I REMAIN unconvinced that there is hard evidence of a “Quiet Revival” among young adults (News, 11 April). But new social trends often start as over-excited media confections or internet memes before taking root in the real world. So, it was pleasingly interesting to hear Start the Week (Radio 4, 21 April) discuss countervailing evidence to “current” trends that will lead to the “collapse” of both the C of E and English Roman Catholicism by 2062.
The Bishop of Newcastle, Dr Helen-Ann Hartley, was surprisingly bullish about the recent Bible-study report, finding supporting evidence in her own diocese. The format suited her; she came across as more rounded and interesting than she can in her more crusading moments.
Lamorna Ash, in her book Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever, explores conversion to Christianity in contemporary Britain, as a millennial who assumed that “Christianity is done,” but started finding, to her surprise, contemporaries converting. That, in turn, opened up a sense of longing within her for something deeper. Research visits included an Evangelical Bible-study group, Iona, and an Easter retreat in a Walsingham convent. The presenter Shahidha Bari was surprised to find more conservative forms of Christianity growing, but Ash found Quaker congregations also attracting newcomers.
Bijan Omrani, a Devon churchwarden, completed his elegiac book God is an Englishman (Books, 25 April), on English society’s vanishing Christian foundations, last October, but seemed pleased that his instinct that Christianity “will surprise us” might be confirmed sooner than he had feared. Instrumental in his own conversion was George Herbert’s poetry, as taught by a lapsed Catholic schoolteacher, which chimed with his instinct towards the eternal things.
All three admitted to doubts: Dr Hartley, in perfect Anglican-bishop manner, was more comfortably accustomed to them than the others.
There has, of course, been substantial coverage of Pope Francis’s death, and speculation about the conclave — by turns edifying and toe-curling. Kait Borsay’s programme The Evening Edition (Times Radio, 22 April) displayed both. Personally, I think the simplicity of the Pope’s coffin was a carefully calculated spin operation, and I’m all in favour. It certainly impressed the programme’s pundits.
One of them, Michael Binyon, earned respect by, in Cambridge tones, pronouncing Cardinal Zuppi’s Italian double-p correctly. He counselled listeners that the conclave was not a simple liberal-versus-conservative contest, which The Spectator’s Gen Z columnist Samantha Smith, a Roman Catholic, put down to Catholicism’s being nine times older than the left-right divide. She then dissected cardinals on the basis of their views on abortion and gay rights.
Borsay was interested in the Quiet Revival, but was sure that Roman Catholicism’s anti-gay stance as “the harshest of the religions” would prevent its “capturing the youth vote here”. Smith agreed: not only Rome, but Anglicans, and even Islam needed to break free of their image as “stuffy old men in frocks” to flourish. Oh, dear! The phalanx of shalwar-sporting young British Muslim YouTube preachers attract plenty of youthful followers.
