14. Bruce, “Late Secularization,” 22.
15. Taylor, Altar in the World, xiii–iv.
16. The Week, 6 December 2008.
17. Eagleton, Culture, 192.
18. Fashion, 29 December 2017.
19. Bruce, Secular Beats Spiritual, 179.
20. Dawkins, God Delusion, 199.
21. London Review of Books, 19 October 2006, 32–34.
22. Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry.
23. Novak, Open Church, 362.
24. Roethke, Collected Poems.
25. Dickinson, Complete Poems, 110.
26. Fosdick, Living of These Days, 230.
27. Korzybski, Science and Sanity, 38.
28. Hollinger, “Comments,” 6.
29. Bradley, Grace, Order, Openness, 1.
30. Dickinson, Complete Poems, 506–7.
31. Caputo, Truth, 15.
2
Life After Christendom
The collapse of Christendom was not a sudden process but has deep historical roots. Its causes are many and complex. One very obviously is that intellectually it became harder to believe. Peter Gomes may be going too far when he says, “Religion for many moderns, has been reduced to a belief in the unbelievable”32 but the basic mood is not in doubt. The fact that church attendance in England began to decline within a generation of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 is no coincidence. Owen Chadwick, reflecting on the effect of Darwin’s theory of evolution, writes:
More educated Englishmen doubted the truth of the Christian religion in 1885 than thirty years before. And in 1885 many persons, whether they doubted or affirmed, blamed “science” for this change of opinion. Some of them talked as though “science” alone was responsible. And among those who blamed science, some fastened upon the name of Charles Darwin as a symbol, or center, or intellectual force, of an entire development of the sciences as they came to bear upon the truth of religion.33
It was not simply science. The rise of critical history made biblical narratives problematic and was reflected in the skepticism of the Tubingen School of biblical scholars led by F. C. Baur, while writers such as Strauss and Renan offered a more credibly human Jesus than the Jesus of Christian dogma. The rise of the social sciences with Weber and Durkheim placed religious origins and beliefs within a new secular explanatory context and a hermeneutic of suspicion grew up, encouraged by those who Paul Ricoeur calls the “masters of suspicion, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.”34
Increasingly a significant part of what had seemed like central Christian beliefs either could no longer be held, or at least, looked less credible. To take a few examples—the Bible is not an infallible source of truth, its science is virtually nonexistent, and its history is often open to question. Life was not created as we know it but developed out of a single cell through an evolutionary process, mental illness is not caused by spirit possession, homosexuality is not a perversion but an orientation, and there is no heaven above the earth or hell beneath it. The fundamentals of belief have moved. Recently I was at Ely Cathedral for evensong and as the congregation declared, “I believe in the resurrection of the body” I could not but wonder if a single person present believed it to be true?
But it was not simply the credibility of belief. It was also a realization that Christian teaching was often of questionable morality. Take the doctrine of hell for example. Historically one of the church’s most effective evangelical tactics had been to frighten people into faith. One of Isaac Watts’s hymns contains the verse:
There is a dreadful hell,
And everlasting pains;
There sinners must with devils dwell
In darkness, fire and chains.35
This happy verse is found in his Divine Songs, Attempted in Easy Language, For the Use of Children. It was an immensely popular book. The British Library contains over a hundred editions from the nineteenth century alone, and it has never gone out of print. Dale Allison suggests it may have been the “best-selling children’s book of all time until the Twentieth Century.”36 This tactic ceased to work with the Victorians for whom the very idea of a God who would torture people for eternity began to seem morally repugnant. If this isn’t divinely blessed abuse, what is? Nor was hell the only problem. A significant reason for the great Victorian agnostics turning away from Christianity was because what Christians taught often struck them as morally inferior to their own highest beliefs and standards. Historically Christian theology has endorsed anti-Semitism, homophobia and misogyny. More recently not only has the revelation of widespread sexual abuse among the clergy been damaging for the churches, but the way the Catholic Church, among others, has covered this up has been a devastating moral scandal.
The result is that a good many find themselves alienated from the Church on moral grounds. A survey by YouGov in August 2018, showed only 27 percent trusted the honesty of church leaders a great deal or a fair amount. One might compare that with the 96 percent who trust nurses and the 89 percent who trust teachers.37 Linda Woodhead comments,
This is not to suggest that most people, even most young people, are actively hostile to the churches. About half now have little or no contact with them at all, and a majority are simply indifferent. Nevertheless, amongst those who do hold negative attitudes, it is older people who are more likely to say that the churches are “stuffy and boring,” whilst younger ones say they are sexist and homophobic.38
The intellectual and moral change was intensified by wider sociological and intellectual changes which were also undermining religious perspectives. The new primacy of scientific thinking undermined approaches to truth. Brad Gregory says, “the success of the natural sciences has made their epistemology the paradigm for knowledge as such.”39 Sometimes as with Richard Dawkins this leads to a conviction that anything other than scientific truth is not real, but even when this was not the case scientific and objective thinking often seemed more plausible than religious myths or stories. As David Martin puts it, with “the growth of science and technology the general sense of human power is increased, the play of contingency is restricted, and the overwhelming sense of divine limits which afflicted previous generations is much diminished.”40 It is not simply that Stephen Hawkins seems a better guide to life’s origins than Genesis or John Milton, it is that often where