Dwindling Shingles: The Post-Secular and the End of Unbelief

Francis Young

Francis Young is the author of 25 books on the history of religion and belief and folklore, including Fairies: A History, Silence of the Gods and Twilight of the Godlings. He holds a PhD from Cambridge University and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He teaches for Oxford University's Department for Continuing Education and is a Series Editor for Cambridge University Press and a lay canon of St Edmundsbury Cathedral.

His most recent books may be found here:

https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=fairies-a-history--9781509566778

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/silence-of-the-gods/70868D9ED26063FAF379972A85CFED2C

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/twilight-of-the-godlings/B6A6B536A3257AB85906F695D71AD391

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach (1867)

Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach – considered rather scandalous in mid-Victorian England for its unabashed avowal of religious doubt – has famously been taken as the starting-gun for the modern era of unbelief. Seldom is it observed, however, that the very tidal metaphor Arnold chose for the retreat of faith – the ‘long, withdrawing roar’ of the waters of the English Channel – intrinsically implies faith’s eventual return. In this respect the poem is perhaps more subtle than some of its interpreters have supposed, such as the radical Anglican clergyman Don Cupitt who took The Sea of Faith as the title for his 1984 book that advocated embracing the death of God. All too often, the advocates of doubt, secularism, agnosticism and atheism who advanced in Arnold’s footsteps in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries insisted on the inevitability of faith’s downfall; it was a one-way process, conditioned by the arrow of time and the spirit of the age – and, indeed, by man’s emergence from a sort of collective infancy in which he needed the crutch of religion.

In recent years, however, it has become apparent that the formerly bone-dry ‘naked shingles of the world’ left behind by Arnold’s the withdrawing sea of faith were not quite as safe from the returning waves as it may once have seemed. Slowly but surely, the sea of faith has been edging back – if its withdrawal was ever anything more than an illusion to begin with, that is. Few people in Britain in 1867, outside of rarefied literary and intellectual circles, would have viewed faith as a dying phenomenon; and the same sort of unwarranted confidence is detectable now among bien pensant atheists, secularists and postmodern nihilists who have held sway since the 1960s as the unrivalled priesthood of unbelief. As much as Victorian bishops at the height of their pomp could scarcely imagine the eclipse of faith, so the hierarchs of scepticism find it hard to envisage a world in which cynical unbelief loses its cachet as the belief-system that carries the greatest social and academic prestige.

It is fashionable to speak of a ‘post-secular’ age – perhaps almost as fashionable as it is to speak of ‘postliberal’ politics – but rather like Arnold’s poem, the word ‘post-secular’ speaks to what we have lost rather than what might replace it. Gone are the glory days of atheism as an edgy, countercultural choice, shocking to parents and grandparents; the unbelieving yet idealistic polo-necked philosophers of yore seem as distant now as the prophets and patriarchs – when heroic feats of unbelief seemed achievable that few can attain today. Even the resurgent ‘New Atheism’ of the early 2000s with which early internet messageboards once sparkled now feels shopsoiled and passé. For those of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, it is as if a mighty and seemingly unstoppable juggernaut has unexpectedly ground to a halt and is now rusting in the sidings. If they are not met with weary sighs, the standard atheist jibes of yesteryear now evoke warm feelings of nostalgia, like looking at old photographs of a Wimpy Bar. So what happened? How did unbelief lose the high ground of its dry shingle to the returning sea of faith?

While I am loath to leave behind Matthew Arnold, perhaps a better metaphor for what has happened would be the bursting of a bubble. For at no point in the last fifty years did the majority of the world – or anything close to the majority of the world – cease to have a religious faith, even at the time when much of that world was still under the rule of Communist dictatorships that avowed de facto (or indeed de jure) state atheism. Unbelief has always been a Western affectation, and an elite one at that; yet in spite of the fact that, even in the West, a minority of people were and are non-believers (that is to say, non-believers in any sort of religious or supernatural ontology) unbelief exercised a powerful hold on society owing to its explicitly teleological framing. Unbelief may have been a minority conviction now, its advocates insisted with evangelical zeal, but the great nothingness was adding daily to the number of the unfaithful. National, civilisational and then universal unbelief was the inevitable trajectory. Since ‘science’ ensured that faith could no longer be replenished by signs and wonders, there was only so much fuel left in the tank of religion, and it would run out eventually. God was assuredly dead; he was just having a rather long funeral, but the last canapé would surely be eaten soon, and the lights turned off by the last to leave the wake.

It was Islam that first burst the bubble. The rise of political Islamism made it impossible to ignore the geopolitical significance of religion, even if many in the secularised West initially reacted to Islamist terrorism by smearing all religious believers as demented zealots and demanding an end to all Bronze Age fairytales. Along with religiously-motivated terrorism, the advent and intensification of mass migration in Europe challenged the cherished belief that either the supposed areligious neutrality of laicité or the relaxed melting pot of multiculturalism was able to contain migration’s potentially malign social and political consequences. Both terrorism and ill-considered migration, while seeming initially to hand the initiative to the advocates of secularisation, have provoked a resurgence of interest in religion in the countries affected by them. When confronted by objectionable beliefs strongly held by others, most people’s response is to directly oppose those beliefs with equally strongly held convictions – rather than, say, to question their first principles. In the face of the threat of militant Islam or the encroachment of deeply alien cultures, atheism has limited force; it is, after all, a philosophical position developed in the salons of the European Enlightenment rather than a passionately held creed for which many have spilled their blood. Extremes invite extremes, and in much the same way that the rise of Nazism provoked moderate democrats in Britain in the 1930s into joining the Communist Party to oppose fascism as forcefully as possible, so in the early twenty-first century people began to turn to Christianity in order to oppose militant Islam.

The key turning point was perhaps 2014, when news that Islamic State in Iraq was marking the homes of Christians with an Arabic letter ‘N’ (for ‘Nazarene’) in order to facilitate their plan of mass murder, rape and forced conversion produced an outpouring of solidarity in the West. This was when it felt – at least to me – that the counter-rhetoric opposing Islamist fundamentalism shifted decisively from a secularist discourse of contempt to one that deployed Christian language and imagery. In much of this reactive rhetoric, and at least initially, Christianity was no doubt little more than an ideological costume. But it is hard to wear a costume for long without asking yourself how it fits together, and over the last twelve years genuine curiosity about Christianity has become ever more normalised in mainstream culture, especially among people born since the Millennium. Mass migration, too, has provoked searching questions about national identity and belonging that have landed inevitably on the centrality of Christianity to the histories of so many European countries. This, then, is how we have arrived at the point where it is once again socially acceptable – indeed, perhaps even rather fashionable, to be curious about Christianity in contemporary Western societies in a way that would have been unimaginable even thirty years ago.

The failure of secularism, at least in its current form, is the subject of a growing social and political consensus. Secularism has failed to safeguard the freedoms and values within modern societies that it was supposed to uphold and protect. But when we speak of ‘post-secularism’ we risk doing little more than naming an absence – in much the same way as ‘postmodernism’ expressed a weariness and disillusionment with modernity but never represented a coherent or constructive alternative. The decay of secularism does not equate to the triumph of faith, and the question of where a post-secular society leaves faith is one of the most pressing of our time. Organised religion emerges blinking into the post-secular light after being trampled into the ground for decades by the onward march of doubt; its position in society and in the state is diminished, its resources are depleted, its leadership is ageing and demoralised – and, all too often, still trying to fight the battles of a previous generation. For all the talk of a ‘quiet revival’ (real or perceived), most people are more likely to satisfy their curiosity about religion by clicking on short-form videos online than by filling the pews of their local church. The result is the rise of ‘disorganised religion’ – which can all too easily become an atomised and atavistic sectarianism riddled with misinformation and conspiracy theories that remains largely confined to cyberspace.

‘Disorganised religion’ of this kind can provide intense feelings of belonging and self-identification with a religious tradition, but it is religion as performative online theatre and thrives on negativity and ideological polarisation. In this respect ‘disorganised Christianity’ is as much ‘post-Christian’ as it is ‘post-secular’, and the ecosystem of ‘disorganised religion’ contains many people who, while identifying as Catholic or Orthodox (for example) have little connection with the institutional Church, which exists primarily as the object of their critical commentary. Christians whose self-identification derives primarily from online engagement often lack basic catechesis or theological literacy, and develop idiosyncratic forms of the Christian faith that sometimes bear little relation to historic orthodoxy. Where we once spoke of those who are ‘spiritual but not religious’, there are now many people who are spiritual and religious (at least in some sense) – but unchurched, insofar as they have no interest in the communal, institutional and hierarchical aspects of Christianity.

For Christianity, as a ‘religion of the book’ where issues of authority and faithfulness to the Scriptures matter (even if they are interpreted differently in different traditions), this is a problem. Other religious traditions are better adapted to the post-secular religious landscape of the 2020s, such as contemporary Paganism. Without formal organisation or institutions (usually, anyway), Paganism is a religion that can be practised singly or in groups, and is almost infinitely flexible when it comes to doctrine and practice. Much the same could be said of Buddhism (or what passes for ‘Buddhism’ in the West, which often bears little relation to the Asian religion), which ranges from full-blown membership of the Sangha to a few online mindfulness courses. What Paganism and Buddhism have in common, perhaps, is that they shade into spiritualities that bear little relation to religion at all. There are many people who identify with Pagan witchcraft, for example, who cannot be said to be ‘religious’ in any meaningful sense and are about as dissimilar from earnest Goddess-worshipping Pagans as they are from members of the local Baptist church. Their interest in witchcraft is as practical as its spiritual. Similar, the average training company offering mindfulness workshops to executives in central London is as dissimilar from a Buddhist monastery as it is from a Pentecostalist meeting. This is religion disassembled into marketable components and repackaged as life-hacks.

To the traditional religious believer, religion as life-hack is a horrifying thought; a blasphemous one, even. But it is not hard to find self-identifying Christians on TikTok for whom prayer is essentially ‘Christian manifesting’, a path of self-realisation designed to bring results – an instrumental approach to faith that will be familiar to anyone who has encountered the ‘Prosperity Gospel’ phenomenon. Post-secular religion is religion that has broken containment from the conceptual restraints of mainline religious traditions. Within those frameworks, it was generally acknowledged (for example) that religious practice should not be instrumentalised, or separated into its marketable components and sold; that faithfulness to the tradition came before bending it to one’s personal political and social agendas. Those assumptions no longer hold.

But having said all this, the great religious institutions of the world still wield great power and influence. It is not as though everyone is running wild on TikTok and Instagram. The vast majority of religious believers are faithful adherents of mainline traditions, trying their best. The challenge facing the churches is now not so much how to keep these people faithful, but what to do with those who are leaving behind unbelief; for there is a growing sense that atheism and agnosticism are socially and politically untenable positions – that one needs to believe in something to be taken seriously. It remains to be seen if that means we are facing a more existential crisis for unbelief: the final unravelling of the Enlightenment tradition of lionising cynical doubt. Perhaps hardy communities of unbelievers will cling on for decades yet. But if almost all unbelievers seek some sort of faith over the coming years as secularism ideologically implodes, it is imperative that the churches should be ready with a compelling and attractive offer. For the alternative is a generation of potential faithful believers in the mainline denominations spiralling off into online rabbit-holes of dubious spiritual value.

The churches have a mountain to climb. Decades of self-doubt and recriminations have left a diminished clergy in most denominations and an ongoing vocations crisis, because increased interest in faith does not equate to lifelong commitment to an institution. The churches are, by and large, sclerotic organisations accustomed to the expectation of decline, for whom the prospect of growth is a threat rather than an opportunity – regardless of their theoretical commitment to bringing to Gospel of Jesus Christ to all nations. I have no magical formula to suggest to turn the churches’ fortunes around, but unless they can make themselves attractive to seekers, the surge of curiosity about religion in the Third Millennium will simply break against the rocks of the Church’s own institutional stasis and be lost forever. I hope that will not happen; I hope that religious leaders will find a way to transform the post-secular age so that from the death of secularism arises a new age of faith.