With the chill wind of austerity blowing through the country, religion’s warm embrace looks more and more inviting. Peter Oborne welcomes the resurgence of a national pastime: churchgoing.
It’s Sunday morning on Upper Street in the heart of London’s secular, left-wing Islington. The shops and cafés are doing a lively business and the pubs have opened. But outside the portico of a handsome Georgian church stands an anachronistic figure. His white surplice flapping in the wind, vicar Simon Harvey is intent on luring shoppers into his Sunday service. He is surprisingly successful. With a smile and a welcoming word for everyone, by 11am Harvey has gathered more than 100 worshippers inside St Mary’s Upper Street. It is a mixed congregation: a mixture of young and old, black and white, the respectable middle class and the very poor. City bankers mingle with asylum seekers.
There’s a choir in the church, and plenty of children, who are taken downstairs to their Sunday School classes shortly after the service begins. The hymns are rousing and cheerful. Many of the congregation even appear to believe in God, not something that can by any means always be taken for granted in the Church of England. What’s more, slowly but surely, the St Mary’s congregation seems to be swelling. Over the last 12 months, attendance at the main Sunday service at the church (where my wife Martine is curate) has risen by nearly 20 per cent, from around 95 to 115. Though much of this is down to Harvey’s hard work and charisma, the growing popularity of St Mary’s is part of a much wider and very striking phenomenon.
Church attendances, in freefall for so long, have started to rise again, particularly in Britain’s capital city. Numbers on the electoral rolls are increasing by well over two per cent every year, while some churches have seen truly dramatic rises in numbers.
Change is afoot. For many years it was accepted that Christianity was all but dead, an anachronistic relic of the past whose foundations had been destroyed by modern science and rationalism, before being left behind by the cultural and sexual revolution of the Sixties. The figures seem to bear this out. Church attendance — which stood at around 50 per cent in the middle of the 19th century – had declined to around 12 per cent in 1979, or 5.4 million. By 1998 it had almost halved to 7.5 per cent and when the most recent census was conducted in 2005, it was discovered that only 6.3 per cent of the population, some 3.2 million, were regular churchgoers. The number of people calling themselves members of the Church of England has collapsed to 20 per cent, according to the latest British Social Attitudes Survey, down from 40 per cent as recently as 1983. More than half of all Britons, according to British Social Attitudes, say they have “no religion” and never attend a religious service.
Despondent churchmen judged that there were just too many alternative attractions — Sunday shopping, sports fixtures and the relentless secularism of modern Britain. Only Islam, fuelled by immigration and more disciplined and certain faith, appeared to be growing.
But, as St Mary’s Upper Street shows, there is still that yearning for faith. Indeed, as the second decade of the 21st century gets under way, there is surely a change of public mood. There have been many wonderful things about the last half-century, but it is impossible to deny that it has been an era of materialism and selfishness. The religious impulse has not quite vanished, but the teachings of the church have been mocked and suppressed. It may be that in an age of austerity, we are collectively coming back to the profound and ancient verities of the gospels.
I asked Simon Harvey the secret of his success. A cheerful priest in his mid-forties, he makes no grand pronouncements – just stresses the importance of being friendly: “This church is massive and it can appear a bit terrifying to local people. For many people, the threshold is the hardest place to cross. We need to get them through the door.” And once inside, Harvey concentrates on making people feel wanted: “Sometimes within hours of coming through the door, they are sitting down for lunch in the vicarage.”
Harvey, who was a minister in Leicester for many years before moving to London, also stresses the importance of being a full-time vicar: “In London, every parish has a church and a minister, whereas in other parts of the country, clergy can cover 8-12 churches. You’ve got to have a relationship with the minister, you’ve got to have somebody out there in the front of the church.”