David Voas British Religion in Numbers Christian decline: How it’s measured and what it means
Ted Harrison Church Times Most kind and gentle death
“Ted Harrison offers a reflection for Candlemas”
Colin Coward has started a new vlog – here is the first episode.
Colin Coward’s first episode is exemplary in its clarity.
What he describes as his foundational belief is pure Gnosticism.
I guess this sort of comment invites questions.
When you speak of your personal experience and relationship with God, are you completely certain your ideas don’t play on the edge of one heresy or another?
Colin is describing a vision of church that was powered by some deeply grounded people who had a mystical faith. What room does the Church of England make for people like this now? And why?
One of the more painful phenomena of the last decade or so has been the tendency for various Church parties to take what they want to out of ‘From Anecdote to Evidence’ in order to advance their own political claims within the Church. Thus one party asserts that it is only their particular way of doing things which is yielding fruit, whilst another attributes decline to decreasing numbers of clergy. They are like the shipwrecked aboard the Medusa scrambling for the last scraps before turning on each other. So much of this is dancing upon the head of a pin.… Read more »
Of course, Froghole. Well said. Of course, going “from Anecdote to Evidence” is not the preserve of the Church of England nor is it restricted to the last ten years. I strongly recommend people to read the David Voas article because it makes its points clearly and (in my possibly subjective opinion) objectively. One thing that David doesn’t discuss is the likely effect of immigration. Immigrants or expatriates who have little connection to places of worship in their original or home country may well join up for cultural and social reasons. And some immigrants will come from countries where “no… Read more »
Many thanks for this, as ever. I have now attended services at nearly 6,000 churches in every region of the country, and in urban, suburban and rural milieux. I am afraid that little more than 50 of these had a critical mass of people within the 18-24 demographic; these churches were overwhelmingly in wealthy dormitory suburbs or certain university towns. Attendees within that demographic were not, on the whole, ‘immigrants’. However, I have attended services at sufficient numbers of Pentecostalist, Seven Day Adventist, etc., churches to note that they have age distributions that are more reflective of society at large,… Read more »
Thank you. I use “immigrants” merely in the sense of the official definition–people who come to this country and stay for more than one year. They are therefore part of the population, and I would therefore take issue with you on only one point…I don’t think that it is fair to say that any of the groups you refer to “skew” the figures. What they do is contribute to them! I can imagine that your “little more than 50” figure is actually an accurate number. I would also presume that some of those were observed some years in the past… Read more »
Many thanks again. Yes, the word ‘skew’ is maladroit. The point I was trying to make, albeit clumsily, is that the big story of the last 20 years is how people who might have identified as Anglican, or at least Christian, a decade or two back have simply abandoned any remaining pretence at such identification. Had it not been for relatively recent immigrants from more overtly ‘Christian’ parts of the world, and the relative intensity of that migration within a relatively short period of time, I suspect the trajectory of the decline in the aggregate numbers of those identifying as… Read more »
I have been dropping in on the live streaming of the Post Office Horizon inquiry. This is a statutory enquiry with the evidence taken under oath: that means I have seen an awful lot of people swearing or affirming. Or, more to the point, affirming or swearing. This is an enquiry about events of twenty years ago, largely, and the people giving evidence are mostly retired. They’re white, middle-class professionals: people who a generation ago would have been stalwarts of their local church or, at the very least, keen not to be seen as _not_ stalwarts of their local church.… Read more »
Many thanks. I agree. Having read an illuminating book about the scandal last year (https://bathpublishing.com/products/the-great-post-office-scandal), it would be interesting to know how the Revd Paula Vennells has fared under cross-examination. It was remarkable that, despite Horizon having been condemned in 2014, Vennells was awarded a CBE as recently as 2019, and was only removed from the Church’s ethical investment panel in 2021.
Horizon vies with Grenfell as one of the great scandals of this century, and for much of the worst of the time the Post Office was led by a priest.
Vennells hasn’t been involved yet: the proceedings so far have been about the early history of the project, commercially, technically and operationally. I agree with you about it being one of the worst scandals of modern times; I think Vennells is mostly guilty of complacency and a total lack of curiosity, because the stage had been set for the disaster before she arrived. There are going to be management PhDs from now until the end of time about what went wrong, but I cannot help thinking that being a cleric in a position like that is likely to make you… Read more »
Dear Froghole, your extended pilgrimage offers possibly unique insights into the life of the Church of England in recent years. I’m not sure if I’ve said it before, but it merits a book pitched to be readable with anecdotes, hard facts, and reflections. I think you have observed this point yourself recently, but if so I agree: whereas it was at one time a socially beneficial thing to be seen at church and associated with church, in secular society at large today it may well be viewed as a negative, because of social perceptions at work and among friends that… Read more »
Many thanks, as ever. Indeed, we are herd animals. If I recall, in his 2014 autobiography, Jonathan Meades (an arch-atheist) has a wonderful evocation of his mother’s home cooking, which was evidently of a high order. He then reflects on the declining standards of domestic catering even as the TV schedules are overrun with endless cookery programmes. Amenity and convenience, he notes, lead to a loss of skill, and then he coins a phrase which made a great impression on me: ‘one generation forgets, the next never knew’. The great mid-Victorians who lost their faith – Matthew Arnold, Arthur Clough,… Read more »
On Vaughan Williams – my favourite composer – it is strange because though (rather like Thomas Hardy) he felt distant from the details of Christian faith and God as defined that way… yet he was still drawn to something numinous about the churches and hymns… and arguably composed some of the most shudderingly mystical and touching music of any English composer. There are passages which resonate with some sense of deeper, numinous mystery. I actually think, for quite a lot of people even in UK today, they sometimes feel drawn to inexplicable numinous sense of deepness beyond words… but may… Read more »
One weakness in the survey, and which David Voas does not mention, is that the options for describing your attitude to Christianity go in one direction only. You can be in favour or indifferent. You cannot enter an answer against a religion. At a recent discussion at Westminster linked to Charlie Bell’s book launch a number of people, MPs, priests, and university lecturers shared experiences of “coming out” as Christian to groups of young people, and immediately having to defend themselves against accusations of intolerance and homophobia. Intolerance was believed to be the default Christian position by large swathes of… Read more »
Many thanks for these shrewd remarks. One of the most striking phenomena of recent years, and perhaps a tribute not only to the increasing diversity of ‘European’ societies but also to the staffing of higher education, is how the Atlantic has ‘shrunk’. By this I mean that the debates about race, gender and identity which have been building in the US over the last 50 years have become ‘mainstream’ within the UK, and have in turn percolated into the wider British education system, a very large proportion of those reaching adulthood since the turn of the century now having passed… Read more »
Thanks for the comment. There are probably a number of causes for the antipathy towards Christianity amongst the young.
I wonder if another cause is the large number of young people in the UK with a commonwealth origin, and who would now be very aware of the appalling history of UK colonialism, and of how the church was a complicit actor in that story.
I agree. The Church was absolutely complicit, and although empire was overwhelmingly driven by economic imperatives (specifically, the desire for investors based mostly in the south-east for high returns on their investments, and the desire of manufacturers for vents for their products), faith invariably followed the flag, although often with limited enthusiasm on the part of the colonial authorities (unlike French colonies, for example, where ‘anti-clericalism was not for export’ and the RCC was one of the most active agents of the colonial state). The Church was complicit because it was, to a great extent, the south-eastern investor class at… Read more »
It was Rustat that was in my mind when I made that post about colonialism. “Mansplaining” is when a man explains feminism to a woman. I have been tempted to create a similar word after the experience of six years of LLF debate, “Straightsplaining” is when a straight man (normally a bishop or professor) explains homosexuality to a homosexual. What’s the word for when a group of white men tell a black woman college master, and her many students from a colonial background, how they should respond to slavery. And we wonder why the church is failing to attract the… Read more »
Thank you for a thoughtful thirteen minutes watching your video, Colin, and well done for getting organised and launching the vlog. I found it easier and more engaging to listen and view this way, than simply reading text on a webpage. I think you are instinctively right in your belief that the Church faces issues beyond simply gay marriage, and that a paradigm shift is needed. It’s brave of you to put yourself out there, for all to view. There’s a vulnerability in that. My views and yours may not completely align, but I do believe that contemplation is an… Read more »
On his Pensive Pilgrim Blog Trevor Thurston Smith quotes what a wise priest once said to him, “Sexuality isn’t the big issue for the church. The real big issue is what sort of church we want to be, how we approach reading and interpreting the Bible and how we do our Theology. That’s a big can of worms, and the sexuality debate is nothing more than the tin opener.” Those are the big issues for me and have been so for sixty years. What sort of church we want to be is a bigger can of worms now than it… Read more »
Here is what Colin is referring to
http://trevthursmith.blogspot.com/2023/01/same-sex-marriage-battle-for-soul-of.html
Thank you, Simon, for this link. This, for me, is a defining statement in Trevor Thurston-Smith’s article: – “I certainly welcome what feels like a very small and tentative step forward. I’m daring to feel slightly heartened that the bishops seem to be moving, albeit very cautiously, in a more affirming direction. More significantly, I welcome the fact that individual bishops of varying shades of opinion are now speaking out and expressing their personal views. This is a major change.” I. too, appreciate the ‘small step’ taken by those bishops brave enough to speak their mind on this issue. Those… Read more »
Trevor: ‘A wise priest once said to me, “Sexuality isn’t the big issue for the church. The real big issue is what sort of church we want to be, how we approach reading and interpreting the Bible and how we do our Theology. That’s a big can of worms, and the sexuality debate is nothing more than the tin opener.” ‘ Such a good observation. We are still embracing a 16th Century reformists paradigm, that fails to accommodate the advances implicit in the Enlightenment, literary criticism, and the ways in which the biblical texts should be read, along with relative… Read more »
On Tuesday a Conservative MP put it this way: “is it not time that the Church of England celebrated every relationship and ended the two-tier system that labels gay people as second-class citizens?”
Given the Conservatives seem to harken to conservatives in the USA and are looking for ways to make trans citizens ever more second class, I wouldn’t hold out much hope that those same Conservatives will be progressive on gay rights.
Kate, the MP I was quoting seems quite progressive in this regard: https://www.petergibson.org/news/mp-welcomes-government-announcement-trans-inclusive-conversion-therapy-ban
Thank you Kate for your spot on remark about conservatives and trans people in the USA. At least one conservative state governor is using attacks on trans people to advance his political career and it is working. It’s disgusting and worrisome. At least one lesson of the 20th Century is that when a State makes it official policy to attack and marginalize a group (Nazis and Jews and other groups, Soviet Russia and Georgians and Ukrainians (deja vu all over again), etc.) that group is in deep trouble. I pray conservatives in the UK don’t go down that route, but… Read more »
Another thing is that when populist media, politicians, or Christian organisations like ‘Christian Concern’ denigrate and attack trans people in various ways… it lends mandate to the thug on the street to beat a trans person up, because ‘everyone says you’re a pervert and freak’. When the Church of England itself discriminates against gay people, it adds to a body of cultural othering and perception that we are a problem for being who we are. And that makes the streets unsafe, when drunk yobs spill out of pubs at night, or even in broad daylight if I hold my wife’s… Read more »
It is sick. My wife passed away last June of cancer. However, if I mention my wife of 16 years to strangers, nobody raises an eyebrow. If, before her death, we held hands in public, no one thought twice about it. But some years before I met my wife, a man and I had a long-term relationship. One day, I picked up and held his hand on public transport. The :”yobs” immediately started calling us names, jeering, etc. I immediately yanked my hand away, and we pretended to have never seen each other before. I hate it. Two people of… Read more »
Trevor Thurston-Smith’s post is a compelling reaction to the LLF news. I’d like to expand on one sentence he wrote about the bishops: “More recently, a deliberate corporate silence has been maintained (or maybe enforced) supposedly so as not to muddy the waters whilst the ‘Living in Love and Faith’ process was underway.” Supposedly, yes. In my view, the LLF process itself was designed to kick equal marriage into the long grass until after the Lambeth Conference concluded. It was the Communion waters that were not to be muddied. The Lambeth Conference took place last summer. So the House of… Read more »
“What sort of church we want to be is a bigger can of worms now than it was then.” The more I study church history, the more I realise that, since the beginning, “what sort of church do we want to be?” has been an ongoing refrain. Indeed, if we talk about church tradition, I don’t see something static as claimed by conservatives, I see fluidity, a constant search for how to be the true church. We often discuss here what makes a successful church and all too often that is measured in terms of numbers of regular worshippers. Maybe,… Read more »
Colin, my intention was to make a technical comment on your vlog. I have no wish at all to be personally offensive to you. I think your initial analysis is correct to the extent it states that we are divided over our understanding of God, rather than sexuality, gender and marriage. I am not clear if you accept or reject my observation that your articulated belief is gnostic ? (I appreciate definition is always an issue, but it is also so often a “rabbit hole” down which a discussion can disappear, so will you allow me to leave the term… Read more »
Peter, I’m sorry this reply is so delayed. It’s been a difficult week.
People label me as gnostic when they want to accuse me of being a heretic or non-Biblical or not really Christian, so the word always triggers a reaction in me.
I don’t know whether my articulated belief is gnostic. It would help if you could tell me in what way it is gnostic.
Ted, Thank you for your moving contribution. I celebrate my 89th birthday next Monday, and very aware that time is getting shorter. But for a Christian death is a friend.