Mission Impossible

At the height of empire, Britain used to send missionaries out to Africa and Asia to instruct the natives in personal hygiene, instil good table manners and preach the gospel. The occasional unlucky one found himself in a cannibal’s pot for his trouble; but mostly they won out, establishing themselves as the kindly, civilising arm of imperialism, founding schools and clinics, and converting the heathen. Back home, the public was jolly proud of them. British missionaries were both an expression and a source of Britain’s muscular national self-assurance.

So what are we to think of ourselves today, now that we are on the receiving end of missionary attention? For, all over the country, from the hamlets of rural Somerset to the urban centres of the north-east, Catholic priests from abroad, many of them from former colonial territories in Africa and the subcontinent, are hard at work keeping the flickering flame of faith alive by preaching the gospel to the English. Why are they here? Is there some master plan devised by Pope Benedict to re-conquer the spiritual wastelands? Or, just as the NHS plunders the developing world for doctors and nurses, are Catholic bishops doing something similarly borderline-exploitative to recruit priests to attend to our spiritual health?

According to the statistics, we are indeed the heathens now. Quite how godless we have become depends upon which survey you read and what question is asked. According to most recent polls, we are not so irreligious as the Estonians, Swedes or Czechs, but we do hover just above them, close to the bottom of the international league table of religiosity, in company with the Belgians and the Dutch. While Christianity is alive, expanding, ardent even, in the developing world; it is pale, sickly and unsteady on its pins in Europe. Our own national census provides a picture of a country where more than two in three identify themselves as Christian; but the findings of the British Social Attitudes Survey acknowledge that much of this self-identification is purely nominal, not underpinned by observance or even belief.