A consideration of how the decade's events impacted faith and religion.
Editors of magazines and television programmes love questions like 'Whatever happened to Christianity in the 1980s?'
They like segmenting history into blocks of time: 'The Middle Ages'. 'The Victorian Era'. 'The Twenties'. Now, 'The 1980s'. And it's easy to see why. It is easier to talk about something rather than everything, this event rather than all the events that led up to it, not to mention the events that led up to the events that led up to the event we are exploring. So, in order not to go mad, in order to say something, we dive in and select a few incidents to explore and we get the article written or the television programme made.
It is the phrase, 'diving in' that gives the show away. History is a flowing river in which everything is connected to everything else and the current never stops. To show how seamless and flowing history was and how one thing led inexorably on to another, one of my teachers claimed that you could trace the causes of the First World War in 1914 back to the building of the Great Wall of China in the 7th century BCE.
But if there are dangers in trying to slice up history like a roll of salami, it is a fact that sudden shifts and jumps in human affairs do happen. The poet Louis MacNeice captured the phenomenon in his poem called, significantly, 'Mutations', included in 'The collected poems of Louis MacNeice':
'If there has been no spiritual change of kind
Within our species since Cro-Magnon Man
And none is looked for now while the millennia cool,
Yet each of us has known mutations in the mind
When the world jumped and what had been a plan
Dissolved and rivers gushed from what had seemed a pool.
For every static world that you or I impose
Upon the real one must crack at times and new
Patterns from new disorders open like a rose
And old assumptions yield to new sensation;
The Stranger in the wings is waiting for his cue,
The fuse is always laid to some annunciation'.
The use of that lovely word 'annunciation' is ironic here, for the fact that started to penetrate our consciousness in the 1980s was that Christianity, like the smile on the face of Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat, was slowly fading from the scene. 'Fading' is the right word. It was not a violent revolution that overthrew the institution that had dominated British culture for centuries, and had given it some of its most cherished values and ideas. It was more like the gradual withering of a marriage. A lot can go unnoticed in a relationship before the realisation dawns that it's over and is drifting towards the cliff top. That's how it went with what has been described as the death of Christian Britain. Sadly, much of it was self-inflicted by the Church, in a kind of slow suicide.
Statistics tell part of the story, though they only tell us what happened not why. Membership in Christian churches in Britain grew down to the first decade of the 20th century, but between 1905 and 1950 it entered a period of fluctuation. There was a boom in the 1950s, with 1954 the peak year. Since then, and particularly since 1963, Church membership has been in decline, but the decline gained speed in those born between the 1980s and the turn of the millennium, the so-called Generation Y, a staggering 70 per cent of whom now claim to have no religion. The interesting thing to note here is that, though the decline accelerated in the 1980s, there was also a bit of a fight-back against it at the time. To understand what happened, we need to think about the role of sacred texts in religious history, and how they are often misunderstood, not least in religion itself.
In the case of Christianity, the text in question is the Bible, an anthology of ancient writings that slowly accreted over the centuries and gradually acquired absolute authority over many believers. Though bits of real history get thrown in during their formation, most ancient religious texts are what we call 'myth', a word we need to understand before we can intelligently discuss it. The first issue to grasp is that a myth is not a lie, though that has become one of its modern definitions. 'That's just a myth', we say, when challenging the veracity of an event. But a myth is not an untruth. It is a story, a fiction, through which a perennial truth is communicated.
from somewhere a false understanding of the meaning of myth crept in to Christianity
Take the story in Genesis, the first book in the Bible, about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the serpent that persuaded them to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree. That was never meant to be taken as the description of an actual event that happened one afternoon somewhere in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago. It was meant to be read as something that happens at all times and in all places, including the street where you live, and maybe even in the house that has your name on the door. The story of Adam and Eve is a parable of the discontent that has broken relationships and destroyed harmony in every human community that ever existed. Read properly, its meaning is never out of date.
That's how creative fictions work. They are about us, here and now, in this place and at this time. Sadly, from somewhere a false understanding of the meaning of myth crept in to Christianity. Preachers began to claim that these ancient writings were not art, the imaginative expression of enduring truths about the human condition. They were news reporting, accurate accounts of events that happened as they were described, right down to a talking snake and a god who walked in a garden in the cool of the early evening. The story was turned from useful fiction into useless fact. And it was an unmitigated tragedy. It put Christianity on an unnecessary collision course with science and social change. Nietzsche described how it came to happen and the loss it caused.
Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy' offers a way to look at religion. In it, Nietzsche reasons:
'For it is the lot of all myths to creep gradually into the confines of a supposedly historical reality, and to be treated by some later age as unique fact with claims to historical truth … this is how religions tend to die: the mythic premises of a religion are systematised, beneath the stern and intelligent eyes of an orthodox dogmatism, into a fixed sum of historical events; one begins nervously defending the veracity of myths, at the same time resisting their continuing life and growth. The feeling for myth dies and is replaced by religious claims to foundation in history.'
That's what happened to Christianity. And it's why Darwin's account of evolution was such an unnecessary crisis for Christianity in the 19th century. It suggested to people that to be a Christian they had to screw themselves up to believe things they knew were not true. That was the beginning of the rot. In time, some parts of Christianity caught up with the science and acknowledged their mistake, but it was too late. People had got used to the idea that Christians were always behind the curve when it came to acknowledging what others had recognised as true ages before.
This resistance to change by Christians wasn't due to ordinary conservatism and reluctance to abandon familiar opinions, an attitude we can all understand. It went deeper than that. It was holding onto a mistake because it had been taught as a divinely mandated truth. It was bad enough where science was concerned. Worse was to come. It was changes in the moral economy, or how we manage human relations in society, that really accelerated Christianity's decline in Britain, which is why it is worth trying to understand what happened.
Reading history can be a depressing experience for people who consider themselves to be progressive in their attitude to social change. For example, they might study the history of the slave trade and ask themselves: how could Christians, who were supposed to love their neighbours as themselves, ever have thought that slavery was right? But they did, for hundreds of years.
Or they might explore the place of women in society and notice how for most of history they were treated as the property of men and were entirely subordinated to their wishes and desires. Even today, in the largest of the Christian denominations, the billion-strong Roman Catholic Church, they are still banned from ordination. And they ask themselves: how can Christians endure this discrimination against women and continue to subordinate them to men?
They read how gay and lesbian people have been persecuted down the ages, and in some places executed for the sin of loving members of their own sex. They note the particular hatred of the Church for gay people down the ages and how it persecuted them. And they ask themselves: how can these Christians refuse to see how inconsistent their cruelty is with a faith that is supposed to be premised on love and care for all God's children?
Now, I have already agreed that ordinary people are often slow to accept shifts in culture and society, because they find change difficult. Anyone can understand that. It can be hard to keep up. But that's not what caused Christianity's resistance to change. To understand what was really going on, we have to go back to the Bible.
We have seen how reading biblical myth as history locked Christians into the absurdity of claiming there was a real Adam and Eve and a talking serpent — not to mention that the creation of the world took only six days to accomplish. But they didn't stop there. As well as insisting that these creation myths were real history, they also insisted that the social arrangements found in the Bible — including the subordination of women to men and the persecution of homosexuals — had to be accepted as normative forever.
This was a double tragedy. It made it impossible for Christians to adjust to those mutations in the moral economy that are such a consistent element in human experience. And it convinced people outside the Church that there was no enduring wisdom or help to be found in the Bible, because Christianity itself had so misread and misinterpreted it. That's what was pushing the river of Christianity towards a cataract of decline in the 1980s.
We are all capable of believing things … because we want or need to
Then something else started happening, something equally inevitable. In human history one action or trend always produces a counter-action or counter-trend. A thesis always provokes an antithesis. The rejection of Christianity, because it claimed that these old myths were to be understood as accounts of real events, provoked some Christians to dig in and harden their commitment to the very attitudes that had provoked such outrage. The move they made was one of those circular manoeuvres many humans love.
'Why', they were asked, 'do you believe these myths are not myths, but accurate descriptions of real events?' 'Because the Bible tells us so', was the reply. 'But why do you believe the Bible?' 'Because it's true', came the answer. 'How do you know the Bible is true?' 'Because the Bible tells us so', was the reply. Matthew Tindal, an 18th-century scholar, described this roundabout logic in these words (taken from 'Christianity as Old as the Creation', 1773, published in 'Enlightenment : Britain and the creation of the modern world'):
'It is an odd jumble to prove the truth of a book by the truth of the doctrines it contains, and at the same time conclude these doctrines to be true because contained in that book.'
But there is little point in arguing with this kind of circularity. We are all capable of believing things not because they are true, but because we want or need to believe in them. It's as common in politics as it is in religion. Something in us wants to end the debate and submit our minds to an authority that will do our thinking for us. It can give our life new meaning and purpose. It is a defiance of uncongenial facts, a kind of 'Nevertheless' — as Muriel Spark would have put it.
That's what started to happen in parts of Christianity in the 1980s. Because its reactionary attitudes to social change were being challenged, there were groups who became attracted to it for that very reason. The shorthand term for them was 'evangelical', because they chose to read the Bible more or less literally and saw it as good news.
More or less, I said, because there were subtle differences among evangelicals in how they did it. For example, we have already noticed how some Christians believe in a six-day creation, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, because the Bible told them so and the Bible was never wrong. Others finessed the argument slightly, in order to conform modern knowledge to what the Bible said. This is how they argued: The Bible said creation took six days. The Bible is never wrong, so six days it must have been. But we know from science that creation actually took billions of years, so how do we square the difference? Easy. 'Day' in the Bible never meant 24 hours. It meant as long as it took to get the job done, even billions of years. Argument over.
This defiant way of understanding Christianity became popular in the 1980s among young people who enjoyed countering trends and standing against received opinions. Churches that promoted this line on the Bible prospered, while congregations that tried to adjust to social change were rejected for conforming to the spirit of the age.
The great strength in the evangelicals' position was that their faith really mattered to them. It was the difference between life and death, heaven or hell. They believed humans were in danger because they had fallen away from the knowledge of God and God's plan for their lives as made known in the Bible. They had fallen into sin. And the reward of unrepented sin was damnation. The way to avoid that calamity had been made clear in the Bible. It contained the plan for their salvation. The Christian faith mattered. It was the literal difference between life or death.
The flip side of this trend was that it persuaded people who were convinced of the moral importance of the changes that had been made in society — such as the equality of women and the right of people to love members of their own sex — that Christianity was more than out of date, it was actually cruel and unreasoning. Hence the statistics that reveal Generation Y's contempt for religion. It is even predicted that by the time Generation Z is in the ascendant religion will be extinguished in Britain forever.
I wouldn't be too sure. Religion fulfils complex human needs. It responds to our hunger for meaning and purpose. That's why I think it would be a mistake to write off Christianity completely. It was once likened to an anvil that had worn out many hammers. It's just a pity that it manufactured so many of those hammers itself.
Will it ever learn? Your guess is as good as mine.
