SOF 44 / November 2000 I SOF 44 / November 2000 In this edited version of his address at the SoF 2000 conference, DON CUPITT argues that the decline of churchreligion is a necessary prelude to the making of a secular religion as ‘a human, value-creating activity’. christianity the church With the new millennium at the beginning of this year came a series of sharp reminders of the accelerating decline of religion, not only in the West but around the world.
The first reminder was given by the sheer unanimity with which press commentators asserted that the human future will henceforth be shaped, for good or ill, by two factors only: technology, and the harsh logic of capitalism... Now it seems that nobody foresees a world reshaped by religious faith or political conviction... It appears that religion and radical politics will survive only as protest movements, and will not be taking charge again.
The second reminder was a batch of statistics... indicating that the old mainstream Christian denominations in the West are now contracting at a rate of over 20% per decade.
Despite claimed exceptions of one sort and another, much “Religion is primarily not about supernatural belief, but about hope. It is ifter secularized so quickly, and why around the world all the great surviving monuments of the old religious cultures of the past are now being taken over by the Heritage industry, which will lovingly restore and preserve them, unchanging and dead.
How do the religions themselves interpret what is happening to them? If you are a theological realist, you must surely be asking yourself, “Why is God allowing his church to die?” No very detailed and well-argued answer is forthcoming. A few leaders will claim, rather hopefully, that the statistics of decline have already bottomed-out, or will soon do so. Evangelical types will claim that their own sect or movement is making converts rapidly. But very few people actually have a theory of religious decline...
In order to show from a Sea of Faith perspective what is the real meaning of the so-called “decline of religion” we must go back to the beginning of the argument and cast the net wider.
We have got to go back about 3000 our communal way of generating dreams | y22:s,10 the period when the of how we and our life and our world might be made better.” the same is happening elsewhere, and to other faiths.
Why? The third reminder is the most savage of all. In January 2000 the Sunday Times published the results of a survey of five hundred 18-year-olds. 77% professed to have no religious beliefs... Among the population as a whole, some 70% still profess some sort of belief in God, but now it seems that a radically non-religious younger generation has appeared. Religious belief is no longer being transmitted successfully within the family, and as part of the culture - which means that the long centuries of national churches and mass religious conformity have now come to an end. A rupture has occurred. This explains how a churchdominated country like the Irish Republic could become Zoroastrian or Mazdaist theology was taking shape.
It was apparently the Zoroastrian priests of ancient Persia who first developed the idea of world history as a history of salvation, a drama in several acts of Fall and Redemption. They saw the good god, Ahura Mazda, as having created the world to be the stage on which he would fight his long battle against the powers of evil, and they held that his final victory would be seen here on earth: “The last days will be marked by increasing wretchedness and cosmic calamities. Then the World Saviour, the Saoshyant, will come in glory. He is to be born of the seed of the prophet, miraculously preserved within a lake, and a virgin mother. There will be a great battle between... good men and bad, ending in victory for the good. The bodies of those who have died earlier will be resurrected and united with their souls, and the Last Judgement will take place... “You may say I'ma dreamer, but I’m not the only one” “Ehave a : dream y M today’ a oday John Lennon and Martin Luther King Jnr: part of a long tradition of prophets dreaming of a “renewed earth”? the saved will be given ambrosia to eat, and their bodies will become as immortal as their souls. The kingdom of Ahura Mazda will come on an earth made perfect again, and the blessed will rejoice everlastingly in his presence.” (Mary Boyce in A Handbook of Living Religions, John R Hinnels (ed.), Penguin, 1985).
Such is perhaps the original eschatological myth, the story of the last days, the last battle, the last Trump, the Last Judgement and the establishment of a millennial kingdom of universal bliss and salvation here on a renewed earth. It has had a huge influence on the Jews, who perhaps picked it up in their Babylonian captivity. Modern Zionism is a late outworking of the ancient hope. Through the Israelite prophets it passed to Jesus and to Christianity, to Islam and then more recently to Western historicism and political utopianism. It even influenced the eschatologies of Hinduism and Buddhism. It is prominent in the early history of North America, itself “the new world”, and was central to the hopes of anarchists and communists. It was the most influential myth ever known among human beings.
The last famous expressions of it were Martin Luther King’s statement of the American dream in the 1960s and John Lennon’s lyric “Imagine” in the 1970s.
Over a very long period most of humanity, and especially the Western half of it, have been influenced by this great story. It first gave us the idea that the future might be, could be, would be better than the past. Instead of being forever confined to standards and patterns of behaviour laid down in a past Golden Age, people could look forward in hope to a better world yet to come. More than that, they are invited to imagine what a better world might be like. It becomes, not just an object of aspiration, but also perhaps a goal of action.
By the way you lived you could do a little more than just ready yourself for the new world: you could actually expedite its coming. At least you would begin to realize its values. This invites the new thought that religion may come to be seen as our human way of first imagining new values and a better world, and then actually working to bring them into being. Religion: our communal way of reimagining and reinventing ourselves, and projecting our values.
This process of re-creation takes a long time - or at least has taken a long time, hitherto. To see why, consider the fact that most of the principal structural features of the better world have been surpisingly constant, if not quite from Zoroaster to John Lennon, then certainly from the Old Testament to Karl Marx and the American dream. I shall simply set out the leading features.
First, in the better world (of the Kingdom of Heaven or the communist society), religion no longer exists as a separate institution and sphere of life - there is no Temple in Heaven - because its task in that role has been completed.
Instead, all of life becomes a sacred continuum. God is scattered into everyone, and politically, monarchy is replaced by democracy. All hierarchy and distinctions of social rank disappear, just as the distinction between the sacred and the profane disappears. (See, for instance, Jeremiah 33:33f and Joel 2:28f).
Secondly, and in close connection with these changes, because there is no longer any value outside life, all value in life becomes intrinsic. When we come to the last world, the world at the end of the world, then there is no further reality beyond the here and now, and therefore there is no instrumental value. Everything is valued and affirmned and loved and done just for its own sake, and in the here and now: no ethical theory is needed, because we feel no need to justify our valuations by saying where they are trying to get us. And as there is no instrumentality, so there is no concealment or deception. You can’t have ulterior motives when nothing is ulterior any more. All communication becomes completely open and transparent; daylight is perpetual and fills everything. (Luke 12: 16-20, Luke 11:33-36 and Matthew 6:25-34).
Thirdly, in the new world people will not be under the yoke of any external authority or written law. Instead, everything flows from the heart. There is no moral realism (that is, no external moral standard), and instead the only basis for ethics will be our co-humanity. In effect, ethics becomes purely humanitarian. All life becomes a flow of exchange, called in religious language “communion”, and in modern language “communication”. (2 Corinthians 3).
And fourthly, as human beings become fully reconciled to each other and to their world, the world becomes fully appropriated to humans. St Paul makes the point by saying simply: All things are yours. The physical world and the human social world coincide. Human consciousness becomes fully globalized. The misunderstanding caused by language differences and the conflict caused by ethnic differences disappears. There is a hint of some form of world government. (Isaiah 25:6-9).
To repeat these four points, in the new era all of life SOF 44. / November 2000 becomes a single sacred continuum, all value in life becomes intrinsic, ethics become purely humanitarian, and human consciousness becomes fully globalized. And these four points can very easily be illustrated in detail from the Israelite prophets, from the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic Gospels, and from other New Testament books such as the Acts of the Apostles and Revelation. And the same themes are still being appealed to by twentieth-century people.
How far have the churches as we know them actually sought to create the new world as thus described? The early church is reported to have made some attempt: it broke out of the ancient Jewish sacrificial system, tried to overcome the received clean/unclean distinction, sought to create a fully reciprocally-transparent society, welcomed gentile members (after controversy), and sought to practise humanitarian ethics by redistribution to the poor.
But the original impulse faded, as the church turned instead into a salvation-machine dispensing sacramental Grace to people who were preparing their souls for death.
Then, in much later times, certain radical groups which emerged at the Reformation made a fresh effort to put the original programme into effect. The Quakers are the outstanding example: they abolished the whole religious sphere of life (the church, the clergy, and the sacraments); they affirmed the value of life, to the point of being strict practitioners of non-violence; they were the chief pioneers of today’s humanitarian ethics; and they sought to be politically supranational. The conclusion is unavoidable: if in the original logic of Western Christian thought all religious action is ultimately aimed at bringing in the new world, then the Quakers have been almost the only serious Christians. [DC originally wrote “are”, but changed it in delivery to “have been”! - Ed.] ..Since the Enlightenment secular culture in the West has continued to move steadily towards the historical realization of the ancient religious dream. It has gone very much further than the church. For example, secular culture is much more egalitarian and democratic than the church, and much more consistent in its respect for human rights.
Indeed, the church is so far behind that it battles to get itself exempted from human rights legislation! Extraordinary!
Secular culture has become much more globalized and supranational, while the church too often has become merely national and lost in admiration for its own past.
Very strikingly, secular culture has recently ceased to believe in progress and has effectively ceased to believe in life after death. It therefore knows that we already live in the last world, and that there will not be any further world beyond this one. Secular culture is already committing itself to the here and now, to the value of life and to the new religion of life... And secular culture since the mid-80s has become intensely communicative on a global scale, and is much more committed to freedom of speech than is the church.
I conclude from all this that in the Western tradition secular culture has since the Enlightenment continued to pursue the ancient religious dream of a new world at the end of historical time, and with considerable success. The world it has been struggling to build, the world of the United Nations, international law, democratic politics, ceaseless global communication and humanitarian ethics, a world now committed to the struggle for the emancipation of women and the reconciliation of ethnic and religious differences - this new world of ours becomes a very much | SOF 44 / November 2000 eee further-developed version of the original Christian programme than anything available from the churches.
And that is the reason for the so-called “decline of religion”.
It might better be called the redundancy of the church...
Ecclesiastical faith was about the fear of death... The alternative view of the purpose of religion goes back, as we have seen, to ancient eschatological belief. Religious thought was imaginative and utopian. People saw practice of religion as a way of preparing for, and perhaps as a way of expediting the final earthly conflict between the powers of good and evil and the coming of a new age on earth at the end of historical time.
Religion is primarily not about supernatural belief, but about hope. It is our communal way of generating dreams of how we and our life and our world might be made better.
We prepare ourselves for the dream, and we start to think about how we might actually start to make it all come true...
Religion is a communal way of reimagining and remaking the self and the world. It is about what we are to live by and what we are to live for. At a time when political thought is very unadventurous, and when the world is becoming overwhelmingly dominated by technology, we need religion as much as ever. We need it as a dream, as a human, valuecreating activity.