Is the Quiet Revival quietly concealing something even bigger?

Back once again with friend of the show, Rhys Laverty, Editorial and Research Director of the Prosperity Institute who wrote this brilliant article for The Critic about the now retracted and rescinded Quiet Revival report:

https://thecritic.co.uk/the-truth-about-the-quiet-revival/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to the Stand Up Theologian podcast. I'm James Carey, the Stand-Up Theologian, and yes, still going. And I thought, oh, I'd love to talk to Reese Laverty about the article he wrote in The Critic, which is about the quiet revival statistics, which were sort of debunked both at the time and now officially rescinded, revoked, whatever you do to statistics. And we have a chat about that. But the thing about the article is that the quiet revival might make us actually unaware of the fact that there has been a quiet, gigantic collapse that's gone on around us. And are evangelicals a bit like a dog chasing a car? If you actually give them what they want, they don't really know what to do with it. Lots of really interesting thoughts going on and whirling around in this episode. I think you're gonna like it. Have a listen. Here we go. Reese Laverty, welcome back to the Stand-Up Theologian podcast.

SPEAKER_02 1:12

Very good to be here. I I genuinely think I've I've lost count of the number of James Carey podcast productions that I've I've been on over the years, which is uh a good place to be.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

I think it might be four or five, but two on the Stand Up Theologian. And so that and the you're an elevated company because it's only Nate Morganlock who shares the the the green jacket for the US Masters. Uh so thanks very much. The reason is, as I might have said in the intro, which I'm recording subsequently, that you wrote an excellent piece for the critic, which we'll get to in a moment, in response to the quiet revival furore. Can we call a furore? I'd like to, because for the benefit of the listener, or a furore. Furore. Okay, yeah, I think Furore probably should be right, isn't it? Back in 2024, a study was put out by the Bible Society, which demonstrated there was a quiet revival going on, and there was pushback at the time. And who was pushing back? And what was it about the numbers at the time that felt wrong? I personally can remember one, I think, bonkers figure about the number of young men attending church. It was like 23% of young. It's like there's no way it can be that. That just seems wrong. So you know, who was pushing back and why were they pushing back at the time, do you think?

SPEAKER_02 2:33

Yeah, it was quite a spread of people, to be honest, who pushed back at the time and um and continue to do so fairly fairly persistently over the the lifetime of of this quiet revival data, which has now been debunked. Um it wasn't just um uh sort of new atheists or the humanist society or the secular society, whatever they're called, um sort of looking for you know for uh for a comeback, um, which they they'd be grateful of uh right now, um at least as a brand. Um it was it was um in fact uh a lot of uh very good faith journalists, both uh religious and and irreligious. Um I link in the piece to to uh a sort of sum-up piece by uh Tim Wyatt, who is an excellent um religious affairs journalist um and sort of good good acquaintance of mine. Um for full disclosure, I've been on uh Tim's podcast with himself and his dad, John Wyatt, the uh medical ethicist.

SPEAKER_00 3:29

Um, is his pro is his is his blog called The Critical Friend or something?

SPEAKER_02 3:33

The Critical Friend is yeah, Tim's uh Substack, which is just excellent for general uh UK church coverage, uh Church of England, uh shenanigans and chicanery uh in particular. He's he's very good at covering um.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

Well, he describes a church that you and I sort of recognise because sometimes when religious journalists who probably didn't set out to be religious journalists talk about the church, you're thinking, I that doesn't what that I think you've used the wrong, I think you've used the word evangelical, and I think you meant to use the word evangelistic, and I think you don't know what a Puritan is, and I think you know there's lots of big gaps. So Tim Wyatt is a critical friend, he is a friend, but he's not he's prepared to be an awkward so and so. Indeed, yes. There was pushback at the time, but even at the time, the Bible Society, I understand, said to you gov who did this research, Are you sure about this? Because we're sort of gonna go all in on this. And you gov said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely fine. Numbers are fine, numbers are fine. And then 2026, oops, forgot to carry the three and take away the number you first thought of. And uh so uh what what exactly was the problem with the stats? Do you do you know?

SPEAKER_02 4:47

Yes, I uh not in as much detail as as as others who's you know who are on the religious journalism beat would do, but um it was essentially a a fairly egregious error when it comes to data gathering, as I understand it, where basic quality controls for online data gathering, which is how um the the quiet revival data was put together, weren't applied and large kind of largely fake answers um sort of uh massively warped it. And so it's it's it's unreliable. So essentially, if you had given the survey to a load of uh teenage schoolboys, that's kind of how I imagine it, and asked them to give serious answers, and then you you sort of you know get the sort of digital equivalent of you know uh of uh of of the male the male member being drawn all over the the answers. That's basically what we got here.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

Yes. I I believe I remember quite a few years ago when I was following American politics a bit more closely, there was a genuine desire amongst people who were gonna go vote for Trump to lie to every single pollster um that they were gonna vote Democrat. And so that there would be this awful shock on election night. And of course, for the Democrats, there really was an awful shock. I don't know whether that was statistically significant or not, but I do love the idea that people are sick to death of polsters and then give knowingly fake answers.

SPEAKER_02 6:05

Yeah, it's sort of church even church face, that's kind of what we're a little bit, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

I think a lot of people have been vindicated and said, told you so. You know, and there are lots of quotes of Bezos, and you've quoted him in your article about when you have data versus anecdotes, believe the anecdotes. So a lot of people are now saying these statistics though are directionally right. They happen to be wrong in certain places, but they demonstrate, but but we all know there's something going on, and I can tell you for a fact, having been to literally 50 churches in the last year to do God the Bible and everything in 60 minutes, that I ask almost every single pastor or vicar, are you noticing anything going on? People walking in off the street, and almost without exception, not in every case, people say, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, young men, yeah, yeah, a few. In a way that was unthinkable ten years ago. So um, so you you point out you so you would agree with that assessment that there is something going on, but you're quite specific about where this quiet revival is happening. Do you want to say a bit about that?

SPEAKER_02 7:20

Yeah, certainly. Well, I I yeah, the the the numbers have been uh debunked in in the form that we have them, but my experience has been largely similar to yours, and I've heard so many anecdotes uh along the same lines, a critical mass of them, I say, from fairly reliable sources, um, that it seems evident to me that there is significant growth happening in a couple of streams of the church, um, but that that just doesn't come anywhere close to offsetting the collapse uh in most churches in Britain. Um and actually that the very success, the very success that's going on in those churches that are growing kind of insulates people in those churches who from just how bad it is elsewhere, and the collapse, and the irony of the whole thing is that what's gone what's been quiet now in the last 18 months isn't the revival, that's been very loud, it's the collapse going on uh elsewhere.

SPEAKER_00 8:13

So, yeah, we'll we'll get into that, but you're you're saying that predominantly evangelical churches are reporting growth, and that's just not anecdotal. That also comes from uh the bishop of the FIEC, John Stevens, who I am uh being mischievous by calling him a bishop, but effectively that's what he is, to independent evangelical churches saying that there is growth in the 600 members or whatever. But you also point out that there is an Anglo-Catholic revival quietly as well, but that that maybe comes from a smaller base because there are a lot of evangelical churches within the Church of England, and there are a lot of evangelical churches outside of the Church of England, there are not so many Anglo-Catholic churches outside of the Church of England, but there are, of course, Roman Catholic ones. But it seems to me that although the Anglo-Catholics are still relatively small within the Church of England, they are pretty robust and growing, but then the Roman Catholics, I think, are now really punching above their weight, and like for the last five or ten years, Roman Catholic Church attendance in the UK has been sky high, and an awful lot of the people like involved in spectator. There was a point where I was just thinking there's a lot of people who are pro-Christianity in the spectator. Oh, they're all Catholics, they're all Roman Catholics, that's interesting. So, what what's what's going on there with these Anglo-Catholics and Roman Catholics?

SPEAKER_02 9:40

Yeah, certainly. So, one of the take-homes from the quiet revival when it was published was that Roman Catholics are doing quite well. Uh, and again, even with the um debunking of the overall statistics, that actually remains numerically true. So, adult baptisms uh in the Roman Catholic Church are uh significantly up. Uh year on year, they are actually above um pre-COVID levels now. Often the the sort of revival stats can get quite muddled because people are looking at numbers that are are basically certainly up until maybe a few years ago, sort of post-COVID return. Right.

SPEAKER_00 10:10

Um to to yeah, backlogs being cleared, as it were. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:14

Yeah. Like uh carol service attendance is a big one on that score. Well, carol service. And now I have again, anecdotally, loads of people tell me loads more people at carol services than they used to be, but a lot of the number returns on those on those things are people just just coming back up after COVID. Um but uh Roman Catholic Church is growing um uh at the conservative end of the spectrum, largely, but conservative kind of both or um conservative in in the sense of both doctrine and or liturgy um and and styles. So um the Latin Mass has been something that um has caught on massively um revival of that. And then Anglo-Catholics, um, who are you know very, very similar in style and and feel, but you know, do not profess the primacy of the Bishop of Rome as uh as the uh vicar of Christ and head of the church on earth, um, are also growing uh in in certain contexts. So um, you know, one of the churches that lots of the sort of members of the London intelligentsia seem to be joining at the minute is uh St. Bartholomew the Great in in London, um, but elsewhere around the country, something like Pusey House, which is the sort of Anglo-Catholic seat in um Oxford, has grown from strength to strength. You know, I've been there for numerous things over the last uh last couple of years. Um it's a very lively um spiritual community, and sort of the outflow from that in other places uh around the country, and certainly in in London, and it's it's urban, it's urban centres really, university towns that these things are particularly catching on. So that seems to have a disproportionate impact because it you you have sort of high-profile conversions of public intellectuals, and that's that's not a super recent trend. All through the 20th century, you would have um high-profile public intellectuals who were drawn back from the sort of you know fashionable secularism of of the 20th century intelligentsia back to the sort of you know perfumed bosom of the mother church.

SPEAKER_00 12:06

I'm thinking Malcolm Mugger Malcolm Muggeridge would be one.

SPEAKER_02 12:09

On the Anglo-Catholic side, T. S. Eliot is is is a sort of prominent example of that. So that's a fairly big trend in the sort of post-19th century philosophical upheaval that the Western world has undergone is fairly high-profile intellectual conversions to uh to Roman Catholicism andor Anglo-Catholicism. So that has sort of moved up a gear, I suppose, in the last 10-15 years. Um and um e even though doctrinally um on sort of uh social issues or um certainly issues of kind of human sexuality and and marriage, there's not uniformly a conservative position among Anglo-Catholics on those things. Um you obviously have some Anglo-Catholics who ally with evangelicals on opposing women's ordination, though for different reasons, um, and similarly will ally with them on um defending a traditional view of marriage. That's not universally the case in um in the sort of Anglo-Catholic revival that we've seen recently in the UK.

SPEAKER_00 13:12

Yeah, there are liberal Catholics and traditional Catholics, and I'm I'm aware of both on General Synod. Hello there, just getting in early with my mid-episode break, just to say that if you're interested in writing situation comedy, which is sort of my day job still, just about, then I'm making a lot more videos on that subject. And if you go over to the situation room on YouTube, you'll see a 45-minute video where I explain in some considerable detail what a sitcom actually is, because the sitcom is not just a funny program with characters that last half an hour, there's quite a lot more to it than that. And it's not just about genre and format, but also why we like them so much and how how human and true to life they are, even though they're obviously contrived and rather goofy and silly. So you might find that very interesting if you're listening to this podcast. Obviously, that's got nothing to do with the Quiet Revival, but I thought you would be interested to hear about that. And also over at the Wittcliffe Papers, I am currently, at the time of editing, putting together a special one-year compilation physical hard copy of the Wycliffe Papers, which you'll be able to buy and peruse and study with all of the jokes from a whole year in it, plus lots of other bonus jokes besides that shan't appear on the website. So if that's of interest, then stay tuned, go over to the Wycliffe Papers, and Loyal Lollards will receive an e-copy of that at least for completely free as part of their membership, which supports both me and the Wycliffe Papers and this podcast, which continues despite the fact that I've tried to say this really is the last one in the series, and yet somehow here I still am. Anyway, thanks for bearing with. Let's get back to the conversation with Reese. Here we go. Here is a thing that really caught my eye, though, uh, in your article, and you were talking about how the evangelical present has been relatively consistently high, comparatively speaking, at two million or so. And I was really struck by how you describe evangelicals, and I thought, ouch, absolutely right, and that is low status. You described evangelicals as low status, which I thought was fascinating because although there is a part of conservative evangelicalism which is highly influenced by Ewan Minster scripture union camps and certain key conservative evangelical churches, which has a high Oxbridge elite kind of thing, and they went to elite schools as well and that kind of stuff. And I'm kind of sort of on the fringes of that because I didn't go to an elite school, but it was an expensive school, and I did go to those camps, but not the not the super posh ones, the slightly less posh ones. So I'm I'm gonna declare my prize there. But nonetheless, this is a low-status group within evangelicals, and I was really struck by the fact that you say that the evangelicals have failed to develop an ecosystem that produces public intellectuals. And a couple of things that occurred to me as a result of what you just said there. And the first is that absolutely right, from my own world of comedy, I've always said this, but it applies more widely. Evangelicals always encourage articulate young men and women into ministry, never into the arts, comedy, literature, journalism, where they might be disproportionately effective in terms of witness and the culture and all that kind of stuff. They certainly don't encourage them to go into politics, and they're certainly not going to do that now because they're terrified of Christian nationalism. And oh no, hang on, you might start trying to pass Christian laws, and obviously we don't want that, don't we? I don't know why we don't want that. I think I want that, but anyway, one for another time. And so Christians with political ambitions, particularly, are treated with pity or bewilderment, but overall, we don't have any Christian public intellectuals, which is why you know the best you could have hoped for over the last 20 years on question time was Anne Atkins or Peter Hitchens. That's it. That is that two spokesmen for two million evangelicals, and Hitchens is not an evangelical.

SPEAKER_02 17:35

No, he's a prayer book Anglican. A prayer book is the violin one.

SPEAKER_00 17:39

Yeah, and Anne Atkins, if we're completely honest, is bonkers. Uh in real life, she's delightful, but she is bonkers. And so, and therefore, because of that, point two, evangelicals have latched onto unreliably not that Christian public intellectuals as independent verifiers that the Bible is true and Jesus is Lord and Christianity might be true after all. And so, all this fawning over Tom Holland, for heaven's sake, he's not even a Christian. I think he goes to church a bit, but he's very coy about being Christian. He's still a hand-wringing centre-left fabian. His podcast host, Dominic Sandbrook, is more conservative than he is and is at least funny about it. And there's Louise Perry as well, and Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw and various other people who have sort of become Christians. Great. I'm thrilled that they become Christians, but they're now baby Christians, and you're not in Kansas anymore. There's a lot to be said here. And so we've jumped, and so we sort of champion these people who don't actually speak for us because we have completely failed to develop an ecosystem that produces public intellectuals. I think that's a really big problem, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 18:55

I think so. Um I think in in defense of the evangelicals' lack of public intellectuals, one uh aspect of that reality is that given the opportunity, to be honest, but a lot of time public life wouldn't want an evangelical speaking publicly because evangelicals are sort of by their their definitive characteristics, or certainly the hills that they have ended up dying on, not fights they've decided to pick most of the time, uh to be honest, but fights that a changing culture has decided to pick with with historic Christianity, are unpopular. So um, you know, uh of the sort of conservative, broadly conservative Christian voices who might appear uh in public life occasionally, some of which you've mentioned, um, a couple others who who, you know, maybe would identify themselves as evangelicals of some stripe may appear sometimes as well. They may be conservative on, let's say, um, marriage um and you know stick to what is still the Church of England's uh uh stated definition of marriage, but that that will probably not be brought up very often. Um I actually think even more unpopular, again, because it was changed 30 odd years ago, more than that, nearly 35 years ago, uh, is opposition to women's ordination. I think that would actually be a much more unpopular thing to come out to bat against uh on on Question Time or on Radio 4 than than uh than defending the traditional and currently uh church-defined uh definition of marriage. And I so I just think they're not invited, they're not they're not wanted. Um it's low status. Um on top of that, insistence on biblical inerrancy, belief in the final judgment, heaven and hell, exclusivity of Christ for salvation, you know, things like that. Um just that th those things make them low make evangelicals low status, and so um they're either not invited or they basically sense that we basically sense that the public conversation isn't for us, and so there's not much point in trying to trying to get into it.

SPEAKER_00 20:46

Yeah, I I take that. The the other thing though, that therefore is, and you might have been about to come onto this, but I'm interested that the people that could engage publicly as a public intellectuals from a Christian point of view that was not always welcome was obviously C.S. Lewis, who in one sense was not wildly out of kilter with his times, but I do keep coming back to sort of George Orwell's reviews of his work and that hideous strength and stuff as like, oh, do we have to have all this supernatural rubbish at the end? I mean, it really doesn't, nobody wants this. And um the second one is obviously GK Chesterton, so he doesn't come out of a university tradition in quite the same way, and obviously he's not an evangelical, but he is conservative. And Tolkien and the Inklings or whatever as well, although when we say Inklings, we mean Tolkien and Lewis, we don't really mean anybody else. Uh Charles Williams was an occultist. The weird ones, yeah. Charles Charles Williams was an occultist, he was a Rosicrucian, so that's that's not good. That's not us. The universities might have at one point have produced public intellectuals from a Christian perspective, but that has been completely killed off as well as an ecosystem. So I I take the point that that all of the land that we had, that we didn't realise we had has been. Ceded, taken away. And so it's not at all obvious, other than gobby people on YouTube and podcasts having any kind of influence. And obviously, there are think tanks and policy units such as uh your employers, and there are more of those now than there used to be. So, um, so yeah, anyway, you were about to go on and say something else which we've probably already forgotten by now.

SPEAKER_02 22:24

Uh no, no, I didn't know what I was gonna say. Yes, I mean just a clarification. My uh the institute I work for is not not a Christian organization, but very uh friendly towards the uh sort of historically and uh Judeo-Christian heritage of the country. But um the point I was going to make was that so you know, even though it calls us sort of low states, not not not invited to a seat at the table. But would we be capable of sending anyone where we invited? Yeah, it's a chicken and egg situation. You know, if you're not getting invited, you stop stop putting the effort into creating anybody. Um but let's say we you know the theoretically uh could or would be invited. You said bright young men, spokesworth watching is the phrase within the evangelical world, are um funnelled towards ministry. But we don't really and haven't ever really produced clergymen who can be public intellectuals. Not really. Um that that is a thing. You what roll back the roll back the the clock to um let's let's say at least prior to the invention of the Crown Nominations Committee, which was supposedly meant to allow the church to s select its own bishops and have a you know a better, more more spiritual, spiritually robust set of uh Lord Spiritual.

SPEAKER_00 23:30

Yeah, we should check in on how that's going once. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 23:33

I don't think anybody really thinks that the quality of bishops has improved since that happened in the 70s, uh let alone since uh it became even less the gift of the Prime Minister under Gordon Brown. But prior to that, you had real d diversity, at least, of very thoughtful different opinions uh on the benches um uh among the bishops, and they would be real public intellectuals. Whereas now, evangelicals are yes, frozen out to some extent, but um the the clergymen that we do produce are not really capable of doing that, partly because of their schooling and partly because they don't turn up to actually become bishops. This is what um, you know, various people ensconced in the general synod structure have told me, evangelicals involved in synod, uh lay people, not clergymen, one of their major frustrations is that evangelicals are often sort of, you know, at this point opting out of church structures, they've got funds, counting outside the Church of England. And that's at this point, when things are far worse, you know, maybe that they have ever been. But even 20, 30 years ago, when things were much, in theory, much better, evangelicals were not doing what they needed to do to gain these positions of influence within the larger church structure. That's partly because they're very local church focused and very evangelism focused, and they think, what's the point in me, you know, spending 10 years at a cathedral, you know, in order to then you know maybe become a bishop when a vacancy comes up? When I could be doing 10 years of word-based ministry, rather than thinking strategically that, well, if you can become a bishop and you know, sway the church nationally, then actually you can release tons more people into that, you know, parish-based-based ministry. So the clergymen that we do create, we basically do nothing with them, and they're not capable of becoming public intellectuals and don't take the opportunities to become so. And then, as you say, we direct um we don't direct them into other things, into the arts, into literature, into um, or even into even into politics. And I think that that's a whole conversation in and of itself that um evangelicals are sort of losing out, have lost out on public life and political life because we just don't have a theory of politics. We've had a sort of resurgence in some ends of evangelicalism on vocation and a theology of work, kind of post-Tim Keller, that oh you know, you can be a great, you know, is that's is I think probably apocryphal Martin Luther quote. The the Christian cobbler, he doesn't carve little crosses into the bottom of his shoes, he makes good shoes, you know. And we can sort of now give a sort of an account of okay, well, if you're a if you're a Christian carpenter, you're like this, and if you're a Christian um you make you make good, good, you know, furniture, if you're a Christian cobbler, you make good shoes. What do you say to the Christian politician? I don't think evangelicals know. If a if a if a carpenter works with wood, if a cobbler works with leather, what does a politician work with?

SPEAKER_01 26:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:14

And we we don't have an answer for that. And all we think we need to tell politicians to do is just like not sin, don't fall into scandal, which is good. Um uh that's a sort of cinequal non should be.

SPEAKER_00 26:24

But the moment they start talking about their own party, they become divisive. So what exactly you have to be a member of a political party.

SPEAKER_02 26:31

They're power hungry. No, my my answer to that question would probably be a politician works for power. Yeah. Uh and that's there's nothing wrong with that, because someone has to. That's what politics is. Someone has to make those decisions. The there's a way of working with power that just knows how power works and and how how you do things and and how you govern, that is sort of a of a separate kind of thing from whether you're a good person. Yeah. Um, you should have both, but we think a politician shouldn't work with power, although that's inherently um sort of deficient or to be avoided.

SPEAKER_01 26:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:59

Uh but that's kind of like telling a carpenter he shouldn't work with wood because he might be tempted to make something offensive out of wood.

SPEAKER_00 27:06

Or an idol, yes. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yes, there you go, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Second second commandment.

SPEAKER_02 27:11

So we the clergymen we create, we don't are not capable of becoming public intellectuals and we sort of vacate the field anyway. Admittedly, most people would be keen to invite us. But if you had someone who was really worth listening to, if you believe George Whitfield set a man on fire and people come from miles around to watch him, then we might have done a bit better. But then also we don't funnel people into other areas of public life. Uh and the few who do break through tend to do it because they will sort of toe toe some respectable lines on on various things.

SPEAKER_00 27:39

Yes, there are always that pinch of incense has to be given to certain shibboleths and sacred cows, and you really aren't able to say, are we okay with this? I don't think we should be okay with this. This thing that we've been okay with since the 90s, can we not? Um, so yeah. But in what in one sense though, it's never been a better time to be a Christian in politics because politicians are falling over themselves to say we're pro-church. I just noticed that I forgot to cancel my spectator subscription uh because I get a very cheap one. And I said, Oh, I've just paid for a quarter for 30 quid, so I better start reading it again. And I read, um, sorry, it's just there's an awful lot of content that you just think, oh, I think I think ChatGPT could write Rod Little's column now, couldn't it? You just put in five key words.

SPEAKER_02 28:24

Oh, no, that's that's a I challenge myself every week to read Rod Little's column without laughing out loud and I never succeed.

SPEAKER_00 28:29

It's yeah, I don't know. I I don't really still understand what he what he wants. But anyway, Kemi Badnock just wrote a piece about being, I think the importance of the church or something like that. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. She's publicly said she's not a believer because of some abstruse apologetics um question that's sort of fairly boring and normal about suffering in the world or something like that. And there's that immense frustration though, that there's all so there's this all these people who are pro-church who are on their knees saying to Jesus, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And do you know what you want to do you know what you gotta do? Follow Jesus. No, don't be pro-church. You have to follow actually follow him, let go of all of the things that you place above him, like wealth for the rich young ruler, but for you it could be something else, and follow Jesus, and people don't want to do it. But it is interesting that there's a that it feels like there are great opportunities in the political space because you you do have politicians reading the room and going, oh, there are people here who want who are pro-faith, and we should uh, you know, as long as they don't make too much noise and as long as they don't cause too much problem or ask us to scrap certain laws that we're all basically happy with. So it is interesting that though there's still an awful lot of people who are pro-faith but still say, yeah, I mean, I obviously don't actually believe it, but it's very important. And I think that's that's it's very weird. Very weird times we live in, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 30:06

Of course it's weird because we're living through the sort of decline for now of Christian civilization, um, which no one alive has ever lived through meaningfully before. Not not in the way that we have we have um that we're experiencing now in a sort of organic way. Uh there are plenty of people around who may have well within living memory, not quite, you have things like, you know, Christian genocide in Armenia, as in Christians being the victims of genocide in Armenia and and other parts of sort of the Middle East and places like that. So we've sort of seen the end of or destruction of Christian civilizations in in various places, but um but to live through um the sort of slow decline of uh of a Christian society is is a fairly novel experience, um, and which some people sort of say about the quiet revival, oh one of the things that makes it different to previous genuine quote-unquote revivals is the is the political element of it, um, which I'm not convinced by. Uh, I think a lot of people would would tell you that the the sort of great awakenings of American history, in you know, Jonathan Edwards and all that, profoundly shaped the American political system and the entire culture of the country. You know, Andrew Jackson is sort of the the entry of evangelicalism into public life uh and in America and the sort of passing away of the sort of established basically established waspish order uh that that came before that, which is you know fairly sort of Episcopalian and institutional. And I think if you looked at other more localized British revivals, there would be a huge amount of you know small P political change that that brought about. I think people just like to say it's different now because it's a form of political engagement, if not change, that they don't like. Um because it's you know basically basically conservative. So I think I'd reject the idea that this you need to be suspicious of this revival because it has political elements. Um I think that's probably always characteristic of revival. But I I think a lot of people are overly cynical about whatever sort of religious turn that some politicians on the rights of both British and American politics have made. I'm sure that there may be some element of that. But eva evangelicals and sort of evangelism and gospel growth and revival are basically a bit like a a dog chasing a car and that they wouldn't know what to do with it when they got it. Yeah. It's well, what do you want to do? Okay, what what if you know XYZ number or XYZ very high profile figures in public life were sincerely converted? And I it is also a sort of snobbish uh political thing as well. I think I think if it were left-wing politicians experiencing and conveying some sort of big signals of of of sincere uh conversion to Christianity, I think most British evangelicals would be would be thrilled with that and would be falling over themselves. But I think because it's it's happening on the rights, they're they're basically snobs towards it, and it's it's it's the um it's the wrong kind of convert. It's oh this brother of yours, father, he took all of your wealth and he spent it on conservative politics, you know.

SPEAKER_00 33:18

I mean, I think that's interesting about wouldn't know what to do with it if they got it, because as you said in your article, and I would sort of summarize it as you know, uh the quiet collapse of the mainstream. And if you're moving in evangelical circles or to some extent Anglo-Catholic circles, you just think, well, the church seems actually going much better than you thought, and you write very interestingly in your piece about hoo-hoo, not where I've just been. And I I think we do overestimate the spiritual health of these other churches which are virtually on their knees and about to collapse if they've not already collapsed. And I think in the article you said that there's something like 3,000 churches have been closed um in X number of years and in the last decade. And they must be, broadly speaking, non-conformist churches, because the the Church of England doggedly refuse to close churches. I mean, they I suspect the Church of England might account for 10% of that, but they tend to leave them open.

SPEAKER_02 34:24

Well, it's sort of yes. Well, but that that that argument makes it even worse for the Church of England, because it's covering the figures. Yeah. Again, if if that doesn't cover, you know, the the you know, the parish of of St. Frida's Wide on the Marsh, which you know has has one short spoken communion service every month, you know, which is absorbed into the yeah, which has been absorbed into the benefits of of whatever, then that's except in the winter because it's basically underwater. Yeah, yeah. And that's that's just the Church of England's not not certainly cooking the books in practice. It's actually covering over how many churches are effectively closed.

SPEAKER_00 35:01

Yeah, yeah. But the I mean nothing total heartbreak. I remember during COVID going for a walk around a village I'd not spent much time in and came out into the village next to a former Methodist chapel that was opened August 1885 and closed August 1985. And I thought, oh my goodness. I mean, even I think it even had a plaque saying when it had closed or something like that. And I thought, oh my goodness, that it's very humbling to see that because obviously, in a non-conformist congregationalist context or whatever, there's no safety net, there's no nothing, there's no church commissioners sitting on 10 billion quid, um, gleebland, all that kind of stuff. It's gone.

SPEAKER_02 35:46

And so there's you're telling me the church commissioners are actually sitting on all those liquid assets, James?

SPEAKER_00 35:52

They've got 10 billion quid, that's not a secret. Um, which is which is not an insubstantial amount of money. Uh, I mean, it's it's it's our money because it was our land, and it was land given to the church, and it was all collectively hoovered up in the 1970s, so that there could be a universal stipend. Because up until that point you had rich parishes and poor parishes, and they just couldn't recruit in some places because the money was so terrible, because the church was so cool. So it swings and roundabouts. But it's interesting that the non-Anglican and the non-evangelical, uh, non-Anglo Catholic, non-Roman Catholic, those have fallen off a cliff quite severely to the point where I think that's we haven't really come to terms with that. And so no matter what the positive numbers are for evangelicals, they're still not it's like paying off, it's like paying off some of the deficit. Like, no, no, you're still borrowing at a horrendous rate, and you're paying off the interest on the interest. So it's this isn't going to tip the balance uh particularly. But the reality is, I think, at the risk of sounding like Owen Jones, who you used to go through a phase of saying the reality is, which is his way of saying, you have opinions, I have facts. But the reality is the Church of England could end up in the hands of evangelicals if they stay there, because the non-evangelicals are literally going to die. They are literally going to die out, at which point we've got the whole established church. What are you gonna do then? What's the plan?

SPEAKER_02 37:26

But that would be yet another uh what another dog chasing the car situation because evangelicals, this is back to our sort of point on the production of public intellectuals, are by disposition non-or at worst anti-institutional. Yeah. And they they they they can think sort of collaborating as you know, strategic partnerships, sort of tactically, yeah. I I think is probably a better way to put it, rather than strategically in terms of of these these big these big um these big institutions and and uh you know endowments and you know th things of this nature that that that that span the generations, um that they're kind of incapable of of of thinking best about stewarding those things.

SPEAKER_00 38:06

Yeah. Um I'm just remembering now we have to have a separate episode by the end of this year about Hooker, because he is a public intellectual who kind of draws a whole bunch of things together. Because I'm currently reading uh a book about essentially the health of the church in the Elizabethan period by a buyer called Patrick Collinson, I think. It's a series of lectures or whatever, and it's you know, published in 1976. And but the the pure the the great Puritans, which modern evangelicals look back on, they were outsiders too. And England's arguably greatest theologian, short of Cranmer, who was a liturgist rather than theologian, although I'd argue therefore he's a theologian, is John Owen, who is a nonconformist. And all at Baxter and whatever, all these great godly men and theological men and with practical pastoral wisdom and ministry and all that kind of stuff, they were all thrown out of the Church of England, even though some of them now have their own day celebrated by the Church. Like Baxter's got his own day in the Church of England. It's like, hang on, he wouldn't let me back.

SPEAKER_02 39:12

The greatest insult.

SPEAKER_00 39:13

That's right, yeah. I mean, John Bunyan's got a day, and he was a non-conformist, he refused to leave prison because otherwise he's going to preach without a license. What a bizarre way of recognising that. So it is a very interesting situation because all of our heroes are outsiders, with the possible exception of Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury, who use their political influence and power to bring about social change. Well, we we don't want that, do we? We're all terrified of political social change.

SPEAKER_02 39:42

Yes, and so to that extent, I think I think the the it's somewhat anachronistic to project the word evangelical back onto the the 16th century. Um Palakas sort of the first evangelicals were it's just what they call the Protestants. Um but yeah, Richard Hooker, who is the Anglican uh sort of apologist for the Elizabethan religious settlement, which he uh puts puts together in his Magnum opus, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, thrilling title, um, is arguing with you know these convictional Presbyterians who are convinced that the Bible says there's only one possible way to structure the church and it's Presbyterianism, and so we need to tear up the whole of the Episcopacy, get rid of all the bishops, and and reinstitute um a different different kind of a still established usually, but uh Presbyterian uh church. And part of Hooker's sort of argument is this that do you have any idea the chaos that that would cause like politically, uh uh socially, like it would just be such a mess. Uh but that that religious uh urge of you know the then the Puritans has basically been inherited by the evangelicals who just don't understand the the burden that politicians have to govern effectively. Uh you see even again, when you learn about the the the British Empire's relationship to evangelical missionaries as a as a evangelical first, like how awful that the the imperial authorities were sort of holding back evangelical missionaries from from going in and spreading the gospel and and bringing sort of social change into these places. But it's because often wherever they went, like just chaos ensued and not not good, you know, oh gay, let's let's let's you know bring bring justice. It was a it was a mess. Like disaster came everywhere. It's not it's not the cynical preservation of imperial assets, it's like political disorder, which is specifically the thing that political rulers who are you know given given their office by God according to the Bible, the specifically the thing they're meant to stop happening. And evangelicals just throw all caution to the winds because they're so so impassioned by the urgency of the gospel that they think that should be done sort of without without prudence and without without the considerations to the the you know public disorder that that can cause, which is a testament to sort of the power of the gospel, maybe. Um but maybe it's also just that they like to cause a mess and other and people that they're preaching to sort of want any reason for a fight, you know.

SPEAKER_00 42:03

Yeah, yeah. It's a right old mess, isn't it? I mean, it it's these are such bizarre and interesting times that we live in that I feel like I still don't really know because part of me is not sad because of my very non-conformist evangelical roots and schooling and education, even though it was a sort of Church of England-ish uh school, it's always been more non-conformist evangelical than that. And I was did all the university, you know, UCCF type stuff, and I went to a United Reform Church at university. Wow. It had the best preaching, had the best preaching.

SPEAKER_02 42:39

What's the deal with them? They have so many buildings. I was by what I was in High Wickham over Easter weekend on the Rye, which is the big sort of green bit in the middle of High Wickham. Glorious uh United Reformed Church, just on the edge of the green. And also often United Reformed Churches are either lovely or at least very big.

SPEAKER_01 42:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:55

Um I had the realization at a certain point in my life that loads of church halls I remember going to for different things as a kid were United Reformed church halls. I'm like, goodness gracious, and they're just like that, they're not what are they? Like they're I've never met anyone who goes to a United Reformed Church ever.

SPEAKER_00 43:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:11

Um I've been around.

SPEAKER_00 43:13

Well, yes, except it was only formed, and I'm just looking it up now, in 1972, uh, from the Presbyterian Church of England and the Congregational Church in England and Wales, later joining the Reformed Association of Churches of Christ and the Congregational Union of Scotland. So it it's a bit of a hoovering up of a series of different um denominations, all of which were conservative, but of course aren't now, because um, yeah, I think it's uh hasn't quite bowed fully the knee to the uh the rainbow flag, but I I don't think it's unwelcome there. And yes, I'm just looking at one here. We see hospitality as our main God given purpose. We are a friendly, non judgmental lot and uh Questions are encouraged actively encouraged, and you think, okay. Um so oh, I'm just looking at their transgender day of remembrance service here on the twenty-third of November. They have nailed their colours pretty much to the mast on that. So so part but part of me is like, well, let's let's not kid ourselves that these churches there's there's no one at the wheel that Ichabod, the spirit has left or something. But another part of me, the Anglican in me, which is these great buildings signify a historic faith and a place within society that is unmistakable and ancient and beautiful and part of who we are, and therefore the abandonment of them is I think also disastrous. I'm sounding probably more and more like Hooker, aren't I? Which is I think the I think the cure might be worse than the disease. So but equally we have a disease that is not necessarily well, it's partly of our own making, I'm sure, uh, because we're a faithless generation who are cowards and all kinds of other things. So it's hard to know whether to stick or twist or what even what game we're playing. So if I s if I twist and I get a trump card, is is a trump's good. No, no, Trump's bad. Oh, okay. That's it's good, good to know that now. My church on Easter Day was full, completely full, and people who were occasional, all of the occasionals came, and there were some people there who I didn't recognise and who might have been on holiday in the West Country in Somerset or whatever. But we can see that we are not just bouncing back from COVID but doing something a bit more, and but we're not, but we haven't, yeah, we can't really capture that particularly across denominations and all that kind of stuff. But we all know that things feel very different from how they felt 10 years ago.

SPEAKER_02 45:45

Where's that gonna go? We don't know, and I th I think that's an important yes, there are lessons to draw from from other other revivals. Um, probably the the the slow decline of Christianity in other eras is is much more worth looking at, the sort of decline of of um of the Roman Empire, the disappearance of Christianity in in in a couple of other places. Um but again, in most places where Christian society civilization has ended, it's been fairly abrupt. It's been by the sword in one way or another. Um so we are in quite uncharted territory. As I say, I think we all logically, who knows what sort of black swan events will come in the future, but logically we will reach a point where the upward line of the evangelicals and the traditionalists, Catholics and Anglo-Catholics will meet and cross the massive collapse of of the other churches. And then we'll have a bit more of an idea of where we are. Yeah, basically, you know, the the the numbers on however many churches and and Christians there are sort of basically reflects who's actually going to church, who's actually sort of living living out their faith in whatever way. Um, but until then we're we're in a very, very strange position. And who knows what things are gonna go.

SPEAKER_00 46:55

The more church history you read, the more you just go, Well, that was a strange time, wasn't it? So you've got yeah, the the the late 16th century I've been reading about where you have Puritans having conventicles, which is basically private Bible studies, and being told off that they shouldn't do it by fellow like-minded bishops or archbishops who are like, that's not you're not allowed to do that. And as a modern, you're reading it just going, they're not allowed to gather together and study the Bible. That seems bonkers. But then the Anglican in you goes, No, I understand the principle why, and if everyone did it, then that's how you get cults and anabaptism and all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_02 47:29

And political political disorder, and like again, even even this is a sort of my you know, sort of into the weeds now, but even like a low church evangelical pastor can actually recognise that dynamic that if if some other gathering begins within the congregation that is sort of totally off the books and and causing problems or or whatnot, that that's a cause for intervention, you know. Yes. There's nothing nothing wrong here, inherently, but in the name of good order, yes, um, is this the best idea, you know.

SPEAKER_00 48:02

Good order is something that is overlooked in the desire for expressive individualism and my rights, and I should be allowed to read my own Bible, my own version in my own way, and go to the church of my choosing. At which point I think you'll you're losing a lot, but what you lose immediately is not visible, but what you do lose eventually collectively is really hard to replace, uh, certainly quickly. But anyway, fantastic. Um, so thanks very much, Reese. We'll put a link in the uh show notes to that article and to Reese's blog as well, and anything else he emails me to send a link to. But uh thanks very much, Reese.

SPEAKER_02 48:45

Very good to be with you, James, as ever. Hope it's not too long until uh till the next time. Talk about Richard Hooker.

SPEAKER_00 48:49

We'll talk about Richard Hooker, yeah. Thanks very much for listening, everyone. Speak to you next time. Cheerio. Hope you found that interesting. Next time I hope to have some thoughts on St. George's Day and a whole load of other things because I'll be starting to make some YouTube videos. Anyway, is this how it ends? Yep.