Losing our religion
Christian ethics can’t survive without Christian faith
GREG SHERIDAN
standing superstition. Christianity is either
true, or it’s not much use at all.
That is why I finally decided to write
about the truth of Christianity and why,
now that I’ve ‘come out’, so to speak, I
would encourage other shy Christians to do
the same. Owning up to Christian belief is
intimidating not only because the culture is
so unsympathetic but because you realise
how ridiculous it would be to have Christi-
anity judged by your own life. That modesty,
however, can also be an excuse for coward-
ice. And if we leave the defence of Christi-
anity only to the morally qualified, it will be
a small platoon.
Dawkins et al assume that faith is irra-
tional. Most British people seem to take it onfaith (ironically) that to have faith is stupid.
But the way I see it, faith is not the enemy
of reason but the basis of reason. First, to be
reasonable, I have to have faith in my ability
to distinguish between what is real and what
is imaginary. Then, for almost everything
I know, I need faith in other human beings.
I believe I am the son of my late parents.
I can’t prove it. It’s a rational belief but not
proven. Much of the atheist assault on belief
deliberately confuses what it is rational to
believe with the much narrower category of
what is rationally proven.
Religious belief, of course, is not just
the absence of atheism. That belief in God
conforms to our intuition, and to the over-
whelming history of human experience, is
the most powerful evidence for its being
true. God is a God of experience. The long
human experience of God, and the vast
testimony of this, is persuasive.
The culture in the Anglophone West,
and much of western Europe, declares this
human evidence inadmissible, even as Chris-
tianity is partly replaced by every crazy cult
you can imagine, from witchcraft to Gaia,
with really wacky beliefs mostly given some
measure of respect. I saw advertised on the
BBC recently a documentary in all serious-here is no faster way to get yourself
classed as dim than by admitting that
you hold religious belief, especially
Christian belief. Anti-Catholicism used to
be the anti-Semitism of intellectuals; now
Catholics get no special attention. All
believing Christians are regarded as stupid,
eccentric or malevolent.
Some conservatives will make the case
for the social usefulness of Christian val-
ues. The conservative asks: if society pros-
pered with these traditions and customs, is
it really wise to throw them away without
a moment’s hesitation?
That is just what the West is doing, espe-
cially the Anglophone West. Britain, Aus-
tralia and even the God-fearing United
States are becoming atheist societies. Britain
is more atheist than Australia, which is more
atheist than the US, but the trend of radical-
ly declining belief is undeniable in all three.
This is historically new. As Nicky Gumbel
from Holy Trinity Brompton pointed out to
me recently, there have been periods of very
low religious practice in Britain — the mid-
dle of the 18th century, for example — and
other western societies, but never before of
wholesale atheist belief (atheism is a faith
like any other, only less reasonable).
It is a very eccentric position for the
West to adopt. The vast majority of human
beings who have ever lived, and the vast
majority alive today, believe in God. Chris-
tianity is on fire in Asia — it’s the only social
force the Chinese Communist party cannot
control — and Africa and many parts of
the world. It is also the most persecuted
religion. From Pakistan to the Middle East,
Christians believe so seriously that they
accept death rather than disavowal.
The European Union famously declined
to make any mention of Europe’s Chris-
tian inheritance when it produced a quasi-
constitution. Modern liberal opinion is not
only hostile to Christianity, it is positively
embarrassed about any connection with it.
If the EU holds the good parts of European
history in contempt, it’s not surprising peo-
ple are losing faith in the EU.
Two explanations for how we got here
predominate — the long story and the
short. The long traces an evolution over
centuries of disillusionment with faith, from
the renewed emphasis on humanity in the
Renaissance through philosophical chal-
lenges to gospel miracles, the discrediting
wars of religion, the disassociation of faith
and reason in the Enlightenment and on to
our own times of mass affluence and church
child abuse scandals.
The other explanation is more straight-
forward. The West was still widely reli-
gious, and religiously observant, until the
end of the 1950s. The sexual revolution,
the extreme disorientation brought about
by the rapid spread of information technolo-
gy, everything from television to ubiquitous
pornography, through to the new conven-
tions of simultaneous abuse and narcissism
on social media, mean Christian belief has
collapsed in a couple of generations.
The prestige of the West has declined as
its belief in Christianity has declined. The
world is full of vigorous societies and move-
ments — Chinese and Russian nationalism,
Islamism in all its forms, east Asian econom-
ic dynamism — which no longer think the
West has anything much to say.
I have come to a disconcerting conclu-
sion. The West cannot really survive as the
West without a re-energised belief in Chris-
tianity. The idea that we can live off Christi-
anity’s moral capital, its ethics and traditions,
without believing in it, appeals naturally to
conservatives of a certain age. But you can-
not inspire the young with a vision which
you happily admit arises from beliefs that
are fictional and nothing more than long-Britain, Australia and even the
God-fearing United States are
becoming atheist societies‘He’s adopted a more optimistic
approach to Brexit.’