Gage declared to Romme: ‘I’m not schizophrenic, I’m ancient Greek!’20 Together, they helped to create groups where voice-hearers could meet to discuss their experiences, explore meanings, and provide support for each other. There are now several hundred Hearing Voices groups around the world, and they’ve been a life-saver for Eleanor Longden and many others. What I like about them is they’re pragmatic in their metaphysics. Many people in the group think their voices or experiences are encounters with spiritual beings; others think they are aspects of the self. The groups support and help you, give you a social connection and a social role, no matter what your metaphysics. It helps people to find a more balanced and equal relationship with their voices – they learn that they don’t have to take their pronouncements as the Absolute Word of God.
As for Hardy’s grand vision, in some ways it could be said to have been a failure. The RERC constantly ran out of money, and was moved from Oxford to Lampeter in 2000, where the database slumbers, its warehouse of revelations more or less ignored. And yet, in other ways, Hardy’s vision has become mainstream. People in Western societies report more and more spiritual experiences, and the attitude of mainstream psychology and psychiatry to such experiences has shifted considerably in the last two decades. While the number of church attendees continues to decline across Western societies, the number of ‘spiritual but not religious’ rises.21 Spiritual experience could be said to be at the centre of the West’s new democratic spirituality – we rely more on our own personal experiences than on traditional institutions, authority figures or sacred texts.
The risk of this cultural shift, however, is that our post-religious spirituality becomes all about experiences, descending into a sort of consumerist thrill-seeking. Philip Pullman warns: ‘Seeking this sort of thing doesn’t work. Seeking it is far too self-centred. Things like my experience are by-products, not goals. To make them the aim of your life is an act of monumental and self-deceiving egotism.’ Hardy’s database is full of comments like ‘That moment was worth more than all the rest of my life put together.’ Is that a healthy attitude to the spiritual life? Imagine a marriage where you thought all the value existed in one date.
We need to integrate these moments into our everyday reality. But how? Hardy, like James, Myers and Jung, was wary of collective ecstasy. Their preferred spirituality was highly individualistic. Yet surely communities have an important role in helping us to make sense of ecstatic experiences, supporting us in the disciplines and practices we need to integrate them, and directing us outwards to serve our fellow beings.
It was with this in mind that I decided to join a charismatic Christian community. Let’s head to the Revival Tent to meet them.
2: The Revival Tent
I’m standing on a stage in a packed church, in front of 500 believers, next to the most famous Christian preacher in Britain, Nicky Gumbel. ‘So, Jules,’ he says, ‘what difference has Jesus made to your life?’
What am I going to tell the audience, I wonder? And how did I end up here?
It all started in 2012. When I finished my last book, Philosophy for Life, I’d become aware of the limits of Stoic philosophy: it was too rational, too individualistic; it left out important things like the arts, myth, ritual, sex, dancing and ecstatic experiences. I was searching for deeper community. I was a Stoic, single-dweller, bachelor, freelance writer – I was about as individualist as you could get. Philosophy clubs like the School of Life or my own London Philosophy Club were fun, but not the sort of loving community I imagined churches might provide. I was dating a Christian woman, and was impressed by how she and her Christian friends cared for one another. They seemed more open to ecstatic experiences than philosophers. One of my girlfriend’s mates, Jack, was a curate at Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB), home of the famous Alpha Course. Jack asked me if I fancied doing the course. I’d rejected Christianity when I was 16, never read the Bible and tended to think Christians were weird. But why not? If nothing else, it would be interesting research. ‘Careful you don’t get brainwashed,’ a friend told me, as I set off for HTB one Wednesday evening in January 2013.
There is a kind of self-consciousness the average English person now feels about going to church, more than if one went to a yoga session or Vipassana retreat. As the sceptic psychologist Richard Wiseman put it: ‘Being a Christian used to be shorthand for being good. Now it’s shorthand for being odd.’ In 2013, the UK became a post-Christian nation, with the majority now subscribing to no religion. There’s been a cataclysmic decline in church attendance since the 1960s, particularly in the last decade – only 750,000 people go to church on Sundays, less than 2 per cent of the population. The Anglican Church appears to be heading for extinction in England (although it’s booming in Africa). But you wouldn’t guess that if you visited HTB.1
As I approached the church in South Kensington, I joined a long line of people queuing to sign up for the Alpha Course, mainly well-dressed people in their 20s and 30s. There was a mixture of nationalities and ethnicities. HTB is particularly popular with new arrivals to the UK, and with single people – it’s been nicknamed Hunt the Bride. We were registered by a team of young volunteers, radiating positivity and wholesomeness, and divided into 40 or so groups. The groups of ten to 15 people sat in circles around the church, eating the free lasagne and introducing themselves. I was in a group with Nicky Gumbel, who is vicar at HTB. Nicky is a 60-something Old Etonian ex-barrister, grey-haired, charming, not the most obvious vessel for ecstasy – although he’s full of enthusiasm and says ‘amazing’ a lot, like everyone else in the church. He and his wife Pippa are good-looking, in love, and have charming children and grandchildren – they’re like the ideal mother and father of the extended HTB family.
When he speaks to you, Nicky fixes you with a sort of Aslan focus, as if he sees your potential role in the Great War. It’s flattering, you feel eager to sign up. He often mentions HTB’s vision: ‘the re-evangelisation of the nations, the revitalisation of the Church, and the transformation of society’. It seems a doomed mission in a country where church congregations are flat-lining, yet the success of HTB has been cited by everyone from historian Simon Schama to former Economist editor John Micklethwait as evidence that ‘God is back’.2 To date, the Alpha course has been taken by more than 29 million people in 169 countries. Hundreds of thousands have watched the Alpha videos, which feature a shirtless Bear Grylls (a member of HTB’s extended congregation). Nicky’s Bible app, Bible In One Year, has been downloaded more than a million times. In London, HTB attracts a Sunday congregation of 4,000 people, across ten services and four sites, and it has played an important role in making London the one English diocese in which the Church is growing. HTB curates have ventured forth like missionaries and opened at least 30 ‘church plants’ from Birmingham to Brighton. ‘Whenever people see a church unused or turned into a block of luxury flats, it’s like the empty palace of a long-forgotten king,’ Nicky says. ‘But when you see a church that’s full, people know the King lives!’ HTB’s influence spreads far and wide – Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, came from the HTB congregation; Tony Blair spoke at HTB’s leadership conference; David Cameron praised Alpha in his special Easter message; various celebrities have done Alpha, from Will Young to Geri Halliwell. When you’re in the warm cocoon of HTB, you really start to believe revival is possible.
Upon this rock I will build my church
After we’ve introduced ourselves and eaten our lasagne, the band on the stage starts to play. We rise for a couple of hymns, singing the words as they appear on the video screens. It’s at this point that I realise something has changed in the Church of England. Gone are the Victorian hymns and the wheezy organs; they’ve been replaced by rock bands and Coldplay-esque anthems. On Sundays, the congregation sings, arms aloft, or sways with their eyes closed beneath the twinkling lights. Initially, I found this very cheesy, sacrilege even – how dare Christians steal rock and roll? Later I learned how much rock and roll had stolen from the Church, how it’s always been
