Don Cupitt When I first came up to Cambridge in the early Fifties the majority of undergraduates were the products of Anglican public schools. Hardened by long years of compulsory chapel, rugby football, the cadet corps and cold baths, we were pleased to find in Cambridge a slightly more grown-up version of a world we already knew. The baths were a long way off in a special bathhouse that served the entire college, but they were hot when you finally got there, and the sport and the chapel were now voluntary.
There was a warm atmosphere of male camaraderie, Anglicanism and sherry. A very high percentage of us were already confirmed, and polls at the time suggested that almost half of all undergraduates practised religion.
Another striking feature of Cambridge in those days was the fact that Anglican priests still largely controlled the Divinity Faculty. Indeed, till early Victorian times they had controlled all knowledge: dons had to be in Orders.
In the early Fifties there were still many clerical dons, but theology in particular witnessed to the link between religion and sound learning: almost every University Lecturer was also a College Dean. I admired the ideal and wanted to become one of these men. During the Sixties I did so.
Such was the old Anglican academic establishment of religion. If one remembers such names as T S Eliot, C S Lewis, Benjamin Britten and John Betjeman, one sees that it was also a cultural establishment.
Already, though, things were beginning to change. Facing acute labour shortages in textiles, transport, health and elsewhere, the Government was looking to mass immigration from the New Commonwealth countries to plug the gap. The leadership in fashion and culture was being seized by urban youth and the mass media. And so on.
Today’s Cambridge, it goes without saying, is very different. The undergraduates are of both sexes and from a wide variety of national and class backgrounds. College chapels are no longer well-attended. The Church is not friendly to theologians and it seems that in October 1994, for the first time, there will be nobody in Cambridge who is both a College Dean and a University Lecturer.
Theology is now largely a lay subject. Anglicanism has been disestablished intellectually, and in many ways culturally too. Saddest is the fact that the great tradition of Anglican poetry is now passing away, with Geoffrey Hill and R S Thomas as its last voices.
There is no respectable apologist today; so much have things changed that C S Lewis’s public now consists of the Evangelicals - especially in America. The sad fact is that by the Fifties the old Anglican culture had spent so long in a rearguard action against modern thought that it had become hopelessly provincial. Believe it or not, the great modern thinkers - people like Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud - were not in the college libraries because they were not on the university syllabus. They were simply not read. Except in science, Cambridge was backward.
We didn’t know it at the time, but the still-Anglican England (or at least middle-class England) of the Fifties was doomed. Today it is vanishing fast.
You may ask, then, why John Major promises us that the traditional England of village cricket and old maids biking to communion will not pass away? Why are so many members of his Government and of the House of Lords talking as if they still live in the Fifties - or at least can recreate the Fifties? And what of the media? They treat the internal problems of the Church of England, in particular, as publicly-important events occurring within the mainstream of the national life. Think of such recent Sometiones | wish, | hadwe gone w uy From My God by Mel Calman (Aurum Press) events as the ordination of women, the Church Commissioners’ financial speculations and sundry scandals. All were treated as national news, whereas the internal life of many other religious groups is hardly reported at all.
Are we living in a mental time-warp? Perhaps remembering their own schooldays, the Lords in a famous debate required all schools to hold a daily act of Christian worship; and so the Government wants Christianity to be privileged in the RE syllabus. They seem to have overlooked a number of points: few schools have a large-cnough assembly-hall or enough Christian teachers to conduct daily compulsory worship, or even pupils compliant enough to put up with it. The fact is that our own leaders do not seem to be living in the country that we see when we walk through our inner cities. Mentally, they and the media - and perhaps much of the population too - seem to be living in Shepton Mallet and reading Agatha Christie.
A symbol of this is the gulf between what people say and what they actually do. The number of people you find in church on a direct count is less than half the number who will claim to have been there when questioned by pollsters, and only about one-thirtieth of the number who are and claim to be members. Thus, for the C of E, the percentages are somewhere around 1.5, 3.5 and 46 per cent of the whole population. Similarly, a surprisingly high percentage of people profess when polled to hold Christian beliefs and to want a Christian upbringing for their children, even though they have no plans to practise religion themselves.
To explain all this, take a look at Israel, where surprisingly few Jews practise their religion, and surprisingly many eat ‘‘white meat’’ (pork) - yet they are still very much Jews. And in fact, among Jews, Christians and Muslims it is common nowadays to find whole populations where religious belief and observance are almost extinct - and yet people remain fiercely and tenaciously locked-on to their religio-ethnic identity in a way that people of other faiths will experience as racist.
I don’t think anyone yet fully understands this; but it is our problem in Britain, still, We may be Statistically a multi-faith society, but we are not so culturally or morally. To a surprising extent we still seem to be a Christian society which very profoundly excludes people of the newer faith-communities. We don’t feel they really belong; so they don’t either.
It sems that the whole project of a truly multi-faith society is much more difficult than used to be supposed.
But non-realists should be able to perceive the problem more clearly than others, and should be better able to welcome genuine religious pluralism in a free society.
Don Cupitt’s most recent book is After All.