we believe in not believing in anything. After ‘40,000 years of believing and belonging’ we will become the first society in the world without religious belief at its core.
In a BBC Radio 4 series, Living with the Gods, Neil MacGregor, former director of the British Museum, will broadcast daily a 30-part programme over the next six weeks, featuring objects from the museum’s archive that show how religion has shaped society.
‘In a sense, we are a very unusual society,’ says MacGregor. ‘We are trying to do something that no society has really done. We are trying to live without an agreed narrative of our communal place in the cosmos and in time.’ As the Beatles would sum it up: ‘We are nowhere men, in a nowhere land, making all our nowhere plans, for nobody.’
Asked if he was referring to the disappearance of religious faith from the lives of people in Britain, MacGregor replied: ‘Yes, exactly that. As a country, we no longer have an agreed narrative of that sort.’ He’s right. Christianity, which provided Britain with a shared narrative, is the fastest dying religion in the West.
Islamic scholar Patrick Sookhdeo emphatically shares MacGregor’s realism. Sookhdeo, who is a Muslim convert to Christianity and a prolific author on Islam, has hurled his most incendiary grenade on to the playground of the morally and spiritually decrepit Western church.
Hot on the heels of Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, Sookhdeo points his prophetic finger at the Western church that has shamelessly prostituted its identity and made a Faustian bargain with 300 years of the Western zeitgeist. Sookhdeo titles his book The Death of Western Christianity: Drinking from the Poisoned Wells of the Cultural Revolution.
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