Christian Engagement
in a Secular World?
Dr Gladys Ganiel
TCD at Belfast
gganiel@tcd.ie
Trinity College Dublin
What is Secularisation?
• The disconnecting of the relationship between
church and state
• Decline in religious practice (church-going)
• Decline in belief in traditional or ‘orthodox’
Christian beliefs in the West
• Decline in belief in God
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Is Secularisation ‘Inevitable’?
On present trends, which
there is no reason to think
will be reversed, the
Methodist Church will
finally disappear in about
2031 and the Church of
England will by then be
reduced to "a trivial
voluntary association with a
large portfolio of heritage
property". (book review by
Anthony Campbell)
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The Onion, ‘God Hinting at Retirement’
Attempting to downplay such
concerns, God told reporters that
he wasn't "going anywhere just
yet" and that, in any case, the
universe was largely selfsustaining these days.
"This place pretty much runs itself by
now," the Lord said. "And
besides, how many people still
notice I'm around? To be frank,
I'm not even sure I'm much more
than a beloved figurehead at this
point.“
… "Maybe I'll visit Europe," God said.
"I've never been in the Vatican,
and I've heard it's supposed to be
beautiful."
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Grace Davie: Believing Without Belonging
Davie’s argument is that
people may no longer
go to church, but they
continue to believe in
God, the afterlife, the
supernatural etc, in
surprisingly large
numbers
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What about Northern Ireland?
Traditional social scientific
indicators of
secularisation buck
European trends
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The lay of the land: Denominations
Catholic
37%
Presbyterian
22%
Church of Ireland
17%
Methodist
4%
Other Christian
7%
Other religion and
philosophies
>1%
No religion or not stated 13%
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Decline in Weekly Church Attendance
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Belief in God
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Vacant Seats and Empty Pews
Bernadette Hayes and
Lizanne Dowds report
on 2008 NI Life and
Times Survey,
http://www.ark.ac.uk/pub
lications/updates/updat
e65.pdf
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Vacant Seats and Empty Pews
• 80% of NI population identifies with one of
the main religious denominations, though in
1968 it was 96%
• In last 10 yrs ‘no religion’ has grown to be
fourth largest
• Since early 1990s, decline in attendance
among no religion have declined sharply,
especially among Catholics
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Vacant Seats and Empty Pews
• The decline in weekly levels of religious
observation has been replaced by less
frequent attendance rather than by no
attendance at all
• A majority of people in NI still believe in God,
even among those who do not attend church
on a weekly basis, But …
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Vacant Seats and Empty Pews
• Those who claim a
religious affiliation but
do not attend religious
services on a weekly
basis has now become
the norm for the
majority of individuals
in Northern Ireland
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Iona Institute Survey
Religious Knowledge in
Northern Ireland (2007)
http://ionainstitute.net/as
sets/files/NI_religion_p
oll.pdf
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Iona Institute Poll
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Iona Institute Poll
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Church Attendance Among Presbyterians
Duncan Morrow,
‘Presbyterians in
Northern Ireland: Living
in a Society in
Transition,’
http://www.ark.ac.uk/p
ublications/updates/up
date21.pdf
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Trajectories?
• Retrenchment – looking
after your own
• Pietism or Privatisation
• Condemnation of the
secular world
• Nostalgia for the way it used
to be
• Selective socio-political
engagement around ‘moral’
issues
See Ganiel, Evangelicalism and
Conflict in Northern Ireland
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Trajectories
• ‘Resident Aliens’
• ‘Not of this world’
• The ‘kingdom’ of God is
bigger than the church
• Engagement as one
‘interest group’ among
others – faithful witness
• It is good to be free of a
relationship with
political power
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Trajectories – Leaving
People choose to leave their churches (and in
some cases their belief in God) because of
intellectual doubts, negative experiences of
church (personal and political), harsh moral
codes – but reluctant to claim atheism
(Claire Mitchell and Gladys Ganiel, Evangelical
Journeys: Choice and Change in a Northern
Irish Religious Subculture, 2011)
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Trajectories – Disillusionment with the
institutional church
Some of those who believe but don’t ‘belong’ to
churches are quite passive and take little
interest in the church;
Others ‘believe’ quite passionately but think
that the church is a big problem.
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What’s happening outside church institutions?
• Post-evangelicalism
• The emerging church,
the emergent church,
emergence Christianity
• Pub Christianity
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Critique of the (evangelical) churches
• The churches have been interested in the
wrong issues (sexual matters, personal
morality; in NI – unionist politics)
• Churches should be more concerned with
social justice
• Reject literalist reading of the bible
• Churches have created unrealistic
expectations & images of Christ
• Doubt should be embraced, not resisted
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‘Churches should carry
warning labels, like
cigarettes: Churches can
seriously damage your
health.’ – emerging
Christian, Belfast
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Everybody in Northern Ireland has had a conversion experience as a teenager,
and clearly for most of those people it didn’t work out. I’m not saying that
they don’t bear a degree of responsibility for what they do after having a
conversion experience but when you’re 14 and you go forward at a
meeting and you cry and you feel like you are going to go to hell if you
don’t do this, and when someone tells you afterwards – not using these
words – even though you’re 14, and you like to stay up late, and you don’t
get up early for school, and you have difficulty at home, what you have to
do to maintain this faith commitment is to read the Bible every morning,
with Bible reading notes. And if you’re an adolescent male, to not
masturbate. And the reason I use those examples are adolescent males
don’t get up early, they don’t read, and they’re adolescent males, and
they’re going through normal human development. And there seems to be
a culture within conversionist, conservative evangelical movements that
have dominated in Northern Ireland that actually impede normal human
development. – emerging Christian, Belfast
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Alternatives? Reform of Church Institutions
• A ‘cultural update’
approach
• ‘Seeker’ churches
• Some pub churches
• Calling the church back
to concern for social
justice
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Alternatives? Alternative Institutions
• House churches, home
groups
• ‘Emerging churches’
• ‘Collectives’ (i.e. Ikon in
Belfast)
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• These alternative
groups may be a
person’s primary
religious community; or
people may attend a
traditional church as
well as interact with
their alternative
community …
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Alternatives?: Religionless Christianity
John Carroll, The Existential
Jesus
In this book, Jesus is presented
as a strong critic of religious
institutions and leaders
The establishment of the
church is portrayed as a sort
of consolation prize for
people who can’t follow
Jesus or don’t understand
what he was really about
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Alternatives? Religionless Christianity
Peter Rollins, The Fidelity of Betrayal
Christianity is not a set of beliefs about God, but a
critique of all religion. It is especially a critique of
religions that align themselves with social and
political power. The central task of Christians, then, is
to interrogate their own religious beliefs and
institutions, with an emphasis on discerning how
they exclude or oppress the poor and the outcasts.
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Alternatives? Religionless Christianity
Kester Brewin, Other
Brewin on anarchist Hakim
Bey’s ‘Temporary
Autonomous Zones’ (TAZ) or
‘pirate utopias’
The operate outside the
constraints of the dominant
religious, political & social
systems, providing space for
freedom & love
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Alternatives? Religionless Christianity
The idea is that religious institutions are at best
flawed, at worst inherently harmful for
people.
Christianity should be de-institutionalised
But where does that leave community,
accountability and our traditional church
structures?
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Is Christianity Doomed?
• What trajectories for social and political
engagement seem most promising to you?
• Can ‘emerging’ critiques revitalise
Christianity?
• How can and should existing churches engage
with these critiques and alternative
expressions of Christianity?
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