“Once the world was filled with the sacred – in thought, practice, and institutional form. After the Reformation and the Renaissance, the forces of modernisation swept across the globe and secularisation, a corollary historical process, loosened the dominance of the sacred. In due course, the sacred shall disappear altogether except, possibly, in the private realm” – Charles Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press, 1959, p. 32).
The sociological pioneers, including Weber, Durkheim, Marx, and Freud, were not just theorists but also prophets of their time. They all predicted the decline of religion and its diminishing significance with the advent of industrial society. This foresight was later echoed by anthropologists, psychologists, and philosophers, who argued that theological superstitions, symbolic liturgical rituals, and sacred practices were all remnants of a bygone era, destined to be relegated to the private realm, as Mills had suggested.
For many sociologists, the response to the famously controversial 1966 Time Magazine cover, which asked ‘Is God Dead?’, would be “not yet, but he’s on his way”. Among the most vocal of these proponents was Peter Berger, who linked the decline in the belief in God to the prevalence of science in the 20th Century. This shift meant that the natural phenomena which had once been interpreted in religious terms were now explained scientifically, leading to a decline in the authority of spiritual knowledge. Moreover, within religious traditions such as Protestantism, a specific rationalisation had taken root. This had stripped away Catholicism’s ethereal or magical functions, reducing faith to a more fundamental level, with significant societal implications.
In this evolving paradigm of Christian thought, the importance and occurrence of miracles diminished, with Protestants, in general, no longer perceiving the world as constantly influenced by divine forces. For commentators like Berger, it appeared that God was not entirely absent but had adopted a more laissez-faire approach to intervening in the world, marking a significant shift in religious beliefs.
Correspondingly, the sacred and profane were pulled further apart and began to exist in two increasingly unconnected realms that rarely delved into one another. To a large extent, this trajectory has continued to the present, with the secular and sacred pulling further apart and increasingly living separate lives. Therefore, religion’s decline is linked to the advent of modernity and rationalism.
As the individualism of Protestantism led to an erosion of the communal basis of religious belief, rationality rendered many of its beliefs and purposes implausible and unnecessary. Two of the Galácticos who hold this viewpoint are Peter Berger and Steve Bruce believe that religion became, in effect, a kind of lifestyle preference. An option that added value and meaning to life but did fundamentally dictate the beginning, end, and fundamental conditions of that life. Those were now determined by medicine, economics, politics and the individual’s autonomy. God did not prescribe for these. As a result, churches rapidly began to yield ground to new and more communitarian or individualistic expressions of religion, such as novel forms of denominationalism, bespoke sects and other forms of religious organisation that reflect the increasing individualism of life.
Through the diversity available in these options – or ‘pluralism’ as Berger described it – we see the fragmentation of the religious culture into a range of competing alternatives. As more significant religious expressions are accepted, the legitimations of older, more substantial faith expressions become weaker in the face of religious competition. That is the religious routine low-level social reinforcement of objectified knowledge, which explains the social order, is drastically curtailed. For Bruce, this means that when we can no longer be sure that those we meet share our faith, we tend to keep it to ourselves.
Correspondingly, with all faiths running essentially equal in modernised societies, there tends to be a lack of incentive for parents to indoctrinate children with religious beliefs. The trajectory only leads one way: a broader range of options in the religious marketplace means there are no monopolies, which in turn means that religions become a private matter of choice. In effect, a form of spiritual consumerism is created.
In terms of the maths, the number of regular givers in the Church of England fell by 30% in 2013 to 172,000, according to the most recent statistics published by Church House, Westminster. The figures, found in Parish Finance Statistics 2022, make for grim reading. Income from giving, fund-raising, and trading was not enough to keep pace with inflation or recoup the losses of 2020 (in which parishes’ income fell by 15%). Parishes’ real-terms income fell by 14% between 2019 and 2022. At the same time, the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) rose by 5.4% in the 12 months to December 2021.
In total, there were 401,000 regular givers in 2021. Statistics for Mission records that, in the same year, total adult average weekly attendance was 567,000. The average weekly amount from regular givers has risen each year in recent decades, but in 2022, for the first time, this amount decreased in real terms to £16.20, from £16.80 in 2021.
In total, income was 13% lower in real terms than in 2019. Fund-raising income was 31% lower, and trading income was 21% lower. But, in 2022, there was a £10-million rise in collections taken, at services as churches continued to open more after the pandemic.
The report highlights the gulf between the richest and poorest parishes. In 2022, the 10% of parishes with the smallest income generated an average of £6200 a year. For the 10% parishes with the highest income, it was £296,000. The median income for all 12,215 parishes was £42,200, which represents a fall compared with £45,800 in 2019. Thousands of parishes are in deficit. The number of regular givers fell by 15% between 2019 and 2021. Across dioceses, the percentage of worshippers who were regular givers varied between 30% and 64%, while the level of giving ranged from £8 to £26 per week, with no correlation with deprivation.
That said, the trajectory of any secularization thesis in the 21st century needs heavy qualification, modification – or possibly even abandoning. To the point in which Berger’s later book was entitled The Desecularization of the World (1999) and proclaimed that “a whole body of literature by historians and social scientists loosely labelled secularization theory is essentially mistaken” (p.2). As most scholars have now recognized, there has been a rapid resurgence of religion, as religious people have either chosen to adapt or reject the perceived secularizing effects of modernity.
The growth of orthodox Islam, and particularly the continuation of religious significance in modernized states such as the USA, has refuted the thesis to an extent. However, as Grace Davie has noted, Western Europe may still be a case of exceptionalism. To paraphrase Berger himself, Europe bucks the trend and is the only place where the old secularization thesis remains in place. Yet even within Europe, the religious landscape is highly diverse. However, focusing at home, Britain (or more likely England) was described in a French study of European Religious Values as région laïque, meaning a high proportion of the population identified with no religious label.
Church attendance statistics in the UK regularly support this, a relatively rapid downward trajectory from half the population to only 8% in 2006. In addition, there’s been a steady decline in orthodox Christian beliefs, general belief in the existence of God, and a drastic fall in religious weddings and baptisms. For Bruce, this is an obvious demonstration of the decline of organised religion in Britain, leading to a shift from religious people being loyal followers to becoming selective consumers, confirming Berger’s fears of more bureaucratic practices becoming necessary and common in churches.
Therefore, and from the data, it would appear that Britain is, in fact, moving in line with the older, traditional secularization theses and that religious people are not turning to alternatives, satisfied with having no religious label. Despite this, there has been work which has attempted to refute the evidence, much of which focuses on the belief that all people are essentially religious. In the work of Heelas and Woodhead, they try to locate what Bruce describes as a ‘diffused spirituality’ in activities such as Yoga, massage therapy and other expressions of spiritual practices.
For Woodhead and Heelas, fewer than half the respondents, when questioned, claimed that their participation had anything to do with spiritual growth. However, Heelas and Woodhead still asserted that the figure they arrived at proved that the number of people in Britain who have shown interest in alternative religion is not minute. Bruce dismisses this as trivial, as the work has taken on New Age spirituality at its narrowest, and these activities are more likely to be extensions of the gym or salon rather than Christianity, practised by people who don’t even pretend to see them as spiritual.
However, I think that what Bruce, Heelas, and Woodhead all fail to acknowledge is the awareness of the respondents in this diffusion. The European Values Study (EVSSG) looked at a correlation between religious values, which are now considered secular. That is, the spiritual origins of values which are not plainly evident to those who now hold them, or they do not hold them for religious reasons. But they were and are religious or spiritual. It is just that the holders of these values and patterns of behaviour do not recognise this. The awareness of the respondents, however, is limited.
The indicators within The European Values Study (EVSSG) highlighted two crucial variables. First, those concerned with feelings and experiences. Second, those that measured religious orthodoxy, ritual participation and institutional attachment. It would appear that in the latter’s case, the study revealed a significant degree of secularisation in the UK. Whereas the former case shows some real persistence in religious life. For Davie, this begs the question of a permanent generational shift in religious behavior, where we are an ‘unchurched’ society rather than a secular one. With markedly lower attendance and institutional detachment in the younger generation, it may be a case of “believing without belonging”.
Counter to this, but not too dissimilar, is Danielle Hervieu-Léger’s reverse characterisation of the European situation as an almost “belonging without believing”. Her theory is that Western societies are less religious, not because of increasing rationality, but because they are less capable of maintaining the memory of the heart of their spiritual existence. They are thus, in her words, ‘amnesiac societies’. Unlike Heelas and Woodhead, who assume that the UK has found satisfactory alternatives for religion, she believes that there is a gap that needs to be filled.
Following Weber, the two crucial functions of religion are community-based and societal roles, which are in line with Durkheim’s functional definition. The other is the offer of individual salvation. Not all religions do both. But Christianity, which did, ceded its purpose as a community base to the secular nation-state, and Casanova believes that alongside this, it lost its ability to function as a religion of individual salvation. Therefore, why those people moved away from the church and did not seek alternatives is for Casanova, because British people continue to be implicit members of their national churches, even after explicitly abandoning them.
The public becomes distant but kindly-disposed supporters but does not usually seek to become active members. Moreover, they become implicitly religious in the process. The general view of the population, therefore, is that churches remain there as a public good which they have access to when it comes to rites of passage, birth and death.
Thus, rather than specifically looking at the decline of religion, we should be attempting to become more attuned to new forms of religion, and specifically the implicit and vicarious nature of religious people in Britain. Therefore, it is crucial to develop a lens, or some kind of analytical instrument, in which we can view the less obvious and perhaps visible layers of British people’s behaviour and commitments in order to understand how it is that religion still persists.
British society has both the elements of “believing without belonging” and “belonging without believing”. Correspondingly, it is important to try to understand those commitments, which in society appear to be like religion but, in fact, are not. And equally, try to identify and understand those commitments and practices that seem to be non-religious but, in fact, are.
What is becoming clearer is that many would-be volunteers are being deterred from supporting the Church of England because of the overly onerous bureaucratic demands hoisted onto parishes. Safeguarding vetting and training requirements for entirely non-contact roles such as singing in a church choir, reading a lesson, or leading intercessory prayer, are absurd. The demands made on Churchwardens and church treasurers now mean that there now new volunteers. Time was when a vacancy for a Church Warden could be a contested election. Nowadays, many parishes have to function with only one Warden or none.
The Covid-19 pandemic has evidently produced permanent scarring to most denominations in the Western world. In the Church of England, the number of regular givers is probably a more accurate estimate of regular attendance than almost any other metric. If so, the news that the Church of England is down to about 400,000 subscribers, means that around 170,000 have been lost in just a decade. It is almost certain that 300,000 of the 400,000 are over the age of 50, and probably about 250,000 are over the age of 70.
If we take a diocese like Birmingham, with a population of 1.6 million, it is sobering to note that the usual Sunday attendance (uSa) figure for the Church of England is 6,300, which represents just 0.39% of the population. The football stadiums for West Bromwich Albion (capacity 25,000) or Birmingham City (capacity 29,000), and so to put this in context, Anglican worshippers in diocese of Birmingham would not fill one stand at either football ground, let alone an entire stadium.
Given that two-thirds of the 6,300 will be retirees (in line with national figures), it will only take another decade for that figure to descend to around 2,000 – 0.13% of the population, without factoring in any growth in the city’s population. That suggests that within a decade or so, the diocese will be down to about 2,000 worshippers for usual Sunday attendance. This represents a devastating statistic for England’s second city, even allowing for massive demographic changes, it has to be asked how any diocese can be sustained on so very slender a base. This is far worse than the scenario – only 3% of the population remaining in some kind of Christian congregational domain by 2030 – envisaged by Linda Woodhead in The Spiritual Revolution (2005). The more likely number is less than 1%.
In Scotland, the population as a whole has largely withdrawn, and now the Kirk — as it is usually dubbed — is itself withdrawing. Its finances are stretched, new ministers are scarce, and congregations scarcer. The Edinburgh headquarters of the Church of Scotland has done some research, crunched some numbers, and formed webs of committees to determine the cull. The results now emerging from the committees are only just beginning to bite, but Church of Scotland HQ have decreed swingeing cuts in the Kirk. Church of Scotland churches presently number around 4,500. The plan is to reduce this number by 40%, and the ministers and the manse-stock by the same percentage.
Is this fiscal prudence, or merely an organised retreat in the face of rapid secularisation? In 2001, 65% of Scottish people claimed to have Christian affiliation, with 33% stating they either had no religion or would not state it. Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim and other faiths made up the remaining 2%. By 2011, Christian affiliation had shrunk to 54%, and those with no religion had 47%. The Muslim population in the same decade had grown from 0.8% to 1.45%.
The figures for church weddings in Scotland also paint a bleak picture. In 1970, churches were close to 31,000 solemnizations of marriage. By 1990 that had dropped to just over 20,000. In 2020, the figure was 5,333, with 6,653 civil weddings. It turns out that 2005 was the year when there were more civil marriages than Christian ceremonies. In 1970, the Church of Scotland performed around 35,500 baptisms. In 2020, the figure was 459. Figures for the Church of England in the same period show almost 350,000 infant baptisms in 1970, but by 2020, the number had fallen to just over 40,000.