One thousand people got baptised in Perth on Good Friday. Why?
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A primary reason for the resurgence of interest in Christianity (Quiet Revival or otherwise) in the West, is that the younger generations no longer believe the lie that we are all on a cable car gliding smoothly to the top of Mt Progress.
They no longer believe the tech company, or “ethical” pensions fund vision of forests glades with young multicultural children running slo-mo, releasing balloons into an azure sky.
Such soft-focus pap hid the tech-bro’s gimlet-eyed insatiable appetite for rare metals, and their gleeful commitment to replacing humans with bots.
There is a churning queasiness about the nature of reality, the future of technology, the future of me within technology, and the fact that I may have been lied to by consecutive global leaders about their true intentions.
The young no longer believe that if they swipe right enough times they will find the right person. They no longer believe that if they are swiped right enough times they will be the right person.
The children have been betrayed. Their balloons first snagged then deflated on a gnarly branch. The sky grew dark. A once happy child is standing abandoned and alone in a clearing, lost and sobbing for home.
But what home? Home is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Mum and Dad are everyone and no-one all at once. The state has told us so. Too late, the younger generation now sees all of this for the propaganda that it is. And events such as the current crisis in the Middle East has exposed it as a lie.
This is no cable car ride. This is a terrifying rollercoaster ride travelling through a house of horrors. Ghoulish black swan events and beastly creatures popping up at random. Twists and turns we didn’t expect. Someone pass the vomit bag!
We are experiencing the cultural nausea that comes from such sideways churn and seismic shocks. We expected smooth progress and all we got were the jolting realities that the best days are behind us.
COVID lockdowns, war playing on the screen in real-time, brutalising porn available at our fingertips, job insecurity, plummeting levels of trust, rising levels of violence, young men being gunned down at university campuses (and influencers laughing about it), governments disconnected from the populace, mainstream media wilfully suppressing truth and showcasing its own ideologies.
The people who are telling us that it is going to be alright are the people for whom it is alright. The Hunger Games generation is watching the Capital with the realisation that Katness Everdeen isn’t coming to rescue them. They’re on their own.
Which is why the church. Which is why the reason for the re-ignition of the spiritual flame. Not all directed towards the church of course. But gee, this Easter just past was unlike any Easter I have seen in the past thirty years. It was full on. Not just on-line, but in real life.
One thousand people were baptised in Perth on the banks of the Swan River on Good Friday. One thousand! Perth, Western Australia, is the most baldly secular state in the country. No high levels of hostility towards the faith.
But no interest either. Just the unthinking rejection of a people intoxicated by beautiful beaches, wide open skies, and a gleaming lifestyle personified in the skyscrapers thrust up by the minerals and resources boom that has made Perth rich.
Now, good conservative that I am, I’m supposed to be churlish about such figures, and put it all down to froth and bubble. Yet let me just say that refusing to mourn when the dirge is played, and then refusing to dance when the flute is played, is risky business according to Jesus.
Most Easter holidays the Swan River would be filled with the sounds of jet-skis and power-boats. This Good Friday, the sound of singing and prayer. There, against the backdrop of those aforementioned skyscrapers, Jesus was proclaimed, no doubt to many a curious onlooker.
Now this does not mean that across the Western world the Sunday roads are blocked as people race off to worship God.
The churches may not be full, the Quiet Revival data may be flawed, but if you’ve been watching this thing for three decades and only seen a trickle of gospel interest, then suddenly BOOM!, you know for sure that something is happening. This is not wish-fulfilment.
Certainly not from me. I wrote several viral articles, and an award winning book on the fact that we need to settle in for a long defeat, in which Christianity in the public square will either fold its wings, or have them clipped.
Nek minnit!
A sudden spike in interest, and indeed countless elite level conversations, secular podcasts, books, young people turning up at churches, soccer players in the major leagues around the world declaring their allegiance and their Bible reading. Casual conversations about God.
That just did not happen three decades ago. I know because I was watching. And closely. I was under no delusions about the moribund state of the faith in the West.
That’s why I don’t take the secular naysayers too seriously. They were not watching. They’d turned their back on the religious thing in the West, confident that it was on its last legs, and, like a punch-drunken fighter was just awaiting an infinitely better book than “more-holes-than-Swiss-cheese” The God Delusion to send it to the canvas.
Writing in Britain’s The Telegraph this Easter, newly minted Roman Catholic, David Frost, picked up on the language of “full-fat” faith, launched by fellow journalist, the secular James Marriott of The Times, who last year was astonished at the young people populating churches.
Frost notes:
… the numbers are still pretty low in absolute terms. Moreover, nothing much seems to be happening in the mainstream Church of England, whose congregations are declining fast, perhaps weary of sermons about climate change and social justice. The impact seems mainly confined to two domains: Protestant evangelicals and Catholics (Anglo and Roman), not perhaps coincidentally the two areas where full-fat supernatural Christianity is still generally preached.
So I suspect it is a bit much, sadly, to call this a revival yet. But what I do sense is a greater cultural openness to Christianity, especially in Gen Z. It is an awakening, perhaps, if not a revival.
I agree. I’ve written before that it’s not that there are necessarily more Christians, but that those who are Christian are Christian more. That was last year before the debunking of the revival data.
And that greater cultural openness? What’s with that?
Much of it is down to the fact that this great progressive future we were all promised, a future zealously prosecuted by the grey halls, grey suits and grey hair of our cultural administrators, is more stultifying, more oppressive, more legalistic, and more willing to ostracise sinners, than any church has in the West for centuries.
Young people, having been told that the priests of religion would steal their joy, have found their joy being stolen by the state priests, who then charges them monthly fees for the privilege.
One of the great ironies, of course, is that same tech companies who promised a seamless, a-religious utopian future, have harboured the very seeds of the rejection of this vision.
Modern information technology - just as the printing press did in the past to the state - has usurped the propaganda, and become too slippery and responsive for the masters to control. The word is out. Or the Word is out. If one resurrection happened, may that not be true of other resurrections?
Frost observes:
One is the simple availability of different Christian voices on the internet. If your only exposure to Christianity is in your school religious studies class with a dull and inexpert teacher, as it might have been in the past, it could turn you off for good. But if you can hear Glen Scrivener or Bishop Robert Barron online, you are more likely to think: “I need to take this seriously.”
In a sense some of this is simple psychology. When the edgy Baby Boomers who told you that old, tired Christianity was a dud intent on stealing your freedom, suddenly lose their own edge, before stealing your freedom by buying three investment properties for cash, you might be forgiven for going “Hey, wait a minute!”.
Bad ideas don’t work. And nor, for that matter, do lies. Not forever any way. They may last some time, but as we saw with the Berlin Wall and Communism, a simple version of “the emperor has no clothes” can bring a thing crashing down pretty quickly.
In our current time, we’re seeing that with Iran, which gave off an air of invincibility for decades, because we chose to believe its lie.
The fact that it now giving off more than a whiff of desperation (despite the scurrilous attempts of some in the mainstream media to say that Iran is going to emerge stronger from all of this), proves what a house of cards the lies were.
It’s the same mainstream media in Australia that can wax lyrical about the month of Ramadan, with interesting pieces on its relevance in Australia, but which - when it comes to the pressing crowds buying fish on Good Friday, concludes the huge piscine interest is because of a “public holiday”. Eventually people go “Yeah, Nah” and switch off.
Riffing on CS Lewis, the newest, reluctant, convert, David Frost, concludes:
The important thing about Christianity is not whether it makes you feel better or whether it is good for society, but whether it is true. If it is, we should all want to know that, and if it isn’t, we are right to reject it. The one thing we should not do is refuse to properly consider it. And in Western society, that is all too easy. The quiet awakening, the cultural awareness of an alternative worldview, is a sign that this might just be changing.