The Church in a secularising society

Address (abbreviated) by Canon Ian Ellis to Affirming Catholicism Ireland, an organisation  founded in 1994 to “uphold the integrity of the Church of Ireland as a Catholic and Reformed Church, affirming Catholic faith and order within the Church of Ireland”.

Church of Ireland Theological Institute, Dublin, 21st October 2017

Last July, Barnabas Fund, an organisation which focuses its work on bringing hope and aid to persecuted Christians around the world, reported happily that two Christian street preachers had been found not guilty at Bristol Crown Court of inciting public disorder. I suppose such reports are somewhat familiar, but there is no doubt that, more often than not, they try our patience because so often they seem to display, quite simply, an aggressive intolerance of religion. Religious people often tend to see such episodes as evidence of not simply a creeping but actually a galloping secularism.

The meaning of 'secular'

However, we must 'hold our horses' here for a moment. It is important to be aware of the more strict meaning of the terms 'secular' and 'secularising' because they are easily misunderstood. Secularism is perhaps typically seen as hostile to religion, or hostile to the Church but it is more accurate to see secularism as hostile to religious privilege in society as opposed to religion per se.

The UK National Secular Society states: “Secularism is a principle that involves two basic propositions. The first is the strict separation of the state from religious institutions. The second is that people of different religions and beliefs are equal before the law.”

As well as promoting the separation of religion from the state, the National Secular Society says it seeks the protection of freedom of religious belief and practice and clearly distinguishes itself from atheism.

This does seem rather benign in that secularism is not presented as a threat to religion, only as seeking to separate religion and the state, a principle that is perhaps most celebrated in the French secular doctrine of laïcité.

However, more loosely used, the terms 'secular' and 'secularism' and 'secularising' are understandable as referring to a drift away from religious influence in society at large. Indeed, explaining 'secularisation' in The Encyclopedia of Ireland (General editor Brian Lalor. Gill & Macmillan, 2003), Michael Hornsby-Smith, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Surrey and editor of Catholics in England, 1950-2000, describes it as “the supposed declining power and influence of religion in the modern world”.

But is growing secularism the cause of a decline in religious adherence and influence or is a growing secular environment simply the result of religious decline?

In the Republic of Ireland, however, the decline of religious influence in national affairs sits somewhat surprisingly against a continued relatively high level of personal religious identification.

In a nutshell, taking Roman Catholic and Church of Ireland together, the 2016 census showed that those so identifying amounted to a total 81% of the overall population, although this was a decline for the two denominations from 87% in 2011. In fact, widening the religious scope, with a large increase in the number of Muslim people, just over that same figure, 87%, of people identified in 2016 as religious.

Recent secularist development in Ireland

In the Republic of Ireland, the 5th Amendment of the Constitution, following a December 1972 referendum, removed – by a considerable 84-16% of the vote - the Constitution's special position of the Roman Catholic Church and recognition of other religious denominations, including the Church of Ireland. At that time, the Church was of course still socially very dominant in Ireland and the change in the Constitution may have been considerably influenced not so much by a secularising trend as by a desire for better relations between the Republic and Northern Ireland at a time when the Troubles were escalating. But, nonetheless, there was a secularising trend also at play.

Colin Barr and Daithí Ó Corráin, of the University of Aberdeen and Dublin City University respectively, write in a chapter in The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland (ed. E.F. Biagini & M.E. Daly), 'Catholic Ireland, 1740-2016': "Change and modernisation were the zeitgeist of the 1960s and they gradually dissolved the defensive walls surrounding Irish Catholicism. Over the past half-century a variety of factors combined to transform Irish society and the place of religion within it.” (p. 82) They point to the state's prioritising of economic growth, the establishment of RTE television in December 1961 - with programmes such as the Late Late Show facilitating the questioning of traditional structures of authority and, over time, reducing clerical influence - and the relaxation of the laws on censorship.

The 5th Amendment, enacted in January 1973, came towards the start of a clear trend away from Church dominance in social affairs in Ireland. But one can go back earlier. As Christine Kinealy has pointed out in her War and Peace: Ireland since the 1960s, “The liberalizing intentions of Vatican Two did not extend to birth control.” She recalls how, against a background of considerable moral and legislative influence, the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland had faced opposition to the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae by dedicated feminists who formed themselves into the Irish Women's Liberation Movement in 1970; the organization decided to challenge the legislative ban on contraception. The law was eventually changed in 1993.

The secularising trend, in the sense of society moving away from church dominance, has of course resulted most recently in the 2015 referendum on same-sex marriage. Indeed, the gradual separation of sex from marriage had led to a situation in which the traditional Christian view of sexual relations being reserved to one man and one woman in marriage was largely redundant in wider society. With marriage being widely seen as less about sex (if at all) and more about romantic love, the stage was set for a redefinition of marriage in the secular realm, as took place in the referendum.

Indeed, the General Synod's 2012 resolution, moved by Archbishop Jackson and Bishop Miller, reaffirming the traditional Church view of sex and marriage, refers to the Church of Ireland's understanding of marriage at Canon 31 as its understanding “for itself and of itself”, thus leaving the door open for the integrity of other understandings in society at large.

Secular influences in the Church

There are of course those who want marriage to be allowed between people of the same sex not only in the civil context, but also in church - as clear an example as one can possibly get of the secular influencing the religious. There are many ways in which this has happened in the past because the Church is not insulated from the world. It is therefore the Church's task, such as was recognised by Pope John XXIII when he called the Second Vatican Council, to discern the direction in which the Spirit wants to lead the Church. That is precisely the process in which the Church of Ireland, along with other Anglican Churches across the world, is engaging in the matter of the marriage to each other of people of the same sex.

Can the Church of Ireland hold within itself two opposing understandings of marriage? In a letter to the Gazette published in the 5th June 2015 issue, in the wake of the same-sex marriage referendum result, Dean Tom Gordon raised the prospect of some structural differentiation within the Church of Ireland, stating: “If the Church of Ireland in the Republic is to survive, it may be time for us to reflect on the seismic differences which now exist between the Church’s Southern and Northern constituencies. The Equal Marriage referendum demonstrates that Church pronouncements on traditional morality - however forcefully maintained - are the ultimate turn-off in a now transformed Republic. It must surely be obvious that the distinctive theological cultures in both provinces are of such divergence that each must now be allowed latitude formally to develop separate theological and pastoral identities.”

Is such a scenario possible? Over the summer, the Archbishops of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, released the report of a working group set up explore how different strands of thinking on sexuality could be kept together in the denomination – the Motion 29 Working Group. Among its recommendations is the proposal that there should be no alteration to the formularies of the Church but that decisions on blessing same-sex relationships should be devolved to diocesan level. It remains to be seen how that proposal fares.

The Way Forward - Authenticity

There is no doubt that there has been a significant decline in religious influence in Ireland and further afield and a concomitant rise in secularism in its broadest sense. What is to be done, as far as the Church is concerned?

As I draw to a conclusion, I must refer to a recent lecture given by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, on 'The Challenge for the Church in the 21st Century'. The Archbishop warned that the separation of Church and State in Ireland “is not a hostile one, but [that] it could turn into one”. He acknowledged that the sexual abuse scandals of recent years have affected the faith of many people and described them as having been “an indication of an underlying crisis of faith where the self-protective institution had become in many ways decoupled from the horror which ordinary people rightly felt”.

I suppose this prioritizing of the institution over actual people amounts to a lack of authenticity, and therefore a lack of precisely what is needed in the Church today – placing people before institution because the earthly Jesus showed himself supremely as a person for others.

We are well aware of the negative statistics of church attendance. However a particular parish or denomination responds to this situation of decline, the approach will have to be a demonstration of authenticity - and to be authentic requires consistency of words and actions, of faith and works. We are good with words, but it is by our authenticity, not our words alone, that the Church is being judged both by the world and by God.