‘Christian values’ still matter in the modern world for thought

Pause for thought

Glamorgan Star news 14/01/2023

4 minutes read

Rev’d Robert Parrish. Background: Adobe.

‘Christian values’ still matter in the modern world for thought:

By Rev’d Robert Parrish.

According to the 2021 census of England and Wales published at the end of last year, 46.2 percent of the population describe themselves as Christian.

This was a decrease of 13.1 percent on the 2011 census. Some newspaper columnists expressed shock at this sharp decrease in just 10 years, but it didn’t greatly surprise me, as 46.2 per cent is way above the four per cent or so of people who attend a church on Sundays!

As a colleague remarked: “if 46.2 percent regularly attended we would need to get some extra chairs!”

I suspect that when the 2031 census is published there will be another sharp drop in the number identifying themselves as Christians, and here’s why: Despite Lenny Bruce’s quip that “every day people are leaving the church and going back to God”, there is a connection between giving up church attendance and loss of belief.

“You don’t have to go to church to be a Christian”, goes the old saying. And indeed, you don’t have to be a churchgoer in order to pray, read the Bible, or lead a good life. But it is when it comes to transmitting the faith from generation to generation that there is a problem. For when someone stops attending church, but continues believing, it becomes their sole task to try to pass on their faith to their children, without any help from Sunday schools or churches.

That is a lot to expect of anyone. The result is that often even the rudiments of Christianity are unknown to the grandchildren of former churchgoers. And how can you say you are a Christian in surveys if you don’t know much about Christianity?

In the 1960s, people started drifting away from the churches in large numbers. Families could now afford to buy cars, making day trips possible. It became usual for both parents to work, leaving Sunday as a day for a ‘lie in.’ In the 1990s, shops began opening on Sundays, and Sunday morning rugby and football coaching for children became common.

Back in the 1960s, it was assumed that children would continue to learn about Christianity at school. But Religious Education lessons in schools have since broadened out to include world religions and ethics. These are important subjects to learn about, but inevitably it reduces the amount of time spent on teaching about Christianity.

When Monty Python released their satirical film The Life of Brian back in 1979, most people knew the story of Jesus, even if they didn’t believe in him. I think that were the film released today many of the references would be lost on a lot of people. During a Good Friday Walk of Witness a few years ago a lady asked me if Christians celebrated the birth of Jesus on Easter Day. According to a story doing the rounds a woman went into a jeweller’s shop and asked for a cross necklace. The assistant asked her ‘Do you want a plain one, or one with a little man on it?’

Another story relates how a group of art undergraduates were taken to a gallery and shown a series of paintings of the Nativity (the birth of Jesus). One puzzled student asked, ‘Why is the baby in all these paintings male?’

‘So what?’, you may be thinking. Provided people lead good lives, what does it matter if they are ignorant of religious stories? Isn’t treating people fairly innate to human nature? In his book Dominion (2019) the historian Tom Holland relates how he rejected Christianity and became an expert in ancient Greek and Roman civilisation.

It was his study of these ancient civilisations which caused him to question his rejection of Christianity. He said: “It was not just the extremes of callousness (of these civilisations) that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or weak might have the slightest intrinsic value. Assumptions that I had grown up with were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’, but very distinctively of our civilisation’s Christian past. So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilisation that it has come to be hidden from view.”

Of course, other religions and philosophies have moral values as well, but Holland is speaking specifically of how Christianity has shaped the West. He writes “to live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions.”

To the objection that many terrible things have been done in the name of Christianity, and by people calling themselves Christians, Holland replies that the opposition to those things and the call for reform has come from Christians referring back to the example and teaching of Jesus. “Jesus would never have acted like that or condoned such behaviour.’

It is too early to say what the long-term effects will be on our nation of jettisoning Christian beliefs. Can Christian values survive without Christian beliefs? According to the 19th Century British Prime Minister William Gladstone, Christian values wouldn’t survive the disappearance of the churches by more than a generation. Over the next 30 years or so we may find out if he was right or not.