trinity college dublin christian engagement in a secular world? dr gladys ganiel tcd at belfast...

Trinity College Dublin

Christian Engagement in a Secular World?

Dr Gladys GanielTCD at [email protected]


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


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)


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 self-sustaining 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."


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


What about Northern Ireland?Traditional social scientific

indicators of secularisation buck European trends


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%


Decline in Weekly Church Attendance


Belief in God


Vacant Seats and Empty PewsBernadette Hayes and

Lizanne Dowds report on 2008 NI Life and Times Survey,

http://www.ark.ac.uk/publications/updates/update65.pdf


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


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• The decline in weekly levels of religious observation has been replaced by less frequent attendance rather than by no attendance at all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 …


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


Iona Institute SurveyReligious Knowledge in

Northern Ireland (2007)http://ionainstitute.net/

assets/files/NI_religion_poll.pdf


Iona Institute Poll


Church Attendance Among Presbyterians

Duncan Morrow, ‘Presbyterians in Northern Ireland: Living in a Society in Transition,’ http://www.ark.ac.uk/publications/updates/update21.pdf


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


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


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)


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.


What’s happening outside church institutions?

• Post-evangelicalism

• The emerging church, the emergent church, emergence Christianity

• Pub Christianity


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


‘Churches should carry warning labels, like cigarettes: Churches can seriously damage your health.’ – emerging Christian, Belfast


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


Alternatives? Reform of Church Institutions

• A ‘cultural update’ approach

• ‘Seeker’ churches• Some pub churches• Calling the church back

to concern for social justice


Alternatives? Alternative Institutions

• House churches, home groups

• ‘Emerging churches’

• ‘Collectives’ (i.e. Ikon in Belfast)


• 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 …


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


Alternatives? Religionless Christianity

Peter Rollins, The Fidelity of BetrayalChristianity 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.


Alternatives? Religionless ChristianityKester 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


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?


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?

trinity college dublin christian engagement in a secular world? dr gladys ganiel tcd at belfast...

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