Christianity

Thursday

Theo Hobson

Does an understanding of Britain's cultural debt to Christianity develop with age?

There’s a spate of statistic-based stories about Christianity in decline. Recently we heard that under a million Brits now attend the CofE. Now we hear that the proportion of Britons who say they have no religion is creeping up to 50 per cent. Already, most white Britons identify as non-religious. It’s not really news. For decades religion has been a minority thing, a subculture that the main culture ignores or derides. But this was half-obscured by a residual sense that most Britons were culturally Christian. In 2001 a surprising 72 per cent said that they were. We are seeing a new honesty from these cultural Christians – many of them are

Wednesday

James Mumford

A truly liberal society would tolerate the Anglican church's views on sexuality

Given how apocalyptic the predictions were, Anglicanism’s make-or-break meeting about issues of human sexuality last week proved something of a damp squib. The Anglican Communion was supposed to be rent asunder. Upheaval was imminent. Schism was certain. Conservative African Archbishops were going to be tripping over their cassocks in the rush for the door. In the end, however, unity prevailed and the status quo was (boringly) upheld as the 36 primates gathered here together voted overwhelmingly to stick to the church’s traditional view of marriage. Nothing really changed: Anglican HQ merely recognised formally the break its American division has been boasting about for over a decade. So the summit ended

Tuesday

Melanie McDonagh

Britain is losing its religion, but nobody seems that bothered

This evening, if you have time and are around central London, there is an interesting lecture at the British Academy by the admirable sociologist of religion, Linda Woodhead, whose book with Andrew Brown on the CofE, The Church We Left Behind, is as depressing as it is largely to the point. The title is ‘Why No Religion is the New Religion’, and that is pretty much the size of it: the default identity of Brits is no longer reflexively CofE, but not-religious. (Actually, I am a Catholic of sectarian bent but I would personally hesitate to describe myself as religious, on the basis it is a bit of a self-regarding

Friday

Theo Hobson

Gay marriage isn't splitting the Anglican Communion - it's holding it together

My line on the Anglican crisis is a bit eccentric. I think there are now grounds for hope that the Communion can survive – and the reason is the recent rise of gay marriage as the central issue. Lazy punditry says that gay marriage is the bone of contention. But it’s actually a new issue – it wasn’t being discussed a decade ago, when Rowan Williams was holding these summits. The real bone of contention is whether actively gay priests and bishops should be allowed. On this the two sides are obviously adamantly opposed. The arrival of gay marriage as a big issue seems to make the crisis worse than

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 31 December 2015

The Egyptian driver of a London minicab said almost nothing during our journey but dropped me off at my destination with the words ‘What do you think of the condition of the world at the moment?’ He didn’t think well of it himself, he added: and I could not but agree. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so uneasy, not even during the Cuban missile crisis. The threats to international order and stability are now so varied and so amorphous that it is difficult to know how they are to be confronted, and even more difficult to predict when or where the next horror will erupt. But that, I suppose,

Peter Jones

Plato and think-tanks

In Living with Difference, a think-tank report on the problems raised by a multi-faith UK, the chair Baroness Butler-Sloss says that the recommendations amount to a ‘new settlement for religion and belief in the UK’ and are aimed at providing space and a role in society for all citizens, ‘regardless of their beliefs or absence of them’. This is what happens when good people decide this messy world needs to be hammered into an intellectually satisfying shape. Plato’s Republic is a very good example of the genre. It is an extraordinarily interesting document, telling one a very great deal about Plato and the ancient Greeks, deeply influential on intellectuals down

The Spectator

Letters | 31 December 2015

What Blair omitted to say Sir: Mr Blair’s latest in these pages, like his recent Foreign Affairs Committee appearance on Libya, papers over so much history that one hardly knows where to start (‘What I got right’, 12 December). His own Libyan history will do. We all know the ‘deal in the desert’, whereby Gaddafi relinquished a feeble ‘WMD’ programme to come in from the cold, lift the sanctions, and pave the way for oil deals. What was not known until 2011 was the real price of this bargain. The price was a UK-US-Libyan conspiracy to kidnap two whole families from exile and ship them to Gaddafi. Had we not seen the

Thursday

Dan Hitchens

Britain needs Christianity - just ask Alan Partridge

Are we really, as David Cameron claimed in his Christmas message, a country shaped by ‘Christian values’? Yesterday’s Evening Standard poll – which found that shopping is three times more integral to Britons’ Christmas than going to church – makes you wonder what the phrase even means. It doesn’t just mean do-goodery, though that is important. About 10 million Britons get help from a church-based group every year. If you see a queue of homeless people in a town centre at about 6 o’clock in the evening, you can bet there are a bunch of God-botherers handing out sandwiches at the other end of it. Where there is poverty, physical illness, mental illness, unemployment, the

Isabel Hardman

David Cameron says Christian values make Britain successful. Why?

David Cameron’s Christmas message is being reported as one of his most Christian public statements yet, with the Prime Minister arguing – as he did at Prime Minister’s Questions recently – that ‘it is because of these important religious roots and Christian values that Britain has been such a successful home to people of all faiths and none’. Cameron has – with the occasional rather odd hiccup – become much more confident about talking about Christianity, both in terms of his own beliefs and the importance he thinks faith should have in wider society, since he described his personal faith as being ‘a bit like the reception for Magic FM

The Spectator

Justin Welby on imposter syndrome, American exceptionalism and what makes churches grow

In the Spectator’s Christmas treble issue, Michael Gove speaks to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. Below are some outtakes from the interview. On the supposed decline of religious belief I don’t believe that that was then or is now an accurate perception. Church attendance in this country has fallen hugely both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the population. The number of Christians around the world has risen hugely since the nineteenth century and continues to rise at an extraordinary rate: it is over two billion now. So we’re seeing a change in the pattern of where the church is: the Anglican Communion is essentially global, as much

Tuesday

Theo Hobson

Biblical art, like Christianity, is always renewing itself

This sign adorns a local church in Harlesden. I suppose it could be called a Pop Annunciation. Who says religious art is stuck in the past? Then again, it is a perennial – and fascinating – question in Christian art: how much contemporary life to include in biblical scenes. For centuries artists have shocked the public by including ordinary-looking young beauties as Mary, ordinary working blokes as shepherds or apostles. Caravaggio is a good example, but even before him nativity scenes were transposed to Tuscan landscapes. In fact the first realistic landscapes in Western art were posing as biblical backdrops. The shock was rehashed by the Pre-Rapahelites, whose sacred scenes featured

Taki

Atheism may be fashionable, but most intelligent people believe in God

Have we ever needed Christianity more than we do today? It’s a rhetorical question, for sure, because the loss of our faith and the inability to confront Islam have never been greater. When I was a little boy during the war, my mother assured me that if I believed in Jesus everything would be OK. This was during the Allied bombing on Tatoi, the military airfield near our country house where the Germans concentrated their anti-aircraft guns. My Fräulein, the Prussian lady who brought me up, was more practical. She handed me a beautiful carved knife that made me feel safer than my prayers ever did. Today, of course, 74

Sunday

Mary Wakefield

Twenty years on, I'm homesick for the Christian cult I left

When I was 21, I lived with a cult for a year. It was a commune really, a tight-knit group of Christians, but I’ll call it a cult because it was in Texas and for special occasions we all wore white. There were other cult markers, too: we had a charismatic leader; the younger kids were home-schooled; and, to my great excitement, one (now ex) member wrote a book after she left: I Can’t Hear God Anymore: Life in a Dallas Cult. That I ended up there is a testament to the dangers of showing off. All those endless questions after finals, all those inquiring adults: ‘And what are you going to

Thursday

Taki

We need Christianity more than ever in this Age of Atheists

Have we ever needed Christianity more than we do today? It’s a rhetorical question, for sure, because the loss of our faith and the inability to confront Islam have never been greater. When I was a little boy during the war, my mother assured me that if I believed in Jesus everything would be OK. This was during the Allied bombing on Tatoi, the military airfield near our country house where the Germans concentrated their anti-aircraft guns. My Fräulein, the Prussian lady who brought me up, was more practical. She handed me a beautiful carved knife that made me feel safer than my prayers ever did. Today, of course, 74

Alexander Chancellor

The Lord’s Prayer is no more offensive than Jeremy Clarkson or deodorant

There was a time not so very long ago when the most common complaint about Christmas was that it had become too commercial and that its Christian significance was being forgotten. Since then the decline in religious belief in Britain has grown so much that the secularity of Christmas is taken for granted. It is effectively a pagan festival now. According to the Church of England, only about one million people, or around two per cent of the population, still attend church on Sundays (though about twice that number do so on Christmas Day). The Church is in a bad way, and it is only natural that it should seek,

Martin Gayford

Why would a dissolute rebel like Paul Gauguin paint a nativity?

A young Polynesian woman lies outstretched on sheets of a soft lemon yellow. She is wrapped in deep blue cloth, decorated with a golden star. Beside her bed sits a hooded figure, apparently an older woman, holding a baby. In the background is a huddle of resting cows, suggesting that the setting is a barn or stable. There is something familiar about the set-up — baby, young mother, farm animals — but it may take a while to notice certain details. The head of the woman on the bed is encircled by an area of darker yellow, which forms a sort of halo, and the baby’s head is similarly ringed

Michael Gove

Faith is left, right. . . and central

There was, of course, something very special about the House of Commons debate on Syria earlier this month. The moral challenge of how to face those who embrace evil without limits, the long shadows and sombre memories generated by military actions past, the divisions within parties and between friends, the wrestling with conscience that brought good men and women close to tears. The importance of what the House of Commons was being asked to authorise inspired outstanding speeches, most notably of all, Hilary Benn’s. While I was listening to the shadow foreign secretary, I noticed a hunched figure in the gallery also held spellbound by the speech, his head occasionally

Mary Wakefield

Am I a brave cult survivor, too?

When I was 21, I lived with a cult for a year. It was a commune really, a tight-knit group of Christians, but I’ll call it a cult because it was in Texas and for special occasions we all wore white. There were other cult markers, too: we had a charismatic leader; the younger kids were home-schooled; and, to my great excitement, one (now ex) member wrote a book after she left: I Can’t Hear God Anymore: Life in a Dallas Cult. That I ended up there is a testament to the dangers of showing off. All those endless questions after finals, all those inquiring adults: ‘And what are you going

Matthew Parris

The question Christianity fails to answer: ‘Who is my neighbour?’

‘Fine old Christmas,’ wrote George Eliot, ‘with the snowy hair and ruddy face, had done his duty that year in the noblest fashion, and had set off his rich gifts of warmth and colour with all the heightening contrast of frost and snow.’ Thus opens the second chapter of Book II of The Mill on the Floss. I had found the passage when searching for a secular reading for my newspaper column’s readers at a carol service at St Bride’s church in Fleet Street a couple of nights ago. I knew at once I’d found what I wanted. Eliot had been my first port of call. You can be confident

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

‘Creeping intolerance’ towards religion could push young British Muslims to Islamic State, Cabinet Minister warns

What do politicians find it harder to admit to doing in Britain today: smoking weed or praying? Welsh Secretary Stephen Crabb thinks it’s the latter, and that this is part of a ‘creeping intolerance’ in Britain that makes our society less able to resist religious extremists. In a lecture last night to the Conservative Christian Fellowship, Crabb argued that ‘Britain in 2015 is… increasingly characterised I believe by a creeping intolerance towards Christianity, and towards religion more generally, which we should be deeply concerned about’. He believes that the marginalisation of religious faith and discussion ‘risks pushing more young Muslims into the arms of Isil’ because it delegitimises their faith.