Quelle Surprise: Le Quiet Revival!

Le Quiet Revival

It’s happening in France too! Amazing eh? The term “Quiet Revival” has reached the Gallic shores of the most stubbornly and proudly secular country in the West.

Don’t believe me? Then check out this well-researched and nicely put together report into the phenomenon:

Turns out there is something happening. God is doing something. What was seemingly confined to the Anglophone world is now spreading out across the European continent, beginning with that bastion of all lands eminently secular – France.

Go have a watch of the video. Then notice that the presenter even uses the term “Quiet Revival”, gently stealing it from the UK Bible Society’s report of the same name. Something is going on, and once it was under the radar. But with this report it is now firmly in the line of sight.

While the Youtube video is in English, I am pretty sure that, just as with the term, le weekend,  the French could not come up with anything better than the English original and so we will surely have le Quiet Revival in days to come!

Though perhaps that’s something of a misnomer.  In order to have a revival of any stripe, muted, quiet or noisy, you would have to have had some sort of life in the first place. Ad let’s face it, France was not the place for evangelicalism.

I have a French evangelical friend. He is an outlier in his culture. His people and his church are a tiny minority. Not that he was bothered by that. “Meh?” he would grunt, shrugging his shoulders. Though, admittedly, he does that a lot to things that we non-Gallic types are always anxious about.

Yet something is happening in France.  What is going on? I believe a number of factors are involved.

Meaning and Purpose Deficit

First up there is a definite lack of meaning and purpose in a culture such as France’s. Well, a meaning and purpose beyond pure pleasure and style.

I mean pleasure and style (and serial mistresses and adultery) can only get you so far. Perhaps France believed that its version of secularism was more secure than the rather ropey version in the English speaking world, but that is not proving to be the case.

France, like many Western nations, is no longer sure of what it believes in. How do we know that? Because like all of those other Western nations, when its elites are no longer sure of what they believe in, they declare the things they are no longer sure about more vociferously.

Now I learned French for six years in school. I loved it. And lost it. Gotta use it, right?  I had enough French back then to read Albert Camus’ L’Etranger in the original language. And understand it. I managed to flex with that fact at my son’s school valedictory dinner last week in Perth, seated as I was next to a well-read, thoughtful French Canadian, who declared it was his favourite book. Ever.

We had a bit of a chat about existentialism and then I told him that my favourite band growing up, The Cure, have a song called Killing an Arab, which is about that book.

Sadly all of my Francophone ability has gone. These days, when a new Michel Houellebecq novel comes out, I have to wait for the English translation. And it’s probably not quite the same.

But here’s a thing: if Camus was the literary father of existentialism for the French. Houellebecq is its bastard son – a progeny more acquainted with a self-loathing nihilism. And it’s a nihilism that, while the existentialists don’t want to own it, is imprinted with its DNA nonetheless.

To take Houellebecq seriously, you have to take seriously the fact that the famous disinterest of the French, coupled with the sheer love of the material among its people, has soured into a deep, pleasure-only nihilism.

Houellebecq is a secular prophet highlighting France’s need for something transcendent. Something more.  Something that the French appeared to have rejected many lunes ago.

Indeed, when the Notre Dame fire raged through that wonderful cathedral back in 2019, it was seen as a harbinger of the death of religion once and for all in France. The images of the spire falling in were used to highlight the victory of the immanent frame in the modern West. Sure we might lament the lack of anything bigger than ourselves, but that did not mean there was anything bigger than ourselves.

So we got comments such as this:

That’s the trouble with the French, no term for fait accompli.

But guess what? It wasn’t fait accompli – not by a long shot. Such a bold statement has aged poorly. It’s almost as if God saw that sort of response and said “Hold my beer!”.

The result? Several terrible COVID couple of years later, a churning cultural angst about the fate of liberal society, the rise of radical Islam across Europe in which cities across France are no-go areas for security forces,  and suddenly eternity is back on the agenda. And not just cathedral-esque, priestly-garbed eternity a la The Roman Catholic Church, but evangelicalism is surging.

“Zut alors!”  you say! How could that be? Evangelical churches in France have been viewed as almost beyond the pale, weird at best and cults at worst. And since the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, anyone not aligned with the Catholic Church who wanted to be religious kinda kept their heads down.

But no longer.

There is movement afoot in France that is seeing a growing cohort of people joining evangelical churches. What an irony!  All of the wistful English speaking ex-evangelicals moving to the Roman Catholic Church. Meanwhile the French are lining up at Reformed and Pentecostal evangelical churches.

It’s intriguing listening to some of the stories in that video above. People looking for meaning and purpose and finding it in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Just like the rest of the world. Who would have thought.

The Vibe Shift

Another factor is the rising tide of young people in France who are more conservative than their parents. The cultural vibe shift in the New World of the USA is taking hold in the old world of France.

Having been told to avoid religion, the option seemed to be rampant individualism, sexual licence, serial monogamy (at best), pleasure and the je ne sais quoi that the French are self-consciously known for. But there is always going to be a pendulum swing against the excesses of a one-direction only culture.

Read any recent novel by Houellebecq and you will realise that such self-confidence is increasingly being run ragged. And the secular poets such as he have been calling it out for years. Time was running out. And like going broke financially, the trend is slowly, slowly, slowly, all-at-once.

The political scene in France is a nightmare. Do young French people really believe that the people – and the ideals – that have gotten them into this mess in the first place are the ones who will lead them out?

Clearly they do not. Not that all of them are suddenly turning up at church. But the fact we have a video exploring the rapid rise in evangelicalism from such a low base is startling.  The vibe shift – or is that le vibe shift is affecting all Western nation to varying degrees.

Diversity

Another factor of course is that immigration has changed the face of France. Check out the video. One of the key factors that is raised by the presenter when experiencing an evangelical church is the is diversity. As if that is some sort of surprise.

Of course we know that Christianity is extremely diverse. All tribes, tongues and nations. Diversity – true diversity rather than the faux offering of the post-liberal framework – is a mark of a gospel work.

For all of the self-proclaimed originality of secular France, it struggles to permit any real diversity. Witness the angst historically over hijabs and crucifixes being worn in public settings.

So it would stand to reason that the reporter expresses surprise  about how diverse the evangelical churches she visited were.  People from across the world, particularly the African continent, have landed in France.  And many of them are Christians. Christians of the orthodox stripe. You know, the awkward ones who believe in the resurrection, the reality of the spiritual realm and the exclusivity of King Jesus.

It’s commonplace to believe that immigration in France is leading to an explosion in Islam across that nation. But the same is also the case for Christianity. The average migrant coming into France is decidedly religious. Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world (higher birth-rate), but Christianity is still the world’s biggest. And many Christians are ending up in France, and adding to the colour, experience and cultural diversity of the church.

On a purely sociological level, Islam is making great strides in France.  But what Christianity has that Islam does not have is not a higher birth rate, but a “new-birth” rate.

Islam can grow as fast as it wants in terms of addition, but it cannot by definition transform the hearts of human beings. Its new-birth rate has stood at zero since 610AD.  Only the Holy Spirit can bring about new birth. And when the Holy Spirit brings about new birth it’s generally not an addition process, but a multiplication process.

And the Holy Spirit will only do that when the gospel message of Jesus is proclaimed. And suddenly France is full of proclaimers of the gospel.  Islam has no new-birth power. Hence it cannot have le quiet revival. Primarily because it has nothing to revive with.

Incidentally the French do actually have a term for spiritual new birth – it’s nouvelle naissance. I like that. I pray in years to come we can see that the UK and the French have more in common than a mutual benign disregard of each other, but a love of Jesus among myriad of their peoples.

And that’s a great hope to take into le weekend.