Saturday 19 February 2022

The end of British Christianity

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I attended a godless state grammar school in Westcliff-on- Sea, Essex, across the road from a Catholic secondary modern school called St Thomas More's. 

I thought  at the time that I would have killed myself had I attended a secondary modern or comprehensive. I wouldn't, but some sensitive children do.

A couple of days ago a Catholic friend of mine, who lives in my home town, sent me this letter produced by the headmaster of St Thomas More.





I reread and commend to you this article by 
Damian Thompson from 2015 headlined 

2067: the end of British Christianity



'Let’s not get sidetracked into another argument about Islam. Although it will probably become Britain’s largest religion some time this century, it isn’t emptying our village churches. The deadliest enemy of western Christianity is not Islam or atheism but the infinitely complex process of secularisation.
'Or, to put it another way, choice. Long before digital technology, social mobility was undermining what the American scholar of religion Peter Berger calls ‘plausibility structures’ — the networks of people, traditionally your family, friends and neighbours, who believe the same thing as you do.
'I’m not saying that my Catholic grandparents accepted the doctrine of transubstantiation only because the people closest to them shared that conviction: faith can’t be reduced to social processes. But supernatural belief is hard to sustain once plausibility structures collapse.
'You go away to university and suddenly almost nobody believes what you do, or did. Your siblings move to different towns, so you won’t see them in church any more. Your laptop plugs you into any social network that takes your fancy. Even if you’re born again as an evangelical Christian, life pushes you from one congregation to another. Many Evangelicals get bored and turn into nones.
'The mainstream churches can’t cope with this explosion of choice. Also, as you may have noticed, they’re led by middle–managers who are frightened of their own shadows. They run up the white flag long before the enemy comes down from the hills. I sometimes wonder why Polly Toynbee bothers to fulminate against religious education. A quick tour of ‘Catholic’ state schools, where doctrine has been supplanted by multi-faith jargon and the cult of Nelson Mandela, would reassure her that she has nothing to worry about.'

Yes religious education in the UK is a joke and Catholic schools are teaching the essentially materialistic human rights religion of peace, justice, sexual equality and climate change, rather than Catholicism. They are as LGBT friendly as Protestant and godless schools.

I wrote about all this here

By the way, Damian Thompson said elsewhere that Muslims will outnumber Christians in the UK by about 2050.

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