for thinking Christianity is declining in the UK because the churches lost credibility and community while other faiths didn’t?

[LoveWFH]

This is not about belief in God versus no God. It is about institutions and what people experience on the ground. The Church of England in particular feels like a faded bureaucracy. Empty buildings. Clergy stretched thin. Services that feel performative or stuck in a time capsule. A lot of talk about tradition but very little that speaks to how people actually live now.

There is also the trust issue. Abuse scandals. Cover ups. Financial mismanagement. A sense that when the church fails it protects itself first and the vulnerable last. You can only ask people to suspend disbelief for so long when the institution itself looks morally compromised. Younger people especially are ruthless about hypocrisy and the church gives them plenty to work with.

Then there is the class and culture gap. Christianity in the UK often feels tied to establishment power and respectability. It does not feel like it belongs to ordinary people anymore. It feels like something you inherit rather than choose. Something you tick at a wedding or funeral rather than something that shapes your life. When belief becomes purely ceremonial it is already on life support.

By contrast other faiths seem to be growing because they are lived not just referenced. They have visible daily practices. Clear moral frameworks. Strong community networks. You see them meeting regularly supporting each other showing up for births deaths crises celebrations. There is structure and discipline but also belonging. For migrants especially faith communities replace the support systems the state no longer provides.

There is also confidence. Other faiths are not embarrassed by themselves. They do not constantly apologise for existing or dilute their beliefs in the hope of being liked. People are drawn to certainty in an uncertain world. Not cruelty or dogma but clarity. Christianity in the UK often sounds unsure of what it even stands for anymore beyond being inoffensive.

So AIBU for thinking this is not some mystery about secularism but a very predictable outcome of an institution that lost its moral authority community roots and sense of purpose while others doubled down on theirs?

I think this is unfair.
Christmas is a cultural as well as purely religious festival and it's been that way for many years. Minority religious groups have a long history of sometimes participating in that. This isn't just UK : if you look at 1930s Netherlands, for one example, some less-observant Jewish families would celebrate Christmas as a cultural thing, although more Orthodox ones would not do this.

At my school, the Christmas carol services & other events were a highlight for everyone. Was it disrespecting Christianity for Hindus, Muslims, and indeed many atheists & agnostic to enjoy them?

I think there is a qualitative difference between minority religious groups/atheists/agnostics taking part in the official religious celebrations which also have a strong cultural element, and taking part in a minority one : would be odd to celebrate Diwali in UK unless you have a strong connection to Hinduism etc

Re Xmas & Easter, it's also fair to say they were consciously intended to incorporate festive pagan/Roman elements to get people to forsake that for Christianity. So green leaves, tree, the date December, the Easter bunny, etc are all non-Christian in that they are not tied primarily to Bible etc Obviously the tree often has star, angels etc but the tree tradition has different roots.

Yes, I think that was unfair. I don't think Hindus/Muslims/Jews/atheists celebrating Christmas is Christianity biggest issue right now...!

Have you read Bart Ehrmann's Jesus book Apocalyptic Prophet? I found it quite interesting, he saw him as similar to your description in quite a few ways...

Well, it appears he has sent a plague of wise guys.

It was literally included as the word of God in the bible. People do seem to be increasingly selection of their reading: "Thou shalt not murder" Tick. Thou Shall stone any pledged virgin who sleeps with a man" Not Tick

“the Lord says: ‘About midnight I will go throughout Egypt. Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn son of the female slave, who is at her hand mill, and all the firstborn of the cattle as well."

I'm glad we haven't had too much of the vengeful God recently but after 2000 years his mood might be changing back.

That’s my point the religious aspect of the festival being diluted for cultural reasons. Dilutes the religion in my opinion. I am not against at all people from any aspect of life joining in a celebration but the religious aspect has been lost. We have been invited by some Hindu friends to some of their celebrations and we have attended. But in the uk Christmas had become about the biggest pile of presents and the Christmas Eve boxes etc etc. people from other religious dominants always celebrate the religious aspect as the most important part of the celebration while still celebrating.

I don’t believe people are diluting the faith per se but the commercialisation of the festivals. They are bank holidays and are seen as such. If they were presented as Christians festival/celebration etc it would be much easier to explain to your children that we don’t celebrate that holiday because we have xyz but it’s hard to do that when Christmas has become about Father Christmas rather than the birth of Jesus. My sons have friends from all religions and it’s very easy to for me to say o we don’t celebrate these because we are Christian and this a festival for them to celebrate and then explain what ever the festival is.

Ah I see : I agree about that. I think that's caused by increasing advertising & consumerism, as you say.

I respect your point of view. However, as someone who loves the book but hasn't seen the film (which may have diverted somewhat from it) I thought I'd give a couple of points:

Patrick Ness, the author, is Irish, and so was Siobhan Dowd (the author of 4 YA novels who tragically passed leaving the idea behind so he received commission to continue it). Ness himself is gay & some of his books deal with homophobia in Ireland. Irish fiction generally is still wrestling with the relatively recently revealed sins of the Church, so it's unsurprising the book has a negatively portrayed priest. I understand your point about opinion-formers bashing Christianity but I think this is one area where it's important to differentiate Irish vs English rather than class them all as 'British', as the context is very different.

Moreover, I don't think the point was that the adults' bad behaviour was 'just life', at least in the book. Nor Conor acting out. The point was more about Conor processing his grief and admitting to himself both the inevitability of the loss of his mother & the fact that he was exhausted and it wasn't betrayal to accept rather than fight the loss. I didn't read the book as accepting bad behaviour as 'being authentic' or 'living your own truth'.

Thank you. No, I haven’t. Looking into it now.

Lack of credibility or trust has led to many leaving churches in many countries, I don't think the UK is unique in that. The Church of England isn't unique in this.

There is also the major thing of the declining social pressure to belong to any church or other religious institution. For some it is within living memory - or true today - that not belonging to a religious institution has severe social impact, like people questioning whether you are fit to be a parent type of impact. That shift is part to do with lower credibility, but in countries like the UK and many others, a significant part is that powers that had been in the church moved to secular institutions.

Other religious institutions have also had abuse scandals, cover ups, financial mismanagement, and many people who feel those in power fail to protect the vulnerable because they're too busy protecting themselves, and a shed load of hypocrisy and moral corruption. So have secular institution like the NHS and basically every government. The churches aren't alone in that. They can appear the loudest in areas where they had a lot of power, in places where other religious institutions have significant power, you'll see it play out there.

That's great that the church by you gets busier every week but thousands of churches have closed down in the last decade.

And thousands of other institutional buildings have closed in the last decade, particularly those in older building that people have decided are too expensive and difficult to maintain or in areas that have been redeveloped. Buildings close for far more reasons than just declining numbers - they plays a part as different denominations rise and fall in popularity, but there is more to it.

My area has a lot of abandoned and repurposed churches (or ones that were knocked down with other buildings to redevelop the area). It also has had quite a few reopen or newly start up in retail areas of town where many large stores have closed over the years. Part of the draw is that the buildings are a lot easier to dealing with, that they're already DDA compliant, and so on. Many of these new churches are being started and run by and for migrant populations, and some are UK grown as well. The large old buildings that were once grounding in tradition become difficult for families, an aging population, and a general population wary of the spending going on these buildings.

I also know of quite a few synagogues that have closed - some sold off, others just left, much like the churches. Yes, there have been multiple scandals within different Jewish communities in the UK and beyond, but I don't think any of them specifically are why its been happening for decades. It's mainly moving populations and having specific needs for buildings - particularly around safety - with options that weren't considered or available before. What was once very useful - a large synagogue in a busy university area to support Jewish students - has become too much of a risk to some communities so choices are made.

Which religions are you referring to that have "clear moral franeworks?"

This is all very interesting.

Your mother could easily combine the two within herself (my assumption being that she acquired her Protestantism first), but passing both things down together feels like an impossibly tall order.

If your (our) theory is right then we are in an interesting transition time, or perhaps at the tail end of it. It occurred to me that CS Lewis fits into our story well, straddling both 'truth-seeking' and 'Protestant tradition'.

Is it noteworthy that he frames his (re-)conversion to Christianity in logical terms? Something like: 'I researched it and concluded Jesus was either, mad, bad, or the son of God, with no other option'.

I've always been unimpressed by his logic there (there are plenty of other options, and even if there weren't, the likelihood of someone being mad or bad is much higher than of them being divine, so the third option has a much higher evidential hill to climb).

But he clearly felt it important to justify his belief as being the product of a rational process.

I don't know enough to know if that's something distinctive about early/mid 20th-century English apologetics.

Also interesting that he was raised Christian before becoming an atheist in his teens. So your idea about catching protestantism first still holds.

Which of course fits in turn with “give me the boy until he is eight years old, and I will give you the man”. That’s the other thing I take from history nowadays – that our ancestors basically understood everything, and how stupid it is of us to imagine that the solutions they left us were simple superstitions or outdated nonsense to be cleared away or ‘made relevant’, when what they are is usually extremely subtle systems reflecting a world of complexity.

I do like that Lewis was able to get there through logic, but as a struggler myself like you I find it an unsatisfying route. What I want is kind of the opposite – a thunderbolt which isn’t rooted in logic, because faith should follow its own rules or else it can surely equally be reasoned out of. That’s a very difficult place to get to from a place where truth-seeking is everything. Hence the importance of giving children a world of magic and wonder first – those are tools they are going to need later.

Lewis's Mere Christianity showed much more influence from his Christian upbringing than reasoned, objective logic. As you say, what you're told when you're very young is incredibly influential. Mere Christianity is one of those (many, many) books that is great for helping a Christian to reinforce their beliefs that Christianity is true but skips past way too much to make it effective in persuading an actual non-Christian to Christianity.

For me, the core of all this is this question - is faith a good path to arriving at truth? There's a lot of people with a lot of faith in a vast array of contradictory things so I find it impossibly hard to imagine that it is. But if faith can't reliably get you to truth you either have to discard the value of faith, or disregard the importance of truth. For me, truth is more important and so I follow that where it leads.

of course you are not. You are just slamming christianity, comparing it to other things which are not even faiths but religions. Let it be according to your deeds

let it be to you, according to what you are sowing with this thread.

All faiths have their problems and scandels. the Christian faiths haven't been involved in promoting terrorism.

Ok controversial view here from someone who was a non conformist brought up c of e and now deals with the clergy on a regular basis through work.

The protestant church's are staffed by people who seem to have a large ego but little ability to actually lead people. I've met with really really rude ones. People with no character or charisma or anything . People who revel in the power. People who are arrogant to the point they just put people off.

Some examples. A vicar who was organising a funeral and didn't write anything about the person down that the family wanted mentioned... didn't even take a pen and paper. "No I will remember it all". She didn't. Plus wore filthy muddy boots under the cassock.

The vicar who had the pall bearers and family stood outside the church when he conducted length prayers when he was under an umbrella...think 5 minutes worth that could have been moved inside.

The minister who told a lady in her 80s to shut up because she was annoying them...it was at a social event and she were talking about one similar they had in the same hall at the end of the war.

Sorry but the wrong people are attracted to the job

You haven't raised a point that all the Christian thinkers of the last two millennia have somehow missed. You'll have to forgive me for not addressing it on this thread though.

Thanks for the interesting reply and I appreciate I'm giving the film a hard go. I will add the point that processing grief can be done many ways, and can be done in better or worse ways. You could say the film was just a grief observed but to me it was trying to be more than that but had nothing to say about how to do it.

My father died of cancer a few years ago and the stoicism he had in facing it was a great lesson to me and it made his passing so much easier for the family. He was an atheist but brought up Presbyterian and I think that upbringing shaped his last years and how he faced death. That sort of self-denial and discipline is, I think, fading with Christianity. I'm not going to suggest that feature was all good- the Magdalene laundries for example typified its bad side, but it's something I find myself thinking about a lot these days.

Data from the 2011 and 2021 census reports show a clear decline for Christianity in the UK.

I’d be interested to see some data around the revival that people have mentioned. For example, which denominations are seeing an increase, and what are the demographics of this group who are new church goers?

People still aren't expecting the Spanish Inquisition I see

https://www.biblesociety.org.uk/research/quiet-revival

There’s data here. I should confess that I am a little sceptical about it, even though it’s exactly what I’ve been expecting would happen and I am myself part of it. Our churches locally do seem healthy enough but they remain few, and the fact is that I’m not yet seeing fervour in my corner of the country, and the uptick is just a bit too sharp to persuade me that there isn’t some wishful thinking going on here.

Having said that, anecdotally there are plenty of accounts—including on this thread—of expanding church attendances, there is similar data from other countries like France and Finland, and yougov has been reporting an uptick among the young in the UK for several years now too, albeit more modest than this report indicates.

One really interesting thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that I’m now seeing street preachers around regularly again. There was a twenty-period where they seemed to have vanished but they’re back. And they’re all younger men too.

How is Christianity being 'slammed'?

What do you consider the difference between faith and religion?