The soul of Britain

The Herald Tribune called Europe ?the most godless quarter on earth?. But the situation in Britain is much more complex than that. The Tablet editor analyses the scene

IN September 2001, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O?Connor, Archbishop of Westminster, dropped a bombshell. Giving the keynote address at a meeting of the National Conference of Priests in Leeds, he unfolded a programme for the Catholic Church in England and Wales which was basically an invitation to all congregations to get up off their seats and get going before they found themselves without any seats left to sit on. Then he made an unscripted remark. Christianity, he said, had been ?almost vanquished? in Britain. It hardly featured any more, he said, as a backdrop to political decisions or to people?s moral lives.

That might sound pessimistic but Cardinal Murphy-O?Connor is an optimist and this was a wake-up call to the Catholic Church in Britain to take on more of the duty of ministering to the nation. Next day the Daily Telegraph splashed the news across its front page, detecting that a churchman had now said openly what everyone knew. A country that has been Christian since Augustine of Canterbury came to its shores at the end of the sixth century AD at the behest of Pope Gregory the Great is now no longer secure in the faith.

The then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, was quick to respond that Christianity was alive and well and living in Britain. Dr Carey was perhaps too sanguine on that occasion, and he was ignoring his own experience. When he went to the Millennium Dome for the opening ceremony of that ill-fated venture, there was a palpable hostility to the archbishop from sections of the audience when he offered a prayer. They thought they were being got at ? whereas nothing could be more appropriate than to launch the millennium of Jesus Christ in this way.

In Britain, as in the rest of Western Europe, the mainline Christian Churches have been losing ground ever since the 1960s by whatever measure is used ? attendance at Sunday services, baptisms and marriages in church, vocations to the ministry. The black Churches have been an exception, but now they too are losing their young people.

On the surface it might seem that people are happy enough in their secular world. Cardinal Hume once said that shopping was the new religion, to which its customers were devoted. Sport is part of the new religion too, with athletes idolised, and so is sex, which is looked to for human revelation. At the same time, however, everyone is aware of the breakdown of marriage and the family, the basic unit in society, and rising crime. The pundits offer the assurance, as they have done since the nineteenth century, that there can be morality without religion. But can moral motivation renew itself without religion? What has happened when people claim rights without duties, and Christian language about good and evil, right and wrong, sin and grace, is substituted by talk about ?appropriate? and ?inappropriate? behaviour? A transcendental register has vanished, diminishing the spectrum of what can be said and impoverishing the power of comment. At the same time, the thrust of scientific and psychological thinking is towards deterministic explanations of the human person. Something has been lost, and subconsciously people know that. They like the new freedom that they have but also they feel that somehow a truth has faded.

Meanwhile, European societies have been rebuilt on the basis of pluralism. Plural means more than one. These pluralistic societies are no longer bound together by one overarching story, like the Christian story. That is arguably more of a challenge to Christians than atheism or Marxism. Atheism, after all, is a religious counter-narrative, and its advocates, like Richard Dawkins, Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, are crusading evangelists. Marxism is a religious heresy ? the Communist Party as the Messiah, the classless society as the Kingdom of Heaven. But today?s ?post-modernism? does not believe in overarching stories any more. There are no absolutes, everything is a choice. So Christian language is much more difficult to use, and it sometimes seems as though the only people who do not have the right to speak are the Christians.

The ebbing of the Christian tide is a continuation of a process that started with Darwin, Marx and Freud. The Church thinks it has made its peace with Darwin, but it is more of an uneasy truce than an end to battle, until someone does for Darwin what Einstein did for Newton. Nevertheless, in the early 1940s the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, was a power in Church and State, a unifying force in the British nation and a prophet of the post-war settlement (it was Temple, close to William Beveridge, who coined the term ?the welfare state?). And in 1953 the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was a national festival celebrating British identity and belief ? and it was Christian through and through. In 1955, when Princess Margaret wanted to marry a divorced man, Group Captain Peter Townsend, she consulted the Archbishop of Canterbury, and when she made her official statement that she had decided she could not proceed, she referred to Christian doctrine, which had her assent. No princess in her position today would act like that over a divorce.

In the 1960s came a real parting of the ways. There was a social earthquake, particularly in sexual ethics, and a steep decline in church affiliation became obvious. It was inevitable. In the pluralistic societies of today, no one is a Christian because of the social environment or because of the lead of the ruling establishment. Instead faith is reached by individual decision, which cuts down the numbers.

The Church of England, as the established Church, naturally feels particularly threatened by these developments. The Roman Catholics in Britain do not have any golden age to look back to, and are more comfortable with a Church whose membership rises and falls, knowing that in the eighteenth century the Catholic faith was nearly extinguished in their country. The Free Churches for their part feel that they have largely lost their old constituencies in the working class and the trade unions. But Anglicans believe in a mission to every man and woman in every parish of the land, and it is very hard if these men and women are not interested. When the statistics for attendance in Anglican parish churches on Sundays slipped below 1 million, they were not published any more. The exception, with Anglicans as with Catholics, is the church schools, which are overwhelmingly popular.

The late Cardinal Hume reflected on this process in an interview he gave me for his seventieth birthday. His own standing as a spiritual leader had soared, but Catholic statistics in England and Wales were all falling. If the Catholic Church in England and Wales had been subject to the same sort of assessment as a business firm, I said, and had turned in results like that, the management would all have been sacked, wouldn?t they? He answered with his typical feline dexterity. It was not the Church that had failed, he said, it was the culture that had succeeded. And he went on to suggest that some healthy persecution might do the British good (he had recently returned from Russia).

The Tablet has sponsored a number of surveys of the scene. While the percentage of atheists has remained stubbornly low, most respondents deny they are religious. They make a distinction. ?But I am a spiritual person?, they say. That hunt for spirituality can take myriad forms. ?When people stop believing in God?, G.K. Chesterton said, ?they start believing in anything.? But these are genuine seekers. They do not have closed minds.

The spiritual journey they are on, as they say, is not a religious one, though it may lead some that way. A moment which held up a mirror to the direction in which people were travelling came after Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed died in the car accident in Paris. The nation was soon caught up in a mass emotional reaction. The media interacted with this phenomenon and stimulated it, but they did not cause it. At first they were caught off guard like everyone else, then they detected a trend with which they could interact and resonate. Nor was it hysteria. The crowds in the gardens of Kensington Palace where Diana had lived were reflective and muted as they gathered in little groups talking quietly, or stood silently by themselves. The religious aspects were inescapable, though sentimentalised: candles burning, written prayers tied to railings, offerings such as teddy bears. There were even miraculous appearances in the Long Gallery of St James?s Palace, where queues built up as people patiently waited to sign the condolence books. At the end of the gallery hangs a portrait of King Charles I, and a number of mourners reported that they had seen Diana?s face in the top corner of the painting, looking as she had done on the cover of Vogue. They were shattered by the experience, they said.

The whole nation from the Prime Minister to the children became caught up in mourning for the princess. The power of it was such as to threaten the royal family with a revolution if they did not respond. The service in Westminster Abbey, sanctioned by Church and State, was remarkably secular. An address was given by Diana?s brother, Earl Spencer, which said nothing about resurrection, but was used rather to throw down the gauntlet to the Windsors.

But the extraordinary event was a one-off. It came and it went. There were no huge crowds on the first anniversary of Diana?s death. There was no power here to change the world. But there had been a manifestation of how the nation had changed ? in part, been feminised ? in ways that had been below the radar of sociologists and journalists who thought they knew the contemporary scene.

Shortly after this extraordinary time, I happened to be attending a lecture in Oxford given by the then Master of Balliol College, Sir Anthony Kenny, who was once a Roman Catholic priest. His theme in his lecture was the inexorable march, as he saw it, of secularisation. Then he paused. He had to confess, he acknowledged, that recent events had somewhat disconcerted him. He had a flat in London near Kensington Palace, and as he wandered in those gardens and saw the way Diana?s death was being commemorated, he had to wonder, he said, just how secular his fellow citizens actually were.

The new culture of ?I?m a spiritual person, not a religious one? is also accompanied in Britain by a truly alarming ignorance about the Christian faith itself. There are endless stories of how people simply do not know what a crucifix signifies.

In The Tablet we published another example. One of our editorial staff had been reading a magazine called Country Living. It had invited its readers to write in with details of quaint traditional customs still observed in the English shires. There was the Abingdon bun-throwing ceremony, it reported, and the Atherstone Shrove Tuesday ball game. And then there was the ceremony observed by one Mrs Joan Lane, which she called ?Ashing?. This was a Staffordshire custom, she reported, reintroduced by the local vicar, and she went on to describe it: ?After ceremonially burning the previous year?s palm-leaf crosses, the vicar mixes the ash with holy oil and anoints parishioners at a service on Ash Wednesday.? Such was her perception of standard Christian practice as congregations are marked on the forehead with ash, with the words ?Dust you are and to dust you will return?.

The tide of amnesia eating away at the Christian heritage is writ large on the European scene. The new European constitution is now in its final draft stage. The preamble discusses the sources of the values that produced European culture. The text refers abstractly to what it calls ?the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe?. In its original form, the preamble talked about the influence of Greece and Rome, and then the Enlightenment, airbrushing out all the vast Christian heritage in between.

There is also in Britain an increasing degree of straight hostility to religion. Religious people disturb a population many of whom have decided, in the words of the Catholic bishops at the second Synod on Europe held in Rome in 1999, ?to live as if God did not exist?.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has begun to mount a critique. ?We are a deeply, dangerously bored society?, Rowan Williams says. ?And we?re reluctant?, he goes on, ?to look for the root of that. Why do we want to escape from the glories and difficulties of everyday life? Why do we want to escape into gambling or drugs or any other kind of fantasy?

?Why have we created a culture which seems more in love with fantasy than reality? Whether that?s gambling or drugs or, for that matter, the national lottery, we should be asking, ?What?s happening to us? Why are we so bored???

Dr Williams also points out how the British have abolished sacred time. Sundays are now for shopping, just like weekdays, or for very pleasant occasions such as picnics in the country ? but what they are not about is Sabbath rest, a time for stopping so as to recall that other dimension in human life. That dimension gets pushed out or prevented from intruding by a secular glass ceiling that comes into operation whenever the possibility of going higher presents itself. The State denies that it has any duty or responsibility to make space for religious observance and reflection. ?We are asthmatic?, Dr Williams says. ?We have no time to breathe or stop.?

Dr Williams?s success or failure as Archbishop depends on what impact he can make on this changing British culture which defines ?spiritual? in contradistinction from ?religious?. Christians are reacting to the situation in various ways, and often they disagree strongly among themselves about what approach to take. I will reflect on that in a concluding article next week.