Oh come all ye faithful: Is politics putting people off church?

Across the world, Christianity is flourishing. The number of Christians is estimated to be growing by tens of millions a year. The Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts put it at 2.5 billion – up around half a billion over the past 20 years. That’s based on how many of us identify as Christians when asked in surveys or censuses. But they also do some number crunching using other measures which suggest an even sharper growth. In 2019, 93 million Bibles were printed – in the year 2000, it was 54 million. They estimate there are 5.5 million congregations – 20 years ago they put the tally at 3.3 million.

Protestants have been growing fastest – but the Roman Catholics and the Orthodox churches are also up. Now it is true that the population generally is also up. But Christianity is growing faster. Compare that to those identifying as atheists. In 2000 they were estimated at just 137 million. In 2019 there was an increase to 138 million. 

But there is one country that is notably letting the Christian side down. I’m afraid that country is England. The Church of England figures show that in 2019 on average 854,000 of us went to church once a week. Down from 871,000 the year before, continuing a long, slow, gentle, dreary decline. Some other statistics showed sharper declines: 89,000 baptisms, down from 97,000 the year before; 31,000 marriages in church, down from 37,000.

For obvious reasons 2020 numbers are bound to be far worse. Often it has been illegal for churches to hold services. Even when allowed they have been emaciated events, with masks required and singing banned.

What is the strategy of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and his fellow Anglican bishops? It would seem that their key priority has been to try to ingratiate themselves with fashionable (thus usually non-Christian) lobby groups and to try to make Conservatives as unwelcome on the pews as possible. In 2020 we had Welby and friends endorsing the Black Lives Matter movement – including the notion of white people bearing collective guilt. The Bible says: “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.” Perhaps the Archbishop thinks that’s a bit out of date.

Earlier we had a large number of bishops attacking Dominic Cummings, in the most uncharitable terms, over his visit to Durham during the lockdown. Whatever happened to the message: “Judge not, that ye be not judged”?

Then we had Welby and other church leaders writing a letter to the Financial Times complaining about the Internal Market Bill, siding with the EU over various objections and legal interpretations.

Finally, we have had the claim from Welby that cutting the Overseas Aid budget from 0.7 per cent to 0.5 per cent of gross national income is “shameful”. As Enoch Powell put it, over 50 years ago: “Those who advocate aid or more aid do so not in order to be charitable themselves but in order to bring compulsion to bear upon others to perform what, in the case of those others, cannot be a moral act. As for Christianity, I confess it seems to me little short of blasphemy to seek arguments from it in favour of a compulsory levy of one per cent rather than 0.7 per cent. Whatever Christianity is about, it is not about decimal fractions of a percentage point.”

Some Christians clearly believe that cutting aid spending will increase poverty. Other Christians will disagree. Personally, I would like to see more attention on how the money could be better spent rather than focus on the total amount. But these are arguments about economics rather than theology.

It would be reasonable for the Church to intervene by objecting to that section of the aid programme that is government-to-government aid and goes to regimes that are involved in persecuting Christians – or at least do nothing to prevent persecution. Some of the largest recipients of our aid are culprits in this regard: Pakistan, China, Nigeria, South Sudan.

Would it not be reasonable for the Church of England to propose that further aid to such regimes should cease, or at least attach conditions about ending the persecution of religious minorities? Surely Welby is aware of the persecution these regimes are undertaking, or acquiescing in. Is he unaware that the British taxpayer is sustaining them and thus aiding and abetting them in such evil?

When I raised my objections about this with my own local vicar, she replied that the Archbishop was giving a “personal view”. In a way that is right. As Anglicans, we are not asked to regard his judgment as infallible. From a technical point of view, for the Church to have a view there would be some rigmarole of a motion being passed by the General Synod.

But that defence will not really do. Nobody would care what Welby thought if he were still an obscure executive at an oil company. He was seeking and obtaining publicity for his views by using his current status as Primate of All England.

While these various Welby utterances (earlier examples include attacks on Universal Credit, calls for higher tax and greater economic equality) annoy me as a Conservative, the damage they do to the Conservative Party is negligible. By indulging in political propaganda, thereby straying into “the things that are Caesar’s”, the Church of England does far more damage to itself. 

There will be many, who despite everything, will have gone to church at Christmas and will do so again at Easter, if not indeed more often. Some will do so merely for the sake of tradition or some other cultural or aesthetic reason. But others will do so in need of spiritual nourishment or to seek help as they grapple with the mysteries of our existence. If what comes from the pulpit is a stream of low-grade and vacuous agitprop, then that need is not being fulfilled. The clergy are letting them down. If Christianity can be inspirational in other countries, then why on earth not here?

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