Spursex
Alert Team
Luke Coppen
Will coronavirus hasten the demise of religion – or herald its revival?
The lockdown is testing believers of all stripes
From magazine issue: 11 April 2020
On Saturday evening, Christians will prepare for an Easter unlike any other. With every church closed, from St Paul’s Cathedral to the meanest country chapel, Anglican worshippers will be directed to a website where lay leaders, priests and bishops will hold a ‘virtual vigil’ ending at dawn on Easter Sunday. In Westminster Cathedral, the mother church of Catholics in England and Wales, a deacon will sing the great Easter proclamation known as the Exsultet. But this year, when the final syllable dies away, he will look out into the nave and see row upon row of vacant seats. It’s faith, but without the faithful.
It’s happening the world over. This week Jewish families were forced to celebrate the Passover Seder without guests for the first time. Regent’s Park mosque has cancelled all major events and advised Muslims to pray at home. For those who think it’s difficult enough to keep faith in a secular country like Britain, the fear isn’t so much the lockdown as what comes after. Will people get out of the habit of worship? Might faith — already fast declining in Britain — enter a downhill slump?
Christian thinkers are split into two broad camps: those who believe the crisis will lead to a religious revival and those who think it will hasten the demise of organised religion. Resurgence or ruination, which one will it be?
The case for resurgence could be summed up by the phrase ‘There are no atheists in foxholes’. No one’s sure who said it first, but it could date back to a sermon by a chaplain during the Battle of Bataan in 1942. That would be fitting, because the second world war is central to the reasoning of those who foresee a Christian renaissance. The Covid-19 outbreak, they say, is the western world’s first experience of mass death since 1945. The following years saw a boom in religiosity. The 1950s was, in some respects, a golden age of American Christianity. Mainline Protestantism flourished, while the Catholic televangelist Fulton Sheen held audiences spellbound as he wafted his cape. In 1954, Congress added ‘under God’ to the Pledge of Allegiance.
But the argument for revival doesn’t rest solely on a historical analogy. It also cites growing evidence that something is stirring in the souls of millions presently under lockdown. The number of people searching for the word ‘prayer’ on Google ‘skyrocketed’ last month, doubling with every 80,000 new registered cases of coronavirus, according to a University of Copenhagen study. A Pew poll found that 55 per cent of Americans have prayed for an end to the pandemic. And no, it’s not only the Bible Belt: researchers reported that 15 per cent of those who ‘seldom or never pray’ and 24 per cent of those who do not belong to any religion have prayed about the virus.
With worshippers confined to their homes, websites that livestream church services are reporting record figures. Pray.com,which describes itself as ‘the world’s #1 prayer app and website’, is racking up new subscribers (and revenue). In England, meanwhile, more than half a million Catholics took part in a ceremony rededicating the country to the Blessed Virgin Mary in late March. So many people logged on to the main website that it crashed. Traffic promptly brought down a second site too.
But what if the coronavirus outbreak is not, in fact, a catalyst for spiritual renewal? What if, after the lockdown is lifted, the pews remain empty? Some sociologists believe that coronavirus is a dire threat to western Christianity. They predict that the disease will speed up the already fast drop in churchgoing. As donations fall, church schools, hospitals, homeless shelters, parishes and even cathedrals will struggle to survive.
The decline in religious affiliation is arguably the most striking demographic change to occur in Britain in the past few years save for immigration — the latter only partially offsetting the former. The British Social Attitudes survey found that the number of Anglicans halved between 1983 and 2014. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of people identifying as Christian in the UK fell by 4.1 million, despite the arrival of 1.2 million adherents from Eastern Europe and Africa. If UK-born Christians continue to disappear at that pace, hardly any will remain by 2067.
Stephen Bullivant, whose book Mass Exodus studied Catholic attrition in Britain and America, offers three reasons why he believes churches will shrink after the pandemic. First, he says, churchgoers (both lay and clergy) tend to be elderly and therefore more likely to die of coronavirus. Second, many churches rely on a steady influx of immigrants. With the world in lockdown, that supply has, at least temporarily, dried up. Third, churchgoing is a habit, and once that habit is broken it is hard to take it up again.
Will coronavirus hasten the demise of religion – or herald its revival?
The lockdown is testing believers of all stripes
From magazine issue: 11 April 2020
On Saturday evening, Christians will prepare for an Easter unlike any other. With every church closed, from St Paul’s Cathedral to the meanest country chapel, Anglican worshippers will be directed to a website where lay leaders, priests and bishops will hold a ‘virtual vigil’ ending at dawn on Easter Sunday. In Westminster Cathedral, the mother church of Catholics in England and Wales, a deacon will sing the great Easter proclamation known as the Exsultet. But this year, when the final syllable dies away, he will look out into the nave and see row upon row of vacant seats. It’s faith, but without the faithful.
It’s happening the world over. This week Jewish families were forced to celebrate the Passover Seder without guests for the first time. Regent’s Park mosque has cancelled all major events and advised Muslims to pray at home. For those who think it’s difficult enough to keep faith in a secular country like Britain, the fear isn’t so much the lockdown as what comes after. Will people get out of the habit of worship? Might faith — already fast declining in Britain — enter a downhill slump?
Christian thinkers are split into two broad camps: those who believe the crisis will lead to a religious revival and those who think it will hasten the demise of organised religion. Resurgence or ruination, which one will it be?
The case for resurgence could be summed up by the phrase ‘There are no atheists in foxholes’. No one’s sure who said it first, but it could date back to a sermon by a chaplain during the Battle of Bataan in 1942. That would be fitting, because the second world war is central to the reasoning of those who foresee a Christian renaissance. The Covid-19 outbreak, they say, is the western world’s first experience of mass death since 1945. The following years saw a boom in religiosity. The 1950s was, in some respects, a golden age of American Christianity. Mainline Protestantism flourished, while the Catholic televangelist Fulton Sheen held audiences spellbound as he wafted his cape. In 1954, Congress added ‘under God’ to the Pledge of Allegiance.
But the argument for revival doesn’t rest solely on a historical analogy. It also cites growing evidence that something is stirring in the souls of millions presently under lockdown. The number of people searching for the word ‘prayer’ on Google ‘skyrocketed’ last month, doubling with every 80,000 new registered cases of coronavirus, according to a University of Copenhagen study. A Pew poll found that 55 per cent of Americans have prayed for an end to the pandemic. And no, it’s not only the Bible Belt: researchers reported that 15 per cent of those who ‘seldom or never pray’ and 24 per cent of those who do not belong to any religion have prayed about the virus.
With worshippers confined to their homes, websites that livestream church services are reporting record figures. Pray.com,which describes itself as ‘the world’s #1 prayer app and website’, is racking up new subscribers (and revenue). In England, meanwhile, more than half a million Catholics took part in a ceremony rededicating the country to the Blessed Virgin Mary in late March. So many people logged on to the main website that it crashed. Traffic promptly brought down a second site too.
But what if the coronavirus outbreak is not, in fact, a catalyst for spiritual renewal? What if, after the lockdown is lifted, the pews remain empty? Some sociologists believe that coronavirus is a dire threat to western Christianity. They predict that the disease will speed up the already fast drop in churchgoing. As donations fall, church schools, hospitals, homeless shelters, parishes and even cathedrals will struggle to survive.
The decline in religious affiliation is arguably the most striking demographic change to occur in Britain in the past few years save for immigration — the latter only partially offsetting the former. The British Social Attitudes survey found that the number of Anglicans halved between 1983 and 2014. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of people identifying as Christian in the UK fell by 4.1 million, despite the arrival of 1.2 million adherents from Eastern Europe and Africa. If UK-born Christians continue to disappear at that pace, hardly any will remain by 2067.
Stephen Bullivant, whose book Mass Exodus studied Catholic attrition in Britain and America, offers three reasons why he believes churches will shrink after the pandemic. First, he says, churchgoers (both lay and clergy) tend to be elderly and therefore more likely to die of coronavirus. Second, many churches rely on a steady influx of immigrants. With the world in lockdown, that supply has, at least temporarily, dried up. Third, churchgoing is a habit, and once that habit is broken it is hard to take it up again.
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