SEX, TERSE, AND NONES

The New York Times's Nicholas Kristof published a column on Sept. 4 titled "What Religion Would Jesus Belong To?" After noting that great religions often migrate far from the idea(l)s of their founders, and pointing out the staggering religious illiteracy among Americans who call themselves Christians, the column unsurprisingly moved to defending action above doctrine.

And in the age of Pope Francis -- who nevertheless, at the beginning of his pontificate, stressed that the Church's mission is not to become a religiously-tinted NGO -- this seems to be the way even the Catholic Church is tending. The Anglican church, of course, has been churning steadily in this direction for decades. Meanwhile, not only is church attendance falling but, as Kristof notes, the percentage of "nones", those who when asked their religion answer "none", is growing by leaps and bounds. In the very religious USA, it is now at 25% and among millennials at one-third; in Once-Catholic France it is not far from 50%.

Some clergy insist that this is not a problem. What is falling away, they say, is merely the churchgoing, and the adherence, out of habit; what is left is the core of true believers, real disciples, who are the essence of the church (and who, some though not many still claim, will some day change and convince the world by their faith and action). Others do see it as a crisis but persist in believing that the solution lies in "reaching out" ever more to the young and the unbelievers by "updating" the church, its doctrines and practices, and putting it "in tune" with contemporary life. Their explanation for the emptying of pews and the growth of the "nones" is that the church is old-fashioned, bourgeois, stick-in-the-mud, reactionary and unable to cope with the issues that really concern thinking people in our time.

As an Anglo-Catholic living in ever-more-aggressively-secularist France among Vatican-II-raised Roman Catholics, I have ample time, occasion and reason to ponder these issues. And over the years (because I am now numbered definitively among the Elderly if not the Elders) I have come to a few conclusions which contradict both the positions described above.

To the "thank goodness we are now left just with the core of true disciples" clergy I say the following: if bad habits can eventually ruin us, as we all know, why may good habits not eventually save us? I am convinced that those who went habitually to church every Sunday morning, slept through mediocre sermons delivered without microphones, were rarely offered, and rarely took, Communion, but knew the texts of Matins, Evensong and a number of Psalms by heart, were extremely fortunate. Because when a crisis struck their mind, body or estate, they were surrounded and held up, if not by a small group of active well-wishers, certainly by a deeply-integrated body of words and doctrine become habit, by a parish that still observed feasts and fasts, and suprisingly often by a good and compassionate vicar or Rector. What, now, in like situations sustains the 3/4 of  their children become Nones? The 1/4 who have become True Disciples have prayer, fasting, and helping Syrian refugees to sustain them, as well as the knowledge that their church approves; but the others are foolish virgins at best, no oil in their lamps, no wedding-garment on a Monday. Who, moreover, are made to feel that the church doesn't really want them, not as they are anyway. In any case, the new/alternative/common-worship services they might go to are all geared to touch them to the heart and call them to action in everyday language, not recognising the fact that they might prefer to be left in peace in their pews with the comfort of age-old glorious English and their own quietly but urgently recited prayers.

Which leads me to the second class of clerical opinion: that the church must be in tune with the times, holding (as the current Archbishop of Canterbury put it) "the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other". Each church service must be attuned to the casual None passer-by, to draw her in with instantly-comprehensible language and gestures, with clearly-expressed involvement in current public issues, with catchy music, and with well-organised child-care. In the first place, this ignores the fact that a congregation, a parish, is a group of baptised and confirmed adults (with their families, if any) that meets as a body to meet its Maker and Saviour, and that its "family" meetings are not necessarily Mission services. No family organises its every family birthday, Christmas or Sunday dinner in view of the first casual passer-by. Secondly, this view ignores, and so by implication contemns, those whose ecclesiastical needs are expressed in a mood of collective reverence and awe that best incarnates itself in great ancient music and texts, in visual beauty and in much stillness. At best such people, in the Anglican Church, are given the sop of a spare and minimal 8 a.m. BCP service; in the RC church they are mostly given nothing at all.

Beer comes to mind. Many years ago Carlsberg, with Tuborg a fine Danish lager much prized by connoisseurs, proudly announced to Canadian beer-lovers that it would henceforth be brewed under licence in Canada and thus be much more, and more cheaply, available. We then found that Canadian-brewed Carlsberg had a quite different taste and had become simply another Canadian beer, like Molson's. When I mentioned this to a brewery executive, he smiled and said: "The original Carlsberg had maybe 25,000 customers in Canada. The new Carlsberg has a million and a half. Why should they care about the original 25,000?" Why should the modern Church care about what they think is the minority to whom faith is expressed in awe and reverence and ancient beauty?

Except that there is no million of new customers, and the Nones flourish. So my conclusion is this: is the thought not at least envisageable to those in charge of Church doctrine, education and worship that the Church has been driving away as many people as, if not more people than, it attracts? I personally know a number of Roman Catholics who have been alienated from their Church, and consequently from their faith, by an unfortunate remark by a trusted priest. I also know a number of both Roman and Anglican Catholics who no longer feel at home in modern liturgies and resent being pushed into early-morning corners. And I know several of both kinds who need their faith, and who need their church, without necessarily wanting to be lectured to, at every turn, on the absolute cost of, yet the imperative need for, True Discipleship.

Christ had twelve disciples. But He touched and healed many -- dozens, hundreds, thousands. What happened to them? They saw and treated, I'm sure, their troublesome neighbour a different way. They prayed with more thanksgiving when they woke up and went to bed. It was perhaps for them that St Bernard wrote, "Whoever loves God even a little, and loves his neighbour even a little, is united to God." It seems a shame to let them drift off into Nonehood.

Finally, the answer to doctrinal illiteracy is not, surely, to ignore it as long as there is enough admirable social action. Christ spent much of His time teaching. He taught in synagogues, He taught on beaches, He taught on the slopes of green hills. He taught over lunch with tax-collectors and over dinner with Pharisees. Should the Church now renounce its teaching function because doctrine is difficult and sometimes breeds discomfort? No, an epistle is not a female apostle. No, Joan of Arc was not Adam's wife. Yes, the Eucharist is a stupendous mystery but not therefore impossible to comprehend. Not all teaching is or should be about sex. If there have been different theologies of the Holy Spirit, that does not mean it's better not to bother with Him at all. And as for Good Works, let us remember the title, as well as the content, of Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical: Caritas in Veritate -- Charity, in Truth.

NOT THE DEATH OF GOD

Samuel Palmer, "Coming from Evening Church" (ca. 1827)

A few nights ago I heard an interview with a highly intelligent and perceptive woman, Monique Hébrard, who has written on “Twelve Urgencies for the Church”. One of the urgencies, she said, was for the Church to recognise that “Christendom is dead”. Not God, not Christianity: Christendom. Referring to the recent massive demonstrations in France against gay marriage, she said that many of the demonstrators were simply “nostalgic for Christendom”: a time when the Church dictated its morality to society at large. When the interviewer asked, “So, it’s gone? Isn’t that sort of sad? Haven’t a lot of good things gone with it?” Hébrard replied, “Yes, sure. Lots of good things have gone. But what are we going to do? Cry? No: we’re going to live.” A sturdy answer. And I thought she was probably right.

Then today I was preparing for Christmas, around family, after discussing what we were going to do on Christmas Eve, and listening to one of my favourite ancient Christmas vinyls: the glorious Austrian soprano Maria Stader singing German Christmas songs. And I thought of the death of Christendom. The faithful go on being faithful, and find ways to live with the perfectly valid pagan aspects of Yuletide. Angry atheists carry on being Grinches, growling at the season in their lairs. But what is vanishing is the wave that carried some beauty, some thoughtfulness and even some prayer into the ordinary deserts of the year’s dark. Singing “Silent Night” and “O little town of Bethlehem” was never proselytism: it was a way for thousands to touch the hem of a garment.

And it made me think of an urgency different from Hébrard’s: with what are we going to replace “Christendom”? What is the Church going to do for the thousands who are not ready to become active members of the Party, so to speak? In French politics, the parties distinguish between “les militants”, the full card-carrying members, and “les sympathisants” who will probably vote for you at the next election but still maintain some distance. What I see in the mainstream Churches at the moment is a sense that nowadays you need to be “un militant”, and the more militant the better: to be a “sympathisant” is simply not good enough.

But what happened to the five thousand who were fed in Galilee? How many became apostles, enthusiasts, constantly at Temple or synagogue, founding and running charitable organisations to help widows and orphans? Ten per cent., probably. But the other 4500? Did they continue worshipping irregularly, keeping what commandments they could but not scrupulously, and yet – and yet with a new question always behind their eyes, a new presence filling their prayers when they least expected it?

This is what “Christendom” did. I remember it, as I was part of the generation that saw it turn. Many people went to church because, yes, they believed, but also because it was what they were used to and because it was a good thing to do on Sunday mornings. “I don’t know why it is,” said Squire Letterby in Charles Morgan’s Breeze of Morning, “but church and sherry always seem to go together.”

Not good enough, perhaps. But the Church is in danger here of an insidious hypocrisy. The standard justification for “a smaller, poorer Church”, as Pope Francis says he wants, is that people are leaving in droves anyway, and that the Church should respond to that by being both smaller and far more activist, involved in social action and evangelizing at every level. What this justification occludes is the fact that a tight, coherent, highly activist Church may in fact participate in the process it claims to observe: the death of Christendom. Such a Church may in fact be helping to kill what was left of Christendom.

In the Hébrard spirit, facing up to things is a Good Thing. In that case, the Church should perhaps face up to that uncomfortable possibility. Is it what is wanted? Is the ecclesiastical reaction to Christendom’s wasting illness to be simply “Good riddance”? Do we prefer 500 militants on their own to 500 militants plus 4500 people who come for mixed and sometimes unworthy reasons? Would such a reaction be consistent with the claimed evangelical spirit, or even with charity? Or would it be whisking away the garment’s hem from their touch?

What could be done to save that remnant of “Christendom”? The Church can’t get its authority over the secular world back. But part of its claimed evangelism could be a gentler conversation with the “Yes, I used to go, but it’s been so long” people; a listening to their reasons for not going, both the ones they give and the ones they don’t give; a less strident tone in the Church’s pronouncements on itself and the world; a little more attention to prayer and spirituality; a less continual emphasis on change; a great deal more beauty in the liturgy; a recognition that nostalgia is an aspect of human nature that God can love also, and not necessarily a form of sin; and that, contrary to a certain Gospel pronouncement, some old bottles hold new wine quite well.

The villagers in my part of France, even the elderly, have taken to the Vatican II Mass quite well. They like the cheerfulness, and shaking hands at the Peace. But out of 48 villages, each main Sunday Mass (there are 3 in all, a Saturday night and two Sunday) has about 40 people, who drive considerable distances. And I personally know a number of people who stay away yet who might have been retained; those for whom the new régime has neither loaves nor fishes. It seems a pity.