UK Under Attack Again: really?

I was sent a link recently to a broadcast from the States lamenting that "Christian Britain" was "under attack again". It's a polemical report scattered with stories about the persecution of Christians in the workplace and the inevitable and inexorable erosion of Christian values in the nation. I'm reminded of a great story that the artist David Hockney tells. His mum is visiting his villa in the hills overlooking LA, all the way from industrial Yorkshire. As she looks out over the vista of swimming pools glinting in the sun below them she remarks to David (cue broad Yorkshire accent): "It's disgraceful! All this sunshine and no one has got their washing out."

Well the supposed decline of Christian Britain really depends on how you're looking at things and where you're standing. Admittedly, many of our inherited denominations are struggling with numbers and finances, but look across at the growth of black-led churches. What of persecution then? I don't want to be complacent, and there are real issues for many converts from other faiths seeking to become Christians in Britain, but is our country really a harder place to be a disciple than even 20 years ago? Look at the profile of religious issues in the news and documentaries. We have to thank our Muslim neighbours for some of this, but I believe that we are in a far healthier state than we have been for the significance of religion in the public square.

The broadcast I linked to began by referencing Winston Churchill's Christian battle against the forces of Nazism...(These days, anything that defaults to using Churchill as an emotive way in to making a point deserves deep suspicion!) I think what we are seeing is a genuine distinctiveness in the church from society, and that is something to be welcomed. It is not as simple as separation of church and state; the American model which originates the broadcast gives the lie to that pretence. Rather, it is about the genuine reality of diversity and the church being a voice of pastoral and prophetic concern. It will at times agree and affirm, and at others at will contradict. But being a critical friend means that, as Christians, we have to make sense of our beliefs to others, communicate why they are "good for all" and expect that they will not be the aspiration of many.

Having a Christian core to the constitution from our history gives us a duty that cuts both ways: to be faithful to pointing out the one hope of all humanity but to be humble about where the church has failed. Invoking the ghosts of Churchill et al means we need to tell the story of colonialism, patriarchy and the class system. Loving our country and witnessing to Jesus seems to me to be less about bemoaning how far we have sold off the crown jewels of our Christian inheritance and more about pointing forward to the new humanity that Jesus has inaugurated.

Comments

[Andy West]

Maybe we need to be a little more confident about who we are as Christians, and how pertinent and relevant faith can be for today, rather than bemoaning the loss of an idealistic Britain, which probably never existed in reality anyway!

[Jonathan Evens]

I posted on some of these issues in a turn-of-the-year post which began by thinking about the Early Church living out the statement that Christ is Lord and, by doing so, were living in the truth of Jesus’ words when he stood in front of Pilate and said that his kingdom is not the kingdom of top-down power and control that Pilate exemplified.

This is an understanding of politics, power and kingship that was lost, in part, for a large period of the history of the Church beginning with the adoption, by the Emperor Constantine, of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire. There were long periods of the history of the Church where Patriarchs and Popes held political power over large parts of the then known world and periods where alliances between Church and State gave Christianity huge power and influence within society. These periods of Church history are known as Christendom and we now live in a period after Christendom while often still remembering the final days of Christendom through which many of us have lived. Days when legislation was generally rooted in the Christian scriptures, the Church was the dominant and determining voice within our society, the nation was generally considered a “Christian” country, and levels of churchgoing were higher than now.

These changes have had increasingly significant implications for churches in our Deanery and more widely as we struggle with changing patterns of churchgoing, multi-faith parishes, less people with free time for volunteering, and the financial demands of maintaining large, old building through the generous giving of local congregations. These are all issues that we have grappled with at St John’s Seven Kings over the past few years; with the past year seeing us making significant changes to the way that we respond to these challenges.

Initially these changes were driven by a secular agenda which sought to drive Christianity to the margins of public life by arguing that religion was entirely a matter of private faith, but that drive has been counter-balanced by recognition of the diversity of faiths that now exist within the UK. We still see the secularising agenda in the militant atheism of people like Richard Dawkins and Polly Toynbee but what has been enshrined in law is an equality of religions and beliefs, not the eradication of religion for which the militant atheists have argued. So, in the Post-Christendom world, Christianity is losing most of the privileges that it previously possessed in order that it receives equal treatment from the State to that of other religions and beliefs.

Many still yearn for the Christendom period to return but the reality of today is that we are in a Post-Christendom period and we have to deal with the reality of where we are, not yearn for the supposed ‘Golden Age’ of the past. The reality of being in a Post-Christendom period also means that we are actually much closer to the situation of the Early Church than was the case when the Church had political power and influence.

My thoughts on how we can respond are at: http://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2010/01/post-christendom-church.html.

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