THE most striking thing about the evangelism of the mainstream Churches in secular countries is how very useless it is. It’s one of those things so obvious that everyone has to ignore it if the conversation is to remain civilised. So, the Church of England has a director of Vision and Strategy, for all the world as if people took their vision and their strategies from Church House. The kind of horizontal evangelism, in which adults are converted, is vanishingly rare, and largely insignificant compared with the vertical disevangelism, in which adults fail to pass on their beliefs to their children. It’s like watching someone trying to fill a colander with water using only a teaspoon.
The release last week of a large Pew forum study was covered only in The Times and The Daily Telegraph, but it gave the proportion of the teaspoon and the colander fairly accurately: 29 per cent of the British population was described as formerly Christian, and three per cent as converts to Christianity.
This is, of course, a general pattern across Europe. The fading of Christianity in these terms is usually described as a loss of faith or of belief. I don’t think that this is right. Most people don’t believe anything very much, and this includes churchgoers: why else would priests spend so much time and effort every Sunday telling them what they ought to believe?
What is lost is most of all a habit. You wake up one Sunday and realise that you haven’t been to church for a while, and feel that it doesn’t matter. Then there is a loss of ritual, which, in this sense, is something deeper and richer than habit — some practice that seemed to work, so that, when you went through the motions, they took you somewhere.
The obvious example would be prayer, but services are meant to work that way as well. There is a loss of the imaginative frame: the belief that a Christian pattern makes sense of life, and that there is a rhythm of sin and forgiveness. This is, in a sense, both the first and the last thing to go; on the one hand, people come to believe that they can forgive themselves — as the whole of therapy culture urges us to do — but, on the other hand, there is a vague faith in progress, which seems to make any particularly Christian insights obsolete. The smooth arc of history bending towards justice and prosperity comes to replace the angular and bloodstained cross.
All of these processes take place within families, and with each generation it comes to seem less and less important whether you are a Christian, as well as odder to identify yourself as one. In England, we have the particular problem that a national Church remains after the nation for which it was the Church has dissolved into incoherence.
WHERE are things different, and why? One rather discouraging answer is “in Silicon Valley”. It is discouraging to me, at least, because the things that American Christians believe are such a very long way from historic Christianity. The consciousness of sin does not much trouble either Peter Thiel or Elon Musk, who called himself “a cultural Christian” in a conversation with Jordan Peterson.
A long piece in Vanity Fair dilated on the attraction of disciplined believers to the venture capitalists who are the power in the Valley: “No one wants the Palantir guy to be high on acid for two weeks at Burning Man,” one said. “You want hard workers. People who are like, ‘I learned that at West Point.’ We have Israelis who served in the IDF and are religious and conservative and super libertarian. And we’re like, ‘Yeah, that seems focused. We’ll take that.’”
Elizabeth Breunig, who is actually a Christian, cast a cold eye on the phenomenon in The Atlantic: “Silicon Valley Christians perhaps see Christianity as a kind of technology, which is to say a product used to accomplish human purposes . . . [but] much of the faith’s central traditions run counter to the aspirations of this new Christ-curious class.”
Faith, in Silicon Valley, is a way to stand out from the crowd. But the faiths that flourish work the opposite way. They bring people more closely into their families, and into their identities, and so into networks of mutual trust. It is the gentle scorn and occasional hostility of outsiders which keep Black Christianity and Brown Islam alive in this country. The belief that Christianity ought to be counter-cultural rather than other-worldly may be theologically correct — but it is only popular when the culture has moved away from Christianity.
