landscape is dotted with them, mute reminders of a time when the Christian faith was practised with generous confidence throughout the land. Seeing them closed and shuttered can prompt sombre reflection even in those who had little use for them in their glory. This is the mood of the poem ‘Church Going’ by Philip Larkin, from which I have already quoted. Larkin is out cycling in the country-side when he comes across an old church and goes in. He notices the ‘little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut / For Sunday, brownish now . . . and a tense, musty, unignorable silence’. And he wonders what will happen to what he calls these serious houses on serious earth when they have all fallen out of use. He writes:
I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was . . . 23
Before churches close their doors for the last time, they undergo a rite called de-consecration. It’s a kind of funeral in which the sacredness is removed and the church becomes just another building. I know a handsome church that went through this process. It was one of the biggest churches in Gorbals in Glasgow when I lived there in the 1960s, sitting proudly in the midst of a teeming neighbourhood of grey tenements. I went in search of it not long ago, wondering if I’d be able to find it among the new streets and houses that have replaced the district I knew fifty years ago. I needn’t have worried. Its new setting makes it more dominant than ever. Still a thrilling building, it is now way out of proportion to its new surroundings. And it is no longer a church.
St Francis Catholic Church and Friary, built by Pugin and Pugin in 1870, was dramatically decorated in the high Gothic style, and the enormous congregation was served by a team of Franciscan Friars. I remember hundreds of parishioners thronging into it for the Stations of the Cross in Holy Week. The vividly painted Stations are just about all you can see of the interior now. The church was sold in 1996 and converted to a conference and community centre by the insertion of a three-storey suite of rooms into the interior. It was disconcerting to stand in the church knowing that behind the screens the original arrangements were all as they had been in the past, as if waiting for the day when they would be unveiled and restored to their former glory.
The superintendent took me behind the elegant timber frame of the insertion to show me the high altar. He told me they still had a mass there once a year. He asked if I’d like to see the little chapel the Friars once used for their community worship. We went up a short flight of stairs, and he opened a little door. I stepped into a perfectly preserved small chapel. Next to the altar, a little window opened above the nave of the church. I looked down into the great space, imagining multitudes praying, lighting candles, whispering their sins into the ears of priests in brown habits, kindling faith into flame. I was hit by a sorrow that stayed with me long after I had thanked my guide and left the church. It was partly remembrance of my own young manhood in this place fifty years before, partly dismay at the way time hurtles so many good things into the past without a backward look. So I had to remind myself that the story of religion, like everything else in life, is one of constant change and loss.
The Pagans were heartbroken when Catholic Christianity arrived in Britain in the sixth century, and banished their gods and took over their temples. At the Reformation in the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church that had supplanted Paganism was pushed out of Britain. Protestantism took over, and a way of life that had its own beauty and romance was destroyed. In our day, it seems to be Christianity itself that is fading away. I can understand why, but it still hurts me. That’s why, like Larkin, I derive a melancholy pleasure from visiting these old shrines and imagining their glory days.
***
What I can’t mourn is ‘the moral decay of Britain’ that faith leaders tell us is an inevitable consequence of the decline of religion. Moral change isn’t always decay. Sometimes it’s an improvement. I can look back with sadness on the vanished churches of my youth. I don’t mourn the passing of some of the moral attitudes they represented. The big moral shifts during my lifetime have all been improvements. I am thinking about the place and status of women and sexual minorities today, compared to how they were when I was young. If I were a woman or gay, I’d rather be alive in Britain now than in the Britain of my boyhood. Religious communities did little or nothing to bring about these improvements, because their sacred texts opposed them. It’s hard to change an ancient prejudice if you have been taught that God commanded it.
One of the useful purposes of religion in the past was the way it reinforced society’s moral order by hallowing it with divine authority. Inevitably, it overdid the reinforcement. Stable societies benefit from operating a moral consensus that most of their citizens accept. But for everything to stay the same, everything has to change. For society to keep itself together and endure through time, it has to respond to the creative dynamism of the human mind and its constant search not only for new ways of making things but for new ways of ordering its moral economy. Ethics, like everything else, is subject to change. That’s why we should hold our values and moral norms with a sense of their provisional nature. We never know when we’ll want to change them because we have been persuaded there is a better way to organise society:
For every static world that you or I impose
Upon the real one must crack at times and new
Patterns from new disorders open like a rose
And old assumptions yield to new sensation . . . 24
Revealed religions find this hard to deal with. Their authors have persuaded them that they are in possession of a divine instruction that, unlike everything else in human history, isn’t subject to change and decay. It’s a mountain not a river. It stays put and never moves. That’s why the biggest junk yard in history is the one marked Abandoned Religions, abandoned because they were incapable of adapting to the flowing currents of human history.
To be fair to them, some Christian groups have tried to keep abreast of the currents of human history, but they have always been double-minded about it: one of their minds telling them to rope themselves to the mountain of eternal truth, the other telling them to throw themselves into the river of time and enjoy the swim. That’s why they were late in joining the campaign to emancipate women and sexual minorities, two of the great moral causes of my lifetime. That resistance to change is one reason for their decline amongst many young people today. The so-called millennial generation, both in the UK and in the USA, is the least religiously committed cohort of the population there has been in the last sixty years, so the future for organised religion does not look promising. There is still a spiritual hunger and interest among the young, but they show a marked contempt for institutions which claim that they alone can perfectly satisfy it.
It’s tough for believers to know how to respond to this situation, and I have sympathy for their predicament. They are fighting to stay afloat in the rushing flood of time. And the myth of the golden and untroubled past is always a potent attraction to those who have lost their moorings. Hence the busy reactionary churches many of us no longer feel at home in. As a tactic, it’ll probably work for a while. It just doesn’t work for me. But that doesn’t matter. I won’t be around to see how it plays out in the long run. I feel sad about that, but only a little. There are places where I can still find some spiritual comfort.
If, like me, you cannot halt the search for meaning in a universe that does not explain itself; but if, also like me, you can no longer cope with the compulsive chatter of what E.M. Forster called ‘poor little talkative Christianity’; then find a place where they don’t talk, they sing – and leave your soul unmolested for an hour. Slip into choral evensong somewhere to experience the music and touch the longing it carries for the human soul. For that, you may have to find a cathedral, which brings us to a significant fact. In Britain today, cathedrals are among the places of worship that continue to thrive in an era of religious decline. There are doubtless a number of reasons for this, but
