A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

WHAT a new springtime! If trends hold, there will be ZERO Christians in Britain by 2067 June 17, 2015

Good Lord, that’s only 52 years away.  That’s closer to us than the Cuban Missile Crisis or Texas’ first national championship in football.

The thing is, trends like these always change.  As the number of believers decreases the trend lines will flatten out and a bottom will be reached – and that bottom will not be zero.  There are a goodly number of very staunch Catholics in Britain having large families and transmitting the Faith to the younger generations. But I had no idea that Christianity was dying in Britain as fast as it is.  How long before Oxford becomes a madrassah for the training if islamic imams?

It’s often said that Britain’s church congregations are shrinking, but that doesn’t come close to expressing the scale of the disaster now facing Christianity in this country. Every ten years the census spells out the situation in detail: between 2001 and 2011 the number of Christians born in Britain fell by 5.3 million — about 10,000 a week. If that rate of decline continues, the mission of St Augustine to the English, together with that of the Irish saints to the Scots, will come to an end in 2067………

……..Our cathedral buildings will survive, but they won’t be true cathedrals because they will have no bishops. The Church of England is declining faster than other denominations; if it carries on shrinking at the rate suggested by the latest British Social Attitudes survey, Anglicanism will disappear from Britain in 2033. One day the last native-born Christian will die and that will be that. [I doubt that.  But I do look forward to the day that the false, heretical “Church” of England no longer exists. I pray all the souls belonging to it experience a real conversion and convert to the Church Christ founded, which isn’t doing all that well, either.]

……..It has all happened so quickly. Anglicans in particular are abandoning their faith at a rate that (in more ways that one) defies belief. According to the British Social Attitudes surveys, their numbers fell from 40 per cent of the population in 1983 to 29 per cent in 2004 and 17 per cent last year……

……His predecessor but one, however, is happy to do so. Lord Carey of Clifton, a more formidable figure in retirement than he was in office, last month warned the C of E that it was ‘one generation away from extinction’. The new Social Attitudes figures support his conclusions.

Between 2012 and 2014 the proportion of Britons describing themselves as Church of England or Anglican fell from 21 to 17 per cent: a loss of 1.7 million people in two years. That’s what you might expect if the established church had been engulfed in a gigantic paedophile scandal. But it hasn’t been.

Self-identifying British Catholics fell from 10 per cent to 8 per cent between 1983 and 2014. But that decline would have been far more dramatic without the arrival of Catholics from the Europe, Latin America, Africa and the Philippines. No wonder Cardinal Vincent Nichols stresses the ‘Gospel imperative’ to welcome migrants. [Yep. Same as the situation here in the US]

But he’s deluding himself if he thinks foreign Catholics will continue to fill his pews. Young Poles in England and Wales are noticeably less devout than they were ten years ago: I’d be amazed if more than a fifth of them were Mass-goers.

This applies to Scotland, too. The Poles propping up Catholic parishes won’t do so for much longer. Meanwhile, self-identification with the Church of Scotland has fallen off a cliff: from 36 per cent of Scots in 2001 to 18 per cent in 2013.

[So……why is this happening?] Why is British Christianity facing such a catastrophe? There is a one-word answer, but it requires a lot of unpacking: secularisation.

……….The American sociologist James Davison Hunter has explored this phenomenon in two books, Culture Wars (1991) and To Change the World(2010). Hunter is rude about left-wing Christians who think campaigns against carbon emissions or campus sexism are ‘Gospel causes’. On the contrary, he says, they are thoroughly secular and even if they succeed the churches won’t benefit……….

The author, Damian Thompson, as he is wont to do, then jumps the shark by saying that “conservative,” or more rightly put, faithful, observant Christianity and especially Catholicism aren’t the answer against secularization, either, because Roe v. Wade still hasn’t been repealed or something, an argument as nonsensical as it is meaningless.  For instance, Thompson failed to note that the most conservative evangelical sects are among the fastest growing entities in American Christianity.  Traditional Catholic parishes, while tiny by comparison, are generally growing, and quite rapidly.  That would seem to point that being observant is, far from doomed to impotence, at least on the right track, if far from exercising a culture-wide influence…….yet.

But the data, if not his commentary, does raise an interesting point: there has been a sudden explosion in departures from the Church in the few remaining developed, Western countries where it was still being fairly widely practiced.  Why?  Why has membership in traditional Christian churches (not evangelical sects) suddenly plummeted, and especially in the past 5-10 years?

I think the answer, secularization is right, but I think Thompson misses the forest for the trees.  What kind of secularization? Militant, left-wing secularization is proliferating rapidly through the leftist “march through the institutions.” They now control, by and large, the media, schools, academia, and the entertainment industry.  In order to shield ourselves from all this crap, faithful families have to literally unplug from the culture.  The first generation is coming to adulthood after the completion of this process, and they are turning out to be very indifferent, even hostile, to orthodox religion, after years of being formed to be exactly that.  I think the internet and the notion of avant garde hipster culture also plays a huge role.  That is why we have suddenly seen an unexpected explosion in really fringe, radical feminism from college age women in the past several years, as just one example. There are many others, from the sodomite front to global warming evangelizing…..our young people are profoundly religious, it’s simply that their religion is for the most part leftism.  Some will come back or enter the Church as they age, but most will not.

Some things that more and more people are positively turned off to include some of the ways in which modernists try to sell the Church, to the extent they even try: desperation, obvious attempts to be cool, pandering, etc.  Nothing turns off someone looking for the veracity of faith as much as a religion that seems unsure of itself, or even more, seems to stand for nothing.  I think those two factors are the two predominate reasons both the Church and the mainline sects have been hemorrhaging the most members.  And the eco-encyclicals, while bringing momentary notoriety, will only turn off lost souls looking for a safe harbor, and cause the Church’s enemies to mock her even more.

The only thing that will bring souls into the Church, and keep them there, is for the Church to be herself once again. But I’m afraid the powers that be are utterly insistent the Church go through complete collapse before we can even begin get back to that point.