Religion In Britain Its There If You Look - Road to the Middle Class

THE BRITISH are considered to be irreligious, with both the established Church of England and the Catholic Church experiencing steady decline. But there is life in the world of religion, as Danny Kruger reports from Pontins, a British holiday camp where folks will be attending “the annual evangelical jamboree organised by Holy Trinity, Brompton.”

Christianity in London radiates out in concentric black and white rings. In the middle is Kensington Temple, near Notting Hill Gate, a vast Pentecostal congregation of West Africans and Afro-Caribbeans led by a hyperactive former ballet dancer called Colin Dye, who does the splits on the podium. A little further out are the posh white churches of central London, like [Holy Trinity, Brompton].
In outer London are more huge black churches, some of them clearly crazy but most safely orthodox. Beyond, round the M25, are the white suburban mega-churches of Britain�s Bible Belt.

Mega-churches? In Britain. Well now. There�s more.

In black neighbourhoods, in particular, the church is perhaps the most cohesive social agent there is, the one cultural force that keeps families intact and steers young men into lives of responsibility and purpose.
As for rich whites like me, what is prompting the evangelical surge? It is partly the churches themselves, which have shrugged off the flummery of established religion. Charles Moore, on this page on Saturday, quoted John Buchan on radical Muslims: “They want to live face to face with God without a screen of ritual and images and priest-craft.” So do we. The same desire for integrity and openness that produced Protestantism in the first place is stoking a new revival, casual in style but solid in substance.

A hundred years ago, Britain featured the muscular Christianity of Eric Liddell, the Chariots of Fire athlete who perished in a Japanese internment camp in China in 1945. Two hundred years ago the “posh whites” of the time got together in the Clapham Sect and helped end the slave trade. Two hundred and fifty years ago the Wesley brothers brought Methodism and its simple message of “work all you can, save all you can, give all you can” to British mechanics.

Stay tuned.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems� No more rules, no more models� Genius conjures up rather than learns� ” —Victor Hugo
C�sar Gra�a, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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