There has been discussion over the past few weeks that Britain’s young people are undergoing a religious revival. This Easter weekend, we asked two young writers to write about their church. The Spectator’s Margaret Mitchell is Catholic; Policy Exchange’s James Vitali is Anglican. You can read the discussion below.
Margaret Mitchell
There’s an episode of The Simpsons that gives an excellent argument for Catholicism. Bart gets sent to Catholic school where he becomes interested in the faith, while Homer becomes taken with the pancake suppers and bingo. Marge is not happy about this. She has a daydream about arriving at Protestant heaven to find WASP-y types with jumpers tied around their shoulders playing croquet, but her husband and son aren’t there. They’re over in Catholic heaven, where the Spanish are drinking and dancing, the Italians are drinking and snogging, and the Irish are drinking and brawling.
Theologically sound? No. But it’s true in spirit. Catholicism is known for being baroque, passionate, a bit gory. It seems distinctly un-British. And yet many young people in the UK also find themselves more at home in the Roman Catholic Church, which hasn’t been the majority faith in this country for about the last five centuries. A YouGov survey commissioned by the Bible Society found that last year, Catholics made up 41 per cent of regular churchgoers between the ages of 18 and 34, while Anglicans made up 20 per cent. Among this age group in 2018, Catholics made up 22 per cent and Anglicans 30 per cent.
Among 18 to 24-year-olds, 45 per cent of them say they believe in God, up from 28 per cent in 2018. I’m not surprised young people are looking for something transcendent. There seem to be endless accounts of how young people are feeling lost and alienated. The things that might have given us a sense of purpose in the absence of religion have, for various reasons, failed us. We feel let down by our country, distant from our families, estranged from our neighbours and spiritually deadened by email jobs and social media. The natural world seems to be receding, and technology is starving culture. Modern love feels cheap and fleeting. Doing ‘what makes you feel good’ rarely lives up to its promise.
But why are so many choosing the Roman Catholic Church? Why not other religions, or even other Christian denominations? I think many young people are attracted to the clarity and cohesion of Catholicism. The worldwide Catholic community is unified under the Pope – we practice the same traditions, read the same scripture, believe the same things. The increase in young Catholics in Britain probably has a lot to do with immigration, and the fact that the Mass in Britain is celebrated the same way as it would be in India, Poland, Nigeria or Ukraine. This is also a testament to the Catholic Church’s strong missionary work and charity around the world.
The authority of the Pope is a sticking point for Protestants, but I’m not tempted by their alternative, of denominations which cannot make up their minds on theology and social teaching. Many of our secular leaders also seem to lack confidence, and I think young people are drawn to the conviction with which the Roman Catholic Church asserts its ultimate authority. We have good reasons to do so. Christ entrusted the leadership of the Church to St Peter in Rome, which has been passed down through generations to Pope Francis today. The books of the Bible were compiled by the Catholic Church, and over the past 2,000 years some of humanity’s greatest thinkers have been in the service of the Church, articulating and clarifying her teachings.
Yet at the same time as the Church is sure of itself, it is also full of mystery. The Trinity, the virgin birth, the human and divine nature of Jesus Christ: these things go beyond our comprehension. The existence of angels and demons is tough to wrap one’s rational mind around. I think many young people already have this strong sense of the ‘spiritual’ – Gen Z are quite comfortable playing around with crystals, astrology, tarot cards, manifestation and sorts of witchy things that derive from a sense that the world is more than material. Young people are primed for the stranger aspects of Catholicism that require a leap of faith.
Catholicism is terribly beautiful, which by comparison makes other faiths look merely pretty
The Bible Society’s study showed that the increased attendance across churches was mainly down to young men: 21 per cent of men aged 18 to 24 attended church at least once a month, compared to 12 per cent of women. Many of these young men will be drawn to the discipline and intellectual tradition of the Catholic faith, as well as its conservatism when it comes to gender, sexuality and the family. The Church sees masculinity and femininity as virtues, not liabilities or weaknesses. The body isn’t inconvenient material that gets in the way of salvation, but something that God has redeemed – He was incarnated as a human, after all. The Catholic Church’s insistence on a male priesthood is not evidence of an inherent, inescapable misogyny, but rather an affirmation of the fact that men and women are evidently different and created to excel at different things.
Of course, the Church is more than an arbiter of morality, but there’s something attractive about its clear sense of good and evil, and the recognition that what is good for your soul will bring you joy. True freedom, paradoxically, requires rules and sacrifices. Jesus did not shy away from making difficult demands from people, asking us to love him more than we love our own life.
Though I was raised Catholic, I have always had a secret fondness for Anglican churches, their bleakness in Advent, their tweedy elder parishioners, the majestic style of the King James Bible. I like their hymns better than a lot of the praise-and-worship songs that have somehow become popular in Catholic churches. It is painful to think that the declining population of young Anglicans in Britain means many of those churches will go out of use, and that the people for whom it’s so wrapped up in family and patriotism will suffer a profound loss.
That being said, I think the youth revival in the Catholic Church really comes down to the fact that Catholicism is terribly beautiful, which by comparison makes other faiths look merely pretty. I don’t mean just aesthetic beauty, though that exists in abundance, too. I mean the teachings and traditions of the Catholic Church are beautiful, and that they answer a longing in the human heart.
As an example, one of the aspects I find most beautiful about the Catholic Church is its way of seeing all of creation as a way of encountering God. We believe there’s an entanglement between the material and the spiritual. We’re not just souls with bodies, we are bodies. We hold onto relics, bless things with holy water, make the sign of the cross. We believe that when a priest consecrates the Eucharist, the prayer is not just spiritual fluff, but changes material reality – it is the Body of Christ. From afar, these acts seem bizarre, halfway to idol worship, cannibalism or natural theology. But from within, it strikes me that there couldn’t be a more natural or beautiful way to look at a world which God called very good, and no better way to see it for all its mystery and depth.
James Vitali
Margaret is undoubtedly correct when she says that one of Catholicism’s principal attractions for young people is its clarity. The Pope is the supreme authority on spiritual matters in this world. This is the transubstantiated body and blood of Christ. These are the doctrines you assent to. In a world where the human condition seems more uncertain, where there appears to be greater confusion over even the most basic moral concepts, where truth in our culture is being replaced with ‘my truth’, that clarity feels like a lifeboat.
Indeed, it attracts me. I realise increasingly that so many of my views about politics and life are essentially corollaries of Christian convictions – about right and wrong and about what it is to be a good person. And so certainty about those ideas offers the prospect of a fixity and firmness in the world which in so many ways is denied to younger generations.
I don’t think it is just a moral or theological fixity that young people so crave, however. I think they also seek a more tangible, more social rootedness in the geography and history of the places they call home – something the Anglican Church, deeply implicated in both local life and the life of our nation, seems better equipped to provide than the Catholic Church.
I realised this during a recent visit to Jerusalem. I was fortunate enough to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and with tourists scarce in the city at present, I was able to spend quite a lot of time on my own at the Altar of Crucifixion and the Aedicule – the place where Jesus was laid to rest. It is a profoundly spiritual place, in which the stories of the Bible take on a concreteness and physical reality.
Looking around and seeing Catholic and Orthodox Christians in worship, however, I couldn’t help but think that the profundity of it all was probably lost on me. The objects and relics – the Rock of Cavalry where Jesus was crucified, the anointing stone where he was laid to rest – didn’t inspire in me what they clearly inspired in many around me. It was a holy place, but it felt distant somehow.
On Good Friday this week, I sat in the pews of St Gregory’s – the parish church of my home village of Marnhull – with the rain beating on the stained-glass windows. It is a place I know intimately, and to which I have been coming for all of three decades.
It is that connection to place and past which young people yearn for, and which the parish church offers
In the service, we were encouraged to think about the significance of the Easter story. About what Jesus’s ultimate sacrifice means, and what it demands of us as a Christian.
But I don’t think it’s the prospect of theological stimulation that keeps drawing me back to this particular church – with its small, shrinking, and largely elderly congregation. Rather, it’s the fact that every time I attend a service at St Gregory’s, I feel an intense sense of belonging, of being in the right place – a feeling I simply do not get anywhere else.
St Gregory’s is where my parents were married. It is where my brother and I were baptised. It is where I went to Sunday school and confirmation class as a child. It is where my grandmother’s funeral took place. It is where I first learned to speak in public. It is, in other words, where many of the most important events not just in my own life, but in the life of my family have taken place.
And through this stone building we are connected with both a deep history and a community in the present whose very sense of place continues to be formatted by the commanding church tower. You can see it from miles away as you approach the village; from the local cricket pitch, when taking guard; from the Crown Inn of which Thomas Hardy wrote in Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
It is that connection to place and past which young people yearn for, and which the parish church offers. And for historical rather than theological reasons, it is the Anglican Church that provides the majority of such sites throughout our country.
Margaret writes of her sadness that these ancient places will go out of use with declining congregations. But I’m less fatalistic (maybe that’s true faith). As a county councillor, and outside of the transitory life of the city, I see how parishes continue to play an important role in our communal life, and how much more of a role they might play given strong Church leadership.
My friend Esmé Partridge has written about what could be done to restore their local role. I’ve spoken elsewhere about how the Church might help address pressing social issues like housing provision. Marcus Walker, chairman of Save the Parish, argues passionately that a vast diffusion of power downwards to the parish is not only in the interest of Christian mission but might also catalyse the sort of localism and community interaction that people are so eager for.
I believe there is a growing number of people in our country who feel as if something is missing from their lives. Something that previous generations did and which bound their communities together, but which our own has forgotten to do somehow. Something connected to questions that we rarely ask of ourselves today.
Charles Moore wrote this weekend that when it comes to addressing that void, “all we can try to be is in the right place at the right time”. It strikes me that whatever their present challenges, it is the Anglican churches – “our history shown; in wood and glass and iron and stone” – that offer the right place.
Comments