January 27, 2025 - 5:00pm

When I was a postgraduate student, my tutor liked to repeat an old saw popular with academic philosophers, to the effect that the discipline “always buried its undertakers”. That is, critics were forever forecasting the death of philosophy, and were forever being proved wrong by its persistence or resurgence.

The same might be said of religion. At least since the mid-1800s, with the twin blows of evolutionary theory and new forms of historical criticism, European intellectuals have been confidently predicting that Christianity will vanish, or lose all credibility among educated people. Yet, despite undoubted decline and loss of influence, it has not done so. And now it has been reported that British members of Generation Z — people now in their teens and twenties — are significantly more likely than their parents’ generation to identify as “spiritual”. There are undoubtedly what the statisticians call “compositional effects” at work here, with a large number of younger Britons coming from immigrant backgrounds where religious belief is much more prevalent. But this may not be the only explanation.

It is also possible that the economic stagnation of the last two decades, and growing cultural fragmentation and alienation, are sharply exposing the limits of the vague and complacent secular liberalism which has tended to dominate British public discourse for several decades. This worldview — insofar as it gave any thought at all to the meaning of the good life — breezily assumed that people would be happy with material progress, technological innovation, and ever-expanding frontiers of personal choice. I am not among those conservatives who disdain economic growth or scientific advance, but it remains true that man cannot live by bread alone.

The possible difference between members of Gen Z and their parents in this area is fascinating. It was observed recently that people whose professional lives and personal finances were largely well-established and comfortable before the great financial crisis of 2008 — a demographic which includes Keir Starmer — struggle to understand just how difficult life has become, materially and socially, for their children.

That older generation, mostly born in the Sixties and Seventies, represents a kind of high water mark as far as disconnection from religious belief in Britain is concerned. Consider, for example, the Government’s plans last week to cut tax relief for religious buildings (known as the “worship tax”), which feels very much like the kind of thing that would be attempted by politicians who have little understanding of or sympathy with religious observance, and who have little contact with it in their everyday lives. They benefitted — if that is the right word — from the fading of Christian belief and observance, but also grew up and lived much of their adult lives in the afterglow of the old orderly, stable Christian Britain, whose positive aspects they have denied their own offspring.

Trends in belief are fickle things, but no observant or thoughtful person should be surprised to see a questioning of unbelief at this time of ongoing radical disruption to British society.


Niall Gooch is a public sector worker and occasional writer who lives in Kent.

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