Guest Post: A Riposte to Damian Thompson's Crisis of Faith

This piece was originally published on the Evangelical Alliance website.

I'm thrilled to today be hosting a guest post by my good friend, and Father-in-Law, Keith Lucas. Keith is a thoughtful and provocative writer, and I really enjoyed his response to Damian Thompson's article in The Spectator titled '2067: The End of British Christianity'. I hope you will find it as useful as I did. You can follow Keith on Twitter here.

A Riposte to Damian Thompson’s Crisis of Faith

It has been heartening to see how Damian Thompson’s ‘Crisis of Faith’ (The Spectator, 13th June 2015) has ruffled a few ecclesiastical feathers and caused some anxious clucking in some of the more complacent corners of the church.

However eloquently his points were made, his analysis and the conclusions that flow from them were, I suggest, somewhat questionable. His opening premise, for example, that shrinking congregations represent “a disaster now facing Christianity in this country”, is supported by the claim that “between 2001 and 2011 the number of Christians born in Britain fell by 5.3 million”. His evidence rests on census records for those two years in which parents claim, on behalf of their child, to which (if any) religion the child belongs. Yet the growing secularisation and social liberalisation seen during this period, cited repeatedly by Thompson, has seen such a rise in personal independence and freedom of expression that, by 2011, it could be argued that only firmly committed Christian parents would claim their child as being unequivocally ‘Christian’. To make this claim on behalf of a child today might feel overly prescriptive or controlling whereas a decade earlier the child of even nominal (rarely-practicing) Christian parents might have ticked the ‘Christian’ box by default. Let us also not forget, as well, that in recent years Christianity has been de-positioned and stigmatised by large parts of the popular British media (not least the liberal elite mentioned by Thompson) such that Christian ‘brand’ has been made to appear somewhat ‘uncool' and dogmatic and even archaic and outmoded. Admitting that you, or your child, is ‘Christian’ is tantamount to confessing an adherence to nerdy traditionalism - if in doubt, who would not play the agnostic card? 

His predicted demise of the church by 2067 was a rather crude extrapolation of two data points whereby he assumes a linear decay of 10,000 per week. This is about as robust as plotting rainfall by measuring the number of times you needed an umbrella in March and May then concluding that because usage fell by 50% over this period the trend would be maintained and by August rainfall would cease for ever. Thompson is, at least, wise enough to offer the caveat: “feel free to take any apocalyptic vision of religion in Britain in 2067 with a pinch of salt”

He then goes on to assert that “Christianity is dying out among the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic inhabitants of Great Britain”. This is, once again, based on a rudimentary interpretation of data from census returns and the British Election Survey wherein those claiming to have ‘no religion’ rose from 15% to 25% between 2001 and 2011. Leaving aside the cultural shift already discussed, what this fails to take into account is that people are much less likely in 2011 to hold any firm affiliations with any organised group than they would have in 2001. If we applied the same logic to politics, for example, we could, with some certainty, conclude that political parties will be defunct long before the church has stopped twitching. Between 1998 and 2008, according to the European Journal of Political Research^[1], the UK’s political parties lost 1.16 million members between them (that is a fall of 68.2% from 1.69 million to 534,664 members); most other European countries show similar trends. In their study of this phenomenon it was noted that "traditional pillars of organised mass society – the Christian churches and the unions – are also losing membership and clout”. Yet, I do not hear any gloomy predictions of the end of politics. We expect it to evolve and meet changing consumer behaviour, why would we suppose the church would not?

Another, widely discussed phenomenon that belies the impending demise of Christianity is the notion of ‘believing without belonging’. The underlying principle is that faith may change shape but it does not fade away, as Professor Davie of Exeter University, who first coined the term, puts it: “more and more people within British society are, it appears, wanting to believe but without putting this belief into practice”^[2]. She goes on to say: “The sacred does not disappear - indeed in many ways it is becoming more rather than less prevalent in contemporary society”^[3]. This certainly poses some seminal questions for the church, which one assumes will adapt to meet changing societal needs as it has done for centuries.

In our haste to explain falling church attendances, however, we might just be ignoring the most conspicuous of all contradictions of Thompson’s hypothesis: the relentless growth seen in some of the Church of England’s more vibrant quarters - notably in the capital (Holy Trinity Brompton, St Helens Bishopsgate, etc.) - which have, incidentally, been well documented in the secular press (The Economist Jan 17th, 2015 for example^[4]). Their burgeoning congregations would seem to comprise a good many members of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic extraction whose numbers continue to multiply in the face of the supposed inexorable trend away from Church of England.

Humanity’s response to God, within and beyond the context of the church, may be evolving as some traditional modes of worship fade and new ones gain favour, but Thompson’s nihilistic prophesy of the church’s premature demise is, I suggest, a false one. As GK Chesterton wryly noted: “on five occasions in history the Church has gone to the dogs, but on each occasion, it was the dogs that died."

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^[1] European Journal of Political Research 51: 24–56, 2012

^[2] Davie, G. (1990) ‘Believing Without Belonging: Is This the Future of Religion in

Britain?’, Social Compass 37(4): 455–69.

^[3] Davie, G. (1994) Religion in Britain Since 1945: Believing Without Belonging.

Oxford: Blackwell.

^[4] ‘Go Forth and Multiply’. The Economist, Jan 17th 2015.