'Irrelevantly Relevant'

Wednesday December 14 2022

Adam McPherson argues that the influence of Christianity is still important in the west, even as fewer people identify as religious

What does it mean to be Christian in 2022?

Ask the 22.2 million people who ticked the 'no religion' box in the 2021 Census of England and Wales and they might respond with 'nothing'. In Scotland, we will have to wait until next year for our own census results but if they skew in the same direction as in England and Wales, we might find ourselves asking whether Christianity has become relevantly irrelevant or irrelevantly relevant; whether it is something interesting to study in an RE (Religious Education) lesson or whether it still shapes our lives today.

It is impossible to determine why every one of the millions of respondents to the census ticked the boxes they did. Was it because they thought being Christian meant going to Church every Sunday? Do they feel their lifestyles are incompatible with a preconceived notion of Christian belief? Or did they just feel a bit queasy when they saw the box next to the word 'Christian' but couldn't explain why?

The reason we should consider the relevance of Christianity today is because it has shaped the way we live our lives. We see it in the work of our charity sector, in the presence of Church of England bishops in the House of Lords and through the monarch's role in the Church of Scotland.

In the sixth century, Pope Gregory dispatched the Benedictine prior Augustine to reconvert the British Isles to Christianity and the outcome of this expedition was a series of laws passed by the Kentish king Aethelberht. These laws were in turn based on Roman traditions, the first Christian empire. Many more would follow including the Carolingian dynasties and the Holy Roman Empire. But all Western states have been influenced by Christianity. The historian Fernanda Pirie describes the development of laws over multiple millennia as reflecting “cosmological ideals”, linking the divine to the state, the transcendent to the earthly, investing power in those who claim to interpret the will of a higher being through rules that aim to order society.

Over a short period of time, society has rolled back many of these laws. Marriage between couples of the same sex is permitted and celebrated, divorce is becoming increasingly common and shops even open on Sundays! It may be archaic to wonder why people identify less and less with Christianity but to do so is to neglect the conceptualisation of what it means to exist. Compare how citizens of the West cherish their identities as individuals, as special and unique, to those of the East with belief structures underpinned by collectivist attitudes, and the way this influences their laws, and we see how Christian we all are without noticing it.

So rather than being relevantly irrelevant, a product of a bygone age tracking in one downward trajectory, Christianity today has become irrelevantly relevant. It is part of everyday life in ways many of us neglect because it is so ordinary.

The question for the Church now is how to make this obvious again to a population that takes it for granted.