Freed From Behind The Paywall: The End of Christianity?

Or can it be re-born? From December 2022

Photo by Vaishakh pillai on Unsplash

I was struck by the fact that in the recent census results, Britain has become a minority Christian country for the first time since records began.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/29/why-is-the-christian-population-of-england-and-wales-declining

This is not something that particularly vexes me. Although I am a theist - that is, I believe in some guiding intelligence in the universe ( see my earlier essay on this site, button below ) I am not a Christian and I find it hard to makes sense of Christianity. And yet…

For most of my life in fact, I have believed that Christianity is for those who can tolerate and indeed welcome improbably simple solutions to the extraordinarily complex problems of being alive on the planet. I also felt that Christianity as a church did at least as much harm as good. Its emphasis on personal guilt was a heavy burden for people to carry. My late friend, the psychologist Dorothy Rowe, told me of the very many of her patients suffering from depression who had religious beliefs. I didn’t doubt it.

More to the point for me, I found church services - which I cynically attended for some years in order to get my daughters into the local church school - were simply childish and dull. The idea of some book received direct from God being sacred and to be worshipped and lived by made no sense at all. And although I enjoyed a singsong, all the hymns written since 1970 were of pretty appalling standard.

However over the last decade I have had second thoughts. This is partly because I have read some excellent books on the subject of Christianity which, even if they didn’t quite convince me, at least showed me that very highly intelligent people could also be Christians - whereas up until that point I had simply believed that anyone with a brain of any quality would be unable to swallow what was in the bible.

Some of these writers are well known. When I read ‘Suprised by Joy’, CS Lewis’ story of his conversion to Christianity from atheism, although I found Lewis pompous, not to mention homophobic and sexist, there was without doubt a considerable intellect at play. The fact that he had been a committed atheist for years until he was forced by the pressure of his own logic to accept Christianity struck me as remarkable, since I didn’t think Christianity had anything to do with the faculty of reason.

This, I think, is a common misconception borne out of the fact that the version of Christianity we have served up in most churches is not theologically complex, to put it mildly. But theology is in fact a highly challenging discipline, and it is heretical, so to speak, about scientific materialism , our now widely accepted belief that nothing is real unless it can be quantified and measured scientifically.

Lewis sent me on a reading path of intellectually developed Christians. I read Maurice Nicholl’s ‘The Mark’ which went a long way to explaining to me the deeper meaning of the apparently absurd and magical stories in the Bible. My fellow novelist, Francis Spufford ( ‘Golden Hill’) wrote a superb book called ‘Unapologetic: Why Despite Everything Christianity Can Still Make Surprisingly Emotional Sense’. I contacted Francis afterwards ( we have the same literary agent) and he put me onto another remarkable book, this time by an Eastern Orthodox Scholar, ‘The Experience of God’ by David Bentley Hart. It was heavy going, because Bentley Hart is incredibly smart, but it was also profoundly convincing. Instead of asking the question ‘is there a God?’ it poses the far more interesting question ‘What do we mean by the word ‘God’?’. The answer is surprisingly illuminating.

Another step for me in my intellectual re-calibration of Christianity came throught the Bible lectures of Jordan Peterson. Peterson has become a toxic name for many on the left of today’s political divide, but these lectures are entirely apolitical. They attempt to explain the symbolic and mythic meaning of the Old Testament, and I found them extremely convincing. They are available on YouTube.

There are other Christian writers who impress me. James LeFanu ( a Catholic ) , also a friend of mine, wrote a fascinating book called ‘Why Us’, about the odd centrality of mankind in the story of existence which was very provoking. And Rowan WIlliams, formerly Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote ‘The Lion’s World’ a deconstruction of CS Lewis’s Christian stories, in the ‘Narnia’ books.

I am still not a Christian. But I cannot deny that the Christian story has an immense power over me. Why did the CS Lewis books affect me so profoundly as a child ( and I still loved many of the reading them as a grownup). Why does the musical ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ move me to tears? Why does the whole drama of purification through death and rebirth, a theme I explored at book length in my YA novel, ‘Fearless’ ( Walker Books) have such power? And as one of my fictional characters Frankie Blue - also an atheist - reflects, ‘Why are there so many churches sticking up everywhere? All over the world? Why did they go to all that trouble?’ It’s a good question, and I can’t simply put it all down to mass, pre-scientific magical thinking.

EF Schumacher writes in one of his essays in ‘This I Believe’ points out that he made a great breakthrough in his thinking when he realised that he couldn’t actually dismiss all the great pre-scientific thinkers, including theologians, as unscientific naifs who didn’t understand the world in a modern way and therefore had nothing useful to say about life and its meaning. Only science could do that supposedly, but science offers no meaning at all - no morals, no purpose, no meaning, nothing. Only facts and theories and mathematics. Schumacher discovered that the great thinkers of the past, before they understood the difference between protons and electrons, or even that they existed, still had a profound understanding of what it meant to be alive. Whereas for the modern atheist, the question really has no meaning, let alone an answer.

I’m still not a Christian. Instead , I believe, along with the deepest Christian thinkers, that the universe and existence is unknowable ( ‘The Cloud of Unkowing’ is one key Christian text) and deeply mysterious. The medieval Christain mystic Meister Eckhart and the modern Christian thinker Dom Cupitt knew that morals and ethics cannot be worked through by using logic alone - there has to be faith, faith in what I suppose I would call The Good. This goes way beyond universal human rights, or earthly law. But the more you understand it, the more impossible it is to talk about.

I was talking to another Christian friend of mine, the therapist and former priest Mark Vernon, recently, and I was trying to convince him to write a piece about the potential for the rebirth of Christianity in a very different form from what that is being preached, increasingly unlistened-to, in our churches. Mark has the intellectual clout to write such a piece whereas I do not. He was considering it last time I spoke to him, because he also knew of a surprising number of modern people, including Paul Kingsnorth and Karen Armstrong, who are showing an increasing interest and even belief in the underlying tenets of Christianity - if only they could be expressed in a way that makes sense of the modern person.

As for me, I will go as far as this: I pray. I do not know who I pray to, if it is a God, or if it is a Christian God or if I am just praying to myself or into a void. But I find it helpful in some fashion I don’t really understand.

I don’t think there’s any doubt that in this country, and across the world, Christianity is in serious decline and has been for a least a century. But this may be the moment where it could be revivified - once we get away from the nursery school Christianity we have been fed by the churches. I don’t know what such a New Christianity would look like - or even if it would much involve Jesus of Nazareth, whoever or whatever he was. But I do believe that in the creed we call Christianity there is a deep well of meaning that we need to plumb, before the entire world dies under the crushing weight of ‘rationality.’.

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