‘Civilizational erasure’ and Evangelicalism’s future

Some of us will remember the old Orange mobile phone advert from the turn of the millennium: “The future’s bright, the future’s Orange.” The future did not, as it turned out, belong to Orange. But can it still be bright?

There is no doubt that Britain, like many of its neighbours, is afflicted by several overlapping crises. Pause for a moment and consider the state of our hospitals, our schools, our prisons, our armed forces, our borders, our economy, our collective mental health, and our social cohesion, and the picture becomes clear enough. And all this before we turn to the present condition of the Church of England. The skies all around us seem to be darkening. Recent remarks from the White House about “civilisational erasure” in Europe prompted the predictable response: what manner of incendiary rhetoric is this? Yet one cannot help wondering whether the proverbial frog in the water is quite as comfortable as it imagines, unaware that the temperature is still rising.

At the same time, we have been hearing a good deal about the so-called “Quiet Revival”: a renewed interest in Christianity and churchgoing, particularly among Millennials and Gen Z. Whatever the data ultimately shows, it does seem that many younger people feel aimless and rootless, and are therefore searching for ultimate reality – something enchanting, durable, and transcendent. There is a hunger for something far deeper and more substantial than the thin, individualistic, reductionist, “Help, I missed my Quiet Time” version of Christianity.