There’s a religious earthquake coming. You can tell. The first rumblings were a few years ago. Despite the obvious decline in the number of people ticking a religion on the census data, something is shifting.
I’m living in Christchurch, New Zealand, at the moment, and the Anglican cathedral in the centre of town is still a tottering heap, it’s reconstruction still not underway following the dreadful earthquake here a dozen years ago.
In a sense it’s like a metaphor. The secular rumblings of society blew out to a full scale seismic collapse of Christianity in the West. So much fell down. All that was left was for the Four Horsemen of the Atheist Apocalypse, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett to kick over the final traces of religion with their invective, their wit and their intelligence.
In a century or so, modern men and women (if there are even such categories allowed in a century or so), will have forgotten what it was even like to oppose religion, never mind adhere to it. True, the occasional piece of rubble might wend its way to the surface, but merely to be gawked at and put in a museum, with a warning that it might not be safe for kids.
Yet here we are. Two of those four horsemen have, sadly, died (Dennett most recently, and Hitchens most famously), while Dawkins and Harris are dragging their now-lame charges off to the knacker’s yard. More glue anyone?
Dawkins is saying more loudly what he’s been saying since 2007 – that he’s a cultural Christian. And Harris? Well I’ll leave you to interpret the “atheist/not atheist” of his own website when plugging his new book “Waking Up” (notice how he can’t even find a title without stealing a deeply biblical metaphor):
My hope is that Waking Up will help readers see the nature of their own minds in a new light. A rational approach to spirituality seems to be what is missing from secularism and from the lives of most of the people I meet. The purpose of this book is to offer readers a clear view of the problem, along with some tools to help them solve it for themselves.
To which I would say, “Wake up Sam!” You’re playing with language you don’t own. You’re a squatter on a property for which you are not paying rent. Have the decency to evict yourself or start putting some greenbacks in the hands of the landlord. Or the Lord of the land, whichever nomenclature you prefer.
Far from a collapse following an earthquake, it’s a bit more like this:
“Hey we’re back!”
But lest we get too cocky, let’s just pause to think about what we want to have back. What do we need to leave in the rubble heap and what do we need to rebuild.
That dilemma crossed my mind as I read The Times today, and James Marriott’s piece:
Two which I would say “Duh!” Where have you been the past five years James? Probably in the offices of The Times of London, that’s where. The kind of place that has an alternate social imaginary, a way of looking at the world myopically: containing slightly warmed over preconceptions that came with a First at Cambridge, along with a healthy dose of skepticism birthed in a lifestyle that would be too challenged if God were on the table.
But hey, it’s a start, right?
Marriott’s newfound starry-eyed acceptance that while Boomers and X-ers were throwing it away in spades, Millennials have found religion all over again.
It’s as if those ungrateful brats couldn’t just thank us for giving them a world in which they are permitted – nay, required – to indulge themselves in every experience possible with no exceptions and no guilt (consent being required of course), but with absolutely no meaning and purpose attached to it all. Why couldn’t they just take the gifts, repurpose them for their own bodily orifices, and turn their back on the Giver?
Here’s why. An earthquake hit them. Or to change it up, a tsunami swamped them. An earthquake of insecurity. A tsunami of anxiety. A tornado of meaninglessness. A cloud-filled, damp-ridden cold depression that just won’t allow the sun to break through long enough to dry up the puddles.
And Marriott gets it. Here’s what he says:
We may look back on the high point of secularism as a phenomenon peculiar to an age that hubristically believed itself to be at “the end of history” — an affluent, self-confident and relatively monocultural society that now belongs to the past.
Affluent, self-confident and mono-cultural. Yeah that sums up the West!! 🙂
But here’s a little thing for us to learn. A little thing for those of us who are quietly purring, “I knew you’d be back. Come to Papa.” Or Mama – depending on your flavour.
What is it we need to learn? Maybe for the first time in a long time? That religion – in particular Christianity – is not for the great and the good. Though you’d struggle to believe that given how much we fawn over the great and the good in Christianity in the West these days.
And like it or not, that’s the air we give off. That’s the vibe your honour. That’s the vapour we exuded when those cathedrals and impressive buildings were a long way from their collapse.
Cos listen to what James Marriott says, when discussing the outrageous fact that Russell Brand just got baptised:
If I were a believer, the baptism of Russell Brand in the Thames this week might lead me to question, if not the Almighty’s existence, then at least His good judgment. Though the Lord’s summons to the devilish Brand is a perplexing development in the unfolding of the divine plan, it belongs to a discernible cultural trend.
Now where would Marriott have gotten that idea? The idea that the Lord’s summonsing of Brand is a perplexing development in the unfolding of the divine plan?
From us of course. When our buildings were opulently grand. Or even when they were chastely bland (as was the case in my upbringing), we gave off that air all of the time. The powerful and the good were the Lord’s focus and attention. And so much the better for us, because we could build those grand edifices – whether literal or metaphorical – off the back of the money and cultural cachet that flowed from such types.
We’d never say so of course – well not often. But it just dripped off us. The schools, the assemblies, the “equipping a boy for life and damning him for eternity’s”, the shelter workshop of Christian subculture. You name it. Walk into any Christian bookstore and you can smell it. It’s as if they all use the same room deodoriser.
It’s the green room. It’s the canapés. It’s the stage. It’s the prince and princess pastors who are barely touchable. It’s the cathedral next to the town hall. It’s the quiet “Tutt-tutting” at the drunken neighbour.
It’s us.
But it’s not Jesus. Not the Jesus who said:
I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 8:11-12)
And what was Jesus’ responding to? The astonishment of the insiders when Russell Brand – er a Roman centurion – came to Jesus in his need and asked for help to solve something that he himself could not solve – the recover of his paralysed servant. Jesus himself was equally astonished – at the centurion’s theological knowledge, I mean, at the centurion’s humble yet assertive faith.
Here we are in a society paralysed by the fears, anxieties and ennui of a culture that promised so much, yet has delivered so little. And here we are in churches that are in decline census after census, and which we will pull almost any lever we can find to ensure that the earthquake does not level us to the ground.
Maybe, just maybe, God will rebuild something from the rubble. And maybe, just maybe, it will look a little different (okay, a lot different), to what we have build in the past. Same foundations of course – let’s not get carried away and think that somehow we can build upon any other foundation than:
…the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. (Ephesians 2:20-22).
So of course it’s not a case of anything goes. But it MUST be a case of anyone can come!
If we read the likes of Marriott and get smug then we have missed the point. If all we see this revisiting of the religious question as a chance to rake over the rubble of our collapsed cathedrals, rebuilding something that the Marriott’s of the world still assume is for the great and the good and not for the despised and the bad, then perhaps the next earthquake will total us for good. And rightly so.
Though to his credit, Marriott finishes with a flourish:
The world is not as secular as it seems. For a long time I was in the habit of mourning the fate of my local church, St John at Hackney, when passing by on my evening walks. In the pale springtime twilight, its vast sides of yellow London brick and towering classical portico present an image of helpless, melancholy gigantism — a great ship of faith stranded out of time in a profane century. Recently I walked past for the first time on a Sunday morning and, hearing a clamour, strayed inside to witness a huge, jubilant service. I had believed I was contemplating a ghost of the past; perhaps it was a vision of the future.
Mourning turned to dancing. Anxiety turned to joy. The church is Futureproof.
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