At noon today in St Paul’s Cathedral, Justin Welby will be officially confirmed as the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of All England. The Daily Telegraph in an editorial last Saturday, February 2, gave this appraisal of the church, faith and society in Britain.
Justin Welby takes up his post as the new Archbishop of Canterbury at a testing time for religion in Britain
At noon on Monday in St Paul’s Cathedral, Justin Welby will be officially confirmed as the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of All England. Even to non-Anglicans, this matters. As head of the Established Church, the former Bishop of Durham will play a part in our national life that ranges far beyond the narrowly doctrinal.
The new Archbishop takes up his post when the relevance of religion is under question more than at any time in our history. On Thursday night, the Cambridge Union debating society considered whether “religion has no place in the 21st century”, with speakers including Professor Richard Dawkins, the country’s most prominent atheist, and Lord Williams of Oystermouth, the most recent occupant of the throne of St Augustine.
Prof Dawkins described religion as nothing more than charlatanry, because it was “a phoney substitute for an explanation” of who we are and how we got here. However, this is more a critique of the belief in God than of the efficacy of organised religion, which can be a powerfully cohesive force in society (if also a divisive one). As Lord Williams observed: “Religion has always been a matter of community-building, a matter of building relations of compassion, fellow-feeling and, dare I say it, inclusion.”
Increasingly, however, that function has been taken over by government. We have replaced the horizontal ties that bind people to each other with vertical ties that bind us to the state. Self-help, community and family have been supplanted by the notion that an avuncular and benign bureaucracy will always be there with money, guidance and a comforting arm around the shoulder.
The Church, along with many other institutions, has gradually been squeezed out of our lives as greater emphasis has been placed on values and rights than on responsibilities and duties. Recent politicians have been complicit in this aggressive secularism – even when, as with Tony Blair, they have themselves been believers. It is hard to imagine a prime minister taking office today and reciting a prayer on the threshold of Downing Street, as did Margaret Thatcher in 1979. David Cameron confesses that his religious faith comes and goes like “Magic FM in the Chilterns”; and it was insisted that Mr Blair did not “do God”.
Some consider the slide of religion to be inexorable; yet Bishop Welby senses this may be the zenith of the secular age. The Church, he said in Nottingham on Thursday, will have a greater role in future because of the failure of the very institution that has sought to supplant it: the state. “We are at the greatest moment of opportunity for the Church since the Second World War,” he said. “The state has run out of the capacity to do the things it had taken over since 1945.”
That is crucially important. It has profound consequences for the future of Britain and for any country that is wedded to the provision of services that the state can no longer afford. The advance of post-war welfarism assumed perpetual economic growth, but there has been little such progress since 2008 and there may not be again for a long time. As Bishop Welby implied, if the state can no longer care for people who have come to rely upon its ministrations, then charities, the private sector and, indeed, the Church will have to step into the breach.
All surveys suggest that, apart from our immigrant communities, we are a less religious society today. While the evangelical wing of Anglicanism – from which Bishop Welby hails – is flourishing, most people are more likely to be found in the shopping aisles on a Sunday than in the pews. And yet, the new Archbishop begins his reign at a more propitious moment for the Church than could have been imagined a few years ago. The prospect of economic stagnation stretching far into the future should diminish the concept of an all-pervasive modern state, and create space for renewal among the institutions it has so dangerously crowded out. Perhaps it was a sign that, at the Cambridge Union this week, the proposition that religion has no place in modern society was comprehensively defeated.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/9842380/A-moment-of-renewal-for-the-Church-and-country.html