Keeping Alive the Rumor of God. Martin Camroux

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 once we might have looked for religion to aid us, we now prefer practical solutions. We now mostly no longer look to God to add to our crop yields or protect us from disease. Recently I was bitten by a dog in Saigon and somewhat concerned in case I might have contracted rabies. I made straight to the hospital and a series of injections. It never occurred to me, as it would have to our ancestors, to pray that I might be protected. As Emily Dickinson wrote,

      “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 СКАЧАТЬ