of this phenomenon, as is the Alpha Course’s endorsement by Bear Grylls.
To the identification of individuals as ‘A list’, ‘B list’ or minor celebs, relatively recent developments in Reality TV have brought a further category into play, namely, those who are famous for being famous. Such is the infamy and then tragedy of a character like Jade Goody, one-time anti-hero in the Big Brother house and then transformed by her battle with cancer into a national heroine: Reality TV brings celebrity within reach of ordinary people. The storming success of franchises like Big Brother, The X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent and the rest are testimony of the significance of celebrity in validating reality. For all that most people happily live ordinary lives, the culture of celebrity constantly whispers a different story.
Liquid modernity
We live in changing times and the present looks very different from the past. In trying to understand the reality that confronts us and the future that lies ahead, many have turned to the conversation regarding postmodernism for help. Along the way almost every change and trend in contemporary life has been used as an illustration of the postmodern advance. For some this is a deeply unsettling dialogue as old certainties are swept away: others want to embrace this new context enthusiastically and so to enable the gospel to contextualize itself into the new cultural reality. Scholars like Stanley Grenz have attempted to sum up these influences and demonstrate that the future will be defined by the postmodern impetus to pessimism, holism, communitarianism, relativism, pluralism and subjectivism (1996, pp. 14–15). Other voices hold that the Christian community needs to take seriously the deconstruction of Derrida, Lyotard’s ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ and Foucault’s work on the relationship between knowledge and power.
There is no doubt that these are important thinkers who have significantly influenced contemporary ideas. However, Christians often have either been overly fearful or, conversely, have over-interpreted this debate. James K. A. Smith in his Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? looks to exorcize the fear while giving a more accurate account of the ideas of postmodern theorists (Smith, 2006, see also White, 2006). For example, Smith outlines how Lyotard’s ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ addresses a distinctly modern phenomenon where the grand stories were legitimated by an appeal to universal reason. What he had in view were the scientific narratives told by modern rationalism, scientific naturalism and sociobiology insofar as they claimed to be demonstrable by reason alone. By contrast, while the biblical narrative is grand in scope, it does not make an appeal to a supposed universal, scientific reason. Rather, it is a pre-modern matter of proclamation and requires a response of faith. By Lyotard’s definition, it is not a metanarrative (Smith, 2006, pp. 64–5).
While most commentators will make clear that in talking about postmodernism the subject of the conversation is about this time of transition and flux at the end of the modern era, the very term itself can be deceptive. It is often misunderstood as implying that the whole of life is now being lived after the modern era, which is patently not so. In many ways contemporary western society remains thoroughly modern as both our individualism and scientific rationalism clearly demonstrate.
An early writer on the advent of postmodernism, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman began to publish his series of books on liquid modernity in the year 2000, seeking to reframe the conversation. In short, Bauman’s thesis is that one of the most significant and formative dimensions of our late modern culture is the speed of change. It ‘is a society in which the conditions under which its members act change faster than it takes the ways of acting to consolidate into habits and routines’ (Bauman, 2005, p. 1). He goes on to observe that it is increasingly difficult for elements of culture to hold their shape or stay on course for long, and that predicting the future on an extrapolation of past events is an increasingly risky and potentially misleading thing to do. He charts the five key challenges of liquid modernity as:
1 The inability of social forms to keep their shape for long.
2 Power and politics separating as power flows beyond national boundaries in a globalized world.
3 The loss of community with the increase of a randomized network of relationships.
4 The collapse of long-term thinking, planning and acting.
5 The responsibility for resolving life’s problems and challenges shifting onto the shoulders of individuals.
Christianity and British society
There is no escaping the fact that the place of Christianity significantly changed over the second half of the twentieth century. A seemingly inexorable decline in attendance at Sunday worship and increasingly strong calls for the secularization of public life and its implied demand for the disestablishment of the Church of England are all evidence of this trend.
Many writers have begun to explore the idea of a post-Christian Britain and have concluded that it might not be as bad a context in which to engage with the missio Dei as some might have feared. Stuart Murray defines this period of Post-Christendom as,
the culture that emerges as the Christian faith loses coherence within a society that has been definitively shaped by the Christian story and as the institutions that have been developed to express Christian convictions decline in influence. (2004, p. 19)
Once again the designator ‘post’ can be deceptive by implying to the casual observer that Christendom has already been consigned to history. This would be a mistake as Murray himself points out, as he identifies a range of ecclesiastical and social vestiges of Christendom in the life of both the Church and wider society (pp. 189–93).
There can be no mistake that the place of Christianity in British society is changing. But what is its present form and what might the future hold? The best empirical data that is presently available indicates that on any given Sunday between 6 and 7 per cent of the population attend services of worship, rising to 15 per cent on any given month and 25 per cent, if it is once or more each year (Brierley, 2006, and Tear Fund, 2007). Indeed, if attendance at a Christian service for a christening, wedding or funeral is taken into account, it is 80 per cent. Or again, according to the 2001 census 71.75 per cent of people in England and Wales considered their faith identity to be Christian.
The uncoupling of the formal relationships between Church and state seems irreversible. While Rowan Williams may have admitted to the New Statesman in an interview on 18 December 2008 that he could ‘see that it’s by no means the end of the world if the Establishment disappears’, he confessed to a ‘bloody mindedness’ that would resist a push to the privatization of faith by that route. While the old Christendom settlement may be passing, some have speculated on the arrival of a new expression of Christian social influence through the growth of Christianity in the global South. In Africa, Asia and Latin America the churches saw spectacular growth during the twentieth century. Many admit that the centre of gravity for Christianity has already shifted away from the West, and commentators like Philip Jenkins have observed that through social, economic and politically driven migration, not to mention missionary endeavour, the Church of the South will re-evangelize the first world. This is ‘The Next Christendom’ (Jenkins, 2007). With 44 per cent of worshippers in inner London being drawn from the black and ethnic minority communities, this is already a reality in the capital (Brierley, 2006, p. 99).
Mediated
