The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God
A Review
I’ve written a lot about the religious decline of the West. Some of it is quite despairing!
Losing Our Religion: The Religious Decline of the West?
Will Christianity Die Out by the End of this Century?
Not only that, look at the mass followings of Abraham Piper (John Piper’s son) who TikToks Bible mockery and Alex O’Connor (who looks like Harry Potter and Nicola Sturgeon made a baby) who has made a digital career out of religious scepticism on YouTube (though even his scepticism is waning a bit I hear).
Maybe we are really in a “secular age” where religion is replaced with politics or entertainment.
Religious adherence in the West is declining whether it is because of scientism, church abuse scandals, right-wing politics interfaced with religion, or even iPhones, sociologists and statisticians tell us that religious adherence is declining at a rapid rate.
But are there signs of a reversal? I do keep hearing stories of people coming to faith.
I just saw an ad for a Lenten prayer guide led by actor Chris Pratt and read about how actor Nicole Kidman and her musician husband Keith Urban attend a church. Plus, public intellectuals like Niall Ferguson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali have converted to Christianity. Even Richard Dawkins is touting himself as a “cultural Christianity.” Meanwhile, psychologist Jordan Peterson and musician Nick Cave inhabit the porous boundaries between faith and doubt. Historian Sarah Irving-Stonebraker came to faith because the new atheists were so bad.
Check out the Side B Stories podcast about interviews with ex-sceptics … like me!
Added to that, I just read that journalist Giles Coren has given up atheism for Lent. Read his story here or an account of it here.
Religious revolutions are rarely top-down or bottom up, but happen when the influencer class in a society starts to join a new religious wave, as arguably happened with the Reformation! So perhaps a new religious wave is afoot with all these journalists, intellectuals, historians, and artists becoming Christians.
Why am I telling you this? Well, I was sceptical when Justin Brierly brought out his book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, since it looked like the sun was setting on Western Christianity. But maybe he is onto something!
Brierly writes from the perspective of the UK, but he has insights about the USA and wider world too. He’s had conversations with N.T. Wright and Tom Holland about faith today, spoken to sceptics and ex-sceptics, he gets into materialism and morality, covers the Bible’s storyline, and documents the rise and fall of the new atheists.
Brierly begins and ends the book with the metaphor of faith as a sea that ebbs and flows. If the 1990s were high tide for religion in the modern era, it seems like since 2008 the tide has been going out and going far. But Brierly gives us enough cause to suppose that maybe the tide will return again and faith will once more sweep upon our shores.
A tremendous book, thoroughly recommended!
It can be depressing viewing from the rooftops rather than at ground level. I run an art group within church premises but open to all. As people learn new interesting techniques conversations are open interesting and fruitful and we support a wide neurodiverse community. Numbers joining the group, and alpha as a consequence have doubled. Yes in terms if population and demographic we are a small % but one that invites people as they are and offers support to transform, if taken up i.e.no pressure to conform just an open invitation. Acorns or better mustard seeds growing.
Thanks for the recommendation. There are signs of hope, Dawkins 'God delusion' and the angry middle aged men who made up the New Atheists seem quite out of fashion amongst the intelligensia.
From a UK perspective however I am
worried that some of this new found interest in, and appeal to, Christianity may just be part of some 'culture war' phenomena waged against ill-defined 'wokism' or Islam or some other perceived threat to 'British values' rather than a genuine following of Jesus.