Talk given by Linda Woodhead to the SOF Conference in London, July 2024. Linda Woodhead is F.D. Maurice Professor in Moral and Social Theology and Head of Department, Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London.
Thank you very much indeed for inviting me to give this talk. I hadn’t realised how many people here I would know, so it’s been lovely to see people I know from many different parts of my life here today. Don Cupitt was my director of studies and my supervisor when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge and I went to study theology and religious studies in 1982. The Sea of Faith series came out in my second year as a student, and I was a student of Don’s. He taught me anthropology of religion, amongst other things. He taught lots of different courses. And it’s to his credit, I think that in my second year, I was barely aware that this Sea of Faith programme was coming out. He never neglected his students for one moment. He was very self-effacing and life continued very much as normal in Emmanuel.
That period, the 1980s was a real hinge, a time of change in lots of ways. We might think politically it was the Berlin Wall coming down. The Cold War was coming to an end. But I’m interested in the religious and cultural change at that time. Anthony Freeman has reminded us of just the same point, that this period, the late 1970s and the early 80s, was a time of great theological ferment as well.
We were very excited when we were students. There was feminist theology. There was liberation theology. There was a questioning of many things. The churches were still very powerful in society and in culture then. Actually, they were in decline and they were challenged, but it didn’t quite feel like it then and there was a sense that they could still be carriers of significant values and of change. I think that Don thought that by speaking into them, he would be an agent of that change. And that’s the focus of my talk today. I want to think about how far it has or has not happened.
I’m going to argue it hasn’t happened for the churches and religious culture in the way Don hoped. I am a sociologist of religion. Even though I was trained in theology, I became really interested in social change. I have spent most of my life talking to religious people, visiting religious institutions and trying to make sense of how sociologists look at how society and religion have changed. How they are fitting together, how is social change impacting religion and how is religious change impacting society? Anthony also finished by saying he wasn’t going to talk about that, so my brief is to talk a bit more about putting the Sea of Faith and the Sea of Faith movement into context.
I’ve been studying two things, particularly in my career. One is the growth of some forms of spirituality, another is the decline of many forms of church. Let’s start with the first. In the year 2000 I was part of a group who went to study the town of Kendal in Cumbria because we were at Lancaster University and it was the right kind of size to really study in depth over a couple of years and our intention was to use it as a sort of spiritual laboratory.
The main thing that we found, to our surprise, was how much of this thing called spirituality there was. We called it mind body, spirit spirituality or holistic spirituality, because those were the words that the people we met were using. And there were people who were doing things like running yoga groups or doing Reiki healing, or faith healings or interfaith groups. In Kendal, we found 123 different groups and one of our findings was that 80% of those both offering the practices and participating were women.
The other thing I studied is what happened to the churches in the same period. I wrote a book with Andrew Brown, who was the Guardian’s religion correspondent. We called it That Was the Church that Was. We thought we would have a journalist and an academic talking about the church. It answers the question why did the Church of England collapse so dramatically after the 1980s, not just numerically but also in its social and cultural influence and standing.
The Church of England, which is an historic national church, faced unprecedented changes after the 1980s, partly because of its party structure and partly because there was a drive by the more evangelical and conservative and fundamentalist wing to take over the church, which has been successful. The liberal wings have collapsed. So the Church of England ended up at odds with the English people who drifted in a more liberal way in terms of morality. The Church of England went the exact opposite way, became much more conservative, holding on to a very conservative sexual and gender morality.
So where does Don fit into this landscape? He saw exactly what was happening. He saw that in many ways it was going in a fundamentalist direction. He deplored it but he saw it was a real possibility. I think he really hoped to change church decline but that has not happened.
And where does he fit in with the growth of alternative and post-Christian spirituality? He didn’t ever really like that. When I published my book The Spiritual Revolution, he talked to me about it, for any of that kind of spirituality really wasn’t his thing. It was not the kind of spirituality he could affirm or that he wanted to encourage. In the early 1980s when the Sea of Faith series aired, there was still enough Christian dominance in the culture so I think he was still speaking to the mainstream.
But that was very quickly going to change, because every generation since then has been less Christian and the number of those who affirm they are non-religious has been growing. So fewer and fewer young people know anything about Christianity and have not been to a church. But I think one reason why Don was and remains influential to a small group is what I’m going to call his heroic asceticism. The Sea of Faith is a story about the destruction of myth, magic, supernaturalism and religion by science, technology and the modern world. And it’s not a lament, it’s a celebration. Don is extraordinarily uncritically positive about science and modern society. Perhaps that was a feature of the 1980s too.
The Sea of Faith takes us from the modern world, where the series opens with Dover and car ferries and jumbo jets and speed, and takes us through how the medieval universe collapsed and how the idea of God doesn’t make sense to us now. Don is going to help us come to terms with this. He takes us on a journey via heroic minds – all intellectuals – not monks. But people like Freud and Schweitzer and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. Schweitzer, I think, is a great emblem of his and probably the most important figure for Don in that series. He is seen as facing the truth unflinchingly – going into complete disillusion through historical studies and yet nevertheless throwing himself selflessly into religion, a Christianity focused on life and helping others.
The message of the Sea of Faith is that we can do the same. And I think that part of the success of that series is that Don himself embodies this heroic ascetic figure like the ones he talks about. At the recent Cambridge conference it really came through to me that many people’s lives had been very much changed by Don and often they went into a quest, a truth quest. Don actually did have a much bigger influence on academia than people realised because he inspired people to go into academic life and pursue the truth in different fields. He certainly inspired me in that way, even though I didn’t agree with all his thinking.
There is no mysticism in Don Cupitt. He has no spiritual mystical sense and he dismisses it as supernaturalism. Mysticism is about merging with the higher good. Asceticism is about renouncing self for a higher good; that plays out in Don’s works as different forms of self-outpouring – the solar ethic. That ethic is really the opposite of what has happened in the ethical landscape of our society, which I think has moved from a give-your-life self-sacrificial ethic to a live-your-life, have pride, celebrate life, be who you really are.
That’s a new ethical turn since the 1980s, which is really at variance with a give-your-life Christian ethic of the sort that Don embodies and espouses. So there too society has gone in a different direction. Except we do still have respect for duty. You could see it when the Queen died in all those tributes thanking her for doing her duty. You could see it in the respect for carers in the COVID pandemic. And the memorialisation of nurses and doctors who gave their lives in caring for others.
We are dimly aware that we need people who do put themselves to one side and pursue a higher truth or fight for a higher good or consider that there are some things that are worth dying for. I think that’s the recessive ethic of our day. It’s still there in the foundations and we still have some respect for it. It is not the dominant ethic anymore and I think we should be profoundly grateful that there are people like Don who keep it alive and gave it such a lasting contemporary expression without the need for a certain metaphysical background. That particular legacy of his will be an enduring one.
To sum up. I have been looking at the wide influence of Don Cupitt and the Sea of Faith. I’ve argued that in terms of the big trends in this country, such as the growth of post-Christian spirituality but decline of institutional religions, particularly the churches, Don Cupitt did not speak to either of these trends. He didn’t embrace new spiritualities, he didn’t succeed in changing the decline of the mainstream churches or the growth of fundamentalism. But I learned from him that it is important to be true to things more important than yourself. That part of his legacy has influenced many individuals besides myself and it remains extremely pertinent and valuable to us. The Sea of Faith movement helps keep that alive.
My final wish is that we could move in the future to a different sort of society which has respect for a variety of ways to explore and articulate spiritual and moral experience, both supernaturalist and non-supernaturalist, with none being trivialised or marginalised. At the moment I think we are still in the phase of rejection and reaction against institutional religion in which religion is widely looked down on, not taken seriously, given low status. I look forward to a time when that is not going to be the case. And I hope the Sea of Faith movement is a little harbinger of that sort of openness.