Religion In Britain Its There If You Look - Road to the Middle Class

THE BRITISH are considered to be irreligious, with both the established Church of England and the Catholic Church experiencing steady decline. But there is life in the world of religion, as Danny Kruger reports from Pontins, a British holiday camp where folks will be attending “the annual evangelical jamboree organised by Holy Trinity, Brompton.”

Christianity in London radiates out in concentric black and white rings. In the middle is Kensington Temple, near Notting Hill Gate, a vast Pentecostal congregation of West Africans and Afro-Caribbeans led by a hyperactive former ballet dancer called Colin Dye, who does the splits on the podium. A little further out are the posh white churches of central London, like [Holy Trinity, Brompton].
In outer London are more huge black churches, some of them clearly crazy but most safely orthodox. Beyond, round the M25, are the white suburban mega-churches of Britain�s Bible Belt.

Mega-churches? In Britain. Well now. There�s more.

In black neighbourhoods, in particular, the church is perhaps the most cohesive social agent there is, the one cultural force that keeps families intact and steers young men into lives of responsibility and purpose.
As for rich whites like me, what is prompting the evangelical surge? It is partly the churches themselves, which have shrugged off the flummery of established religion. Charles Moore, on this page on Saturday, quoted John Buchan on radical Muslims: “They want to live face to face with God without a screen of ritual and images and priest-craft.” So do we. The same desire for integrity and openness that produced Protestantism in the first place is stoking a new revival, casual in style but solid in substance.

A hundred years ago, Britain featured the muscular Christianity of Eric Liddell, the Chariots of Fire athlete who perished in a Japanese internment camp in China in 1945. Two hundred years ago the “posh whites” of the time got together in the Clapham Sect and helped end the slave trade. Two hundred and fifty years ago the Wesley brothers brought Methodism and its simple message of “work all you can, save all you can, give all you can” to British mechanics.

Stay tuned.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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