The Collapse of Organised Religion in Scotland
As Carrell writes: “The Church of Scotland, once one of the most powerful forces in Scottish life, is disposing of hundreds of churches, manses, halls and cottages over the next five years as it faces up to a “perilous” transformation in its fortunes and its place in Scottish society. Congregations are in steep decline, its clergy are ageing and its finances are in disarray.”
Photograph Murdo MacLeod
The stats are stark:
“The data suggests Scotland’s two largest Christian faiths, Presbyterianism and Catholicism, may be in terminal decline.
In 1982 the Church of Scotland had nearly 920,000 members; last year, that stood at 270,300, a decline of 70%. The average age of its congregants is now 62, and only 60,000 worship in person.
“In 1982, the Catholic church conducted 4,870 marriages and had 273 men training to be priests. In 2021, there were just 812 Catholic marriages, with just 12 seminarians in training; it attracted only two new recruits this year. It no longer trains priests in Scotland and this year sold off its most famous seminary in Rome, the Pontifical Scots college, moving into another institution.”
“Until data from Scotland’s 2022 census is published next year, reliable figures on exactly how many people follow other faiths are hard to find but there are other indicators. Nonreligious marriages now far exceed religious in Scotland. Of the 30,033 marriages in Scotland last year, only 8,072 were religious (27%), compared with 9,140 Humanist and 12,821 civil ceremonies.”
Who cares?
The retreat, or is it a collapse of organised religion may be a good thing? Both wings of Scotland’s organised Christianity have their own crosses to bear (if you pardon the pun). Both have their own back-story that isn’t great, to say the least. Both have failed to keep up (in different ways) to the changing world around them.
As a born-again atheist I’m not bothered by this inevitable, long-overdue process. Except, except in a world that is disastrously commodified – in which every aspect of our lived experience is turned into a commercial exchange – the loss of spaces that try to give voice to the sacred – or the spiritual – or the other – is, arguably a disaster.
For a society that has lived through the pandemic and the lockdown and has realised the need for the social space of the office/the workplace we seem to be slow in the uptake. How to protect and save public spaces where people can come together as a community and sing, and celebrate something is a live question.
In the year when Elon Musk can buy and take over the public space that was ‘Twitter’ and turn it into the degraded commodified space that is ‘X’ we should be alive to these questions. As Joni wrote: “Don’t it always seem to go. That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?”
But can anyone step in to meet those needs, and does that even make sense?
In an institutional/political sense the decline of the Church of Scotland is perhaps less important than the social function it serves to a generation of people for whom it is a source of basic community. The church – and the Church of Scotland is not (rightly) baked-in to the nascent political state in the same way that the Church of England is baked-in to the British State. This should be a good and progressive thing in a multicultural multi-religion and largely secular society. It’s 2023, just.
How do you protect and defend non-commodified spaces in a time where we face both socio-economic breakdown and the existential threat of climate change? The digital world can’t do that. It pretends to be a community when its a network, and as we know from the sometimes brutal isolation of the lockdown people need to be together.
The challenge is not just how do you fulfil the functions of churches and their communities in a secular world but how do you reclaim and defend the public realm from its private ownership by the likes of ‘X’? It’s a paradox. Who are the groups or movements who will replace these functions? Does the humanist movement (does that exist?) have the momentum to step up and is this even needed? Maybe football grounds, music venues, festivals offer the secular equivalent to yesterdays churches?
Is this important? Does anyone care?
Other bodies, often football clubs and other charities have stepped up and fulfilled the function of care and support for the most desperate in society without the baggage of religion to serve up hot food and distribute basic care. Maybe none of this matters?
In the post-deferential society organised religion has little to offer if it doesn’t supply ‘grace’, practical support and community or a coherent explanation of the world.
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Funny how wars, terrorism, poverty, homelessness etc. seem to have increased over the same period.
I understand what you are hinting at. It’s the sort of thing an infant would say. Oh and it’s also incorrect.
While there is clearly a decline in The Kirk and other ‘traditional’ churches I don’t think it’s the end of religious observances. There is a much younger cohort now attending non- traditional Christian churches in Scotland such as Catalyst Vineyard Church which appears to be thriving in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire.
I won’t support you, I give my covenanted money to Catholic organisations.
The Church is certainly in decline. I expect the state of Israel to be in a much worse mess than the church in the near future. I expect the “American Empire” to take a damned good hiding. I expect Russia to rebuild as a proper Christian society soon. Further ahead I expect Iran to convert to Christianity. As for nay sayers like you Iexpect you to continue to be lost unless you care to join me and others going against the grain in trying to revive the Church in Britain.
No one is going to join you. Least of all me. I rejoice that churches are in decline. They have a stultifying effect upon society. I mean look are your own stance. I’m optimistic whereas you just can’t wait to go to your nonexistent saviour.
Most of these thought are clearly true but I wonder. We are moving away from religion; I have an interest as a long term atheist.
Have you seen the recent action to provide warm spaces for those that need them? So far little has been done but I believe this is an idea whose time has come. Provide a warm space and some comfortable chairs and see how many come, not just for the warmth but to engage with others in the same situation.
There are Men’s Sheds springing up where men can enjoy masculine company and tackle jobs they cannot do at home; break the ice and take that step and word spreads. Women are different creatures, they naturally chatter and gossip much more than men do and you might find they use the warm spaces most.
Times are changing and society changes with it. Here in Scotland the instinct is to provide facilities either free or at a nominal cost; in England almost everyone has their hand out. Something to be proud of and something to strive to maintain.
I don’t speak as a Christian, but Athiesism is a belief without a community. It must be the most bleak and stark of beliefs.
Atheism is a belief in the same sense that not going fishing is a sport. Try thinking.
How come Satan speaks such sense? Is he well?
(and how come, even in these enlightened times, Satan always stays a “he”?)
@Alastair McIntosh, Shurley not?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0230030/?ref_=nm_flmg_t_22_act
Benighted times, enlightened times? Many species are going dark, anyway, despite the torch-bearing Statue of Liberty.
Communities are not necessarily about religion. I see no personal need for any atheist community but good luck to those that need and use the churches.
Wars are, in many instances, based on religious beliefs and as such go against any sensible person’s way of thinking. The present genocide in the Middle East is based on religion. There is a believe that somebody heard a whisper in their ear that one part of the world belongs only to them. The elected leaders of these people are working to ensure that only they reside in that area between the river and the sea. Not an idea that I find acceptable.
What we need is a society engineered ( I mean that word particularly) to provide what humans need rather than letting market forces provide it.
In other words government (which should act at our behest) should provide these spaces and encourage others. Access to such things should be simple and an inalienable right. Libraries should operate in this way. And councils have been closing them left right and centre. Authorities need to be reminded that they work for us.
The church of scotland fell out of favour 180 yrs ago over landlords controlling the selection of ministers. The churches stood empty then too.
The free church got the footfall instead.
Yeah the sort of folk who won’t have music in their services and who close up play parks on a Sunday. That toxic bunch. They will go the same way when the flesh eating Jesus cult dies a death in this land.
About time!
Former churches could be turned into community hubs or arts centres.
Lies to truth
From brainwashing to brain using.
I wonder how many congregations the author can mention that *don’t* deliver a wide range of often imaginative community support services.
Has the author or any of the hostile commenters visited the Olive Tree Cafe in St George’s Tron in the centre of Glasgow, for instance, which provides working space for artists, and runs a cafe that provides work experience for people coming out of homelessness?
Our small congregation’s church hall, where we’ll move for worship after we sell our outdated church building, is a base for a range of community groups, a pop-up post-office, and we would love to redevelop it to provide better facilities, with a community cafe something like the Olive Tree, but the redevelopment costs are around £2m. Small scale DIY redevelopment is no longer an option, just as DIY maintenance is no longer an option given insurers’ insistence on professional standards.
Elderly congregations (many members’ only income a state pension) continue to support (maintenance, insurance, heating) buildings that in many cases provide more hours’ use for the local community (in some cases with a higher average income than church members) than for the congregation themselves. And often the congregation help to run those community groups (our church at one point provided the leaders of two food banks, as well as running soup kitchens, a drop-in cafe used mainly by folk on benefits).
On top of that, church members provide an informal network of practical support, providing lifts to hospital appointments, for instance, which over most of Scotland are almost impossible without a lift. Churches provide informal networks that provide practical care, or enable other agencies to engage .. the list is endless.
The Kirk does have a dreadful legacy of domination of local communities, judgmentalism, patriarchy, and imposing crippling social exclusion on those who didn’t conform. Few contemporary members don’t grieve over that, but frankly, much of the article and the comments are describing a church that hasn’t existed for decades.
Genuine progressives have targets across Scotland, in the world of corporate business and abusive governance, that are much more deserving of active opposition.
In a society where people increasingly think that their pals / social groups/ shops / dinner /whatever exists in a little box, the demise of public space inhabited by actual people is inevitable. You don’t have to lift your arse to do anything but answer the doorbell and this will become ever increasingly default. Probably best to buy shares in a big AI advert company or move to Italy – I can’t think of anything more promising about the Scottish phone-zombie dystopia – I suppose extinction is the end result. I have seen how people who don’t do any internet connections are now non-people: Historical trash.
Actually you seem to have read the room wrongly. My kids are part of a cohort who are rejecting social media and the me me me culture quite deliberately. For them the internet is a useful tool when needed but not much used other than as a source for video. They understand that misinformation is rife so they knowingly limit their intake.
One grave problem with religion is that adherents so often close ranks to defend, protect, cover for their co-religionists or co-sectarians against perceived secular threats, in way not mirrored by atheists (there are, of course, many other groups who close ranks regardless of religion). The effects can be seen in the findings of the various child sexual abuse inquiries. This doesn’t mean that religious schisms are not present and often vicious, but you do get hokey and bogus cross-religious piety as well as extremist and existentially dangerous joint enterprises such as evangelical Christians and other longers-for-Armageddon supporting genocidal Jewish Zionism.
As the influence of Church wanes, expect more critical histories and revolting revelations informing an accelerating falling-off. But also the rise of pseudo-religious tenets that are more flattering to the egos of today’s ideological consumers. I reject Humanism on the basis it elevates humans above Nature, whatever late clauses its followers remember to append to their Canon. If life is a value-creation phenomenon, we don’t need scripture or mirrors. And we might soon be talking with whales!
I’d be very interested to read the bits of the humanist manifesto that raises humanity above other life. It’s not a facet I recognise.
@Mark Gordon, as a substrate of ideology (see for example Yuval Noah Harari) and as self-declared belief systems, humanism regularly places humans above the rest of Nature, as in:
“Humanism is a democratic belief system that values all humans equally. It places the happiness and flourishing of all humans at its centre, and encourages cooperation towards this shared common goal.”
https://www.humanism.scot/get-involved/what-is-humanism/
Or more poetically:
“A humanist has four leading characteristics — curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.”
What if we shared the planet with other intelligent, social life, with languages and culture of their own? (we do) And as David Graeber and David Wengrow say in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, our immediate ancestors lived among other human species which would be like living among hobbits, giants and elves. Exposing our humanocentric biases and fallacies is something fantasy occasionally does rather better than science fiction.
Re: “The Dawn of Everything”
Unfortunately, that book lacks credibility and depth.
In fact “The Dawn of Everything” is a biased disingenuous account of human history (https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-flawed-history-of-humanity & https://offshootjournal.org/untenable-history/) that spreads fake hope (the authors of “The Dawn” claim human history has not “progressed” in stages, or linearly, and must not end in inequality and hierarchy as with our current system… so there’s hope for us now that it could get different/better again). As a result of this fake hope porn it has been widely praised. It conveniently serves the profoundly sick industrialized world of fakes and criminals. The book’s dishonest fake grandiose title shows already that this work is a FOR-PROFIT, instead a FOR-TRUTH, endeavour geared at the (ignorant gullible) masses.
Fact is human history since the dawn of agriculture has “progressed” in a linear stage (the “stuck” problem, see below), although not before that (https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/22/chris-knight-wrong-about-almost-everything ). This “progress” has been fundamentally destructive and is driven and dominated by “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room” (www.CovidTruthBeKnown.com or https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html) which the fake hope-giving authors of “The Dawn” entirely ignore naturally (no one can write a legitimate human history without understanding and acknowledging the nature of humans). And these two married pink elephants are the reason why we’ve been “stuck” in a destructive hierarchy and unequal class system , and will be far into the foreseeable future (the “stuck” question — “the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode?” or “how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles” — [cited from their book] is the major question in “The Dawn” its authors never really answer, predictably).
“All experts serve the state and the media and only in that way do they achieve their status. Every expert follows his master, for all former possibilities for independence have been gradually reduced to nil by present society’s mode of organization. The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie. With their different motives, those who need experts are falsifiers and fools. Whenever individuals lose the capacity to see things for themselves, the expert is there to offer an absolute reassurance.” —Guy Debord
A good example that one of the “expert” authors, Graeber, has no real idea on what world we’ve been living in and about the nature of humans is his last brief article on Covid where his ignorance shines bright already at the title of his article, “After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.” Apparently he doesn’t know that most people WANT to be asleep, and that they’ve been wanting that for thousands of years (and that’s not the only ignorant notion in the title) — see last cited source above. Yet he (and his partner) is the sort of person who thinks he can teach you something authentically truthful about human history and whom you should be trusting along those terms. Ridiculous!
“The Dawn” is just another fantasy, or ideology, cloaked in a hue of cherry-picked “science,” served lucratively to the gullible ignorant underclasses who crave myths and fairy tales.
“The evil, fake book of anthropology, “The Dawn of Everything,” … just so happened to be the most marketed anthropology book ever. Hmmmmm.” — Unknown
Well, yes, obviously. But not necessarily for those reasons.
Graeber and Wengrow’s book is undoubtedly biased. It’s written from an anarchist perspective, which provides an alternative ‘origin myth’ for human inequality. It doesn’t disingenuously pretend to be ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ anthropology and archaeology, which its authors consider to be impossible; it’s honestly ‘engaged’ and polemical.
In particular, the book challenges the dominant Rousseauvian narrative that the transition from foraging to agriculture was a ‘civilisation trap’ that laid the ground for social inequality. They argue that inequality isn’t an inevitable consequence or necessary condition of civilisation, and that the notion that it is evolved from the 18th century as an historical justification for the treatment of indigenous populations around the world by European settlers; as an apology for colonisation, in other words.
By rejecting the traditional framework for understanding the origins of inequality, Graeber and Wengrow are seeking to create room for alternative narratives or counter-models that will produce better social and political outcomes; that is, a society that’s ‘more just’ as measured against their anarchist values. If you don’t share those values, the book’s not for you.
@Hevoux, your comment is utterly irrelevant to mine, as I don’t quote Dawn of Everything as an authority, but merely as an observation on the archeological evidence that there used to be multiple human species living concurrently on our planet. Do you accept this or not?
I think this is both relevant to humanism and religious worldviews and human origin stories. If modern humans are not even unique within their family, what does this say about claims to being special and above nature?
“Humans, or modern humans (Homo sapiens or H. sapiens), are the most common and widespread species of primate, and the only surviving species of the genus Homo.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human
This is also relevant to teaching deep history and deep time, and conceptualising our (planetary, extra-planetary) future.
Humanism’s bigger than the Humanist Manifesto, which is little more than an atheist confession of faith.
In the broader history of philosophy, ‘humanism’ has come to designate any [theistic or non-theistic] narration that’s premised on ontological differences between humanity and the rest of nature, stresses the centrality of humanity to the order of nature, and accords priority to human agency it in the explanation of society, history, and culture.
According to humanists, there are qualities and capacities peculiar to human being that make its ‘texts’ or products (historical events, political systems, artworks, scientific theories, etc.) unamenable to the reductive analyses associated with scientific explanation. Humanists therefore conduct their ‘studia humanitas’ through criticism rather than the so-called scientific method.
The connection between the supernatural and the spiritual is one that must be broken if we are to evolve into a society free from the chains of religion. I don’t think this is advancing as quickly as our abandoning of patriarchal religious practices. The two most prominent wars, Palestine and Ukraine, have very challenging religious dimensions, which sustain and glorify the conflicts.
It is a major and very complex problem that goes way beyond any Scottish context and any comment feels highly inadequate. All I know is that the idea of an increasingly virtual society where there are no physical communal spaces left and where even pubs are few and far between as everyone simply stays at home all the time staring at screens, is like a horrible dystopia to me, a terrible indictment of so called technological ‘progress’ and makes me even more convinced that the increasing digitisation of everything and its concentration into our phones, which are now literal physical extensions of ourselves is a total disaster for humanity as they pander to all our worst instincts and few of our good ones.
This excellently thoughtful and quite experimental short 1972 documentary film (with a great score) is what the ruined seminary pictured above was like when it was functioning:
https://movingimage.nls.uk/film/3071
Your comment, Niemand, makes me think of the Quaker Parker Palmer’s expression, “spaces that are hospitable to the soul”. That’s what’s needed, and what wise remaining chuches might offer (and some already offer).
While here, can I recommend the Pew Foundation’s research on global religious trends: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/12/21/key-findings-from-the-global-religious-futures-project/
@Alastair McIntosh, I hadn’t realised how complicit Quakers were in British racialised chattel slavery until I took a course on Quakers run by a Quaker. Marks for honesty, at least. Not only did Quaker banks fund it, according to this source which tallies with our course material:
“Quakers were involved in the lucrative slave trade as ship owners, captains, iron-masters, merchants and investors, in ports such as London and Bristol. These Quaker businessmen faced the opprobrium of the powerful anti-slavery groundswell within the Quaker movement in the mid-18th Century and gradually had to withdraw either from the trade or from Quakerism.”
https://www.quakersintheworld.org/quakers-in-action/55/Anti-Slavery-in-Britain
The odd thing I learnt from the course is that mainstream Quakers regarded personal prosperity as a sign of Divine approval.
This neatly moves on to the horrific consequences of the Christian version of the Just-world hypothesis, manifested in victim-blaming.
Well, I gather Richard Nixon was a Quaker, and not one much interested in providing safe spaces, even in neutral countries.
With regard to the decline of organized Christianity, Mike Small asks; ‘Is this important ? Does anybody care ?’
In the Guardian article he quotes, Professor Callum Brown says, ‘there’s been nothing like this in recorded history.’ This suggests it is important.
Mike Small views it as ‘inevitable and long-overdue.’ Behind such thinking is a belief in progress.
I am far less sanguine about Scottish society’s capacity to thrive in the absence of the common belief system which has been its bedrock for as long as Scotland has existed.
Severin Carrell’s figure of ‘273 men training to be priests’ in Scotland in 1982 is not credible. I would bet it was less than a fifth of that number.
My public library is my ‘church’
Yeah, a public space also vulnerable. Some have said the same of community gardens
I have a dog in this race in that six members of my family have been Moderators ( leaders ) of the Church of Scotland, and indeed so does Mike Small in that one Moderator Leonard, Small was a most notable one.
Even though I regard so many of the fundamentals of their suggested faith ludicrous and I find myself depressed at the quality of the services offered I still would like to see the COS thrive as I see it as a force for good, for community, for orchestrating the commonly held wish for caring for one another and fighting the inherent evils of the capitalist system.
We still within that structure of the church have an opportunity for doing positive good and think we shouldn’t sell off that structure without at the very least asking the church to update their liturgy and systemic order.
I sense that most folk have a need for an organiaation to help them be the better people they would like to be and the Church isn’t helping them get there.
Mind you maybe it’s my genes speaking. Praise the Lord.
Six! Six!
I too believe that both churches could make a useful contribution and would love them to be “for community, for orchestrating the commonly held wish for caring for one another and fighting the inherent evils of the capitalist system”. I hae my doubts but that’s what they could be.
I think the stats presented in Severin Carrell’s piece are rather stark though. Don’t shoot the messenger. Both the catholic and the presbyterian churches are haemorrhaging members at an astonishing rate and left with a vast real estate of crumbling stone. I think the three criteria I have laid out are fair as a test, can they bring ‘grace’; provide community; or offer an explanation of the world. I think the last seems most unlikely and the problem is what is the USP because people can find the first and second through various other mediums.
Doug Gay, who is a minister (I dont know him) has asked to write a response piece to this, which Ive gladly agreed to.
Mike Small would like to see Christian churches survive as, essentially, welfare organizations.
The problem here is that, as the French philosopher, Remi Brague put it; ‘Faith produces its effects only so long as it remains faith and not calculation. We owe European civilization to people who believed in Christ, not people who believed in Christianity.’
The German (atheist) philosopher Jurgen Habermas, agrees; ‘Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights and democracy, the benchmarks of Western Civilization. . . Everything else is post-modern chatter.’
For those promoting secularism, the phrase – ‘Be careful what you wish for’ – comes to mind.
“Christianity, and nothing else is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of western civilisation. To this day, we have no other options [to Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.”
This ‘quotation’ first appeared in the Christian Science Monitor in 2006, and it’s since been reproduced on a large number of American fundamentalist Christian websites.
But it’s a misquotation. It purports to have been taken from a 1999 interview between the critical theorist, Jürgen Habermas and Eduardo Mendieta. The interview’s since been published in English, with the title, ‘A Conversation About God and the World’, in Habermas’s book, Time of Transitions.
What Habermas actually says in the interview is:
“Egalitarian universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom and social solidarity, of an autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, of the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct heir of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.”
The misquote rewrites Habermas’s statement and changes its meaning:
(1) Habermas is talking about the historical origin of the egalitarian universalism that structures our moral discourse, not the foundation of human rights.
(2) Habermas locates this origin in a legacy of all the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam, and Chtristianity) and not just that of Christianity.
(3) Habermas says that we can’t escape this historical legacy, not that we’ve no alternative to Christianity.
According to Habermas, the ideas of freedom, solidarity, autonomy, conscience, human rights, and democracy, are neither religious nor metaphysically ‘founded’ or ‘grounded’ on any specific religion, ideology, or culture. In the same interview with Mendieta, he says:
“Notwithstanding their European origins, human rights today represent a universal language in which global relations can be normatively regulated.”
Towards developing this universal language, Habermas calls for intercultural dialogue in fora that reproduce as closely as possible his ‘ideal speech situation’ and critical self-reflection:
“Insofar as the intercultural discourse on human rights is conducted in a spirit of reciprocal recognition, it can lead the West to a decentered understanding of a normative construction that is no longer the property of Europeans and may no longer exclusively reflect the particularities of this one culture… Thus the Judeo-Hellenic West must reflect on one of its greatest cultural achievements, the capacity for decentering one’s own perspectives, for self-reflection, and for a self-critical distancing from one’s own traditions. The West must refrain from using any non-discursive means in the hermeneutical conversation between cultures, and must become just one voice among others.”
In his ‘Remarks on Legitimation through Human Rights’, in his book The Postnational Constellation, he says that:
“My working hypothesis is that the standards of human rights stem less from the particular cultural background of Western civilisation than from the attempt to answer specific challenges posed by a [capitalist] modernity that has in the meantime covered the globe.”
In his discussion with Cardinal Ratzinger, Habermas give a longer account of how local religious concepts have historically been transformed into universal concepts available to the general public of unbelievers and members of other faiths beyond the boundaries of a particular religious community. Habermas sees this transformation as a secularising ‘recovery’ or ‘revaluation’ of meaning from ‘dead’ religious texts.
Christianity and other religions can still be an inspirational force to our moral and ethical understanding. Non-religious citizens can’t exclude that the world religions still have ‘semantic potentials’ (as Habermas calls it). But these potentials must be released by a secularising recovery or revaluation of the now ‘dead’ meaning of those religious texts. Modern, post-metaphysical thinking must be prepared to learn from religion, while at the same time remaining agnostic.
This interaction also works the other way; institutional religion must also be prepared to learn from science and the humanities. But this Nietzsche transvaluation of religious traditions (e.g. by the other critical theorist and humanist, Erich Fromm) is another topic.
Yep, there’s an argument that capitalism/modernity works by reducing the inherent value of our unique and incommensurable human experiences and their shared cultural expressions to their exchange value as commodities; basically, capitalism makes everything the same, with the worth of anything being determined, not by its own inherent virtue or utility, but by the price it can command in the marketplace.
On the basis of that argument, some apologists claim that religion (in general, and theirs in particular) defends the fundamental humanity that capitalism/modernity erodes through its commodification, which is why it remains important and ‘relevant’ today as a site of resistance to modernity’s dominant materialist culture of and the power relations which that culture expresses (capitalism).
But, even from a religious or quasi-religious ‘secular’ point of view: are church closures any more significant for our spiritual well-being than the closure of other commercial spaces, such as pubs, banks, and post offices? Doesn’t it speak well of our spiritual well-being that we’re abandoning the ‘tombs and sepulchres of God’?
The curators of religious spaces claim that they’re magical sites of numinous experience. However, the ‘magic’ only works if you already believe in it. Even those who still self-identify as ‘Christian’ have largely ceased to congregate in those spaces (as of March 2022, only 18% of Scots who self-identify as ‘Christian’ attend church regularly), which would suggest that the vast majority of Christians no longer believe in the magical power of the institution and/or are experiencing the divine presence elsewhere.
The first secular community centre was created in Thringstone at the turn of the 19th century. In the 1960s and 70s thousands were built in working class communities in the Uk. Paid for by local authorities they replaced traditional church going. In this century local authorities starved of tax money are closing them at speed. Community Development workers are disappearing. Denmark has many. It is interesting that none of your readers seem to be aware of this mass movement. Perhaps it is because middle class people found Community centres a bit rough??? We could build and develop them again given a redistributive state in an Independent Scotland!!
Spot on, Stan. There’s also the matter of how churches and other religious communities have had to step back in to charitably supply the deficit that’s grown in state-funded community development over the past 30 years.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/dec/27/scotland-losing-churches-morham
Someone is pinching someone’s work here.
No. The article is acknowledged, quoted from and linked to at the top of the piece?
“The collapse in religious observance and power is deeply significant” writes Severin Carrell ‘Anchors in our landscapes’: secular Scotland is fast losing its churches.
I hope the application of the ‘right to reply’ will address the case for religious exemptions from secular laws. This Al Jazeera documentary on the Secrets of the Clergy covers legal battles in the federal USA and contains testimony of child sexual abuse:
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/fault-lines/2023/12/20/secrets-of-the-clergy
Apparently Anglican and especially Catholic responses to IICSA want exemption from mandatory reporting under what they term the ‘Seal of the Confessional’.
Also ever-topical are religious exemptions for misogyny, racism and celebration of genocide (the latter particularly evident in the Old Testament). Perhaps it should be given the Mein Kampfe treatment? After all, the racist notion of God’s chosen people has negative real-world consequences. But expect other religions to rally round in defence on that one.
I am still not clear why any secular state would be supposed to tolerate any ideology which insists on worshipping a God who tortures unbelievers etc for eternity.
It’s because a secular state (a state that is unconcerned with religious and spiritual matters) is supposed to be morally neutral and tolerant of all ideologies, even those which most of its population would find repugnant.
As an Atheist I find the decline of churches difficult to mourn. A new landscape is gradually appearing and one which poses new challenges for Humanists. One aspect of this, as Mike rightly points out, is a decline in community life and non-capitalist social spaces. Another is the weakening of liberal Christianity and a shrinkage and splintering into hyper-conservative cult-like bodies with moral beliefs which are in some cases utterly at odds with mainstream secular opinion. Another challenge is how the Humanist movement will respond. When I was working on the Humanist Movement in Modern Britain project, I came to the conclusion that the type of Humanism which we have inherited from the 1960s has serious problems and may not be best suited to present and future conditions. This is Liberal Humanism, much concerned with individual rights and freedoms and geared to campaign to wrestle these from the oppressive grasp of religion, for example, the emancipation of LGBT+ people, the decriminalization of abortion and latterly, assisted dying. This has produced a tradition of campaigning organizations. What happens when the battles have been won? The future direction, as I see it, should not be to tussle with churches in the main, but to provide moral and ethical leadership and community to the Humanist, and the community aspect is one which contemporary Humanism has managed extremely badly. Liberal Humanism is also flawed in that it fails to incorporate a critique of capitalism. It wants rights and freedoms, but ignores the economic system which ensures that access to these things may be restricted to large numbers of people. It also means that organized Humanism struggles with credibility, especially amongst the young. The historical example of the forerunner, Ethical Culture, may provide a sign for future direction and an emphasis on social welfare.
@Charlie Lynch, are there not significant divisions between people within the L*G*B*T constellation, and does that not suggest that there is no simplistic “battle to be won”?
What do you mean?
The Scottish Episcopal Church, the Church of Scotland and the Methodists now welcome LGBT+ parishioners with full access to the sacraments including ordination to the clergy and same-sex marriage. Many had already discreetly employed gay organists and choirmasters for decades. So in protestant Scotland at least, this battle has been won, and nowadays street parades tend to be celebratory in that regard. Last month, Pope Francis announced that priests would be allowed to bless same-sex couples, a move that appeared to depart radically from the Church’s erstwhile denial of its core sacraments to LGBT+ communicants if they were not celibate, and longstanding refusal to bless same-sex unions. One can only hope that an apology and a resiling from anti-LGBT+ catechism and associated rhetoric is not far behind. The transgender debate blindsided many in the LGBT+ community, who thought we could relax in our newfound freedoms. Some want the T to secede from the LGB so they do not have to deal with so-called ‘TERFs’, however most to my knowledge see this as a hill worth dying on, à la “when they came for the [insert disliked minority]…”
The Scottish Episcopal Church, the Church of Scotland and the Methodists now welcome LGBT+ parishioners with full access to the sacraments including ordination to the clergy and same-sex marriage. Many had already discreetly employed gay organists and choirmasters for decades. So in protestant Scotland at least, this battle has been won, and nowadays street parades tend to be celebratory in that regard. Indeed, the Scottish Episcopal Church mounted a sizeable cohort complete with supportive signs for the last pre-Covid Edinburgh Pride and continue actively supportive participation.
Last month, Pope Francis announced that priests would be allowed to bless same-sex couples, a move that appeared to depart radically from the Church’s erstwhile denial of its core sacraments to LGBT+ communicants if they were not celibate, and longstanding refusal to bless same-sex unions. One can only hope that an apology and a resiling from anti-LGBT+ catechism and associated rhetoric is not far behind. The transgender debate blindsided many in the LGBT+ community, who thought we could relax in our newfound freedoms. Some want the T to secede from the LGB so they do not have to deal with so-called ‘TERFs’, however most to my knowledge see this as a hill worth dying on, à la “when they came for the [insert disliked minority]…”
Would be hard to disagree with any of that.
I haven’t any time for evangelism, whether it’s of a theistic, atheistic, or a completely non-theistic variety.
I engaged critically with organised Humanism in the 1980s. It seemed to me that it consisted of a community of Christians who had lost their faith in God, wanted to develop their own ‘godless’ confessions and ceremonies that would serve as an substitute for those in which they no longer found spiritual fulfilment, and to spread the gospel of their enlightenment. It was all very middle-brow, middle-class, and middle-aged. Humanists even then grieved the fact that they were failing to win converts among young people.
Happily, God is dead; young people especially no longer have in general have any need or use for grand narratives that would provide them with ‘moral and ethical leadership and community’ like Christianity once did and Islam still aspires to do. Young people in our society today are generally motivated rather by the petit recits that pertain to particular rights and freedoms and to campaign for the liberation of minorities whose rights and freedoms are denied. And when those battles have been won, then they’ve been won; the victory is to be celebrated and defended. Crusading to bring the world under the moral and ethical leadership and community of one’s own particular faith or ‘truth’ is no longer a viable aspiration in our postmodern times; ‘God’, even in its most militant atheistic forms, is mouldering in the tombs and sepulchres in which we’ve laid and venerate it.
Given that the 1980s were the lowest ebb for the movement in the 20th century your experience is not surprising. If there is no need for organized Humanism today, how do you account for the remarkable growth of Humanists UK in the last twenty years?
A part of it may be down to a legal quirk. If you want to get married outside of a registrars office you need to opt either for a religious officiant, or a Humanist celebrant. So if you don’t want god at the ceremony, you need a Humanist. (At least this was the case when I got married in 2012, this may have changed.)
There’s certainly a need for organised Humanism among the denomination’s 100k members and supporters in the UK, just there’s a need among the UK’s 130k Jehovah’s Witnesses (say) for a religious institution. Organised humanism, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, is a community that provides people who share similar experiences and beliefs with mutual fellowship and succour. And I’d defend every citizen’s right to be treated equally under the law and to have an equal say in the conduct of our public affairs, irrespective of his or her private convictions and associations.
What I can’t defend is any denomination’s claim that it’s especially qualified to provide me with moral and ethical leadership, which is what all missionary religions and their surrogates claim. Such leadership claims is the ‘curst conceit o bein richt that damns the vast majority o men’; succumbing to such claims is an escape from freedom.
Late to this, but while I find the decline of organised religion hard to mourn, community is important.
In Aberdeen we’re building Aberdeen Social Centre to provide community space. Space without god, or drink, where folk can come together and plot the fall of capitalism. (Other topics of conversation are available…)
Check us out if you’re in town.
https://aberdeensocialcentre.org/
Another viewpoint – Red Enlightenment by Graham Jones
“The left commonly rejects religion and spirituality as counter-revolutionary forces, citing Marx’s famous dictum that “religion is the opium of the people.”
Yet forms of spirituality have motivated struggles throughout history, ranging from medieval peasant uprisings and colonial slave revolts, to South American liberation theology and the US civil rights movement. And in a world where religion is growing, and political movements are ridden with conflict, burnout, and failure, what can the left learn from religion?
https://repeaterbooks.com/product/red-enlightenment
Video interview with Red Enlightenment author , Graham Jones
https://youtu.be/dUcVkevLsfs?si=RHIf5ne2qWJmCARf
And the left has been wrong to so reject it. As Marx wrote in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (which he wrote around 1843 but which wasn’t published until 1927, long after the left’s dismissal of religious and spirituality):
‘Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’
Marx was concerned with transforming the moral expression of and protest against real suffering into political action, the piety of hand-wringing and banner-waving and virtue-signalling into the real work of revolution, which is seizing the power of the state and using that power to restructure the relations of production, distribution, and exchange from which that real suffering emanates.
Rather than reject religion and spirituality as counter-revolutionary forces, the left should be embracing and surpassing them so as to (as Marx also said) ‘bring them down to earth’.