The report of Christianity’s death has been an exaggeration

George Orwell began his beautiful, nostalgic pre-war novel Coming up for Air with an epigraph from a popular song. ‘He’s dead, but he won’t lie down.’ It’s tempting to borrow the line when writing about Christianity in the West today. The chronicle of its death has been long foretold, its obituary repeatedly rewritten. Numbers, particularly in older denominations, have been heading south for decades, and churches (in Britain at least) have been shutting ever since over-enthusiastic Victorians opened far too many of them.

Yet at the same time immigration is revivifying congregations everywhere. Many people show signs of spiritual openness, few speaking well of the kind of bare-knuckle rationalism that characterised New Atheism. And a cacophony of prominent, if very different, voices – Jordan Peterson, Nick Cave, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Russell Brand, Elon Musk, Louise Perry, Paul Kingsnorth, Tom Holland, even Richard Dawkins – have been saying positive things about the faith.