By the middle years of the twentieth century, sociologists, psychologists, and other assorted intellectuals – often of a Marxist inclination – were confidently predicting that religious belief would die away over the next few generations. New sciences and technologies drove out the need for God as an explainer of phenomena or provider of bounty. In the post-World-War-II age of rockets, atomic bombs, and the British National Health Service, science and technology would do all that! The men in copes and mitres would be forced to yield to impassive-looking men in white lab coats wearing thick-framed plastic spectacles. Or at least that is how contemporary cinema always portrayed scientists.
Church attendance had already begun to decline markedly since the pre-1914 period, as growing car ownership, Sunday cinema, radio and then television, package holidays, cheap day trips, full employment, the mid-1950s economic boom, and youth culture gave ordinary people more options about how they spent their Sundays. People were more leisured, better fed, better informed, and healthier than in the days of their grandparents, and all of this was due to science, technology, and economics. So what happened to the secular utopia that was so confidently predicted?
Well, the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s were also overshadowed by the Cold War, as Stalinist and post-Stalin Russia, and Maoist China, terrified all those who were not so star-struck by the “Comrade” states as to excuse any atrocity, and who did not want to see the hammer and sickle red flag flying over Buckingham Palace. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other countries all got the iron-fist treatment of Red Freedom, and meditating Buddhist monks were mown down by Maoist tanks. And as one side after the other “tested” their 100 megaton atomic bombs, one wondered when Berlin, or Paris, would vanish in smoke. For the “sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll” culture that nowadays bus-pass-carrying, NHS-dependent “hippies” look back to with such starry eyes was also lived out under the threat of an atomic mushroom cloud. Add to that secular illusion the post-1970s economic mayhem, and one does not need to look far to realize that the God-free secular utopia had failed to materialize. On the other hand, why was there not a sudden boom in traditional churchgoing as in the days of yore? What happened, in fact, is that the situation became much more complicated.
For one thing, immigrant groups coming into Britain brought their own religions, extending from vibrant West Indian Christianity to Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism. Then new forms of religious expression let loose their own bombshells worldwide, the most powerful of which were evangelicalism and fundamentalism. Billy Graham was only the most famous of a number of American evangelists who brought a plain Bible message to millions of people worldwide, a powerful, simple Christian message for a confused and jaded West. And there followed a veritable industry of TV evangelists, first in America, then beamed globally after the digital revolution.
Many of these evangelists, moreover, came from those parts of the American Midwest which gave rise to, and still sustain, “fundamentalism”: the idea that every word of the Bible text is absolutely true, and that contextual interpretation is tantamount to blasphemy. For fundamentalism was no longer the faith of small farmers: the economic boom of post-Depression years in the USA had endowed it with scores of wealthy Bible colleges, universities, and TV stations that took great-grandpa’s plain theology to the rest of the planet.
But the real shock came in from the rest of the world. Almost as if to deliberately prove the secular anti-imperial-missionary school of thinking wrong, many of the post-British-Empire peoples of Africa took their Bibles to their hearts, and central and southern Africa became the Christian powerhouse of the planet: Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Pentecostals, and Charismatics all found expression there, and they began to evangelize their firm, vigorous faith.
I recall a few years ago my wife and I being offered a Christmas card in the street by a black African pastor in Oxford. We thanked him, said we were Christians, and fell into conversation. Then I said to him, “In the nineteenth century we took the Christian faith to your ancestors, and now youare bringing it back to Europe.” He was delighted with my observation, for, so he said, that is exactly what he hoped he was doing!
African Christianity has played an enormous role in inspiring new churches and styles of worship in Britain, and perhaps its best-known figure is the beaming, confident, plain-speaking, former rugby-playing Anglican Archbishop of York, the Most Revd Dr John Sentamu: a “muscular Christian” if ever there was one!
But another fundamentalism which no cosy sociologist of the 1950s could have imagined is that of Islam, especially as inspired by the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, and its call to global jihad. And it has indeed gone global; and especially since 9/11/2001 in America, and the London Tube and bus bombings in 2005, the full impact of that fundamentalism is still being come to terms with. For, yes, a force as powerful as religion can inspire us to slaughter our fellow-creatures as well as to love them, depending on how we see God.
Far from obediently dying away, therefore, religion has boomed in a way that no one could have expected in 1950. Yes, traditional churches may be far from full in Great Britain, but they often are in Holy Orthodox Russia and in ex-Soviet satellite states, as people delivered from the crushing hand of brutal secularism seek God once more. Christianity is also booming in China. And how many 65-year-old liberal 1960s secular “flower-power” children are baffled by their grandchildren who go to cinema-sized charismatic churches and sing choruses about Jesus? And that is saying nothing about the mosques and temples of immigrant groups.
Religion, I would suggest, has failed to die away because it feeds those parts of humanity which other “systems” fail to reach. In an age of ideological relativism, existential self-obsession, gloom, postmodern paralysis, political correctness, and materialist let-down, religion puts fire back into the soul. And human beings need that fire if they are going to be something more than biological computers. For religion inspires and gives meaning, and also produces great art, which later generations too can call upon to give them hope and meaning. Conversely, I am not aware that secularism, doctrinaire evolutionism, or atheism have produced anything that compares to Salisbury Cathedral, Bach’s St Matthew Passion, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel painting, or the great Bible translations over 1,600 years. And even many of the great “secular” art works, from Shakespeare’s plays to Mozart’s symphonies, have been the creations either of religious men, or of creative artists whose very flow of words and imagery was moulded by Bible reading. Perhaps one reason why so much twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, art, and literature fails to connect with wider humanity is that so many of its creations are aggressively secular. And all too often bleakness and despair are the result. Not the things to turn most people on, indeed, after a hard day at work!
So why has religion failed to die away, and why have all the confident prophecies of sixty years ago evaporated into myth? Perhaps because without that necessary sense of contact with the divine that transcendent religion brings, something in us dies.