Is our society seeing a rebirth of faith in God?
One of my favourite reads of the last year has been Woking’s own Justin Brierley’s book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, and its accompanying podcast has proved to be well worth a listen as well. Brierley’s contention is that there is a new openness to Christian faith in our society, and he illustrates this with numerous surprising stories of people coming to faith or returning to it. As I have been reading and listening, I have been observing our own experience as a local church seeing younger people wanting to explore faith, and I have spoken to numerous other church leaders who are experiencing the same thing.
The Rector of one of the leading churches in Oxford, St Aldate’s, was interviewed on another podcast recently, saying they were seeing larger numbers of students turning up interested in Christianity; more than he had seen at any time in his 20-year ministry. Some reported having dreams where Jesus was telling them to go to church, in one case three non-Christian housemates experienced this independently on the same night. Our major university cities can be barometers of developments in our culture: where this rising generation is going, the rest of us may just follow.
Brierley’s contention is that the tide is turning when it comes to faith. For perhaps the last 150 years there has been an assumption that Christianity is outmoded and will gradually fade away from our society. Cultural Christianity faced the real-world challenges of two world wars and the cultural revolution of the 1960s and struggled to respond to all of them. A number of things have happened in the last 20 years which have called this into question.
One factor in a resurgence of interest in faith is the dramatic collapse of the so-called ‘New Atheist’ movement. The publication of Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion in 2006 was a high water mark for these voices, which argued that religion was a cause of many evils in our world. This in itself was a response to the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the threat of Islamic fundamentalism to western society. Within a few years of The God Delusion’s publication, the New Atheist movement was falling apart, divided over politics and ethics. Some sought to push their cause forward alongside a broadly progressive agenda encompassing feminism, LGBTI+ and trans rights. Others including Dawkins himself resisted this approach strongly. Personal animosities emerged, including a very public spat about an allegation of sexual assault at a New Atheist conference. Today Brierley points out that, far from rejecting religion as an ill for society, the New Atheists drew attention to it, keeping it on the agenda for their listeners. As their arguments became more shrill and polemical, there was a reaction among some in their audience, who questioned whether some of the outlandish claims they were making could be justified.
Other influential voices have also been noticing the positive role of religion, and particularly the Christian faith, in our society. The influential historian Tom Holland’s book Dominion argues that many things we take for granted in western culture are not just universal givens: human rights, respect for life, democracy and the exploration of science; all these have their roots in the Christian faith. Holland himself has become a practising Christian. His influence reaches far beyond his writing, through the massively popular podcast The Rest is History. The former atheist thinker Aayan Hirsi Ali, a close friend of leading New Atheist thinkers including Christopher Hitchens, announced her conversion to Christianity last year. The leading philosopher Jordan Peterson discusses Christian themes in his work and his wife has become a Christian. Feminist thinker Louise Perry found the roots of many of her secular beliefs pointed back to Christianity.
Brierley also points to increasing scientific evidence pointing to the existence of the transcendent. A purely materialist evolutionary biology, where humanity is simply the end result of random natural processes, cannot account for the speed or complexity of human development. The universe itself also defies purely materialist explanations; the big bang theory, which is widely accepted, can tell you how the universe exploded into life, but it cannot explain why this happened. Christian faith remains popular among the scientific community.
Humanity appears to be wired to seek something beyond itself. The effect which art and culture has on our brains cannot be explained adequately in terms of rationalist materialism. Similarly, dry scientific processes cannot explain love: the love we feel for others, and particularly for our own children. These feelings are not simply caused by the body’s chemical reactions or a primal need to continue the species.
As we have seen, there is increasing evidence that today’s rising generations are more open to exploring the Christian faith than the elders. Among Gen X in the UK, many have negative experiences of Christianity going back to childhood. Far more commonly for Gen Z, there has been no exposure to the Christian faith at all. Where there are no negative experiences, there are fewer hurdles to jump over to get a fair hearing. Many are encountering faith through TikTok or YouTube videos, giving them the space to do their own research before they think about church. At the same time, more churches than ever have online services, making worship more accessible and allowing you to experience it without leaving your home. There is a wealth of anecdotal evidence that the Holy Spirit is at work too, with many unchurched people with no Christian background having dreams about Jesus, something we have more commonly seen in countries where there is very little gospel witness.
Is this, then, the beginning of something new in our society? Many are dissatisfied with the approach of New Atheism, which seeks to burn down the very foundations on which our culture is based. Without these foundations, who can say what is right and wrong? Secular materialism is inadequate as a way of explaining the universe beyond our planet or within our own bodies. Atheism is itself a faith position, one where many suppositions about how humans or our cosmos have developed are a good deal more far-fetched than some based on religious faith. Just as the book of Acts shows us, the Church thrives when it is marginalised and pressurised; this is a much better position for us to be in than one of cultural dominance. It turns out that, when Christian faith loses its dominant position in society and has to fight to be heard alongside every other world view, it is more persuasive than many would have thought.
The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God by Justin Brierley is published by Tyndale.