By Nick Spencer, Researcher, London Institute of Contemporary Christianity

 

What is happening to Christianity in Britain?  On one level this is relatively easy to answer.  Seven in ten of us call ourselves Christian but hardly seven in one hundred attend church.  We are spiritual but not religious.  We believe but tend not to belong.  The church, like other establishment institutions, no longer commands our confidence.  On a macro scale, we are slipping from being a nominally Christian nation to a sub-Christian one.

How much confidence do you have in¼?

The macro picture can obscure the micro details, however.  If this is how we are behaving as a nation, how are we thinking as individuals?  What is our personal attitude to and understanding of Christianity?  How does that relate to our broader social and intellectual opinions?  And how do both combine to act as barriers – or potential bridges – to the gospel today?

These were the questions which the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity set out to answer last November when they interviewed 40 non-church-attending agnostics in a series of five qualitative research groups.  The results offered a fascinating picture of the outsider’s view of the Christian faith and showed how the barriers to belief can be loosely grouped into four categories. 

Cultural Barriers

Cultural barriers were the (often unconsciously absorbed) beliefs and attitudes which shaped people’s minds and made them resistant to Christianity.  Typically, they would include the instinctive condemnation of religion as dangerous, of Christians as hypocrites and of Christianity as insufficiently flexible.

Most of these attitudes had very shaky foundations.  Actual experience of Christians was almost always more positive than the opinion of abstract or ‘typical’ Christians.  The church’s alleged introspection was betrayed by the various services, such as after-school clubs, which some respondents themselves used.

Yet these subtle cultural barriers, which were almost in the air people breathed and were typified by a general unwillingness to attribute anything good to any religion, were undoubtedly the most depressing of the research findings. 

Personal Barriers

Closely linked to these cultural barriers were personal ones: ideas which shaped people’s minds but which were more consciously held.  Two of the most important have been given the names  ‘totalitolerance’ and ‘guerrilla morality’.

 

‘Totalitolerance’ resulted from a near-deification of the virtue of tolerance which, ironically, left people sounding less rather than more tolerant.  It usually appeared when respondents poured scorn on and refused to tolerate those people, usually religious ones, they deemed to be intolerant.

‘Guerrilla Morality’ was a trend whereby people could attack traditional, out-in-the-open moral codes by means of having unwritten, personalised codes themselves.  By living “my life as I believe I should live it” respondents felt able to attack those who openly proclaimed a universal moral code (i.e. Christians).  At the same time they aggressively defended their own moral credentials, largely because the privatisation of their moral code indemnified them against criticism - if no one else knows what your moral code is, you can never be accused of failing it!

Ecclesiastical Barriers

Whilst some criticisms were valid and demand attention, others were merely the complaints of people whose agnostic consumer rights the church was failing to satisfy.

Perhaps the single most important lesson to be drawn from the various ecclesiastical barriers is that on an average Sunday any one individual is communicated to by at least a dozen different media before they hear the ‘message’.  For those new to the experience, the nature, quality and alignment of these media often predetermine their reaction to the message itself.  It is difficult to overstate the importance, therefore, of ‘aligning the brand’, to use a marketing phrase, or ensuring that all of church reflects the love of Christ, to use a more conventional theological one.

Intellectual Barriers

It is sometimes said that intellectual barriers are used by non-believers as a smokescreen to avoid commitment.  This research strongly suggests this is completely untrue: people had genuine intellectual objections to faith.

Whilst some were clearly profound others were based on elementary misconceptions.  There was a near universal belief that the Bible has been deliberately adulterated through history and therefore cannot be authentic.  There was widespread acceptance that science and religion were opposed to one another for no better reason than one was science and one was religion.  There also was the conviction that faith demanded proof, that the Bible was a single book and that Christianity was a system, which you swallowed whole if you were credulous or completely rejected if you were sceptical.

Turning Barriers into Bridges

The research also examined a number of potential bridges, such as people’s innate spirituality, their persistent sense of the numinous, their desire to believe, and their considerable worries about contemporary society.

Whilst these bridges need to be built on, there can be no substitute for knocking down the barriers.  In some cases this can be done with relative ease: align ‘the whole brand’ around Christ, equip Christians to address popular intellectual misconceptions, give them examples and statistics of what the church really does do in the community, not to boast but to answer pernicious myths of Christian selfishness or hypocrisy.

Other barriers, especially the personal and cultural ones, are considerably tougher.  We can begin to address them by helping Christians develop an accurate and pithy critique of contemporary ideologies, but the most effect response to a pragmatically-minded nation is undoubtedly love in action: by translating faith into works, some will still turn a blind eye, but others, not least the One who matters, will notice.