by Laudable Practice, The Critic
“The Quiet Revival”: in UK church circles, everyone is talking about it. It has even caught the attention of the secular media. The recent Bible Society report highlighted a significant increase in church attendance amongst under 35s. For those predicting the death of Christianity in the UK, it has come as an unpleasant surprise. An exhausted secularism and a brittle New Atheism, it seems, have been tried and found wanting, incapable of offering meaning and roots to those who have come of age amidst the chaos — economic, cultural, political — of the early decades of the 21st century.
That Christianity should be rediscovered by the children of a very secular British culture is indeed good news. You might think that the Church of England would be the leading beneficiary of this. With a presence in every community, its role in education, and its place in national life, Anglicanism should be very well placed to benefit most from a “quiet revival”. This, however, is not happening. In the words of the report, “among 18 — 34s, only 20 per cent of churchgoers are Anglican (down from 30 per cent in 2018), with 41 per cent Catholic and 18 per cent Pentecostal”.
Some commentators have been quick to suggest that the reason for Anglicanism’s relative failure in attracting the converts of the “quiet revival” is due to an inherent inability to compete with the “smells and bells” of Catholicism and the worship experience offered by Pentecostalism. This is a rather unconvincing suggestion. To begin with, it is not at all difficult to find CofE parish churches in which Mass is celebrated in a manner which makes the average Roman Catholic parish church appear distinctly puritanical. And, on the other hand, there are well-known CofE parishes in which Sunday morning services are difficult to distinguish from Pentecostalist services.