In JL Carr’s A Month in the Country, the story of a young survivor of the First World War, set in the unusually hot English summer of 1920, the Reverend JG Keach delivers a rather melancholy verdict on the prospects for evangelism. “The English are not a deeply religious people,” he observes. “Even many of those who attend divine service do so from habit. Their acceptance of the sacrament is perfunctory: I have yet to meet the man whose hair rose at the nape of his neck because he was about to taste the blood of his dying Lord.”
When it comes to Christianity, a cursory look at statistical measures of religious practice lends weight to Keach’s conclusions. The percentage of the population that attends a Church of England service today stands at just over 1 per cent, reflecting a decline of more than 50 per cent since Carr published his novel in 1980. John Hayward, a mathematician at the University of South Wales, has suggested that most UK denominations are “heading for extinction”, with some, including the United Reformed Church, likely to expire within the next 15 years. Most of us are no longer baptising our babies, or getting married or having our funerals in Church.
Given this backdrop, what does it mean that so many people – 46.2 per cent at the last census in England and Wales – describe themselves as Christian? It’s a debate that has been reignited in recent months in the wake of some high-profile conversions, and paeans to the cultural value of Christianity, that have led some to forecast the return of the poet Matthew Arnold’s “sea of faith”. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s testimony, the popularity of Jordan Peterson’s therapeutic exposition of the Christian scriptures and the emphasis on the Christian foundations of the nation at conservative gatherings, bringing together politicians (like Miriam Cates, Michael Gove and Danny Kruger) and philosophers, are among the developments that invite questions that might have been regarded as the sole preserve of theologians. What is the nature of conversion? Who gets to call themselves a Christian?
Perhaps it makes sense that Richard Dawkins, a zoologist by training and committed atheist, should serve up with alacrity a clear-cut taxonomy of Christianity. “You can be a Cultural Christian, a Political Christian, a Believing Christian, or any combination of the three,” he wrote in a recent Substack essay. For some time, he has happily owned the first label, joining Philip Pullman (a self-professed “Church of England atheist”) and, more recently, Elon Musk in rejecting all religious belief while holding in affection aspects of its cultural legacy, including sacred music.
Hirsi Ali, Dawkins argues, belongs to the second category. Her 2023 essay for UnHerd (“Why I am a Christian”) offered several explanations for her conversion. But it was firmly rooted in warnings about the “menacing foes” facing Western civilisation, including Islamism and “woke ideology”. Atheism was, she wrote, “too weak and divisive a doctrine” to combat these threats. But a desire to “uphold the legacy of the Judaeo-Christian tradition” could serve as a “unifying story”. Musk would likely be allocated to the same category. In a recent interview with Peterson, he praised “the principles of Christianity” while linking the decline of religion to anti-natalism.
Dawkins, himself a critic of Islam, denouncing its doctrines as “fundamentally hostile” to women and gay people, took no issue with Hirsi Ali’s formulation. But, he continued – in an impressive impersonation of an evangelical preacher – unless she actually believed in the metaphysical claims of Christianity, he could not really consider her a Christian.
Debate about the threshold for authentic conversion has, of course, been the subject of passionate debate for centuries. “If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved,” wrote St Paul in his letter to the Romans. While the concept of private conversion and the individual’s struggle with sin were central to medieval Christianity, the Reformation brought a renewed emphasis on a person’s responsibility to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling. The Scottish historian Callum Brown has described how, in the 18th and 19th centuries, conversion came to be “the most powerful and widely understood symbol of individual freedom”.
Graham Tomlin, the Anglican bishop who is the director of the Centre for Cultural Witness at Lambeth Palace, suggests that Dawkins’ categories have historical antecedents – that the Church has “always worked with this sense of those who are really serious about their Christian faith and those who were
cultural Christians”. Tomlin is an author of a biography of Martin Luther and observes that “even back in the 16th century, [Luther] would say there are very few real Christians in Europe, even in a very Christianised culture”.
Tomlin’s preferred approach is predicated on an image proferred by another German theologian. “Dietrich Bonhoeffer sometimes used to talk about the Church as defined more by its centre than by its circumference,” he told me. “So rather than trying to draw a line around and say, ‘Who is a real Christian?’, the Church is where Jesus Christ is. Christian faith is being drawn more and more to that centre of life, energy, power, and transformational life. People are at different stages in that, and that isn’t to say there isn’t a boundary, but we mustn’t get obsessed with the boundary.”
It’s an approach that enables the Church to take a “generous look” at cultural Christianity. The Church has always, he said, welcomed people who enter its doors for “all kinds of different reasons”, while taking seriously its responsibility for discipleship and formation, including, where necessary, correcting the heresies about the faith that may “slightly twist the message”. He’s heard some describe Jordan Peterson as holding “an Augustinian anthropology but a Pelagian soteriology”, embracing the concept of Original Sin while, in a heretical move, placing the onus on the individual to attain salvation through their own efforts.
Many would argue that this tolerant outlook is rooted in the Church of England. “We don’t watch church members’ lips, let alone their hearts, when they say the Creed,” pronounced a Sussex vicar in a letter to the Times recently. In Anglican circles, concern has been expressed that the direction of travel – which includes the aim of making “missional disciples” – risks alienating the Church’s “cultural fringe” in its zeal. A 2021 book, Seeing Ourselves as Others See Us: Perceptions of the Church of England, noted that it was this fringe – defined as those who attended occasionally – that was the Church’s fastest-declining constituency.
In The Death of Christian Britain (2001), Callum Brown wrote that what made Britain a Christian country up until 1950 was “not the minority with a strong faith, but the majority with some faith”; not Christian churches or Christian people but the way in which Christianity had “infused popular culture”; the extent to which it was used by people to construct their identities.
His verdict was stark: “The culture of Christianity has gone in the Britain of the new millennium.” There was now a “vast chasm” separating us from the mid-20th century when people’s lives were “acutely affected by genuflections to religious symbols, authorities and activities”. Christianity was no longer, he wrote, in a paraphrase of the moral philosopher Charles Taylor, “like a banister upon which a person leaned when climbing or descending stairs”.
If there is one individual who can claim credit for drawing attention to our continued reliance on this banister, it is not a Christian leader but a historian and podcaster: Tom Holland.
First published in 2019, Holland’s influential book Dominion (which was reviewed in these pages by John Gray) can be located in the grand theories tradition, marshalling evidence across millennia to argue that the West, “increasingly empty though the pews may be, remains firmly moored to its Christian past”. Holland compares Christianity to dust particles “so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye… breathed in equally by everyone”. Its core idea – that “God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong” – is the myth to which we still cling. Following in the footsteps of the philosophers Larry Siedentop and David Bentley Hart and the Catholic broadcaster Rupert Shortt, Holland sets out to show that the values we may regard as universal or self-evident are nothing of the sort, but spring from “the greatest story ever told”.
Dominion was never, Holland told me, intended as a work of apologetics, and its appearance in accounts of conversion – in Christian circles the “Tom Holland train” is spoken of as a new route to faith – entirely unanticipated. “It certainly wasn’t a book about whether God actually exists or not,” he said. “It was a book about the cultural contingency of beliefs that I feel are rooted in Christian assumptions. And so I was slightly taken by surprise that people would start saying to me, ‘Oh, you’ve set me on this journey to go into Church,’ or, ‘You have resolved lots of my doubts.’”
It is not hard to see why some have described Dominion as a work of “subtle apologetics” – particularly given how new some of what Holland recounts will be to readers unfamiliar with the Gospels. It’s the story of a revolution, a world overturned, that presents Christianity as a disruptive, radical force, embodied by a cast of rulers, rebels and reformers. There is little in our culture today, Holland suggests, that has not been shaped by it. It was perhaps inevitable that some would be left wondering if it is true.
Holland is reluctant to pronounce on such a question. “I’m not a theologian – who am I to say whether it’s true or not? I feel torn between a kind of almost existential abyss where nothing is true and feeling the tug of wanting to believe in something that is supernatural, and therefore more exciting and interesting than a merely material world.”
The tug is specifically Christian, he said, “because I’ve been raised to think the things that Christianity teaches are true. And so,
I feel the appeal of its teachings very profoundly.” He described himself as a Christian – no cultural qualifier – but one “prone periodically to bouts of Nietzschean atheism”.
A question that animates Holland is whether Christian morality can survive the loss of belief in the biblical story – the “supernatural framework” that some cultural Christians abjure – underpinning it. What does the future hold for those, such as Elon Musk, who believe in “the principles of Christianity”? Can we, as Tolstoy did in The Gospel in Brief, remove the miracles while finding in its Scriptures guidance on how to live?
CS Lewis was scathing about those who accepted Jesus as a “great moral teacher” but not his claim to be God, suggesting that this entailed a fundamental misunderstanding of the faith. It was, he wrote in Mere Christianity, “the one thing we must not say”.
“You must make your choice,” Lewis wrote. “Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
From a different standpoint, Nietzsche was similarly uncompromising, with a particular contempt for the English. “They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality,” he wrote in Twilight of the Idols. “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads.”
Holland’s theory is that it is only the memory of Nazism that has “inoculated” us from questioning fundamental tenets such as caring for the weak. “It’s because [the Nazis] repudiated those values that for us today, they are the embodiment of evil. Is that sustainable as the memory of the war or fascism retreats? Will the inoculation be strong enough to keep us from going down that path again? Because the conviction that might is right, I mean, it seems obvious. And it’s only Christian teaching, basically, that has stopped us from thinking that.”
For Graham Tomlin, director of the Centre for Cultural Witness at Lambeth Palace, the answer is clear. “A culture can live off the fumes of Christianity for maybe a few centuries, possibly. But you know, the beating heart of Christian faith that gives rise to these beliefs – the equality of all people in the idea of human rights, a legal system that actually treats everyone equally – they’re all found in that belief that everyone is the object of divine love. It seems to me that you can’t have the ethics without the metaphysics, and sooner or later, that will play itself out. Without that transcendent metaphysics, the thing will begin to crumble longer term, I think.”
He takes heart from the interest generated by Holland’s book but believes that, beyond questions of contingency, more existential questions are taking hold of culture. “There is a definite difference in the tone in public life,” he said. “Five, ten years ago all the voices about religion in public were negative voices: ‘Religion is a bad thing, it needs to be eradicated.’” He is referring to the so-called New Atheists: Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, and others.
But today, he said, the “voices you hear in public are Jordan Peterson or Tom Holland or Ayaan Hirsi Ali… People who either are Christian or speak positively about the influence of Christian faith upon culture.” It’s striking that these speakers are often the first to acknowledge that their trajectory towards faith, or the Church, was unexpected – to them as much as their audiences. In a recent post on his Red Hand Files, the songwriter Nick Cave told a reader: “To my considerable surprise, I have found some of my truths in that wholly fallible, often disappointing, deeply weird, and thoroughly human institution of the Church. At times, this is as bewildering to me as it may be to you.”
Tomlin believes there is a backlash to materialism and a greater openness to considering the possibility of “things unseen”. “People have these experiences that are of the transcendent, where you could describe them as experiences of God, but they don’t necessarily have the language to interpret that.”
Polling lends some weight to the claim that belief in the supernatural has proved far more resilient than affiliation with a particular religion, or church. The World Values Survey, conducted by Ipsos, suggests, for example, that the proportion of people in the UK who believe in Hell – 26 per cent – has remained largely unchanged since the question was first asked in 1981.
The public conversation about faith also encompasses acknowledgement of its therapeutic value. In a follow-up interview to her original UnHerd essay, Hirsi Ali described in strikingly candid terms a period of existential crisis, during which she medicated with “enough alcohol to sterilise a hospital”. Christianity, she said, had filled a “void”.
A willingness to speak to the very personal nature of conversion is present in the accounts of other high-profile converts, in narratives that place them comfortably in the testimonial tradition of post-Reformation hearts strangely warmed. In his essay “How I joined the resistance”, forthe Lamp in 2020, JD Vance, the Republican vice-president nominee, describes not only the “deeply unsatisfying” nature of striving for worldly achievement, but the “weird coincidences” that played a role in his conversion. “What is significant is that I felt the touch of God,” he writes, borrowing from Pulp Fiction.
Christian faith as personally salvific is one thing, but what of recent claims about its potential to protect, even redeem, societies and nations?
Sam Brewitt-Taylor, a historian of Britain since 1945, suggests that, in one sense, “cultural Christianity” was widespread prior to the cultural revolutions of the 1960s. Britons who were not conventional Christians typically affirmed that “Christian civilisation” was an essential part of Britain’s heritage. Winston Churchill reportedly conceived of himself as a “flying buttress”, supporting the Church from outside, while Clement Attlee once stated that he “believed in the ethics of Christianity” but not the “mumbo-jumbo”.
“In the 1950s, the key idea was that Britain was a Christian country, and secular society was a really bad idea,” said Brewitt-Taylor. “Because if you go down the secular route, you end up with the Soviet Union. In a Cold War context, that was an extremely powerful framing… The predominant belief was that Christianity underpinned a healthy politics and a healthy society. It was considered the foundation of Western civilisation. It was one of the central reasons why the West had been able to achieve greatness, as they saw it.”
In the 1950s and 1960s, this was eclipsed by what Brewitt-Taylor calls “modernisation ideology”, the belief that wealth and technology naturally sends nations on a transition to individualism, secularity and liberal democracy. As non-Western nations gained in wealth and technology, it was believed, they would come to occupy similar cultural positions to the liberal West.
Today, a lot of these assumptions look “pretty dubious”, Brewitt-Taylor said. The rise of China, the resurgence of authoritarianism in Russia, the success of Hindu nationalism in India and political polarisation in the West all point to a more divergent world. Confronted by this, people have started “asking questions they haven’t asked for a while”, including questions about the ideology underpinning Western societies.
Finding answers to such questions is, some argue, an urgent task. In Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Individualism, Larry Siedentop warned that the failure to recognise the “decisive part” Christianity had played in establishing Western values would have serious consequences.
“If we look at the West against a global background, the striking thing about our situation is that we are in a competition of beliefs, whether we like it or not,” he wrote. Both Islamic fundamentalism and the “crass form of utilitarianism” underpinning China’s governance were incompatible with the moral intuitions of the West. But Europeans were in danger of forgetting the source of these beliefs, he wrote.
Secularism, with its premium on conscience, was “Europe’s noblest achievement” and “Christianity’s gift to the world”. It derived from the moral insights of Christianity: a belief in the moral equality of humankind. And yet it had come to be identified with “non-belief, with indifference and materialism”. This, he warned, “deprives Europe of moral authority, playing into the hands of those who are only too anxious to portray Europe as decadent and without conviction.” He left the reader with a question: “If we in the West do not understand the moral depth of our own tradition, how can we hope to shape the conversation of mankind?”
Ten years since the publication of Siedentop’s book, the idea that we face “a competition of beliefs” has been eclipsed by talk of an internal culture war. While Hirsi Ali remains a critic of Islam, she has also pointed to the threat posed by “woke ideology”. While “wokeness” has been applied to an increasingly wide range of positions, there is a marked intersection between those extolling the virtues of Christianity and critics of progressivist politics, with Louise Perry being one example familiar to New Statesman readers.
At last year’s National Conservatism Conference in London, James Orr, a professor of the philosophy of religion at Cambridge University, made the case that a “constitutionally and culturally Christian nation” offered the best defence for followers of every faith against a “new progressive theocracy”. National Conservatives kept “banging on about religion”, he explained, because they were alive to the dangers of the new public faith emerging, in which “a new priesthood” was “policing conformity to the new dogmas and doctrines of an elite Gnostic theology”.
Others express concern about the way in which Christianity is being refracted through a particular lens. “I’m wary about the alignment of Christianity – a religion that started in the Middle East – with this concept of white Britishness,” said Chine McDonald, director of the religious and society think tank Theos. She points to Richard Dawkins’ recent LBC interview (“I love hymns and Christmas carols and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos, and I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense”) and the “rhetoric around Western civilisation”.
“Dawkins in particular has shared some dangerous Islamophobic views, while talking positively about Christianity, as if Christianity is good because it is not Islam. I would be excited about the so-called Christian revival if it did not just stop at Christianity being ‘good’, but moved people to believing that Christianity is ‘true’.”
Descriptions of the UK’s “Christian culture” also raise questions about how far they capture the shifts in how the faith is now practised in the UK. The calculations made by the mathematician John Hayward suggest that it is the charismatic Pentecostal churches that are growing – places where you may be more likely to encounter a gospel choir or praise band, and gifts of the Spirit such as speaking in tongues, than the traditional hymns and liturgy some associate with English Christianity. Peter Brierley, who has been collecting and analysing church statistics for over 50 years, reported that in 2013 a third of London churchgoers were Pentecostal. It’s a number boosted substantially by predominantly black churches, estimated to number 25 on just one London road – the Old Kent Road – in a 2013 study. One of the most public displays of Christianity in recent years has been that of the black footballers in Gareth Southgate’s England squad, such as Bukayo Saka, the London-born son of devout Nigerian Christians.
For those who hold to Reverend Keach’s diagnosis in A Month in the Country of the English religious temperament, a more widespread revival may seem unlikely. A YouGov poll in 2020 found that, even among those who identified as Christian, nearly half said that they didn’t believe in God or a higher transcendent power.
Tom Holland’s prescription for the Church of England is that it should emphasise the “weird” nature of the faith. He’s critical of the leadership for a perceived failure do so. “Rather than speaking with the voice of prophecy, rather than explaining to a grieving and anxious people how the dead will rise into the blaze of eternal life, rather than proclaiming the miracles and mysteries that they uniquely exist to proclaim, church leaders seem to have opted instead to talk like middle managers,” he wrote during the early weeks of the Covid pandemic.
The Church has been “too successful”, he said. Christianity’s gifts to the culture, rooted in belief in the fundamental equality of all and including education, healthcare and welfare, are no longer recognised as such.
“The future for the churches is to remind people where these ideas come from,” Holland contended. “They come from believing in mad things, that there is a God who created all human beings equally, gave them an inherent dignity because they’re created in God’s image. You know, it comes from the belief that these were taught by a guy who got nailed to a cross and then rose from the dead and offers the promise of eternal glory in life. These are obviously, objectively to a rationalist perspective, mad things. But the madness is precisely what makes them so powerful and has made them so powerful… People want the supernatural, they want the strange, they want what they don’t get out of a Labour Party manifesto.”
This desire for the supernatural – the domain of Dawkins’s “believing” rather than “cultural Christians” – is evident in Holland’s personal story. In 2017, he visited Sinjar, Iraq while making a documentary on the plight of Christian and Yazidi people overrun by Islamic State. In a desecrated church he found a picture of the Annunciation lying in the rubble. “At that point I was open to the idea of there being angels,” he told the Christian broadcaster Justin Brierley. “It was a sweet sense of intoxication, that perhaps, actually, everything was weird and strange. And the moment you accept that there are angels, suddenly, the world just seems richer and more interesting.”
Holland’s prescription, for many within the Church, has been enthusiastically received. For lots of younger worshippers, it’s the “weird” aspects of the faith that appeal – attempts to water that down are occasionally described, pejoratively, as “Boomer religion”. But for the great majority who don’t go to church – and who increasingly identify as “None” – what importance does a conversation about cultural Christianity really hold? Religious conversions may cause short-lived intrigue, but are they actually representative of a trend? For some on the left, any talk of a “Christian nation” will ring alarm bells.
Perhaps, however, there is value in exploring the source of our moral intuitions, in at least entering the debate about how we came to believe what might appear to be self-evident. After all, precisely what entails “Christian values” is contested ground. When the American philosopher David Bentley Hart completed his translation of the New Testament, he was struck anew by Christ’s condemnation of riches and dismissive attitude to the family. He was left with the conclusion that the early Christians were, in fact, communists, “a company of extremists, radical in their rejection of the values and priorities of society not only at its most degenerate, but often at its most reasonable and decent”. One of the most recent assertions that Britain is a Christian country came from the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, who shortly before the general election told the Rest Is Politics podcast that it was also a “multi-faith democracy”. It was an answer that might have delighted Larry Siedentop. The unabashed ease with which he added, having been pushed on whether he believed in God, that Jesus Christ was “the son of God sent as our saviour” would presumably please Tom Holland. More than 20 years since Alastair Campbell barred God from New Labour discourse, it seems we may be ready for a more grown-up, refreshingly weird conversation about faith’s place in our lives and politics.
Madeleine Davies is a senior writer for the Church Times
[See also: Does the Archbishop of Canterbury matter politically?]
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This article appears in the 21 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Christian Comeback