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The collapse of Christendom was not a sudden process but has deep historical roots. Its causes are many and complex. One very obviously is that intellectually it became harder to believe. Peter Gomes may be going too far when he says, “Religion for many moderns, has been reduced to a belief in the unbelievable”32 but the basic mood is not in doubt. The fact that church attendance in England began to decline within a generation of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 is no coincidence. Owen Chadwick, reflecting on the effect of Darwin’s theory of evolution, writes:

More educated Englishmen doubted the truth of the Christian religion in 1885 than thirty years before. And in 1885 many persons, whether they doubted or affirmed, blamed “science” for this change of opinion. Some of them talked as though “science” alone was responsible. And among those who blamed science, some fastened upon the name of Charles Darwin as a symbol, or center, or intellectual force, of an entire development of the sciences as they came to bear upon the truth of religion.33

It was not simply science. The rise of critical history made biblical narratives problematic and was reflected in the skepticism of the Tubingen School of biblical scholars led by F. C. Baur, while writers such as Strauss and Renan offered a more credibly human Jesus than the Jesus of Christian dogma. The rise of the social sciences with Weber and Durkheim placed religious origins and beliefs within a new secular explanatory context and a hermeneutic of suspicion grew up, encouraged by those who Paul Ricoeur calls the “masters of suspicion, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.”34

Increasingly a significant part of what had seemed like central Christian beliefs either could no longer be held, or at least, looked less credible. To take a few examples—the Bible is not an infallible source of truth, its science is virtually nonexistent, and its history is often open to question. Life was not created as we know it but developed out of a single cell through an evolutionary process, mental illness is not caused by spirit possession, homosexuality is not a perversion but an orientation, and there is no heaven above the earth or hell beneath it. The fundamentals of belief have moved. Recently I was at Ely Cathedral for evensong and as the congregation declared, “I believe in the resurrection of the body” I could not but wonder if a single person present believed it to be true?

But it was not simply the credibility of belief. It was also a realization that Christian teaching was often of questionable morality. Take the doctrine of hell for example. Historically one of the church’s most effective evangelical tactics had been to frighten people into faith. One of Isaac Watts’s hymns contains the verse:

There is a dreadful hell,

And everlasting pains;

There sinners must with devils dwell

In darkness, fire and chains.35

This happy verse is found in his Divine Songs, Attempted in Easy Language, For the Use of Children. It was an immensely popular book. The British Library contains over a hundred editions from the nineteenth century alone, and it has never gone out of print. Dale Allison suggests it may have been the “best-selling children’s book of all time until the Twentieth Century.”36 This tactic ceased to work with the Victorians for whom the very idea of a God who would torture people for eternity began to seem morally repugnant. If this isn’t divinely blessed abuse, what is? Nor was hell the only problem. A significant reason for the great Victorian agnostics turning away from Christianity was because what Christians taught often struck them as morally inferior to their own highest beliefs and standards. Historically Christian theology has endorsed anti-Semitism, homophobia and misogyny. More recently not only has the revelation of widespread sexual abuse among the clergy been damaging for the churches, but the way the Catholic Church, among others, has covered this up has been a devastating moral scandal.

The result is that a good many find themselves alienated from the Church on moral grounds. A survey by YouGov in August 2018, showed only 27 percent trusted the honesty of church leaders a great deal or a fair amount. One might compare that with the 96 percent who trust nurses and the 89 percent who trust teachers.37 Linda Woodhead comments,

This is not to suggest that most people, even most young people, are actively hostile to the churches. About half now have little or no contact with them at all, and a majority are simply indifferent. Nevertheless, amongst those who do hold negative attitudes, it is older people who are more likely to say that the churches are “stuffy and boring,” whilst younger ones say they are sexist and homophobic.38

The intellectual and moral change was intensified by wider sociological and intellectual changes which were also undermining religious perspectives. The new primacy of scientific thinking undermined approaches to truth. Brad Gregory says, “the success of the natural sciences has made their epistemology the paradigm for knowledge as such.”39 Sometimes as with Richard Dawkins this leads to a conviction that anything other than scientific truth is not real, but even when this was not the case scientific and objective thinking often seemed more plausible than religious myths or stories. As David Martin puts it, with “the growth of science and technology the general sense of human power is increased, the play of contingency is restricted, and the overwhelming sense of divine limits which afflicted previous generations is much diminished.”40 It is not simply that Stephen Hawkins seems a better guide to life’s origins than Genesis or John Milton, it is that often where once we might have looked for religion to aid us, we now prefer practical solutions. We now mostly no longer look to God to add to our crop yields or protect us from disease. Recently I was bitten by a dog in Saigon and somewhat concerned in case I might have contracted rabies. I made straight to the hospital and a series of injections. It never occurred to me, as it would have to our ancestors, to pray that I might be protected. As Emily Dickinson wrote,

“Faith” is a fine invention

For Gentlemen who see!

But Microscopes are prudent

In an Emergency!41

An important factor here is the way science and increasing affluence has extended our longevity. In the Roman Empire the average age of death was around twenty-five. Today we confidently expect to get to eighty and it is not unreasonable to expect twenty years of life when we retire. In the ancient world death was omnipresent, while today for a long part of our lives we can simply forget it. Biblical texts like “You are like a mist that appears for a while, after which it disappears” (Jas 4:14) no longer have the menace or relevance they once had.

There was an economic basis to this as well. In latter part of the twentieth century, for the first time in history, a form of globalized market capitalism created an integrated and universal economy across large sections of the world. This led to the dominance of social market capitalism. Eric Hobsbawm argues that the marks of such a society are “an otherwise unconnected assemblage of self-centered individuals pursuing only their own gratification.” The result is the logic of the market has become more influential in every aspect of life. Increasingly the basic unit is the individual as hedonistic consumer. This gave people what seemed to many a quite satisfactory goal for the good life though Philip Larkin is characteristically jaundiced. “Our children will not know it’s a different country. All we can hope to leave them now is money.”42 To most people it at least seemed a lot more solid than thoughts on what possibly occur to them after they had died.

The growing affluence of society, and the new ideology of consumer choice, led to a social fragmentation which has undermined collective identities and community organizations. As Robert Putnam has argued in his Bowling Alone the same kind of decline observable in religious institutions can be seen in other social structures as well—political parties, PTAs, bowling clubs, or indeed any local organization. “In effect more than a third of America’s civic infrastructure simply evaporated between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s.”43 The same was true in Britain where traditional class and community-based loyalty gave way to a more pragmatic attitude. Consumer choice became increasingly central to society. People made a transition away from taking their identity from a given tradition or religious community, with a prescribed set of beliefs and practices, to a situation in which you choose for yourself how your life will be lived and seek your own personal fulfilment. For a religious tradition that was already fundamentally intellectually and perhaps morally undermined this new individualistic cultural challenge was to prove deeply destructive. To people experiencing the new delights of consumer satisfaction it might be that nothing the church was offering seemed interesting any more. And even if people did feel a religious need was their local church able to meet it? And if not, why go? As Paul Gifford puts it, “The modern western world increasingly operates on a plane where spiritual forces are scarcely relevant.”44

If to some religion was untrue, to many others it was not so much untrue as irrelevant because it no longer related to what seemed most important in life. It answered questions which many people no longer feel they need to ask. People can live busy lives, working and loving and enjoying themselves, without concerning themselves too much with what W. H. Auden called “the baffle of being.” Hugh Trevor Roper, the historian, records during a walk in Christ Church meadow in in 1936, “pondering on the complicated subtleties of St. Augustine’s theological system, which I had long tried to take seriously, I suddenly realized the undoubted truth that metaphysics are metaphysical and, having no premises to connect them to this world, need not detain us while we are denizens of it. And at once, like a balloon that has no moorings, I saw the whole metaphysical world rise and vanish out of sight in the upper air, where it rightly belongs; and I have neither seen it, nor felt its absence, since.”45 Other, less exalted souls, have felt much the same. As a minister I certainly found that telling people that they had a void in their life which only God could fill got increasingly odd looks. Looking at those who are outside the church but still nominally Christian David Voas concludes,

The dominant attitude towards religion . . . is not one of rejection or hostility. Many . . . are open to the existence of God or a higher power, may use the church for rites of passage, and might pray at least occasionally. What seems apparent, though, is that religion plays a very minor role (if any) in their lives.46

The result is that today Christianity finds itself culturally sidelined, a contested narrative, not the default position which in quite recent memory it still was. Arthur MacArthur was the last general secretary of the Presbyterian Church in England and then joint general secretary of the United Reformed Church. He was born in 1913 and grew up in a part of Northumberland, close to the Scottish border, where Presbyterianism was deeply entrenched. He didn’t have to choose to be a Presbyterian, he just was one.

To the one nourished in the family of faith, youthful doubts were treated as mental aberrations to be reasoned away. All of this may have been possible because the north-east of England was more resistant to change than the south . . . Anyway as far as my experience was concerned I was a Christian and a Presbyterian and took both things as part of the facts of life.47

That is the world we have lost. It was the world the Victorians knew and largely lost, just as it has been lost more recently in Catholic Ireland. It was the world of Christendom and it has gone. By contrast my son went to comprehensive school in South London where few of the children were openly Christian. One day he came home and recounted with scorn that the RE lesson had involved a trip to a nearby church. “They said, ‘that’s a pulpit. That’s where they give the sermon from’. Whatever did they think it was?” The point of course was that a significant number of the children hardly went inside churches or had any clear idea what went on in a service. When Steve Bruce asserts that “Most Britons under the age of 60 (that is, those who were not taught its basic ideas at school or Sunday school) have almost no knowledge of Christianity”48 he may be making the point a little strongly but essentially, he is correct.

IF GOD IS DEAD, IS EVERTHING ELSE THE SAME?

The implications for our culture of this loss of belief are profound. To a lot of people, it seemed that if there was no God you could just take that out of our systems of belief and everything else would still hold up. Some like George Eliot have felt that much of Christian morality could remain after theism was abandoned: “God, Immortality, Duty . . . how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third.” Marx looked to an inevitable victory of the proletariat which is in essence a secularized version of Christian eschatology. The belief in progress is essentially the same. It was Nietzsche, who most strongly questioned this. If God is dead, he says, so is the idea that the world has meaning, or our lives a purpose. In Twilight of the Idols he writes: “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident . . . Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole.”49 If you want meaning in life, says Nietzsche, you will have to make it for yourself. “A virtue has to be our invention.”

You may resist this conclusion, but it is inherently logical. Take Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Inspiring as this may sound one has to ask in what sense it is true? Under any circumstances it is very dubious if the universe itself is moral. The often-brutal reality of life does not obviously appear to have any moral purpose. “For the everlasting right, the silent stars are strong” says the hymn. No they are not, they are just silent. The only way this could possibly make sense would be if there is a cosmic reality with a commitment to justice. Or take Desmond Tutu’s stirring words:

Goodness is stronger than evil;

Love is stronger than hate;

Light is stronger than darkness;

Life is stronger than death.

It ends. “Victory is ours through Him who loves us.”50 Take the last line away and what sense could it conceivably make? If God is dead, says Nietzsche, so is the idea that the world has meaning, or our lives a purpose. Nietzsche is clear: “What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism.”51

This prediction has proved more than a little percipient. Today Nietzsche’s influence is widespread. Paul Mason calls him the all-purpose philosopher for our time. He is thinking especially of his influence on neo-liberal economics. But just as significant is that his belief that “virtue has to be our invention,” is now a central tenet in much post-modernism where it is argued that no version of truth can claim absolute authority. There is no reality per se, and no truth that can’t be relativized. That is pure Nietzsche.

What is more it is fascinating how influential Nietzsche’s nihilism (or something that equates to it) is in popular culture. In the television comedy The Good Place, Chidi quotes Nietzsche: “God is dead. God remains dead, and we have killed him.” The cartoon Bojack Horseman is based on the premise that there are no ultimate values in life. Mr. Peanutbutter puts it like this. “The universe is a cruel, uncaring void. The key to being happy isn’t a search for meaning. It’s to just keep yourself busy with unimportant nonsense, and eventually you’ll be dead.” In Dan Harmon’s popular adult cartoon Rick and Morty, one of the central concerns of the show is grappling with the meaninglessness of our lives amid an indifferent universe. As one character says “Nobody belongs anywhere, nobody exists on purpose, everybody’s going to die. Come watch TV?” In The Sopranos Nietzsche is used to depict teenage angst. “Even if God is dead, you’re still gonna kiss his ass,” Tony tells Anthony Jr. If God is dead there is no doubt that Nietzsche isn’t.

The death of God has not meant the end of morality. Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov is wrong when he said: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted.”52 A sense of fairness seems inbuilt in our humanity. Today there are many people committed to forms of altruism or progressive humanism, or who reverence the planet (even if the planet does not seem to return the feeling). Often it is true that this is more a product of our Christian heritage than many realize. People unknowingly draw on a Christian heritage just as they will quote phrases from the Bible or Shakespeare without necessarily knowing their origin. But moral choice is part of who we are. “It’s not fair,” “That’s not right,” the awareness that we ought to act in caring ways but often do not, are inherent in us. Asked to explain the origin of our consciences Darwin replied, “I throw up my hands. I can’t tell you how this could have evolved. What I can tell you is that any creature that became as intelligent and as sympathetic as humans would naturally have a conscience.”

Nonetheless, once a society no longer has a central belief system, and amazing stories that it shares, and a belief that this is objective moral truth, meaning is harder to maintain and justify. Once you say as Richard Dawkins does that, “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference,”53 Nietzsche stalks. Stephen Hawkins puts it more starkly, “The human race is just a chemical scum on an average-sized planet, orbiting around a very average-sized star, in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.”54 We are not far here from Matthew Arnold,

We are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.55

The former director of the British Museum, Neil McGregor, puts it very clearly:

We are a very unusual society. We are trying to do something that no society has really done. We are trying to live without an agreed narrative of our communal place in the cosmos and in time.56

The end of religion as a cultural center of life has not brought about happiness or freedom but a sense of loss. Modern life is shot through with uncertainty and anxiety and meaninglessness. There is a desperate and dangerous search for identity. Bojack has such a hard time because he doesn’t know or understand how to live in this way. It is his constant searches for meaning and purpose which leads to his depression. W. H. Auden describes our anxiety,

The lights must never go out,

The music must always play,

Lest we should see where we are . . .

Lost in a haunted wood;

Children afraid of the dark

Who have never been happy or good.57

THINGS FALL APART, THE CENTRE CANNOT HOLD?

You can see two quite opposite extreme reactions to the end of Christendom in Christian theology. In more conservative forms of theology there is often an attempt to wish the modern world away. One of the most significant is what is called “radical orthodoxy.” This was founded by John Milbank and takes its name from a collection of essays entitled Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology.58 It sets itself head-on against modernity and sees the liberalism of the 1960s as a capitulation to the modern spirit which leads inevitably to nihilism. Indeed, it goes further, claiming that, if separated from Christianity, all other belief systems lead to chaos. This is part of a wider critique of what Alasdair Macintyre calls “the Enlightenment project.” Alister McGrath, for example, hysterically alleges this is “an intellectually dubious movement which has given rise to the Nazi holocaust and Stalinist purges.”59 This is because when reason seeks to operate outside the perspective of the gospel it can only lead to a corrosive moral skepticism. Stephen Shakespeare describes the radical orthodox critique vividly: “There is reason in Christian theology, but it is not the same as the fake reason offered by the secular Enlightenment, which is western prejudice in fancy dress.”60

The problem is traced back to the very roots of modernity. “Once, there was no ‘secular.’”61 The first line of Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory expresses, in condensed form, the major presupposition of radical orthodoxy, i.e., that during the first millennia of Christianity, thought and belief was rooted in a Trinitarian religious vision. Once there was no secular, but a single community of Christendom. Around the fourteenth century, however, this unity began to erode, and a supposedly neutral space of reason and metaphysics gradually began to open. Once secular thought is let loose, we are on the inevitable road to Hitler and Bojack Horseman.

For radical orthodoxy the key is to recognize that the Christian story and it alone, is true. It is only when enlightened by God that you can think clearly. As Philip Blond puts it, “Only theology can, in the fullest sense of the word, see at all.”62 Lines are drawn between those who have the truth (us of course) and those who do not. Milbank says, “Christianity’s universalist claim that incorporation into the Church is indispensable for salvation assumes that other religions and social groupings, however-virtuous seeming, were finally on the path of damnation.”63 Any church which finds that other than repugnant deserves to be regarded as toxic.

At a more popular level modernity has been resisted by various forms of fundamentalism. The rise of Salafist Islam is but the most visible example of an increasing stridency and fundamentalism among the world faiths. Hardline nationalist Hinduism, extremist Buddhism, like the BBS in Sri Lanka, or the growth of ultraorthodox Haredi Judaism, are all evidence of a fundamentalist trend in much of the world’s religion. This trend is not confined to the global south. In the United States a 2014 Gallup poll showed 42 percent of Americans hold creationist views, though the number is dropping.64 In both Britain and America as the mainstream churches have declined fundamentalist churches have shown more resilience and grown in relative importance, contrary to the liberal expectation that increased education would make fundamentalism impossible. I am reminded of a Peanuts cartoon which showed a downbeat Charlie Brown after his baseball team had been beaten 184–0. “I don’t understand it,” Charlie Brown says. “How can we lose when we’re so sincere?!”

Galling as it is to liberals the facts, however, are quite clear. Most Pentecostals are fundamentalists and the New Church Movement is also largely fundamentalist in nature. Together these two churches represent the fastest growing section of the church in Britain. Collectively, those two groups opened 935 British churches between 2005 and 2010.65 Much of this growth is accounted for by immigration from less secularized cultures but it also reflects the ability of conservative religion to better resist the secular mood. Their countercultural nature allows a basis for resistance to the prevailing secularity and, in an insecure time, they offer security and identity. At a time of fast-changing gender and sexual change, for example, they offer security to those who favor traditional gender roles and authority. Rather ironically, while rejecting the ideas and prejudices of the modern world, they have in practice been more attuned to its cultural characteristics in their worship than many liberals. Sometimes too they may have been better at offering hope.

The intellectual and moral cost is considerable. Fundamentalism is predicated on an absolute view of truth which leaves little space for other faiths, or those who think differently. Fundamentalists frequently endorse an irrational and anti-scientific theory of Young Earth Creationism. Serious biblical scholarship is ignored or rejected, homophobia often tolerated or encouraged, and fundamentalism is increasingly linked to extreme politics. In January 2018, India’s higher education minister Satya Pal Singh threatened to remove evolution from school and college curricula. “Nobody, including our ancestors, in written or oral [texts], has said that they ever saw an ape turning into a human being.”66 That an education minister can say this is particularly shocking, if not Orwellian, like the ministry of peace organizing for war.

At the other extreme, often called progressive, the tactic is often capitulation. Historically liberal theology offered the possibility of combining coherent Christian belief with an open critical cast of mind. The hope (and sometimes the reality) was that faith would end up stronger this way. That possibility seems much more doubtful today. Liberal theology has lost confidence and coherence. One of the major recent theological developments has been the growth of non-objective theism in which talk of God becomes not a reference to a reality but a linguistic device, or a way of talking of the values in which one believes. Don Cupitt, for example, argues that “in recent years the Liberal creed has been falling apart article by article” and argues that liberalism in its essentials is simply another form of traditional theology.

They still stand in the old Platonic tradition and believe both in one-truth-out-there and in moral-standards-out-there. They are almost without exception scientific realists, and also social-historical optimists who believe, like John Robinson, if not quite in a final guaranteed historical triumph of the Good, then at least in a constant Love-out-there at the root of things. And they use a great deal of traditional language.67

For him the only possibilities now are fundamentalism or a post-modern nonrealism in which God is simply a human construct. “Liberalism is being squeezed out, in society, in the church, and in the intellectual world.”68

All this reflects a growing uncertainty in the progressive wing of the church as to whether, in the end, God language is meaningful. Richard Holloway’s deeply moving account of his growing atheism, which led to the position where “I could no longer talk about God,”69 has met with considerable sympathy because it speaks for a good many others. Brian Mountford, vicar of the University Church in Oxford for thirty years, advocates being a “Christian Atheist,” although he is more than a little vague about what this means: “Christian Atheist is a ragged category and I apologize if I can’t be pinned down by definitions.”70 The Quaker David Boulton in his The Trouble with God is honest as to the way his beliefs dissolved: “I have been cutting God down to size, lopping off a hand here, a foot there. Now there was virtually nothing left of him, If I worshipped anything at all, it was a divine Cheshire Cat, sans claws, sans teeth, sans virtually everything. Only the grin was left.”71 The New Zealand theologian Lloyd Geering, in his Christianity without God, argues that not only can Christianity exist without God but today it must. “We have now reached the stage within the evolving stream of Christian tradition when to achieve the most mature state of personhood we must become emancipated from the last element of our cultural tradition which has the capacity to enslave us—namely theism.”72

Such views find sympathy among a good number to whom the language of God has ceased to speak. The result is that a significant number of progressive Christians are closer to atheism than to theism in any recognizable form. Some are quite explicit about this. On its website the atheist Sunday Assembly affirms:

We are a godless congregation that celebrates of life.

•We have an awesome motto: Live Better, Help Often and Wonder More.

•A super mission: to try to help everyone find and fulfil their full potential.

•An awesome vision: a godless congregation in every town city, or village that wants one.73

Whatever Schleiermacher had in mind when he sought to articulate a faith for its cultured despisers it was not this.

Something approximating to a non-theistic faith is more widely held than is sometimes appreciated. When I first cofounded the URC liberal network, Free to Believe, with Donald Hilton in 1996 most of those present were like us evangelical liberals influenced by John Robinson’s Honest to God. Over the years the center of gravity has moved. Jack Spong (whose theism is deeply ambiguous) became the most influential theologian for progressive Christians with a quite considerable following for Don Cupitt. Spong then endorsed Gretta Vosper, a New Age atheist, as his heir. A good many of those who started off their theological journeys on John Robinson’s Honest to God found themselves finally less sure what, if anything, God might mean. So, Adrian Alkar, in his “Radical Church,” concludes:

Is God the cosmic superhero? Is God the embodiment love? Is God defined in the ethical injunctions of the Sermon on the Mount? Is God as a Life force? Is God the Ground of all being? Or is God a human construct, a word which allows thinking of goodness or loving as the overarching ethical principle.74

At different times in his life he has held different views on this question but now he asks if that matters? “The journey of radical openness, of honest questioning and the shared experiences of love have been all that mattered.” As chair of Free to Believe people send me emails saying things like

As a “theological instrumentalist” I can participate in churchgoing and worship because the concepts I encounter there have “instrumental” value regardless of their objective truth-status.

Today I am constantly meeting lay people and ministers who make it clear that an objective God is no longer part of their understanding of faith. It is to the credit of such theology that it is an honest attempt to come to terms with the crisis of faith. The reality is that significant amounts of commonly asserted or popular Christian doctrine such as the infallible Bible or non-evolutionary accounts of creation, or the miracle-working deity, who dictates the course of human life, are not sustainable. The old scenario of heaven and hell is not defensible nor is a great deal of traditional moral teaching or the uniqueness of Christianity as a way into religious truth or the belief that truth comes to us unmediated by culture. Theology is in chaos and attempts to put the genie back in the bottle will not work. God as supernatural being has died and deserves to die. I share many beliefs with those who take the non-theistic option.

It is not, however, for me. It offers no serious solution to the Christian dilemma. Anyone who has ever rubbed two theological thoughts together knows that God is a mystery who can never be adequately expressed by human language. The religious experience is elusive and fragmentary; more an entering into what Henry Vaughan called “a deep, but dazzling darkness” than a simple revelation of the truth.75 But Christianity stands or falls on whether or not there is reality behind such experiences. If the experience is real we are free to jettison images that are now bankrupt and seek for new words, symbols, and myths to express it. But, if it is an illusion, then the religious enterprise is false and dressing up moral values in religious clothing is philosophically misleading and intellectually incoherent. The honest atheism of Richard Dawkins is much more to be respected than using the word God for that which exists only in our minds and language. So the challenge for religious faith remains the essentially liberal one of taking seriously the intellectual challenge of faith while offering a cause big enough to live for and work for.

32. Gomes, “Introduction,” 2.

33. Chadwick. Victorian Church, 1.

34. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 33.

35. Watts, Divine Songs, song 1.

36. Allison, Night Comes, 3.

37. Field, “Counting Religion in Britain,” 1.

38. Woodhead, No Religion in Britain, 257.

39. Gregory, Unintended Reformation, 178.

40. Martin, Religious and the Secular, 116.

41. Dickinson, Complete Poems, 87.

42. Larkin, Collected Poems, 171.

43. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 43.

44. Gifford, Western Religion, 39.

45. Davenport-Hines, Letters from Oxford, xiii, 62.

46. Voas, “Fidelity,” 164.

47. MacArthur, Setting Up Signs, 10–11.

48. Bruce, “Late Secularization,” 14.

49. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 80–81.

50. Tutu, African Prayer Book, back cover.

51. Nietzsche, Will to Power, preface.

52. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 589.

53. Dawkins, River Out of Eden, 133.

54. From an interview with Ken Campbell on Reality on the Rocks: Beyond Our Ken, 1995.

55. Arnold, Poems, 226.

56. Daily Telegraph, 2 October 2016.

57. Auden, Selected Poems, 86.

58. Milbank et al., Radical Orthodoxy.

59. McGrath, Renewal of Anglicanism, 110.

60. Shakespeare, Radical Orthodoxy, 23.

61. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 1.

62. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 232.

63. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 387–88.

64. Newport, “In U.S., 42% Believe Creationist View of Human Origins.”

65. Jonnyscaramanga, “How Many Christian Fundamentalists,” para. 5.

66. Kumar, “Hindu Nationalists Claim that Ancient Indians Had Airplanes,” para. 9.

67. Cupitt, “After Liberalism,” 252.

68. Cupitt, “After Liberalism,” 255.

69. Holloway, Leaving Alexandria, 335.

70. Mountford, Christian Atheist, 11.

71. Boulton, Trouble with God, 55.

72. Geering, Christianity without God, 136.

73. See https://www.sundayassembly.com/public-charter-for-sunday-assembly/.

74. Alkar, Church, 148.

75. Gardiner, Religious Verse, 179.