Nones outnumber Christians -cause for concern?

Recent research told us of an ...

 acceleration in the numbers of people not only not practising their faith on a regular basis, but not even ticking the box   People of no religion outnumber Christians in England and Wales – study | World news | The Guardian:

This has been a couple or more generations coming but it has hit a significant-felling  point. This represents a continuing decline in the reality of the notion that 'cultural Christian' is a good thing. The article points out that there will need to be some further sociological reflection on what is actually happening. However, I will hazard a guess that basically people who used to tick the "CofE" box (or other poility equivalents) are increasingly likely to take stock of themselves as not going to church, not really believing much of what seems to be associated with church involvement and perhaps not even liking or respecting what they do understand about Christian faith. And then they are being honest and saying "Actually, I'm not. And so what?"


So this doesn't represent, in my view, a decrease in Christian faith so much as an increase in the correspondence between labels and reality on the ground. What is significant is what it probably says about identity markers in the wider population and in turn what that implied for the mission of God and the churches in Britain.

It's a further marked movement away from Christendom and so a further indicator of our need to get our heads out of 'come to us' mode and to recognise that 'fringe attraction' is increasingly a busted flush.


Another area that I am interested to see more information emerge on is whether there are particular reasons for this acceleration. Perhaps, I would hypothesise, it is about the mismatch between mores between the Churches and wider society where the churches are looking less compassionate and, well Christ-like, than many churches. Not only that but we aren't looking very 'spiritual' with the result that  people who develop a 'spiritual' outlook tend to look to Buddhism, Daoism etc. though without identifying with them.

All of which is to say that fairly different means and approaches to outreach are needed. As if we didn't already know this: but perhaps this will help to drive the point home.

Advent: do we need to reclaim the season?

Okay, so the season is well over, but perhaps, while it is fresh in our memories, we could think about how to improve things into the future?
The article has some interesting thoughts but I do want to ask who is the 'we' here? The article seems confused between thinking about 'we' as a wider society and 'we' as Christians.

... some churches in the USA are exploring the idea of Extended Advent�– reconnecting with the fact that Advent used to be a season of seven Sundays until Pope Gregory VI cut it down to four in the 11th�century ( Christmas without Advent is cheating: Why we need to reclaim the season | Christian News on Christian Today)

To be fair, Advent has had several forms in the western churches. And today in the East, it is 'little Lent' and practised as a forty day season of preparation. The Celtic church seemed to have the same forty-day season. However, in the contemporary world, we might want to recognise a huge tension. While the inherited religious tradition has twelve days of Christmas starting on 25th December, the culture around about tends to see the 25th as the culmination of the season, perhaps supplemented by New Year's eve.
So strategically, we might be better to recognise that Christmas season begins earlier and have our more Lent-like preparatory season before that. I would suggest that pretty much all the current Advent season is, in effect, the Christmas season with the parties, the food and coral services where the incarnation is read about and sung of.
This would mean that perhaps the Kingdom Season should be treated as a preparation season. Interestingly its lectionary themes do tend in that direction. So, perhaps we should start 'advent' in November and shade into Christmas season in early-mid December. Encourage fasting in November. Perhaps consider a Ramadan-style fasting in that time (the shorter days in the northern hemisphere might make this not to burdensome).
Perhaps it is time to encourage experiments about all of this. including how to mark the various bits and phases with liturgical colours, music and ceremony.

Gratitude -the new meditation?

One of my resolutions over the next year or so is to investigate further the literature on meditation , spiritual practices and wellbeing. And this caught my attention.

 The body of scientific research supporting the positive impact of gratitude on physical, psychological, and social health is quite large. Not only does it feel good, this simple practice protects and boosts your immune system, reduces stress and anxiety, buffers against depression, improves sleep, and supports healthy proactive behaviors such as exercise. On top of all that, it may even make you smarter.
The psychological benefits of gratitude closely mirror those of meditation - Quartz:

 This is interesting to me because most of those things are not just associated in research results with "meditation" but more specifically mindfulness. The next dimension of interest is that gratitude is much more straightforwardly linkable with core Christian spiritual practices. That's not saying mindfulness is not found within the Christian traditions, just that you have to look more carefully to find it and think around the topic a little.

Gratitude is certainly already noted to correlate with measures of happiness. All of which suggests to me that including gratitude exercises in meditative/spiritual practice is a good thing for health etc, and is one area where drawing on specifically Christian traditions is much more obvious.

Sentimentality, Business and funerals

 The article I'm about to reference is about sentimentality and how it shows up in art and also, interestingly, business. It reminded me very much of an insight I had when I was more involved in funerals. The article tells us:

There are two causes of sentimentality in business. The first is a fear of the fragility of the audience, a worry that it won’t be able to cope with the truth. You think the truth is actually OK. But you fear that other people will get excessively agitated and upset. Sentimentality in Art – and Business | The Book of Life

 Once or twice as someone who had been asked to conduct a funeral, I realised that funeral directors don't always act in the best longer term interests of the bereaved. Now, don't get me wrong here: this is not a general 'down' on funeral directors: some of them definitely do get how their vocation is to help the bereaved and most of them most of of the time comport themselves in a professional and appropriate manner. However, just a couple or three times I felt in my interactions with funeral directors that their desire to help the bereaved had been, in the words of this article, sentimentalised. That is, they were approaching the task of offering comfort in a way that slipped over into a refusal to face a certain cold, hard, fact: someone had died. Perhaps that is even a little too harsh, perhaps what I was observing was not a refusal, rather simply a redirection or skirting round the 'elephant in the room'.

And it occurred to me that this was because there was a customer/client dimension which could prioritise short-term feelgood vibes of the service offered and so colluding in or even encouraging a degree of denial. This would be because the purpose of a funereal company is like any other company in crucial respects;

When imagining how to get other people
to like us or be loyal to our company or interested in something we’d
like to sell them, we too often feel we have to omit all the weaknesses
and rough bits. 

And, let's face it, when thought about from a bottom-line perspective, an undertakers' business is about selling funerals more than it is about helping bereaved people for the longer term. In the shorter term, it is desirable that people feel good about the service you've offered and that means the temptation to a sentimental approach is big. The longer-term perspective, however, sees that denial of a death is not going to be helpful for the growth and flourishing of the bereaved.

There is another problem that can hang around funerals and which can get entangled in the relationship between undertakers and bereaved. In some families, perhaps most to some degree, there are dimensions to the relationships between the deceased and the bereaved that are unwhole, unhealed or even downright fractious. This typically brings guilt and even anger close to the surface in and around a funeral service. This is very much the kind of thing identified in the article as a second dimension:

The second reason for business sentimentality is darker. People sometimes get very sentimental when they feel very guilty, when something pretty bad is going on just off-stage. It’s a kind of bubble wrap around brutish things. 

 Again, don't mistake my meaning. I'm not thinking of those rare times when undertakers are negligent about things like labelling bodies. I'm thinking of those situations when the unresolved tensions and guilt among the bereaved is simmering or bubbling. It is only natural then that undertakers, sensing this (who wouldn't?) want to bring out the bubble wrap and keep a lid on the emotional turmoil. An understandable desire even if unhelpful in most long-term bereavement processes.

So sometimes there has to be a way, gently but firmly, to do some things that don't collude in pretending that somehow there has not been a death. Some of the rites or ceremonies around funerals are there precisely because the harsh recognition of a death has to be made before it can begin to be incorporated into the personhood of the bereaved from that time forth. Sometimes a minister at a funeral will need to say the words 'dead', 'died', 'death' etc. even recognising that such things may bring tears. But this can be cathartic. It may usually be necessary to help people to process their grief.

PS Giles Fraser recently wrote in a way that broadly coheres with what the concern I've tried to express here is about albeit focussing more on the trend.

Ellul and Technology

For many years I have been reading bits and pieces of Ellul's work. I find myself drawn to his critique of the idolotry of technology or 'technique', and yet I keep finding myself unconvinced overall. For me there is resonance in the point that 'tech' is a bad master but can be a good servant. But I am not sure that some of the rhetoric actually makes an argument that seems to enlighten a genuine situation or enable us to live wisely with tech.

The linked article here Jacques Ellul and Technology's Trade-off | Comment Magazine is a helpful overview and contextualisation of this aspect of Ellul's work. And the final paragraph helps me to consider one reason why I tend to feel unconvinced by strands of Ellul's argument.

We can laugh and poke fun at technology (and its acolytes and worshippers); it is not god, not by a long shot. We can deliberately waste time having a beverage and long conversation now and then. Choosing to walk and cycle more and drive less, eating a more natural and less industrial diet, choosing not to submit our lives and our eventual deaths to the lordship of medical technology—these are other examples of practices in a life that is not centred on a sacralised technology and its value system. Technology is a good tool, but an unworthy god.

It helps my highlighting for me the partialness of the critique of tech. The article makes the point that Ellul prefers the term 'technique' to 'technology' (hence my use of 'tech' so as not to choose between them) and this is because he is trying to generalise and get away from particular technologies to finger the propensity to worship what our hands have fashioned. The problem that paragraph helps me to notice about this is that the crits are usually based on particular kinds of 'hi tech'. So notice in the suggestion of fasting from tech, 'cycle more' figures. And we might notice too a host of unnoted technologies: clothes, houses, roads etc. Perhaps it is because these don't generally figure in idolatrous attitudes? But if that is so, doesn't that undermine the critique of technique? And yet these unremarked technologies are hugely determinative of our ways of life and our attitudes, but not it ways that set off idolatry alarms.

Nevertheless, I think we do need to be aware of the way they do affect our living of our lives and how those effects influence attitudes, logics and values. But we don't have to assume that these effects will be unmitigatedly bad (or good). In the article we are told that Ellul claimed that he needn't look at the positive aspects of tech because it had enough supporters and worshippers doing that already. However, I do think that setting aside those goods gives the critique a lack of ability to help us live wisely with technology and rather ends up pushing us towards 'just say no'. And that attitude ends up being hypocritical because it inevitably ignores technologies which we have domesticated (such as clothes and cooking utensils).

We need an approach which also does what Andy Crouch does in Culture Making; seek to understand artefacts positively and negatively and then what Vanhoozer in Everyday Theology encourages us to do; to link our understanding of how artefacts function in various contexts to ideological and hegemonic concerns.