By Catherine Pepinster
Christianity is being harmed by increasing secularisation in Britain and the attacks of dogmatic atheists, seeking to further damage it, according to the author of a new study of the decline of the Christian faith.
Yet while surveys show only a minority of people now say they are Christian in Britain, Rupert Shortt said there were, at the same time. signs that younger people were turning to religion.
Speaking at the launch of The Eclipse of Christianity, Mr Shortt said: “Christianity is the foremost expression of human culture, but it is faltering in Europe and the Middle East.”
While Christians in the Middle East were subject to violent persecution, he said, the religion in Europe was being targeted by secularists who have helped create “an era of infotainment, blaming and shaming”.
He went on to cite the theologian Tom Wright who has argued that a society that has rejected the Christian god now worships Mars, Mammon and Aphrodite — war, money and sex.
The Eclipse of Christianity is regarded as an important and wide-ranging international study, both a report on the unsettling consequences of secularisation and a defence of a creed too often belittled by its opponents.
In the book, Mr Shortt outlines Christianity’s fading profile in the present, but also argues compellingly that Europe’s historic faith remains critical to the survival of a humane culture.
He says that mainstream churches are faltering — or even at risk of dying out — in their western and Middle Eastern heartlands. He points to surveys confirming that only a minority of people in a country such as Britain now claim Christian allegiance, and the pattern is being matched in neighbouring societies.
At the same time, Mr Shortt argues that many opinion-formers preach secularist ideology with a self-confidence shading into dogmatism. Others, unsure of their moorings, feel some residual attachment to spirituality, while being sceptical about the existence of God and other articles of belief. Yet he maintains that church teaching remains intellectually robust, as well as inspiring a transformative global presence.
The most trenchant critique of the opponents of Christianity came from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who joined Mr Shortt in conversation at Holy Trinity Church in Sloane Square, London.
Ms Ali, a Somali-born activist who has regularly attacked Islam, announced her conversion to Christianity last year after previously being an outspoken atheist.
“Christianity is being pushed out of institutions like universities,” she told the audience. “We are seeing an abandoning of morality and spirituality.”
She went on to accuse people who said Christianity was a religion of white men who colonised other parts of the world as perpetuating “a shallow lie”, and warned that another religion (which she did not name, but many of the audience inferred she meant Islam) was telling people: It is the greatest religion on earth.
“They are allowed to do so by the woke and this is forcing Christianity into a corner,” Ali said.
Asked by the chairman, Father Daniel French, if Christians, including young people newly drawn to the religion, were able to be subversives in the new situation, Ms Ali replied: “I think we are the new punks, but you need to present yourselves with confidence. Christianity is a religion which is superior to Islam, while woke is like communism that has shifted.”
Mr Shortt later admitted to certain criticisms of Christianity, saying that the churches’ record on gender equality and tolerance of sexual minorities was “not something to write home about”, but now identity politics had created “hierarchies of victimhood”.
This did not recognise, he said, what Christian anthropology recognised, “that the battle between good and evil runs through the human heart”.
Europe, he believed, was the main exception in a world that was becoming godlier.
The Eclipse of Christianity: and Why it Matters, by Rupert Shortt, is published by Hodder Faith
