“Those pews may not stay vacant for ever.” Indeed!

Who would’a thunk?  Harris writes a piece in which, as a self-declared “devout agnostic” is full of the “Is that all there is?” dreaded question of Peggy Lee in the song of the same name.

A song of lament from a woman used and abused by men, and wondering what’s the point of life. Is this it? And he’s wondering, what next? Surely this can’t be all there is to a it? This shredded, mediated-by-screens existence of drab secularism.

In his article Harris cuts to the chase. He realises that the new atheism of twenty years ago is dead and buried. It had its moment. It flared up as an angry response to theism, but didn’t have the energy or the vision to provide anything other than “Stop worrying and enjoy your life”. To be honest, Peggy Lee’s lament is more honest.

He observes:

Here, I think, lies the faint outline of a journey that more people may sooner or later take, and something I can just about imagine: slowly increasing numbers of people being pulled away from their screens, towards something much more human and nourishing. Those pews, in other words, may not stay vacant for ever.

Dawkins et al was kinda hoping that they would. At least he was hoping. But now with the erudite, well-dressed and humorous historian Tom Holland making Dawkins look like an ageing hair rocker in the era of Nirvana, it seems like it’s the new atheism that will stay vacant forever.

Interestingly I spoke at a well-heeled boys school the other month. Well-heeled, well-read and well-versed in having conversations with adults. Great young men. And when I mentioned Richard Dawkins – once the enfant terrible, the scientist who launched a thousand Christian apologetics ships in response, no one – and I mean no one – had even heard of him. And a good thing too, observed their erudite Headmaster when he informed me of this fact.

Harris’s article is on the money. In terms of bad and good.

The Bad and The Good of it

The bad? It is true that the pews are emptying out. For those of us who see the statistics, let’s not comfort ourselves that everything revival is just around the corner. In fact there’s a bit of cleaning up to do before that happens anyway.  Let’s not assume that, like the only boy in town who has tickets on himself, we can say to the girl we’ve treated so poorly “You’ll be back!” So that’s the bad.

Indeed Tara Isabella Burton cautions against undue breezy optimism in her book  Strange Rites: New Religions For a Godless Age. In describing the neo-spirituals of today’s West as the “The Remixed” she’s indicating that although many want the fruit of the gospel (she herself is a recent convert to Christianity), the roots are not primarily the point:

The Remixed hunger for the same things human beings have always longed for: a sense of meaning in the world and personal purpose within that meaning, a community to share that experience with, and rituals to bring the power of that experience into achievable, everyday life. But they’re doing it differently.

Not the quadrant of “meaning, purpose, community and ritual”. And, it would seem, if you can get that without giving up your romantic partner or the lifestyle that flies in the face of Scripture, then you would.   Burton says “they’re doing it differently”.

For the likes of John Harris and his Guardian readership, that simply means let me squat on Christian land without paying any tolls.

Harris laments:

Where do we go and who can we find to meaningfully share our thoughts about life’s inescapable fundamentals: love, loss, death, fear, bereavement, regret? To properly do so might require real-world company, which can be an equally big ask. Think about all this, and you will sooner or later collide with something that predates the internet: the long and steady secularisation of life in the west and the vast social holes it has left.

But that’s the good also, isn’t it? Where else do you have to go when you’ve tried everything else and you find yourself in the secular, post-Enlightenment pigswill of cancel culture, casual anti-Semitism, corporate blandness and blandishments, and government after government that can’t house you, health you, or fill you with hope? Back home, that’s where.

But heed the warnings. Home wasn’t what it should have been for som many. And still often isn’t. This is a critique of the church too. Do we discuss that list – love, loss, death, fear, bereavement, regret –  church all that often?

I hope we do. If your church doesn’t then might I suggest that for all its relevance, it’s songs, it’s “yoof”, it’s latest branding, there’s a chance it’s wide of the mark. We can – and do – get all that stuff elsewhere. It’s discussion around the other stuff that’s in short supply.

Ritual and Relational

Of course, it wouldn’t be a The Guardian article without a swipe at the church. But perhaps one we can take on the chin:

Once, for all their in-built hypocrisies – and worse – churches at least offered somewhere to ritualistically consider all of life’s most elemental aspects. Now, beyond communities with high levels of Christian observance, they are largely either empty or woefully underattended.

First, I’m not sure what’s worse than hypocrisy. Jesus seemed to rank it right up there. But church, when done best, doesn’t just offer someone to consider life’s most elemental aspects ritualistically.

It offers a place to consider them relationally! And that is often a bridge too far for those steeped in the age of expressive individualism, the You Do You culture that would consider any form of church discipline an abuse of their rights.

It’s like that trick to catch a monkey. Cut a hole in a coconut shell big enough for a monkey to get its empty hand into. Fill the coconut shell with nuts. Trick is, the hole is not big enough for a monkey with a handful of nuts to extract said hand. What to do? Drop the goodies and free the hand? Or hold on and pull as hard as it can! And oh that’s what it will do, all the way to its capture.

That’s the modern, enervated West. It wants freedom, but won’t let go of the things that bind it. It wants the good things the church offers, but stubbornly wants those offerings without the remittent cost of letting go. Of trusting oneself relationally to others who might speak into your life.

All the “one-anothering” of the New Testament that makes church so confronting, and – if you can hang in long enough – so comforting. But if you’re holding onto the absolute right of expressive individualism – or more to the point, if it is holding on to you – then you can gnash and rage all you like, you’ll remain trapped.

And how trapped the West is. How captured. Caught in the bind of desire for the good, but clinging on to the things that are destroying it. It’s a tight monkey grip the whole way down.

Harris goes on:

Some of us seem to be belatedly trying to fill the gap. I see that impulse in people’s renewed yearning for nature, the ritualistic pleasures of summer festivals, and the popularity of meditation and mindfulness.

In other words, worshipping and serving the creature rather than the Creator. It must break his heart. It ought to break ours too. Just as in all generations of paganism we see the scurrying around trying to fill the void.

Wild God for a Wild World

And speaking of heart break, it’s to another common topic on this blog that Harris goes, the reinvention of Nick Cave as spiritual auteur to the First-world-weary. Harris points out Cave’s newest album Wild God along with Cave’s spiritually-infused online agony aunt column: The Red Hand Files.  Here is Cave bringing the two together.

And here’s John Harris on Tom Holland referencing Cave:

…Holland – who, like Cave, has returned to the Christianity he was brought up with – says that in the way millions of us interpret world events there is something unspoken: the fact that “at the heart of western culture is the image of someone being tortured to death by the greatest empire on the face of the Earth”. Many modern rituals and gatherings, he says, look like a “tepid echo” of old church festivities. And he likes Cave’s characterisation of God as wild: “Unless you feel a sense of awe and incomprehension, what’s the point? It can’t be a God who’s just nice.”