by Andrew Gimson, Conservative Home
A quiet revival in Christian belief among the young is said to have begun. How strong this revival will prove is impossible to say, for to predict the evolution of other people’s religious convictions is even more difficult than to give, without claiming either too much or too little, a true account of one’s own beliefs.
But there is certainly a more explicit recognition in the last year or two that we live in a nation created and pervaded by Christianity. See for example God Is An Englishman: Christianity and the Creation of England by Bijan Omrani, published in April this year to widespread acclaim.
And on visiting out of the way churches where one might expect to find evidence of terminal decline, quite often one is pleasantly surprised to detect signs of vitality, even of growth.
We have a national tendency to close our eyes to danger, and to put off the evil day when we admit that something must be done. The melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of Christianity, detected by Matthew Arnold in the mid-19th century, was generally regarded as something about which not much could be done.
We hoped, as usual, to muddle through. With any luck the benefits to our political culture obtained under Christianity would endure, even if Christianity itself faced extinction.
Those benefits included the gradual extension of the freedoms enjoyed by members of the Church of England to other denominations. Dissenters and Roman Catholics were at length allowed to become MPs and hold other public offices, and so were Jews.
The Monarch remained Head of the Church of England, but under his or her beneficent authority, one could believe anything, or indeed nothing.