(Church Times) Lyle Dennen reviews Andrew Hayward’s new book ‘The Strange Death of Christian England, and Its Glorious Resurrection: Why faith was nearly lost, and how it is being regained’

For the First World War, he analyses three poets: Rupert Brooke, for whom the war was relief from an empty life, void of meaning; then Siegfried Sassoon, who wrote: “I died in hell — (They called it Passchendaele)”; and finally, Wilfred Owen, who in his “Anthem for Doomed Youth” wrote of “these who die as cattle”. The Second World War with the death of millions, the Nazis, the Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag, and the obscenity of death by atomic bomb — all of this undercut Christian moral and social values based on the faith. Existential angst and helplessness replaced churchgoing.

The 1960s brought massive social and technological challenges, which eroded support for the Church. Hayward describes how faith became to be regarded as the past, not the future. There was a widespread loss of trust in all institutions. Football came to replace church as the centre of community. For Hayward, the final critical event was when the churches were closed when they were most needed, in the pandemic.

Ironically, Hayward wisely sees that the pandemic and the lockdown gave the Church a chance to reset. People had space and silence to ask themselves what life was for, what their life was. People started to go on Alpha courses, return to church on Sundays, become interested in spirituality, not just religion, feel a deep need to care for the poor, needy, the homeless, and to look again to Jesus Christ and his teaching. Hayward gently concludes that when a tide goes out, the tide flows back, perhaps even more powerfully.

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