We need to embrace our history and reach out to the “spiritual” if we want to halt declining Anglican numbers
We must emphasise a mutual belonging to our society, and toughen up religious teaching if we want to achieve spiritual harmony
One of the features of the BSA survey is the absence of a category on the spiritual. I suspect that if there had been such a category, many in the “No Religion” group might well have declared some “spiritual” affiliation.
The term “religion” has increasingly come to have a perjorative connotation, suggesting at least legalism, hypocrisy and hocus pocus, if not downright violence and evil. But most people are not “secular” in the sense of denying the existence of a spiritual realm. Rather than taking the trouble to distinguish between good and bad religion, they instead take the easy option of believing in some kind of “spirituality”, which allows them to acknowledge a spiritual domain without having to belong to an organisation and live by its rules. Their awareness may be vestigial, increasingly distant from historical Christianity and more and more idiosyncratic, but it is there.
For the churches, this can be a point of contact, but we have to realise, more generally, that if spiritual beliefs are to make a lasting impact on society, they need a means of social expression. Soft focus “spirituality” does not make any demands about social responsibility, delayed self-gratification or the importance of the family. This is what the churches have done until now. There seem to be no other candidates in the field. The choice is between even more individualism, and “making it up” as we go along, or some kind of revitalisation of the social aspect of belief. Will our churches rise to the challenge?
Follow Up: A National Secular Society tweet in response to the Bishop–
Bishop says schools should “teach the faith”. They absolutely should not. Need objective education about religion.
http://t.co/lIiyitWk3h
— Secularism UK (@NatSecSoc) June 6, 2015