Is Christianity back? Across several countries, the last few months have seen numerous anecdotal reports of a resurgence of Christian observance. Many British clerics are noting strong attendances at Lenten and Easter services. Similar reports are emerging in the USA, where younger people make up much of the increase. Meanwhile, France has had a 50% rise in adult baptisms, and survey data suggests a fourfold increase in Catholic observance among 18 to 24-year-olds in Britain.

It is possible that this is a false dawn. But equally, perhaps these faint glimmerings do represent something real. If there is real revival among younger generations, that may be because they have grown weary of the extremely rigorist morality that dominates the contemporary world, and are seeking an alternative.

Now Christianity does of course make considerable moral demands on its adherents.  Believers are expected to reorient their lives in many important respects, and to make personal sacrifices. In different ways, across different traditions, they are strongly encouraged to be honest about their failings, whether through a formal sacrament like Catholic Confession, or as part of small groups as in many Evangelical congregations, or corporately in the liturgy.

At its best, Christianity is not a moralistic religion — in other words, it does not place the expectation of perfect behaviour at its core. It is repentance and reconciliation, not respectability, that are central to the internal logic of the faith. The Christian moral system is also coherent and predictable.

Modern secular morality, by contrast, is extremely censorious and has a strongly arbitrary element, as we have seen in the last decade or so of “cancel culture”. People have been subjected to storms of anonymous criticism, resulting in lost jobs and lost livelihoods, with no clear limiting principle and no real interest in proportionality. To make matters worse, this is all highly impersonal and offers no clear pathway for restoration and forgiveness. Were those who loudly condemned Professor Tim Hunt, or Danny Baker, or the scientist Matt Taylor, interested in those men having a way back to the good graces of official opinion? It seems unlikely.

So much of this activism has a hard political edge, too. The grimly fanatical climate activism that we have seen in the last few years makes revolutionary demands, and is unconcerned with the compromises and concessions to humane individualism that characterise normal human political life.

It is no wonder if many people find this all exhausting and fruitless. People will always be seeking a way to make sense of the universe, and to integrate themselves into a moral community. But a heavily politicised system, without mechanisms that take into account human weakness, universal frailty, and the need to reconcile, cannot fulfil this role for long. Christians have certainly often failed to properly emphasise the need for humility and forgiveness.

However, at its heart the faith is fundamentally humane, in its attempt to offer both a vision and pattern for human life, and a way of living with our inevitable failures to meet that ideal. “The man that is will shadow / The man that pretends to be” wrote TS Eliot in his Choruses From The Rock. Humans will always be searching for a way to live with the tension between the ideal and the reality, and Christianity offers such a way.

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