When churches go woke, they die
by Michael Coren, Telegraph:
Traditional Christianity is what worshippers seek – and I say that as a supporter of same-sex marriage.
Earlier this year Right Rev Rose Hudson-Wilkin, Bishop of Dover, told the General Synod of the Church of England that the term “woke” shouldn’t be used negatively, as it is so often by various government ministers who are “threatened” by the social justice movement. She’s far from alone, with some leaders in the church advocating courses in “unconscious bias” training.
Fair enough, and the devaluation of language within political discourse has indeed become a scandal. Just as some on the Right routinely accuse opponents of being woke or Marxist, those on the hard Left throw the term “fascist” around with a horribly offensive disregard for truth, let alone how they’ve distorted “Zionist” and perverted it into a term of abuse.
But there’s another issue here involving organised Christianity, and one that goes beyond semantics. Throughout the Western world it’s the liberal, perhaps woke, churches that are in worrying and sometimes terminal decline.
There are exceptions of course, but generally speaking the growth that we see is within Latin Mass Catholicism, Book of Common Prayer or conservative Anglicanism, and intelligent megachurch evangelicalism. I say this, by the way, as a social democrat, a liberal, an old-style radical.
Individual leaders with a particular charisma or appeal might make a difference and break the trend but otherwise the pattern is fairly clear. The more traditional the beliefs and worship, the greater the appeal. Nor is this nostalgia, with older people clinging on to what they’ve known. It’s the under 40s, often under 30s and teens, who are searching for something that isn’t merely a thin replica of what they see, hear, and learn in secular society.
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