This Easter will be particularly joyous for Christians in Scotland with churches having only just returned to worship after a further three months of lockdown restrictions. And yet it won’t be a case of ‘as you were’ before coronavirus hit.
While many will be ecstatic to be back, some will be apprehensive – and others may not come back at all. A leaked Church of England report suggested that a fifth of worshippers may not return post-Covid. North of the border, there will be similar concerns.
Others however will be watching on optimistically to see if the undoubted rise in spiritual interest there’s been during the pandemic will translate into people returning to church after decades – or starting to come for the first time.
In a recent New York Times opinion piece, the writer Leigh Stein spoke for many millennials when she admitted: ‘I have hardly prayed to God since I was a teenager, but the pandemic has cracked open inside me a profound yearning for reverence, humility and awe’.
In her article, entitled ‘The Empty Religions of Instagram’, Stein argues that while 22% of millennials (those like myself born between 1980 and 1995) would describe themselves as having no religion, they have simply swapped traditional religion for new moral authorities – namely, social media influencers. Televangelists like Billy Graham have been swapped for Instavangelists like Glennon Doyle and Gwyneth Paltrow, but ‘we’re still drawn to spiritual counsel’, such as ‘It’s ok not to be ok’.
However, writing as a ‘leading feminist’ (Washington Post), she says ‘the women we’ve chosen as our moral leaders aren’t challenging us to ask the fundamental questions that leaders of faith have been wrestling with for thousands of years: Why are we here? Why do we suffer? What should we believe in beyond the limits of our puny selfhood?’.
In fact, once we start asking those questions, the answers might surprise us. I was struck recently by a poignant interview that comedian Eddie Izzard did with the Guardian in 2017. Entitled ‘Everything I do in life is trying to get my mother back’, the following paragraph really stood out:
“I have a very strong sense that we are only on this planet for a short length of time,” he says. “And that is only growing. Religious people might think it goes on after death. My feeling is that if that is the case it would be nice if just one person came back and let us know it was all fine, all confirmed. Of all the billions of people who have died, if just one of them could come through the clouds and say, you know, ‘It’s me Jeanine, it’s brilliant…’”
Izzard’s words struck me because at the very centre of Christianity is the claim that of all the billions of people who have died, one did come back. In fact, in the words of the Apostle Paul it is of ‘first importance…that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day’ (1 Corinthians 15:3-4).
In the past year, we’ve been surrounded by death as never before in most of our lifetimes. And according to the materialist worldview, that is it. The end. Finito. And yet when we stand around the body of a loved one, everything in us screams no – that can’t be the end! Furthermore, we’re asked to believe that on an objective level, the death of a human being is no more tragic than the death of an animal.
Stein notes, ‘The whole economy of Instagram is based on our thinking about our selves, posting about our selves, working on our selves’. But deep down, we know that we’re made for something bigger than ourselves.
In fact, Stein puts her finger on it when she says: ‘There is a chasm between the vast scope of our needs and what influencers can provide. We’re looking for guidance in the wrong places. Instead of helping us to engage with our most important questions, our screens might be distracting us from them. Maybe we actually need to go to something like church?’
The challenge for churches is: what will people hear when they come? A recent survey said that 25% of British Christians don’t believe in the resurrection – unsurprisingly when it’s routinely denied or ‘spiritualised’ from the pulpit.
A new generation are asking questions they’ve never asked before. Are we equipped to give them the answers they so desperately need?
Published in the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press, 1st April 2021