Today the proportion of the population attending Sunday services is only around one third of that in the early 1960s.3 According to the National Centre for Social Research’s latest 2018 British Social Attitudes survey, just 38 percent described themselves as Christian—a fall from 50 percent in 2008 and 66 percent in 1983. The biggest change was the number of people who saw themselves as “confident atheists” which rose from 10 percent in 1998 to a record high of 26 percent in 2018.4 Something similar can now be seen across Europe, including in what is now probably best called post-Catholic Ireland, where 39 percent of those aged between sixteen and twenty-nine say they have no religion.5 In America, the proportion of adults who describe themselves as Christian has fallen to two-thirds, a drop of 12 percentage points over the past decade. Fewer than half of millennials (49 percent) describe themselves as Christians; four in ten are religious “nones.”6 Only 15 percent of cradle Catholics now claim to attend Mass on a weekly basis and 35 percent no longer even tick the “Catholic box” on surveys.7
All of these statistics are only indicative. Not all of those who say they attend church regularly necessarily do so and individuals may have a strong religious belief but not attend church. Nonetheless the fact that both Europe and America are increasingly secular is not in doubt. This is not simply a rejection of religious institutions—at its heart is a fundamental loss of belief. Canadian Douglas John Hall has written about the changing landscape for the churches in North America. He calls it the end of Christendom, the centuries-old alliance between Christian faith, the church, and the culture.
We have seen the rapid growth of an almost complete religionlessness on the part of many of our contemporaries . . . the instinct to belief . . . may now satisfy itself in literally thousands of ways that have little or nothing to do with the Christianity we took for granted.8
In Britain where the decline started much earlier, the reality is starker. As a preacher most of the congregations I lead in worship are elderly. I am always pleasantly surprised to find anyone under sixty. There is something poignant in visiting what were once the bastions of East Anglian Nonconformity, often at the heart of civic life, now always a faded relic of what they were. What we are witnessing is the disjunction of Western civilization from its Christian roots. At its heart is a loss of belief, a growing moral challenge to Christian values and a collapse in traditional views of God. Writing from a Catholic perspective Hans Küng is honest about the challenge:
Millions have left the church, millions have withdrawn into themselves, and millions . . . have not joined the church. The hierarchs responsible, sometimes confused, sometimes mendacious, prevaricate: it’s not so bad. But isn’t the light of Christianity slowly being quenched?9
Sometimes with Philip Larkin I find myself wondering:
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into.10
Outside the shrinking religious institutions there is a growing ignorance as to what Christians think and believe. Thus Brian Appleyard, writing about Marilynne Robinson’s novels Gilead, Home, and Lila, says they will seem curious to a large number of readers, “because what is going on here is religion.”11 Similarly Francis Spufford starts his book Unapologetic by telling us that his six-year-old daughter will soon discover “that her parents are weird. We’re weird because we go to Church.”12
Recently I went back to preach at the commemoration service in the chapel at Mansfield College in Oxford, originally a Congregational theological college but now a secular part of the university. Its chapel, with its stained-glass windows of the saints and statues of the great Reformers, has been described as the most Catholic place in Oxford. It represented Congregationalism in its pomp and is full of the ghosts of former glories—Natt Micklem, C. H. Dodd, George Caird, John Marsh, Selbie, Routley, Fairbairn, and Cadoux. The college has now boldly turned the chapel into the dining hall, moving the tables aside for an occasional service. “It’s just wonderful,” the principal said to me. “Now the students can all eat together.” “Yes” said the senior tutor,” it’s a great teaching opportunity, none of them have any idea who these people in the stained-glass windows were.” Increasingly the Christian past is slipping out of vision.
A TIME OF RELIGIOUS DARKNESS
Responses to the crisis are various. Christian theology, perhaps not surprisingly, is suffering a loss of confidence and intellectual vigor. When I went to read theology in Oxford in 1969 one of the wonderful discoveries was the theology books at Blackwell’s. Downstairs in the Norrington Room was a vast selection of serious theology, much of it reflecting the tumultuous debate centered on John Robinson’s Honest to God and what we hoped might be a New Reformation. Today the number of theology books in Blackwell’s has very visibly shrunk. No doubt there is a commercial logic to this, but it also accurately reflects a decline in theological creativity and confidence. As the church shrinks, what theology there is has become increasingly conservative, as the churches retreat into fundamentalist or neo-orthodox laagers.
The confused mood is evident in the slightly hysterical claims some Christians make that they are now facing persecution in Britain, in the avid interest in the programs of the Church Growth Movement, and in the hope that the adoption of secular management models might be the salvation of the Church of England. In many churches the mood is not to look too much to the future, in the hope that it won’t come. Most churches have found themselves largely unable to cope, often trailing along behind social change, unsettled as unquestioned assumptions and beliefs became socially obsolete. The retreat from Christian Britain has been precipitous and disorienting.
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.13
It is possible to try and mitigate the gravity of the crisis. Some would point out, rightly, that the center of Christianity has now moved away from the Western world to the global south, and to the resilience of other religious traditions such as Islam. It is certainly true both that God is not dead in Africa or the Middle East and that immigration from less secularized parts of the world has introduced new religious communities into many Western cities. But secularization is deep rooted in Western society and most people under sixty have little understanding of what religion is about. Religious belief is concentrated among a number of distinct demographic groups such as the old or minority communities. Sociologist Steve Bruce is rightly dismissive of the idea that these are a credible basis for a conversion of Europe.
If there is to be a reversal of secularization, large numbers of the currently non-religious will have to convert. . . . So long as there is little or no social similarity between the religious and those who would have to become religious to reverse secularization, such a reverse is sociologically implausible.14
Others point to the possibility of a new spiritual revolution replacing traditional theism. A significant number of people, perhaps 20 percent of the population, would today describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR). In her book, An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say, ‘I am spiritual but not religious,’ I might not be any wiser about what that means—but I’d be richer.”15 Common themes would include a rejection of institutional religion and of shared creeds. Rather than a defined dogmatic path SBNR offers freedom to choose your beliefs. Healing crystals, Christianity, Buddhism, Sufism, atheism, transcendental meditation—all are equally possible and can be combined in a personal