Christianity is a very strange and a very difficult faith. It is difficult to believe, and it is even more difficult to do what we were asked to do last Sunday — take up the cross of Christ and follow. Yet, in spite of the gainsayers, I do rather wonder whether Britain is as secular as the sociologists of religion maintain. In churches that take the trouble to present a well-conducted liturgy, to preach the difficult and challenging faith of Christ, people still respond.
The evangelicals in the Church of England manage to fill churches. The splendid liturgy of the Western Rite attracts thousands every Sunday to the great oratory churches in Knightsbridge and Birmingham. Even the oft-repeated claim that there are no more vocations to religious orders is not completely true — the Blackfriars in Oxford have a flourishing novitiate.
There has never been a time when it was easy to believe that a loving creator allows the innocent to die in earthquakes or children to suffer from cancer. Since the feminist revolution, and the change in societal attitudes to sexuality, the churches undoubtedly face some problems. But I do not believe that either the sheer difficulty in believing at all, or the sexual revolution, is what keeps people away from church.
Christianity is not destroyed by rival ideologies, such as Darwinism. It is just slowly gnawed at by secularism, consumerism, the “strange disease of modern life”. To visit a church where they still offer business as usual is to be stimulated, as no secular equivalent can stimulate: disturbed as no drama or work of art could disturb.
Excellent article by A N Wilson in today's Times. Well deserved praise for #frgraemerowlands, and a mention for the choir (or Latin Chorus!) aswell. pic.twitter.com/yTShNu2jyA
— ssktmusic (@ssktmusic) September 14, 2023