Religion in the Doldrums

Proposing a toast last year at the National Secular Society’s annual dinner in London, Lord Raglan said that he was an “Anglican agnostic.” He reminded his fellow unbelievers how much they owed to the Church of England. “For every twelve bishops,” he declared, “there are twelve different opinions—sometimes thirteen.”

Three years ago Charles Smith, one of the founders of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism, ingeniously explained the decline of organized atheism. Churches, he said, had been relegated to being mere social centers, and Christianity had been watered down until it had become little more than “cheer ’em up stuff.”

There may be a decline in organized atheism in those United States (though I doubt it), but in these British Isles the Humanist Association is still striving energetically to ensure that its voice is heard, particularly in political circles. It encourages members to participate fully in the work of their political party (whatever it is); it cultivates and briefs humanist members of Parliament; it compiles a dossier on all MP’s and makes their views known to humanist constituents; and through its “Humanist Lobby” it presses humanist policies on parliamentarians of both Houses.

Its evangelical urgency is impressive, as it audaciously exhorts the faithful to anti-religious action. When the secretary for education announced he intended to retain in the new education bill compulsory religious instruction and a daily act of worship in state schools, the humanists were quick off the mark with a circular to their supporters. It bore this message, all in capitals: “Please write without fail to your MP; in this emergency we cannot afford a single passenger.… Write at least two letters.… Write now—and keep on writing!” Supporters were urged to write to the education secretary, to answer his reply, and to send copies to the Humanist Lobby for collation.

Impressed by their admirable organization, the editor of a British religious weekly quoted the circular in full and asked his Christians readers to write to the secretary approving his education bill and to send copies to the newspaper. He got responses from precisely three people. The sequel is depressing: the humanists continued to inundate public authorities and individuals with their ceaseless and strident propaganda; the religious paper, on the other hand, closed down three months later for lack of financial support.

Irreligion seems to be becoming ever more arrogant in England, where religion is currently in the doldrums. As an evangelical I tried telling myself that I ought not to be surprised at this phenomenon, which has good biblical warrant (2 Peter 3), but I’m always a bit uncomfortable about leaving it there. It certainly ought not to mean, for example, that evangelicals settle for holy uselessness and leave a whole area of Christian action to non-evangelicals and humanists who consider themselves to have a corner on compassion which we have abdicated as being outside our terms of reference.

But to come back to England. Here in an area smaller than Alabama we have an established church with one thousand million dollars in investments and the Queen at its head. Of it the former bishop of Woolwich has said: it has “become heavily institutionalized, with a crushing investment in maintenance.… It is absorbed in problems of supply and preoccupied with survival. The inertia of the machine is such that the financial allocations, the legalities, the channels of organization, the attitudes of mind, are all set in the direction of continuing and enhancing the status quo” (The New Reformation?, page 26). He might be right, though I feel vaguely disloyal about agreeing with Dr. Robinson. He could have added but didn’t (I researched this myself) that thirty-nine of the forty-three diocesans in England are Oxford/Cambridge educated. A status suspiciously quo!

There is another angle, one on which Malcolm Muggeridge has views. “Words cannot convey,” says one not customarily short of them, “the doctrinal confusion, ineptitude and sheer chicanery of the run-of-the-mill incumbent, with his Thirty-Nine Articles in which he does not even purport to believe, with his listless exhortations, mumbled prayers and half-baked confusion of the Christian faith with better housing,” and so on. Muggeridge is, of course, a former editor of Punch now hailed as the “Mephistophelian televisual guru of the faith,” his latter-day espousal of which has not blunted his sense of humor.

Let’s turn from a couple of mavericks and look at some recent utterances from the establishment proper. From rural England, the bishop of Bath and Wells predicted that there would be no revival of Christianity in Britain in the 1970s. Dr. Henderson had this gem in a message to his diocese: “I do not expect to see the long-awaited swing back or swing forward—whichever way you look at it—to faith and the permanent unchanging moral values.” And just to clinch things, the swinging prophet continued: “When that swing comes there will be a danger of it going too far to the extremes of puritanism, which is not a Christian alternative.” Oh dear, it looks as though Adolf Von Harnack was right, and that the relevant question for this modern age is not “Is Christianity true?” but rather “What is Christianity?”

If Bath and Wells offers no encouragement to his evangelical clergy, a colleague further north shows what he is doing about preserving those unchanging moral values. The bishop of Durham, according to a national newspaper that has an eye for such things, chaired a London meeting to launch a campaign by small gambling clubs to stay alive. Because of a government clamp-down (puritanical influence?), only thirty-one casinos will continue to operate here this summer. Why is this being done by the bishop, who is regarded as one of Anglicanism’s leading theologians? Because he regards entertainment clubs in his industrial diocese as useful social amenities, and realizes that many of them will have to close down when their gambling licenses are withdrawn.

A concluding commentary comes from George Target in his newly published shocker Tell It the Way It Is (Lutterworth, 9s.), describing the clerical top brass engaged in irrelevancies: “And the millions continue to wander about in the wilderness, strawberry jam on both sides of their Vitamin-Enriched daily bread, milk and honey flowing out of their ears—but hungry, without knowing it, for that other, living, bread … and are offered stale crusts of semantic chatter dipped in water from polluted wells, polythene packets of split hairs, and a Christ denatured and demythologized … (‘If anyone of them can explain it,’ said Alice … ‘I’ll give him sixpence’).” I don’t pretend to understand it all myself, but somehow I think it’s worth sharing.

J. D. DOUGLAS

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