Why the Eclipse of Christianity Matters

With his 2016 book God is No Thing (2016), the author, former Religion Editor at The Times Literary Supplement and now a researcher at the Von Hugel at Cambridge University, began carving out a lethally incisive space in the communication of theistic apologetics – sobriety, clear eyedness, and lack of obvious socio-political idealism being key; yet not averse to stolid combativeness worn on the sleeve of well worked conviction and reasoning; and a raring to be read set of case studies.

Before the 1990s, says Rupert, the sociology of knowledge in Britain was already shaped loosely. Have we grown from this or learnt justified nationwide lessons? No, ignorance is rife: the narrative of criticality is in free fall. People do not know – coherently – why they reject Christianity or think that Jesus doesn’t matter.

This is not mature or better.

Habituation is now gone

Another point is that Covid has impacted habituation. For the remaining Christian population, the cumulative aspect is over. Loyalty is gone. Pastors feel pressured to provide novelty value and clergy feel they must market themselves. This lowers the threshold of welcome, but correspondingly, the interest or challenge is gone.

Take the corresponding example of British education. Ethics teaching has become “here is one view, here is another”, and “which do you prefer?” By default, virtue is not inculcated and a free for all attitude reigns. It is the same for worship. There has been a breakdown of common language and the implicit has been weakened.

Where to now?

First, to imbibe that the goods have not just fallen into our lap. Second: that there is a difference between the French Enlightenment and other Enlightenments which were theologically informed.

This brings a serious take on historian Tom Holland to the table – the inheritance of Christianity: not merely emphasizing the moral realm but having a calm and historical examination of the whole gamut.

Monty Python will become Mount Pelion, asking “what have the Roman Catholics ever given to us?” A lot actually.  Take our systems of Higher Education and Consensual Marriage as just two we take for granted. Thus, in Britain – in that litmus liminality of the curious and the dissatisfied; of the new radicals who buck the trends, it is the Eastern Orthodox, the conservative, and the traditional that are growing.

A realisation of ancient springs has a place in a minority growing their awareness of the roots that have  gone before.

Contra Dawkins, read Noble

What does Rupert engage with for his chapter on the evidence for theism and Christianity. First, his own history. A Catholic father and an Anglican mother and how both streams informed him. How his mid 2000s biographies of Rowan Williams & Ratzinger were an outflow of his own curious mix but were also caused by the unusual cerebrality of an Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury joining at the intellectual hip with Pope Benedict XVI.

This led to a new book aimed squarely and contra at the new atheists. There was a lot of thinking to do about the challenge they posed. The clarification arriving, pithily, that God is no thing but not Nothing, Contra Dawkins. He had hit a nerve.

A little mistily “the first time” he recounts a short Denis Noble story. Noble is the eminent defender of Third Way Evolution – a form of Systems Biology – and the thesis supervisor of Dawkins’s Doctorate in Philosophy. He comes with credentials and gravitas and thus the justified mysticism now in the air. Noble came to Rupert, saying “Strictly speaking Rupert, I remain agnostic, but your book has shown why Dawkins is wrong on science as well as the theology”. 
 
It is clear that Shortt sees this as a telling tick of approval; and the nod to read more Noble.

Persecution of Christians

And then we shift. The science becomes not merely the social scientific, but the heady and flight fueled world of Geo-politics; of which Rupert’s work on the persecution of Christians globally is the focus.

The atmosphere of the chapel we are in (the Anglo-Catholic Pusey House of St Giles, Oxford) changes. We are discussing Rupert’s Chapter “the eclipse of Christianity – Christians don’t count either”. It is heavier to breathe in the charged atmosphere that takes hold under the watchful gaze of Christ

The most persecuted religion in the world is Christianity.

For some this is known, but what is less broached is how the sociology of knowledge in Britain rarely wants to discourse or even acknowledge what may be an unhelpful counter-intuitive fact for many. Narratives of Dominant Churches and Crusading Popes come from the shady side of the wrong sort of Enlightenment – too willing to put narrative above truth’s intermingling with story.

But in the great persecution against Her, come also the worldwide Shifts. First, that non-religious secularism is on the decline worldwide and that Christianity – particularly Pentecostalism, is the 2nd biggest form of Christianity now.  
 
Take one startling fact, even in Britain. There are more African Pentecostals in London than anywhere outside Africa. This sets the western secularist movement into a startling convergence with a worldwide renaissance in religious practice, an end that is unknown, uncertain, unclear from the final point of progress that seemed so clear to so many.

Why does an eclipse matter?

In the end though, why does the eclipse of Christianity – as it is in Britain and the western European countries – really and fundamentally matter?

Ultimately, it is that a Pearl of great wisdom, hard won, is being cast aside. Even without the unknown unknowns of an encounter with a Renaissance Religious World outside Britain’s secular bloc, that is a sobering thought. In any case, can any form of secularism be truly defended or grounded without recourse to our ocean of history and its many vivid currents, including the Christian?

This seems ever more unlikely.