The strangest thing happened last week, though few people noticed it. America officially ceased to be a Protestant country.
According to the Pew Forum, the percentage of Protestants has dropped
to 48 per cent, down from 53 per cent in 2007.
That’s a huge shift.
But, before Catholics start punching the air, let me point out that
the percentage of Catholics has been flatlining for years at 22 per
cent.
The big jump is in unaffiliated Americans, including atheists – up
from 15 to 20 per cent.
These “Nones”, as pollsters call them, are
laying waste to the religious landscape of the United States. And
Britain.
Here’s the question that intrigues me. Once the old, routine
churchgoers have died off, and now that “None” is the default position
for liberal-minded young people, what will the churches of the future
look like?
We’re beginning to find out. More to the point, the clapped-out
Anglican and Catholic bishops of the English-speaking world are finding
out, too – and it’s giving them nightmares.
Those youngsters who once went to church out of obligation are now
spending Sunday mornings in the supermarket or the gym (body worship is a
flourishing faith). That means that the only young people in the pews
are true believers who really want to be there.
If you’re a “go-ahead” bishop, vicar or diocesan bureaucrat, this is a
scary development.
You’ve spent your career reducing the hard truths of
Christ’s teaching – such as the inevitability of the Last Judgment – to
carbon-neutral platitudes.
Suddenly, the 20-year-olds in your flock are
saying: no thanks, we’ll take the hard truths. Eek!
In the Church of England, young evangelicals are embarrassed by the
thespian agonising of Rowan Williams, the outgoing Archbishop of
Canterbury. If there’d been a hand-wringing event at the Olympics, he’d
have shattered all records.
In the Roman Catholic Church of England and Wales, the disconnect is
even more stark. Young Catholics take their cue from the traditionalist
Pope Benedict XVI, rather than from dreary bishops who only occasionally
wake from their slumber to mumble something about renewable energy.
(Remember Jack in Father Ted? You get the picture.)
Also – and I can’t tell you how much pleasure it gives me to report
this – the Vatican has pulled a fast one by appointing two new diocesan
bishops, Mark Davies of Shrewsbury and Philip Egan of Portsmouth, who
are in tune with conservative youngsters rather than an English Catholic
bureaucracy run by crypto-Marxist megabores trained in the public
sector.
Bishop Egan has only been in his post for a few weeks, but already
he’s been telling orthodox young Catholics what they want to hear: that
they should adore the Blessed Sacrament, advertise their faith by making
the sign of the cross, and even keep a rosary handy in the car.
Cue
barely suppressed shrieks from the old guard in Portsmouth, whose
“director of liturgy”, the composer Paul Inwood, writes cod plainchant decked out in the harmonies of a 1970s cocktail lounge.
None of this should surprise us. When religions come under attack,
they attract believers who invest in their more dogmatic,
countercultural teachings – and who deliberately raise the degree of
tension between themselves and society.
There are few things more
countercultural today than Bible-based evangelicalism or strictly
orthodox Catholicism.
For decades, Liberal bishops have droned on about
how they wanted to draw young people back to church.
But I don’t think
this is what they had in mind.