We need to believe in something ... quick

Filling the God-shaped hole with ... God?

We lack faith. In God, in ourselves, and in our institutions. Each of them, in one way or another, have let us down. Starting with ourselves - Freya India, who writes with great insight on young people and relationships in these strange times, describes her younger generation as ‘chronically doubtful’:

Generations before us had it harder, at least materially, but in their world, even as it sometimes fell apart, something beneath stayed intact: customs, understanding, a shared floor and foundation. Ours is one where all that underneath has been destroyed.

Indeed, India argues that ‘faith in a world of doubt is threatening’. People who throw themselves into relationships, who make themselves vulnerable to others, or hold convictions, are urged to rein it in or tone it down. We are instead encouraged to keep our distance, be non-committal, and remain distracted and unserious. When you consider what a conservative commentator like Melanie Phillips argues we are up against - post October 7 or, taking the longer view, post 9/11 - this is rather worrying:

The Palestinian cause is being used as a wedge issue to weaponise western antisemitism against Israel and the Jews, whose destruction is viewed as an essential front in the wider war against the West, Christianity and the entire non-Islamic world.

Phillips cites atrocities committed not just in Gaza and not only against Jews, but across Africa, the Middle East - where many more Christians have been slaughtered by radical Islamists - and in the West too, to make the case that a holy war is being waged on Judaeo-Christian civilisation and that we are, for the most part - despite all the horrific attacks and the growing sectarian divisions - seemingly oblivious to it. Maybe Phillips sounds over the top, but I think she has a point.

There is definitely a Christian revival, and a renewed sense of urgency, amongst conservatives. Whether its Jordan Peterson, rather compellingly, talking about the importance of sacrifice in in the living of meaningful lives; or his conversation with international Christian figures on how faith equips us to rise to the challenge of our ‘civilisational moment’. Both delivered at a conference organised by his ARC (Alliance for Responsible Citizenship) organisation. Both speaking to India’s concerns about the absence of certainty and aiming, as their recent publication put it, at ‘restoring our foundations’.

Annoyingly, this also sounds like the Starmer government’s unconvincing mantra, repeated ad nauseum by its robotic ministers, about how it is ‘building the foundations’ that the previous government supposedly forgot to build. Albeit as it sets fire to the house, and as the roof falls in. But still, I think India and Peterson are right about this need to go back to basics (as another awful British PM once said). These basics are spiritual and historical, as much as they are moral and political. As former government minister and Brexit negotiator, and now Baron, David Frost puts it:

You don’t have to accept Christianity’s metaphysical claims, but you do, I think, have to accept that it originates in the execution of a specific person, Jesus, a Jewish teacher, who “suffered death under Pontius Pilate” in around AD 30.

From Jesus to St Peter and the bishops of Rome to follow, whatever one’s faith or lack thereof, there was something undeniably awe-inspiring about the events surrounding the passing of Pope Francis in April. As The Telegraph reminded us following his funeral:

For two millennia, the history of Western civilisation has been inextricably linked to the history of the Catholic Church, an unbroken succession linking each Bishop of Rome back to Saint Peter the Apostle, and the foundation of the Church by Jesus Christ.

For all its well documented problems, it is still one of the more popular of our international institutions. For all the real politik of Trump and Zelensky seen in dramatic dialogue ‘among the cardinals’ in St Peter’s Basilica prior to the funeral - somehow (post-Oval Office debacle) the setting and the occasion heightened the former rather than sullying the latter. And for all the political clashes over whether the next pontiff be a progressive or a traditionalist ahead of the election of the new Pope via the conclave - the Church, as that leader had it, ‘remains the same’. (Well, sort of.)

Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley thinks Pope Leo XIV will be more ‘collegiate’ than his predecessor, but echo Francis in championing the Church over the office and the robes. Which is as it should be. So what of the English Church, less lush, less ornate? How is it doing? While less than half of us describe ourselves as Christians, it has nevertheless played a central role in shaping who we are as people. And, after a long decline, church attendances are once again on the rise - markedly so for Catholics with, reportedly, 1.8 million practising (of more than 6 million) compared with approaching a million attending Anglicans.

While many are from migrant communities, others seem to be young men in search of much needed clarity and community, and on the rebound from the ‘growing cultural fragmentation and alienation’ to which they have become accustomed. Another conservative convert, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has noted this development in the US too, upon which she raises hopes - if young women can be persuaded too - of a ‘renewal of the Western spirit’. She understands, intellectually as well as spiritually, what we have lost:

Liberalism, when it ditches the guard rails of classical philosophy and Christianity, becomes hedonism, nihilism and misery.

Her colleague at Courage Media, Connor Tomlinson, points to the rising numbers, again particularly young men, being baptised particularly into the more hardcore traditions of Catholicism and the Orthodox Churches, consequent upon a ‘moral decay in Western civilization’. Of course, this God-shaped hole in society and in people’s lives isn’t a new phenomenon. It is one we have been facing since the creation of the modern world. That it is being filled in … with God … is perhaps the surprising part. A loss of faith in anyone or anything. A loss of a narrative - something that we might live by. These are, surely, what are driving this holy revival.

While I am not one of the converted and not entirely conservative, I feel the same pull and am encouraged by this revival. And yet,

It’s actually over. By ‘it’, I mean the shared Greco-Judeo-Christian culture which fed and shaped the human imagination for the past 2,000 years. ‘It’ was probably over years ago.

A.N. Wilson’s corrective is sobering. Have we allowed ourselves to be carried away by holy rhetoric? This revival, while proportionally impressive, is numerically much less so. A couple of million or so practising Christians in a country of tens of millions is not a lot. Wilson thinks we’ve already reached the ‘end of Christendom’. Is he right? Has a hunger for a new faith in something, for surety over doubt, for order over confusion, and unity over division, blinded us to what’s really going on? Not necessarily. While I’m not a christian and I wouldn’t even describe myself as a ‘cultural christian’, there is so much to draw on. And those foundations still need digging.

Image: Andreas Wahra