A blog post by the Church Mouse relates the results of a Gallup poll on religiosity in national life in many countries. The big news for the United Kingdom is that we are near the bottom of the table for religiosity. Estonia leads from the bottom, with only 16% of the population saying that religion plays an important part in their daily lives. The UK is sixth from the bottom, at 27% saying the same.
The Church Mouse thinks that 27% is overstating the numbers for the UK. I think this is probably correct. Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair’s special advisor, once bluntly said of politicians and the Government: “We don’t do God.” Church Mouse thinks that there is more spirituality in the UK than religiosity. I wonder, though. Is New Age spirituality, the faerie movement, Druidism and the like on the rise as traditional religiosity declines?
I am easy about the decline of religiosity. As someone recently said and I tweeted: Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car. Ponder the truth in these words.
Sunday church attendance in England hovers around 7% of the population—there may be some few more who go during the week. However, the great majority of people here in England live ordinary lives, partnered, raising families, nurturing children and grandchildren in many cases, and practice a kind of rough ethics and morals in their own lives which are derived from the Abrahamic religious traditions without actually being actively informed by them. The Book of Common Prayer, the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, and the two Great Commandments articulated in the Gospels are some of the sources of morality and ethics in English society. But most people are unaware of these influences on their daily lives, or perhaps unconscious to them.
Those who go to church should be actively aware of the influence of their religion on their daily lives. But, often, they are not. Naughty vicar stories, so beloved of the tabloid, abound in English history. Vicars run away with the organist, vicars ditch their wives or husbands after confessing that they have a yen for the church secretary or someone in the Altar Guild. Churchwardens or church treasurers run away with the funds.
On a lower level, there are tales of strangers coming to church and being blanked by all the parishioners and the vicar at the coffee-hour. “Cold as an Episcopal coffee hour” is an allegory of the chill felt by newcomers when they first attend an Episcopal Eucharist. There are other tales of people going to church at Easter or Christmas, or attending a wedding, christening, or funeral—instead of being welcomed as brothers and sisters they are harangued for their non-attendance at other times. People come to church in ragged clothing, or clothing such as very short shorts or a tube top showing a bit too much skin and are turned away for being dressed inappropriately.
Can those who act not in accordance with the express teachings of Christ and the ethical and moral imperatives of Scripture as expressed in the Two Great Commandments but act only according to the feelings of the moment be counted among those 27% of the UK who profess that religion plays an important part in their lives? I sometimes wonder. I include myself in both the 27% and the portion who sometimes fall short of the expectations of my religion and the Two Great Commandments, of course.
What it comes down to is this: statistics and numbers mean little when it comes to measuring religiosity. Six percent of England going to church, 27% of the UK saying that religion plays an important part of their lives, mean nothing. Bums on seats do not mean that a church is successful. In the first Queen Elizabeth’s time, it was mandatory to attend Sunday Church of England services, on pain of fine. The only marriages which were legal were those that were conducted by the Church of England, which kept all the records. Do these coerced church attendances mean that people were more religious then than they are now? I doubt it.
What does count is how people conduct their lives, and it is possible for people to lead ethical and valuable and, indeed, morally admirable lives without explicit reference to any one religion, or any religion at all. Many millions of people do so. The question that is begged by saying that only 27% of the UK is “religious” is this: “We assume that the absence of religious practice in a life means that the quality of that life is declining.” That is an incorrect assumption on so many levels, and religious bodies make a fatal mistake when they assume it.