ANGLICANS WITHOUT GOD

When the former foreign secretary Robin Cook died, he was given a service in St Giles Cathedral, in his native Edinburgh, one of the historic worshipping places of the Church of Scotland. The former Episcopalian Primate of Scotland and Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, took the service. He smiled broadly as he described it - “Here was I, an agnostic Anglican, taking the service in a Presbyterian church, for a dead atheist politician. And I thought that was just marvellous.” He added: “Of course, he was a Presbyterian atheist, which means he distrusted authority - even that of atheism” (one could add of Cook, as of many Presbyterians, that he distrusted an authority that was not his own).


Holloway had long been seen as a man living and ministering at the very edge of where religion meets benign disbelief. He publishes a slim volume of reflections most years; the latest is an effort at reconciliation of the human with what he calls “the massive indifference of the universe”. He addresses himself to, and puts himself among, those “who are living Out There, in the place where God is absent”. In an earlier, less bleak book he writes that if the “truth” of Christianity (and of other great religions) can never be proven, still its moral challenge should not be renounced - an abandonment of the form to save the core. In another he writes that many thinkers “admire the way religions at their best produce people who are benefactors of humanity, servants of the poor and champions of the weak. While they may no longer practise religion themselves, they like the way it continues to challenge human folly and cruelty.”
Holloway’s vision is what Christianity in Britain tends to become: a repository of presumed goodness and wisdom which has no, or at best a very distant, God, but owes a lot to Him. (This, of course, excepts Northern Ireland, where a struggle for religious-cum-national supremacy between the two main religions remains unforgiving.) He is in a line of doubting prelates: infamous in the 1960s was another Anglican bishop, John Robinson, whose book, Honest to God, sought the same “Out There” space as Holloway. Since this was at a time when it was still thought important that bishops believe in God, it provoked a storm of controversy because of its insistence that God had (perhaps) become unnecessary.
Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote of it in an essay three years ago that it posited a world in which “the question of what distinguishes a believer from an unbeliever is quite hard to answer except in terms of intensity: the believer has no different conception of the good, but does have a more profoundly engaged relation to it”. That is what the British have come to expect of the Christians among them: that they are probably decent and probably show it a bit more, but are, and have no fundamental claim to be, no more decent ex officio than anyone else.
The reign of Rowan Williams is likely to mark something of a climactic point for the Church. He faces acute differences within Anglicanism worldwide, particularly on the ordination of women and homosexuals. Holloway, who says he was “revolted” by the bigotry he met among some of his fellow bishops at the 1998 Lambeth Conference, which decided to bar homosexuals from the priesthood, sees a Church whose many mansions have now become hostile to each other, most likely without any hope of reconciliation.
Arguments and breakaway individuals or groups are common within Churches - most organised faiths of any size experience them, even as they are growing. The deeper question about faith in Britain is this: has its moderation, reasonableness, resolute refusal to be too obviously spiritual and the relegation of the Church to blessing births, deaths, marriages and national occasions led it to a position where the two main “national” Churches - the Church of England and the Church of Scotland - as well as many of the non-conformists, and even the mighty Roman Catholic Church, have run out of road?
That decline is not a steady line downwards: indeed, in 2003 - the latest figures available - there was a rise of 1 per cent in the number of people who attend church and cathedral worship each month - to 1.7 million people - and 1.2 million attended each week. The “usual Sunday attendance” measure, however, showed a drop of 2 per cent to just over 900,000. The Reverend Lynda Barley, head of research and statistics for the Archbishops’ Council, commented that while “the Church continues to be a valued part of everyday life... the wider community is dependent on a declining core of committed church members”.
This decline is significant for Britain, even if most of its citizens don’t actively care, for two reasons. First, there has never been an organised, non-Christian challenge to the established Churches on their own territory before. Judaism, itself declining in the UK, was never much interested in converts and is determinedly patriotic: no synagogue service is complete without wishes for the health of the monarch and the government. Now, however, the established Churches face in Islam a faith that is militant, self-confident, fundamentalist (even where it is, by its own lights, moderate) and linked to communities of largely recent immigrants that are growing while the older established communities of the UK are shrinking. On one estimate, there will be more Muslims in mosques than Christians in churches by 2013. It is presently the faith of the future: it grows through rising birth rates and through conversion, including among the young urban poor to whom Christianity still ministers and does much to assist, but does not appeal. Yet unlike the other faiths, it has little interest in dialogue or even understanding, has many adherents who are militantly anti-Semitic or anti-Hindu and it links Christianity to the oppression of the Muslim and, above all, the Arab world.
Second, care or not, the thought that the Christian religion will actually dwindle into real insignificance is a sobering one. What then becomes the standard for morality? Politics? But political parties are themselves declining and their ideologies are no longer convincing as moral poles, even to themselves. Civic duty might sustain a working morality; so too might feelings of charity, or pity, or remorse. But these latter emotions have come to us through Christianity, even if we have secularised and bureaucratised them. If what sustained them is, or becomes, too weak to continue the tradition, what happens to them? Fear of a moral abyss is what unites the faithful with many of those who have none. “Apres nous le deluge” could be the common slogan. Of all the major states in the world, Britain is the closest to that flood.
This is in very large part British Christianity’s own doing. Of all major religions, Anglicanism is the most open to the shifting tides of the times, because it has always defined itself as pragmatic. It was formed for reason of state and dynasty after Henry VIII’s breach with Rome. After the Civil War it was consolidated as a distinct form of Christianity, but as a theological compromise - a position much mocked by those of more rigid faiths on all sides of it. And it was national - also a cause of mockery, indeed hatred, from Rome and from the later non-conformists, who saw in its fidelity to the state a diversion for eyes which should always be upwards drawn to God.
The genius of this compromise was Richard Hooker, a late 16th-century theologian whom Williams describes as the inventor of “that distinctive Anglican mood called ‘contemplative pragmatism’... a mood that embraces a fair degree of clarity about the final goal of human beings and the theological conditions for getting there, but allows room for a good deal of reticence as to how this ought to work itself out, and scepticism as to claims that we have found comprehensive formulations”.
Holloway also brings up Hooker, stressing his pragmatism. “He created a triangular schema: scripture, tradition, reason - three cords which, twined round, became a rope. None to the exclusion of the other. He allowed Anglicanism to be flexible. Now of course, it tried to be a monopoly religion, but it early recognised it couldn’t be, and it had it in itself to accommodate and live with diversity. It became a national Church. And so the country came to terms with it.”
Establishing a national Church was, nonetheless, a cruel business: much beauty, and perhaps much faith, was destroyed. After I left Holloway, I went north to St Andrews, the medieval university town on the north Fife coast. It was the centre of Christianity in Catholic Scotland; now, its most prominent landmark is the ruin of a great medieval cathedral, built over many decades on a promontory looking out to the North Sea. Sacked by an anti-Catholic mob inflamed by John Knox’s sermon in the nearby Holy Trinity church, it has declined to ruins, the gaunt fragments of towers and walls recalling how complete was the excision of the old religion. As Eamon Duffy writes in his The Stripping of the Altars, “a great cultural hiatus... a ditch, deep and dividing” was dug between the Catholic masses of these islands, and their past.
St Andrews has retained a famed divinity school, a few hundred metres from the cathedral ruins. There I went to see Ian Bradley, Reader in Practical Theology, who thinks about contemporary Christianity. An enthusiastic man in his fifties contained in a small, overstuffed office, Bradley is in no doubt why British Christianity is moderate, and why it is likely to remain so, even at the cost of further decline. “It is simply because it’s established. When you establish a Church, it’s for everyone. It’s for the believer and the unbeliever. It’s also a kind of monopoly - no one else but the Church of England in England or the Church of Scotland in Scotland can be established, so there’s not the same competition that you get in the US, where everyone is shouting his wares and the tendency is to get more extreme - you got religion, I got more religion. Oddly, a state Church keeps religion out of politics; and politicians, even believing ones, are very clear on that. The “we don’t do God” reply when Downing Street was asked about Blair’s faith is right: it’s private. There’s almost a tacit understanding, you might say, that the Church will not promote fundamentalism.
“The question about all that is, though, how can we avoid becoming a besieged sect? The C of E is riven by faction; the Church of Scotland too, if less so. Does tolerance, which we have plenty of, become indifference? Tolerance is, I think, the English virtue: but we see in Islam a religion which is much more engaged. You don’t see many Anglicans breaking off work or play for prayer. And though there is dialogue, it’s not much, nor easy.
“The trouble may be that many of us are not fussed by decline, and by the lack of strong doctrine. I like the fuzziness; I like marrying people who are not churched. I like it that people can come into church and sit alone, thinking whatever, and not be disturbed in their thoughts. My view is that decline is liberating. Are we in a secular society? I would put it this way. I think we’re in a spiritual, ethical, moral society. I think the Church has done its job - it’s provided the public model of morality.”
Unlike Bradley, many religious people are very fussed by decline. They see it as a rationale for defeatism, and there are many individuals and centres, in and out of the established Churches, that fight - sometimes furiously - against this view. One of these is Alister McGrath, Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University. He believes that the silencing of the Christian voice - a rather embarrassed assumption by both the religious and the irreligious that it should be seen, in architecture, monuments and art, but not heard - must be reversed, or the Church is doomed. “A Christian voice needs to be heard,” he says.
When Christianity is discussed, the US is almost always mentioned as an exception among rich nations. For there, Christianity is booming - especially in the vast, evangelical mega-churches that have developed an adroit blend of showmanship, marketing and devotion. The model is now being adapted to British use. Among the most prominent and successful of these is the Anglican church of Holy Trinity, in London. It’s an unremarkable, dowdy, large Victorian city church, tucked away behind the Brompton Oratory, a little way west of Harrods in London’s Knightsbridge.
I went one Sunday evening at five - the third of four services. I arrived, as did several others, more or less on time; we were told by the friendly young ushers that the body of the church was full, and that we should go through the crypt to emerge in the choir stalls. I wondered how this could be - what about the choir? The priest at the altar? - to discover that there was no choir, no altar and, apparently, no priest. The audience, spread out in front of us and in the gallery above, was already singing happily - happy was the name for it, with a lot of rhythmic waving of lifted arms. In my fifties, I was probably the oldest person there. A couple, a man and a woman in their twenties, were on stage, dressed in jeans - he with long hair and a beard - talking about the Church and making some announcements. On the dais where the altar had been was a rock band, which then played a song about Jesus’s love, the words of which unrolled on video screens placed throughout the church. The young crowd sang, fervently, many with their arms stretched, palms held out as if showing them to the Lord. After some more of this, Paul Cowley, a young man in chinos and a polo shirt who is one of the team of curates, came on stage and began to talk about God and the truth. He included a long and well-told story about finding, when a child, a casket in his father’s desk containing white powder, which he thought was his grandfather’s ashes. Opening it clumsily, the powder fell out - “Oh no: Grandad all over the carpet!” After an inner struggle, he told the truth and found out it wasn’t his grandfather’s ashes after all. The story was meant to illustrate that God sees and knows everything. Cowley was wholly in command of the audience: every so often he would tell a joke, occasionally he would illustrate his talk with a clip from a film - the Monty Pythonesque comedy, Eric the Viking, was one - which was cued in smoothly to the screens. His style wasn’t the (to British ears) overdone hectoring of the American evangelist: more like an after-dinner speaker, without the blue jokes. But he was practical, funny and plain-spoken. He was pleasant to listen to.
Holy Trinity’s basic units are little groups of about 20 people who meet for prayer and fellowship in each other’s homes all over London (on the church’s well constructed website, there is a map showing how many groups are in which London boroughs). The spine of the church is the Alpha Course, a staged curriculum for opening the individual up to Jesus, designed by Nicky Gumbel, Holy Trinity’s vicar. A slim man in his forties and wearing a sweater and jeans, Gumbel had been a benign presence, but he did not take the service. However, he closed it after another number from the band, sending the congregation away “in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost” - the only conventional C of E part of the whole affair. People were coming forward, at his invitation, to pray with other priests or more experienced members of the congregation. The service didn’t really end; rather, it dissolved into cheerful, prayerful, milling about. In the crypt, as we of the choir stalls retraced our steps to the exit, there were little groups in side rooms discussing, planning, and organising; others were browsing through a bookshop - a world away from Ian Bradley’s solitary figure in an empty pew, communing with herself.
The man who has the mitre and the staff of Canterbury is a scholar and a Welshman. He spent much of his adult life in universities and seminaries and he leads a Church - both the national C of E and the worldwide Anglican communion - which usually makes the news for its internal dissent. At one point in our talk, Rowan Williams said that he “bears the scars” to show his struggles with both “liberals” and “conservatives”. He does not give many interviews, but the subject of decline, and the position of the Church in society, interested him. We spoke in his workroom in Lambeth Palace, just across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament - a room large and austere, with no signs of power, but with a mantelpiece full of religious icons.
Williams speaks with a melodious, deep timbre that gives sonority to what he says and he speaks - rapidly - in sentences and paragraphs. Like his writings and speeches, his talk is pitched at an intellectually very high level: he is not only a studious, but a very clever man, a poet and a translator of poems from German and Welsh. His programme of lectures in the past year has included the annual Clark lectures in Cambridge - four densely argued talks on “Catholic Philosophy and the 20th Century Artist”; lectures on sustainable communities, on child rearing, on Islam, Christianity and the challenge of poverty; on “the media, public interest and the common good”; on “the gifts reserved for age” - as well as many sermons, addresses, interventions in debate in the House of Lords and articles, all this beside a programme of meetings, formal occasions, travel and, of course, worship.
It seems characteristic of him that, when asked about the Church’s decline, he goes back to history, and to literary interpretations. He points to the series of revivals within the Church in the 19th century and says that “if there had never been any challenge from dissent - from Methodism, let’s say - it’s possible that the worst of the 18th century Church would have drifted into what you do see in parts of the 18th century, which is the Church as part of the state. Revivalism outside the established Church prompts a kind of revivalism within the established Church. But it’s never an absolutely free market.”
He’s not necessarily in favour of a Church as established as it is now: rather, of a “Church of first resort”, one to which people naturally turn for the minimal things they still wish it to do for them, such as birth, marriages and deaths. “You end up, as it were, franchising all kinds of odd or not very committed behaviour; you end up exploited by communities that want religious servicing - and yet it can be genuinely a door into a more committed practice.”
When I asked him if he continued to favour establishment, he said: “Establishment remains. Whether formally and legally or just as a sort of cultural memory - yes. One of the paradoxes in Wales is that in spite of legal disestablishment the cultural place of the Church is pretty much what it is in England - it remains the Church of first resort... the model seems to be a clear core of commitment with rather fuzzy edges. The fuzzy edges are necessary. But what we have been reminded of is the need for the committed core. Some clarity about where all these values and traditions are coming from - I don’t see that as prescribing a wholesale doctrinal liberalism. So it’s a matter of what someone years ago called ‘affirmation without exclusivity’, saying: this is where I stand, describing precisely where you are going to stand and what your journey into the centre would retain.”
When I asked him if he shared Pope Benedict XVI’s sense of a Church surrounded by a culture that was inimical to it, he broadly agreed - “though I think I’m coming at it from a different kind of political ancestry, from a particular kind of pluralist tradition. I would see the Church and religious bodies in that sense as almost civil society, which are pressed by a centralised or bureaucratising or whatever trend. It is hard to say if it’s getting worse. I think in Britain we sort of wobble along... on a tightrope. In Europe, there is certainly a much more pronounced anti-clericalism rather than a pragmatic secularism, as here.”
Was he upset that a mention of Christian roots would not have been part of the European constitution? “I don’t think that putting Christianity into a EU constitution is a ditch to die in - though I also think it is odd that if you’re doing a constitution which is specifically setting out the historic roots of Europe, not to mention [Christianity] seems to me just... rather silly. Mentioning it doesn’t mean you have to revert to Christendom.” He doesn’t share Benedict’s sense - articulated before he became Pope - that the Church should, in Europe at least, resign itself to becoming smaller, but in the process become purer, more militant. Laughing ruefully, Williams said: “I think it’s a bit dangerous to say that a smaller Church is the aim - [it is] all too readily achieved!” Rather, he sees the possibility of moral exhaustion in the modernist project: a realisation, by non-believers, that the moral bases of society need religion, if not as a present guide then at least as a past structure.
Two days after we spoke, Williams received a letter from 17 (of 38) archbishops of the worldwide Anglican Communion, most of them from Africa - where the Church is growing most strongly - and Asia. It reminded him that the 1998 Lambeth Conference had declared that homosexual practice was incompatible with scripture and, recognising that he was not sympathetic to this decision, urged him to “rethink [his] personal view and embrace the Church’s consensus”. Williams is, as Richard Holloway described him, “struggling to keep the show on the road”. A split in the Church would in part be one between the rich and the developing worlds, but it would also cleave through the C of E, and could see the evangelicals form an open or de facto Church of their own, using the techniques of Holy Trinity, and a more fervid expression of faith to re-Christianise a country that has drifted away from them.
As Christmas approaches and the most insistent messages are not what joy may be kindled by the celebration of the birth of Jesus but what pleasure may be had from extra consumption, the skeletal nature of Britain’s faith stands exposed once more: a faith that still marks the seasons but, even with such a consummate priest as Williams at its head, falters at giving them meaning.
John Lloyd is the FT Magazine’s contributing editor.