“Faith” is a fine invention
For Gentlemen who see!
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency!41
An important factor here is the way science and increasing affluence has extended our longevity. In the Roman Empire the average age of death was around twenty-five. Today we confidently expect to get to eighty and it is not unreasonable to expect twenty years of life when we retire. In the ancient world death was omnipresent, while today for a long part of our lives we can simply forget it. Biblical texts like “You are like a mist that appears for a while, after which it disappears” (Jas 4:14) no longer have the menace or relevance they once had.
There was an economic basis to this as well. In latter part of the twentieth century, for the first time in history, a form of globalized market capitalism created an integrated and universal economy across large sections of the world. This led to the dominance of social market capitalism. Eric Hobsbawm argues that the marks of such a society are “an otherwise unconnected assemblage of self-centered individuals pursuing only their own gratification.” The result is the logic of the market has become more influential in every aspect of life. Increasingly the basic unit is the individual as hedonistic consumer. This gave people what seemed to many a quite satisfactory goal for the good life though Philip Larkin is characteristically jaundiced. “Our children will not know it’s a different country. All we can hope to leave them now is money.”42 To most people it at least seemed a lot more solid than thoughts on what possibly occur to them after they had died.
The growing affluence of society, and the new ideology of consumer choice, led to a social fragmentation which has undermined collective identities and community organizations. As Robert Putnam has argued in his Bowling Alone the same kind of decline observable in religious institutions can be seen in other social structures as well—political parties, PTAs, bowling clubs, or indeed any local organization. “In effect more than a third of America’s civic infrastructure simply evaporated between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s.”43 The same was true in Britain where traditional class and community-based loyalty gave way to a more pragmatic attitude. Consumer choice became increasingly central to society. People made a transition away from taking their identity from a given tradition or religious community, with a prescribed set of beliefs and practices, to a situation in which you choose for yourself how your life will be lived and seek your own personal fulfilment. For a religious tradition that was already fundamentally intellectually and perhaps morally undermined this new individualistic cultural challenge was to prove deeply destructive. To people experiencing the new delights of consumer satisfaction it might be that nothing the church was offering seemed interesting any more. And even if people did feel a religious need was their local church able to meet it? And if not, why go? As Paul Gifford puts it, “The modern western world increasingly operates on a plane where spiritual forces are scarcely relevant.”44
If to some religion was untrue, to many others it was not so much untrue as irrelevant because it no longer related to what seemed most important in life. It answered questions which many people no longer feel they need to ask. People can live busy lives, working and loving and enjoying themselves, without concerning themselves too much with what W. H. Auden called “the baffle of being.” Hugh Trevor Roper, the historian, records during a walk in Christ Church meadow in in 1936, “pondering on the complicated subtleties of St. Augustine’s theological system, which I had long tried to take seriously, I suddenly realized the undoubted truth that metaphysics are metaphysical and, having no premises to connect them to this world, need not detain us while we are denizens of it. And at once, like a balloon that has no moorings, I saw the whole metaphysical world rise and vanish out of sight in the upper air, where it rightly belongs; and I have neither seen it, nor felt its absence, since.”45 Other, less exalted souls, have felt much the same. As a minister I certainly found that telling people that they had a void in their life which only God could fill got increasingly odd looks. Looking at those who are outside the church but still nominally Christian David Voas concludes,
The dominant attitude towards religion . . . is not one of rejection or hostility. Many . . . are open to the existence of God or a higher power, may use the church for rites of passage, and might pray at least occasionally. What seems apparent, though, is that religion plays a very minor role (if any) in their lives.46
The result is that today Christianity finds itself culturally sidelined, a contested narrative, not the default position which in quite recent memory it still was. Arthur MacArthur was the last general secretary of the Presbyterian Church in England and then joint general secretary of the United Reformed Church. He was born in 1913 and grew up in a part of Northumberland, close to the Scottish border, where Presbyterianism was deeply entrenched. He didn’t have to choose to be a Presbyterian, he just was one.
To the one nourished in the family of faith, youthful doubts were treated as mental aberrations to be reasoned away. All of this may have been possible because the north-east of England was more resistant to change than the south . . . Anyway as far as my experience was concerned I was a Christian and a Presbyterian and took both things as part of the facts of life.47
That is the world we have lost. It was the world the Victorians knew and largely lost, just as it has been lost more recently in Catholic Ireland. It was the world of Christendom and it has gone. By contrast my son went to comprehensive school in South London where few of the children were openly Christian. One day he came home and recounted with scorn that the RE lesson had involved a trip to a nearby church. “They said, ‘that’s a pulpit. That’s where they give the sermon from’. Whatever did they think it was?” The point of course was that a significant number of the children hardly went inside churches or had any clear idea what went on in a service. When Steve Bruce asserts that “Most Britons under the age of 60 (that is, those who were not taught its basic ideas at school or Sunday school) have almost no knowledge of Christianity”48 he may be making the point a little strongly but essentially, he is correct.
IF GOD IS DEAD, IS EVERTHING ELSE THE SAME?
The implications for our culture of this loss of belief are profound. To a lot of people, it seemed that if there was no God you could just take that out of our systems of belief and everything else would still hold up. Some like George Eliot have felt that much of Christian morality could remain after theism was abandoned: “God, Immortality, Duty . . . how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third.” Marx looked to an inevitable victory of the proletariat which is in essence a secularized version of Christian eschatology. The belief in progress is essentially the same. It was Nietzsche, who most strongly questioned this. If God is dead, he says, so is the idea that the world has meaning, or our lives a purpose. In Twilight of the Idols he writes: “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident . . . Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole.”49 If you want meaning in life, says Nietzsche, you will have to make it for yourself. “A virtue has to be our invention.”
You may resist this conclusion, but it is inherently logical. Take Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Inspiring as this may sound one has to ask in what sense it is true? Under any circumstances it is very dubious if the universe itself is moral. The often-brutal reality of life does not obviously appear to have any moral purpose. “For the everlasting right, the silent stars are strong” says the hymn. No they are not, they are just silent. The only way this could possibly make sense would be if there is a cosmic reality with a commitment to justice. Or take Desmond Tutu’s stirring words:
Goodness is stronger than evil;