John Challenor The trend in religion is to privatisation, the free market, consumer choice. Examples abound : * half a million people in Britain stopped going to church in the 80s. * the House Church movement, from zero in 1970, has 150,000 members now • Archbishop Carey foresees Anglican life in the 90s moving out of buildings and in among groups of people at home and at work, and if this happens, he says, "maintaining an Anglican ethos will be crucially important and very difficult". • the Broadcasting Act, 1991, leaves religious programmes more free. * John Bowden (SCM) writes, "religious concerns have been inexorably forced into the private sphere".
From one viewpoint, all to the good. The old Churches have had their day. Their 'orthodoxy' was in any case just one of the many different traditions forming the kaleidoscope (W H C Frend's term) of the early Church. Nothing valuable need be lost - no organised church body has exclusive copyright of any religious book or observance.
And SOF is with the trend, for it "seeks to avoid any pretensions to being a 'movement' or a 'party', which would inevitably place collective beliefs and discipline ahead of individual integrity in the furtherance of some set agenda". (1991 Hand-out.) Yes. But there is another point of view. If religion is dropping out of the dead hands of the old Churches, is it going to be left to run to waste in the sands of the private solitude of individuals - apart from what the fundamentalists can salvage ? Privatisation is not good news for everyone - not for many lonely aged, not for the washed-up single parent, not for the bored television-watching youngster bidden to keep away from public places now made unsafe by private motorists. Out there among the unchurched masses the common opinion is that you have a straight choice - believe in the real old God (regrettably impossible) or be an agnostic-atheist-humanist (boring, negative and unproductive - look at Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union). It's like the two-party choice in British politics - not much good if you dislike both.
It doesn't have to be that way. Like a third or fourth party, SOF has a distinct message of salvation - of truth, meaning, beauty, celebration, enrichment of life, and social cohesion - a message that agrees with the humanist that the old God is dead, and agrees with the traditional believer that the religious life is vital - and vital for society, not merely for the individual.
Do we, as SOF, want to be a little elite of a few hundred articulate professionals and professional articulates, each cherishing personal integrity so jealously and avoiding compromise so carefully that we have no public identity and no communicable message ? Has SOF decided to adopt Quietism ("any system of spirituality minimising human activity and responsibility" - Oxford Dictionary of the Church.) ? If it has, we are already lumbered with an article of "collective belief and discipline", and while from our private armchairs we can comfortably explore religious faith as a human creation, we have severely limited our freedom to promote it !
I feel a contradiction here. The general theory today is that as men and women we live and move and have our being in the social interchange of a shared language and a life with others. When Margaret Thatcher said, "There is no such thing as society ...", she was widely perceived as wrong ; she had not made time to read Wittgenstein, Rorty, etc.
There have been in the past various tendencies, movements, and bodies which can be seen as in some way antecedents of SOF, or precedents. Some, like nominalism (Occam), demythologising (Bultmann), and realised eschatology (Dodd and Robinson) were inside the Churches. Others, like the Unitarians and the Society of Friends, have been outside. Whether in or out depended on how impossible the Church-State establishment looked to the innovators, and how intolerable the Churches felt the new foreign bodies to be.
The bodies I guess future historians may identify as lineal antecedents of SOF (if it survives, and grows fairly spectacularly) are the Unitarians and the Quakers - followers of reason and conscience, rather than of tradition and authority ; or, (if it survives and grows more modestly) perhaps the Modern Churchpeople's Union.
While never belonging to any of these. I've known since childhood of their existence and always viewed them with respect. I was able to do that because they had clearly visible public identity and standpoint. In fact, the early Unitarians (Socinians) expressed their beliefs in a 'Catechism', published in Racow, Poland, in 1605, and energetically circulated. James I burnt a Latin copy sent to him in 1614, and Cromwell burnt an English copy in 1642. They took things seriously in those days.
I personally met SOF by pure chance, happening to SOF MAGAZINE 6, SUMMER 1991 17 read a weekly paper, and happening, further, to read the advertisements. Using this method, SOF will grow slowly. I feel it is perverse to discover good news and not share it. I realise that some of us have to keep our orientation (to SOF) secret. I agree that strident pressure groups are revolting. I grant that it is early days. A majority of SOF seem to be churchgoers, naturally cautious and courteous ? And perhaps the problem is very hard - how to build, on the non-realist negative, a programme which is a profession of uncertainty.
In mentioning the Socinians, I don't suggest SOF frames an old-style catechism with positive questions and triumphant answers. (The Socinians just gave the old-style name to their new-style statement.) Maybe we should learn from Zen Buddhists how to avoid non-questions, and take to heart Milan Kundera's warning that humanity has an innate tendency to rush to judgement before reaching full understanding - and, like the novelist, we try to see and convey the ambiguity and uncertainty of life.
In practice, we are probably already supplying informal outlines of what SOF stands for, when friends ask about all the books on poststructuralism they see lying about, and the family ask about this wretched Conference in July which upsets holiday plans. Maybe, when an unofficial prospectus circulates which members feel is unsatisfactory, they will replace it with an approved one - and we shall be on the way to having public identity.
In the absence of action, events often take over.
JOHN CHALLENOR first encountered SOF at last year's Conference. A former priest and teacher, he lives in Cardiff where he keeps house for a teenage school-going daughter.