Secularisation is leading Britain astray
by Giles Fraser, UnHerd:
The Church must stop trying to be cool.
In the middle of the night, I am often haunted by the thought of weeds and mould breaking through the parquet floor, of the roof falling in, or the space being populated by pigeons not parishioners. The creeping damp is the vanguard of our demise. Larkin’s poem swirls around my head: “When churches fall completely out of use, what shall we turn them into… a few cathedrals chronically on show… and let the rest rent free to rain and sheep.” Not on my watch, I say to myself defiantly.
But still, the sound of the tide going out on the sea of faith is unmistakable. The results of the 2021 census, announced this week, tell us that we are a minority Christian country, with just 46% self-defining as Christian. The humanists are gleeful. And the treasurer tells me we are again set to lose tens of thousands of pounds next year. Churches in poorer areas may not survive the coming storm. Ones set in the leafy suburbs may be able to reinvent themselves as fancy conference venues — but both will be subject to a kind of death.
Of course, the universal church isn’t in this situation. It remains the largest movement on earth, despite a little local difficulty in this part of the world. It just goes to highlight the woeful parochialism of so much of our media coverage. The narrative of secularisation, and of its inevitability, is linked to that dodgy old Enlightenment idea of progress — which is as much a matter of wilful faith as anything said from the pulpit. Numerically speaking, the 20th century was the Church’s best since its creation. Or is it that “progress” only applies to white Westerners?
[…] Generally speaking, however, the leadership of the Church of England is still gripped by the debilitating fear of numerical decline. It nervously responds at every turn with cheesy new initiatives bent on making us relevant and popular. These often have the very opposite of their intended consequences: cathedrals have answered Larkin’s challenge by turning themselves into fun parks of crazy golf or helter skelters. “Please like us,” they plead, desperately, with all the panache (and success rate) of spotty teenagers dousing themselves in cheap aftershave in a bid to make themselves attractive to the opposite sex.
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