Christian England? Maybe not...

I've just read an interesting blog article from Paul Kingsnorth. I've responded to it elsewhere with regard to its consideration of the idea of the soul of a nation (specificially England).

Here I'd like to pick up a few other matters in it.

I think that I should take issue with this claim. "The 2021 census revealed that, for the first time in a thousand years, most people in England are not Christian"  Well, I think that is simply not correct in any helpful sense. Not because I want to deny that the census revealed that now less than half of the English are Christian but because I think that the idea that for the previous thousand years we/they have been. I actually think that a big part of what the census reveals is that people are now more ... honest? ... about their spiritual allegiances; rather than by reflex putting "CofE" people who would have done so 20... 30... 40 years ago, now put 'no religion'. The figures now, then, are more reflective of where people have actually 'been' spiritually for decades. I tend to think that the figure for numbers of Christians is likely to be closer to the numbers of those reasonably actively affiliating to churches. 

While there are people in those numbers who may be there for more social-status reasons than discipleship, these might be offset by those who are fairly Christian but find churches hard to stomach. I suspect the proportions vary over time. However, there have been times when the label Christian and being seen at church were marks of respectability which sometimes had little to do with any active affilition to Christ and the Good Old Way. And of course, we've only had censuses since 1851.

What I'd want to suggest is that probably for the last thousand years, there has rarely been a time when Christians in the sense of active Christ followers has been above 50% of the English population. To be sure there are times abundant when people have used the label of themselves because they have been baptised, were part of a "Christian" nation and/or thought having an opinion that there is a God made one a Christian. But that's not being a Christian. And at a national level there has indeed been rhetoric claiming Christian allegiance but the practices of government both in relation to the people inside and to the people outside of the nation have been sub-Christian at many, many points. Machiavelli has been more influential in practice than Christ.

I seem to recall that before Wesley started preaching, the spiritual scene was reportedly at a very low ebb. England was Christian in name only. Most people were, it would seem, deists in opinion and many were licentious in behaviour and morals. Including those leading churches since the qualifications for doing so seemed to forget the most specifically Christian details relying instead on family connections and having a degree from Oxford or Cambridge.

Maybe it's actually that for the first time in a thousand years many people have understood that the label "Christian" is not fitted to them. There are many different reasons for that no doubt. Some because the cultural connotations of the label "Christian" are no longer prestigious. Rather many are distancing themselves from much of what has become associated with the label: Trumpism, pedophile abusers, socially maladroit weirdness, inability to be other than dogmatic... For others it is recognising that their spiritual heart is not in it; they may be 'spiritual' but not specifically religious; they respect Jesus but not such as to follow his Way.

A few sentences later in Kingsnorth's article, I find the possible connotations of this sentence quite disturbing but not for the reasons I think Kingsnorth writes them; "By the end of this century, most people living within the nation’s borders will not have ancestors who shaped it" I fear that this framing plays into the hands of nationalists and racists by seeming to collude with the idea that ancestry grants title, somehow. Let's note that we are all immigrants (there were no humans here when the country was covered by ice). My own ancestry on one side is refugees from French religious tyranny, and on the other side I probably have more title than people who could only trace ancestry as far back as Saxon, viking or Norman ancestors. -My point here being that I don't think I have any more or less 'title' to live here than anyone else who call it home.

Though perhaps I do him a disservice since he goes on to write: "the spiritual energy in England today is coming from those who are crossing its borders in such unprecedented numbers. Many of them are Christian; many more are not. Will those traditions ever become English, in the sense in which Ackroyd uses in his book? It’s quite possible." 

I can't speak to Ackroyd's conceptualisation, but I do welcome the acknowledgement that our nation changes over time. If those who make home here from birth or from later in life, work for truth, justice, mercy, fairness and so forth, then that's great.

And then Kingsnorth adds something that is a good critique in my estimation, drawing on an older text: "In the Bible, they call it Mammon. It squats now over England like a wheezing, warty old toad, and we pay it obeisance every day. It is a very old god, and it never dies. And yet nobody has to worship it, and this is the secret and the escape. You can turn back towards the light instead, England." 

Quite: the important thing is not about ancestral title but whether we serve a common good or a mammonist agenda that's important. That's more consonant with God's agenda while exclusivising nationalism is not. I note that the nations are judged, according to the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, for their treatment of Jesus who identifies himself with the poor and marginalised.

At this time, England is doing really badly in that respect. Mammonry has increased inequality (quite noticeably over the last 4 decades), doubled down on demonising the most vulnerable among us and has been actively harming the marginalised and failing to help the exploited. England is surely under judgement but not for selling out so-called "Christian values", rather for painting very unChristian values as virtuous while using them as cover for doing the things that Christ condemns the nations for in that parable.