05.20.07
be afraid. be very afraid.
A brief news story on the BBC website earlier this week (sorry - their awful search means I can’t find the damned thing again) mentioned the construction of a new Evangelical church in the south of England, which will seat 8,000 people. By way of comparison, St Paul’s Cathedral in London seats 2,500.
This brought to my mind again a topic which I’ve been looking into with increasing concern in recent months - namely the quiet but extremely disturbing rise of American-style Evangelical Christianity in the UK.
Like most people, I suppose, I thought that the extreme wing of religious nutterdom was confined largely to America, and even then, mostly to the “flyover states”. It’s comforting to assume that for the most part, Christianity in Britain is the laissez-faire Church of England variety, composed largely of grandmothers, lapsed followers bulking up the numbers, and the occasional bishop shooting his mouth off. Even Catholicism in this country has forgotten how to make fire and left its brimstone at home. This is, all told, a Good Thing; although I was still horrified when Tony Blair announced happily that we invaded Iraq because his invisible friend told him it was the right thing to do, at least by and large our religious types indulge their habit in private.
I moved only a few hundred yards when I last moved house, into a nice split-level apartment on South Lambeth Road - but that few hundred yards was enough to put me within the catchment zone of a bizarre, and vastly active, Evangelical church, the likes of which I didn’t realise even existed over here. They meet every sunday and hold service after service in the function room of a local hotel - I reckon at least six to eight services each sunday are laid on, one after another, each one packed to the rafters. The attendees are predominantly black, but there are plenty of caucasians there too - and a little research shows that many Evangelical churches in this country are swelling their ranks with young, disaffected white kids.
This, frankly, scares the shit out of me - because the Evangelicals are in no way laissez-faire. Frankly, they’re not even live-and-let-live; their fires burn brightly and their stock of brimstone is always topped up. They are unapologetically political, and preach openly regarding how people should vote, or act, in a political sense. Naturally, a lot of what they believe politically is revolting to any secular, educated mind; everything from their social views (they’re not so keen on the gays, or abortion, and when you get down to it they’re not pushed on working mothers, rock music or books that aren’t the bible either) to their education policies (never mind evolution, they’re frankly not convinced that ANY of this science stuff is worthwhile) is basically anathema to everything Britain has accomplished as a largely secular society.
And of course, they all vote. They all lobby like hell; local MPs whose offices are near Evangelical groups reportedly get bagloads of mail from the Evangelists, vastly more than from secular groups, and we all know how much pressure extremist Christian groups like MediaWatch have brought to bear on national broadcasters in the past.
This, to my mind, is why athiests, humanists and secularists need to stop being so fucking apologetic for everything we believe - or more properly, don’t believe.
These churches didn’t spring from nowhere; they are funded, with incredibly deep pockets, by American churches which view their “mission” to Europe as crucial in stemming what they call the “rise of secularism” on our continent. (Of course, it would hurt them too much to simply call it the “waning of religion and superstition”, which is more accurate; athiesm and secularism doesn’t rise, as such, it is merely the logical default state that is left behind when you take away the invisible spacemen. More and more land is exposed when the tide goes out; you don’t talk about the “rise of land”, you talk about the ebb of the water.) They prey on the vulnerable, the unhappy, the superstitious, the weak, and the stupid; they tell them what to think, little of it particularly nice or tolerant, and then send them off to preach to others, to write letters, to vote.
They don’t believe in living and letting live, like our traditional churches do, to some extent at least - and take note; nasty developments like the Alpha Course in the Church of England symbolise an increasingly militaristic and evangelical trend even in our older forms of Christianity. Given any kind of influence over legislation and social policy, they would rush to create laws which impinge on the freedoms of non-believers to live their lives as they desire. Their strongest show of force to date was to contest the new legislation which completely outlaws discrimination against homosexuals - in other words, they were desperate to retain the ability to discriminate, to hurt, and to remove freedoms from a minority group outside their own religion. The kind of language they used to mobilise their followers to protest this new law made their true intent very clear; given half a chance, they would recriminalise homosexuality with one hand, while quickly drafting a new “Intelligent Design” centric science curriculum for your kids.
“It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.”
While I fully recognise the irony of this quote’s invocation of God, I think it’s still supremely relevant. Our society became secular slowly, through a basic change in attitudes as a result of a shift in our culture; it was not a directed change, and it has produced no organisations, no leaders, and no champions. It is, indeed, indolent; and Evangelicalism is very, very active. I’m not saying we need leaders, or organisations; but perhaps we need some champions, and perhaps every athiest, everyone who believes in secularism and everyone who enjoys the rights won in the last fifty years, has an obligation to become a champion in their own sense. At the very least, perhaps, it’s worth writing to your MP every now and then - just to let them know that you’re there, and that you’re watching, and that you’re voting. Because remember - the happy clappy guys down the road are definitely doing so. And if our inaction lets them win, we’ll all lose a very great deal.
(A good article about the rise of English Evangelical churches, written from the “other side” - i.e. an American evangelical - can be found here.)
ottocrat said,
May 24, 2007 at 6:43 pm
Good post, Rob. As someone who grew up in precisely the fire & brimstone environment you describe, though, there is cause for hope. Firstly, the evangelical movement with its megachurches, its highly politicised congregations, and its links to the US religious right, has been a fixture in the English social landscape for a long time. I have no idea whether it’s actually growing or not; honestly, I suspect not. I do believe that there are fundamental differences between the US and the UK contexts. In the UK these people do not set the agenda; they are the outsiders. They love to see themselves that way, in fact. They’re outsiders within a secular society. In the US, they’re not: they see themselves as the bedrock of US society, they see the United States as being their creation. Being fundamentalists, they need to see themselves as persecuted outsiders too, but in their case, it’s the whole country which is the persecuted outsider, and the rest of the world as godless pagans serving Satan’s power.
As I say, I grew up in a happy clappy community in the south-east of England, but spent a couple of years living in the Bible Belt of the US, in rural Kansas. I feel that I know these people. I share your view that atheists, agnostics, and moderate religious people should make their views heard. But I am honestly rather optimistic. If I (and my sister) managed to survive an upbringing like that - thanks in large part to our exposure to wider secular society through school and through the BBC - then there’s hope for England.