No, the title is not a typo. It was inspired by the headline on a report on the BBC website last Tuesday, which also appeared in their main 10pm TV bulletin. On Wednesday, the Times got in on the act with a report (“End of an era for Christian Britain”), analysis on page 7, and a Leader. Thursday’s letters pages were full of opinions, advice and argument (here’s the Guardian’s as an example; the Times sits behind a paywall). This flurry of interest in the state of “Christianity” in the UK was prompted by the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) who are gradually working their way through the data produced by the 2021 census. They had just published data on “ethnic group, national identity, language and religion” for England and Wales (actually four separate statistical bulletins) on a relatively slow news day. Before thinking about what implications (if any) can be drawn from the numbers, it’s worth just noting some caveats. The particular focus of the discussion was analysis of the voluntary “religion” question in the census (first introduced in 2001); that was enough to prompt the ONS itself to urge caution when looking for trends. If you want to look a trends over time, there are precisely three data points. A trend is extractable; whether it means anything is the question. That said, in 2021 the question was answered by 56 million people, 94% of the estimated population of England and Wales.
What attracted the BBC’s attention was the change in the number of respondents reporting their “religion” as Christian between 2011 and 2021 which had dropped from 33.3M (59.3% of the population) to 27.5M (46.2%); hence the headline “Less than half of England and Wales population Christian, Census 2021 shows”. The story then started with the statement “For the first time fewer than half of people in England and Wales describe themselves as Christian, the Census 2021 has revealed” (italics mine). The reason I have italicized the first part of this sentence is that it struck me as odd. We have no real way of knowing when this state of affairs became true. And we cannot know if it was true before (it must have been at some point in history). But I’m being picky. We kind of also know the point that is being made.
Have we learned anything new and does it matter? We do not know what was in the minds of the millions who answered the question. This was self-reported religious affiliation that turns on the interpretation of words like "religion" and “Christian”. The two are not synonymous, nor would I argue is one necessarily a subset of the other. When challenged I am usually inclined to deny that I am religious. If “religion” is about humanity’s search for God (as it is occasionally defined in some dictionaries) then that does not apply to me, even although I am happy to accept the label of Christian. I was sought and found by God and am the recipient of outrageous grace. When I could do nothing for myself, God stepped in and rescued me – I am what I am because of Him, not me. And if “religion” names a set of institutions that the religious belong to, or rituals that they must practice, then again I deny that the word applies to me. There are institutions and practices that may be said to mark groups to which the label “Christian” can be attached. But these are neither defining nor obligatory for the Christian, the foundation of whose identity lies elsewhere. All of which raises the question of what a Christian actually is.
If for some reason you have had cause to refer to my blog profile, you’ll have noticed that I have qualified the word Christian. Qualification is needed precisely because the word means different things to different people. And this goes to the heart of the interpretation of the census results. I qualified it with “Biblical”, because that is where the term originates. When the early, mainly Jewish, followers of Jesus were driven by persecution away from Jerusalem (where they had congregated), some headed to Antioch and some spoke to non-Jews “preaching the Lord Jesus” (Acts 11:20, ESV). The result was the founding of a church in Antioch (modern day Antakya in southern Turkey), and it was here that these disciples of Jesus were first called “Christians”, probably as an insult. This was the origination fo the word and it seems to me that it continues to be a sensible meaning of the word. It is those who are in personal relationship with the same Jesus, in response to the same Apostolic Gospel. It is less dangerous and insulting these days to be associated with Jesus (at least here and at least for now). But it is this relationship that was and is the heart and essence of Christianity.
Something is clearly in decline and this may have important consequences. But consider for a moment a counterfactual. Taken at face value, prior to the recently reported decline in the proportion of “Christians” in the UK, every second person I met would have been a Christian. But this has never been my experience. My experience is that people who are followers of Jesus, who are in personal relationship with Him, who seek to think as He thinks and live as He lived, have always been fairly thin on the ground. They were not commonly encountered day to day and certainly made up way less than half of those encountered. This has not changed in my thinking lifetime. Primarily what has declined is a different kind of thing and we might therefore usefully employ a different qualifying word, like “cultural”. What the census is picking up, consistent with other surveys, is a decline in cultural Christianity. The “Christian” veneer that has covered UK society, a veneer derived from values inherited from Biblical Christianity, has begun to slough off.
Veneer, of
course, is only ever a covering, hiding an underlying substance that is usually
something entirely different. Indeed the purpose of a veneer is to both cover
and often conceal what lies beneath (like oak covering chipboard). If this covering
is now being discarded, and at an increasing rate, then perhaps this is to be welcomed as something at least more
honest. But one wonders what really is being revealed underneath and whether it
will turn out to be all that agreeable.
