Article
Belief
Creed
6 min read

2024 - the year Christianity bounced back?

From the opinion sites to the churchyard, we’re seeking a better way to live.

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A man sits in a church pew below a colourful stained glass window, looking pensive.
Karl Fredrickson on Unsplash.

Was 2024 the year Christianity turned a corner? Throughout the year, on substacks, websites, YouTube videos, and Instagram posts, the signs kept cropping up of what Re-Enchanting co-host Justin Brierley has called the Surprising Rebirth of Faith in God.  

Over recent years, and throughout 2024, we have seen a stream of public figures declaring various degrees of interest in Christianity, or even full-on faith. Rowan Williams described the usual suspects well, imagining a scene in an English Churchyard: “Some… have been professed believers (Francis Spufford, Nick Cave, Paul Kingsnorth), some have lingered in the church porch (Tom Holland, Philip Goff), some are still on a bench in the grounds (Alain de Botton).” And there is Ayaan Hirsi Ali (singing along from the pews), Russell Brand (posting Instagram reels from the font?), Louise Perry (on the bench, next to de Botton?), Jordan Peterson (sometimes in the pulpit, sometimes in the porch), and even Richard Dawkins (smiling at the choir’s rendition of Silent Night as he wanders past). 

In the USA, it’s similar. Yet more complicated. The alliance of Evangelicalism with Donald Trump is problematic, to say the least. J.D. Vance is a serious Christian, having made the journey from an evangelical church upbringing, through student atheism into Roman Catholicism. Shia LeBoeuf and Candace Owens are among other US celebrities finding faith recently, while academic Rod Dreher’s public journey into Eastern Orthodoxy has been watched by many. On our Re-Enchanting podcast, Molly Worthen is a good example of why, despite everything, sceptics like her can still find faith in the USA. 

In the UK’s Assisted Dying debate, the place of religion was a hot topic. The case made against the bill by Christians gained a strong hearing, so much so that secular voices started crying foul, arguing that religious voices should not be heard, or at least, such people should declare their hand (though the number of people starting their case with ‘I’m a secular person, and that may colour my beliefs on this, but…” were hard to find). 

In public life, explicitly Christian writers such as Rowan Williams, Elizabeth Oldfield, Nicholas Spencer, Madeline Davies, Giles Fraser and Marcus Walker command an audience, and maybe this website - Seen & Unseen - in its own small way is helping to provide a stronger, more intelligent Christian voice in culture.  

Nonetheless, let’s not get carried away. The Assisted Dying bill passed. Despite the celebrity names, numbers going to church continue to fall, and the public assumptions of the culture remain firmly secular.  

Recent articles in the Spectator express the dilemma well. A. N. Wilson pens a gloomy assessment of the prospects of Christianity in the west, entitled Is the End of Christendom Nigh?, looking out from his pew on a dwindling local congregation of elderly people, watching the lights go out on Christian culture in the west. Yet at the same time Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes a piece about her second Christmas as a Christian, called A Christian Revival is Under Way. Which is it? Maybe to adjudicate, an editorial, presumably written by its new editor, Michael Gove, entitled In Defence of Faith makes a strong case for Christian faith and its place in national life. 

Anecdotally, at the local level, stories abound of people stepping into churches, seeking some kind of meaning in life and re-engaging with faith. Sometimes it’s the powerful emotion of charismatic or Pentecostal worship, sometimes the majesty of cathedrals or the mystery of Orthodox liturgy. Our local church in Oxford has a regular stream of stories of students exploring and finding faith and I keep hearing the same story in churches across the country.  

“People need meaning, and the secular world didn’t come up with the goods.” 

Nick Cave

My take on this, for what it’s worth, is that western culture has run out of steam, either temporarily or for good. In the twentieth century, both Fascism and Communism rose and fell. Francis Fukuyama declared the ‘end of history’ in the triumph of secular, liberal, consumer capitalism. Yet this too has run out of steam, increasingly felt to be spiritually hollow and politically suspect. ‘Woke culture’ was an attempt to restore a set of moral values to restrain the unpleasant and unjust effects of the unbridled market, yet its stridency and aggressiveness, its Canute-like attempt to resist aspects of natural order, not to mention its adoption of a destructive fixation on a reductive identity politics has generated a backlash of its own.  

The elections of 2024 were instructive. Keir Starmer won not because he offered a compelling vision but because he said so little. There was no ‘Yes We Can’ Obama slogan, no Blairite ‘New Labour, New Britain’ moment. No-one knew what he stood for, but we were so fed up with the Conservatives that we just wanted them out. Even with Trump in the USA, unlike last time, people knew what they were getting, yet they voted for him anyway, mainly because they felt he would fix the economy and immigration better than the Republicans who had failed on both. 

Nick Cave put it well in a recent interview in the Times: “people need meaning, and the secular world didn’t come up with the goods.” The perennial human search for purpose and significance hasn’t gone away, and there is not much on offer in secular culture. So, people are suddenly open to exploring more ancient stores of wisdom. 

Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that just at the time when we might be seeing the stirring of an openness to the spiritual, the numinous and the religious, the Church seems in no state to capitalise. The Church of England has been absorbed in a lengthy and acrimonious debate over human sexuality and same-sex marriage over the past five years, the Archbishop of Canterbury has had to resign over the Church’s failure to enact a properly functioning safeguarding culture, and the free churches are in free fall.  

So, what are the prospects for 2025? Maybe the Church of England can find a settlement in its civil war on sexuality, finding a way for the warring parties to live together, even if it has to be at some distance within the same church for a while. Then we might see which side (or perhaps both in their different ways?) might be better placed to appeal to jaded, secular people who are waking up to the lack of meaning in their lives and the potential of Christian faith to offer a satisfying vision of reality and a new way of living. 

Perhaps a new Archbishop of Canterbury might come in, untainted by past safeguarding failures, and, despite the impossibilities of the job, able to steadily steer the church towards its spiritual heart. At the end of his monumental and increasingly influential The Master and his Emissary, neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist (not a Christian himself) makes a telling point: “The Western Church has in my view been active in undermining itself. It no longer has the confidence to stick to its values but instead joins the chorus of voices attributing material answers to spiritual problems.” 

Back in 1930, an Anglican lay mystic from Notting Hill, Evelyn Underhill wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, Cosmo Lang with words that put their finger on what the Church might need now: 

“God”, she wrote “is the interesting thing about religion, and people are hungry for God.” She went on: “We look to the Church to give us an experience of God, mystery, holiness and prayer which, though it may not solve the antinomies of the natural world, shall lift us to contact with the supernatural world and minister eternal life.”  

A church that is seen as ‘a dull echo of the liberal consensus’ as the former Bishop of London, Richard Chartres used to say, is hardly worth the candle. If the message of the church is a vaguely religious version of what you can already find in the Guardian (or the Telegraph for that matter) then why bother with it? 

As Rod Dreher put it recently: “only the return of strong religion - one that makes demands, offers compelling explanations to the problems of death and suffering, and gives worshippers a visceral sense of connecting to the living God - has any hope of competing in the post Christian marketplace.” 

In 2024, religion in general and Christianity in particular has never been far from the front pages, for better or worse. God has not gone away. Dreher may well be right. And the Church, if it is to make the most of a season where troubled people are beginning to look its way again may need to take notice.  

Article
Culture
Music
Wildness
6 min read

Rock ‘n’ roll’s long dance with religion

How popular music conjures sacred space.

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

Rapper Stormzy raises a hand to heaven as he sings with a gospel choir on the Glastonbury stage.
Blinded by Your Grace, Stormzy, Glastonbury 2019.
BBC.

In Faith, Hope and Carnage, his book of conversations with Seán O’Hagan, Nick Cave said: “Music plays into the yearning many of us instinctively have—you know, the God-shaped hole. It is the art form that can most effectively fill that hole, because it makes us feel less alone, existentially. It makes us feel spiritually connected. Some music can even lead us to a place where a fundamental spiritual shift of consciousness can happen. At best, it can conjure a sacred space.”  

That’s because, as Elvis Presley stated during his ‘68 Comeback Special, "Rock and roll is basically just gospel music, or gospel music mixed with rhythm and blues". Following in the wake of key precursors such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Rock ‘n’ roll merged Blues (with its spiritual strand) and Country music (tapping its white gospel) while Soul music adapted much of its sound and content from Black gospel. For both, their gestures and movements, and sometimes the songs too, were adopted wholesale from Pentecostalism. Some, such as Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Cooke, felt guilt at secularising Gospel while others, like Johnny Cash, arrived at a hard-earned integration of faith and music.  

All experienced opposition from a Church angry at its songs and influence being appropriated for secular ends. This opposition fed a narrative that, on both sides, equated rock and pop with hedonism and rebellion. The born-again Cliff Richard was often perceived (both positively and negatively) as the only alternative. Within this context the biblical language and imagery of Bob Dylan and Van Morrison was largely overlooked, although Dylan, in particular, spoke eloquently about the influence of scripture within the tradition of American music on which he drew. 

However, this changed in two ways. First, the Church began to appropriate rock and pop to speak about Christian faith. David Wells has explained that: “The American branch of the Jesus movement effectively started in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, but there was also a parallel development in the UK that slowly evolved from beat groups performing in church coffee-bars. By 1971, leading British Christian rock band Out Of Darkness were appearing at notorious countercultural gathering Phun City, while Glastonbury introduced a “Jesus tent” that offered Christian revellers mass and holy communion twice a day.” 

This development led eventually to the emergence of a new genre, Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) and a consequent oscillating movement between CCM and the mainstream. Mainstream artists such as Philip Bailey, David Grant, Al Green, Larry Norman and Candi Staton developed CCM careers while artists originally within CCM such as Delirious? Martyn Joseph, Julie Miller, Leslie (Sam) Phillips, Sixpence None The Richer, Switchfoot, and Steve Taylor achieved varying levels of mainstream exposure and success. 

Second, the Hippie movement expanded the spirituality already inherent in rock music through the visionary aspect of drug culture and a wider engagement with religion which included significant connections with Eastern religions but also, in part through the Jesus Movement, with Christianity. This was the period of songs such as 'Presence of the Lord' by Blind Faith, 'My Sweet Lord' by George Harrison, 'Fire and Rain' by James Taylor, 'Sweet Cherry Wine' and 'Crystal Blue Persuasion' by Tommy James and the Shondells, 'Let it Be' by The Beatles, 'That's the Way God Planned It' by Billy Preston, 'Hymn' by Barclay James Harvest, 'Jesus is A Soul Man' by Laurence Reynolds, 'Are You Ready?' by Pacific Gas & Electric, 'Spirit in the Sky' by Norman Greenbaum, 'Put Your Hand in the Hand' by Ocean, 'Jesus Is Just Alright' by the Doobie Brothers, ‘God Gave Rock and Roll to You’ by Argent, and both ‘My Life Is Right’ and ‘Try Again’ by Big Star.  

This was also the period of musicals such as Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell and, from the Jesus Movement, Lonesome Stone and Yesterday, Today, Forever. Among the most interesting, but then relatively obscure, examples of albums connecting faith and music were Electric Prunes’ Mass in F Minor (written by David Axelrod), C.O.B.’s Moyshe McStiff and the Tartan Lancers of the Sacred Heart and Bill Fay’s Time of the Last Persecution. Gram Parsons drew heavily on the Gospel music tradition in Country Music, also taking The Byrds in the same direction, while many of the songs of Judee Sill dealt specifically with Christian spirituality.  

It was that spirit that was transposed into the feel and flow of rock and soul and it is this that gives rock and soul its affective nature.

With the majority of Soul stars having begun singing in church, many of the most effective integrations of faith and music were also found there, with Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and the Gospel-folk of the Staple Singers, such as Be What You Are, being among the best and most socially committed examples. Gospel featured directly with Preston, Edwin Hawkins Singers, Aretha Franklin’s gospel albums, and Green's albums from the Belle Album onwards.  

The biblical language and imagery of stars like Cave, Leonard Cohen, Dylan, Morrison and Bruce Springsteen began to be understood and appreciated. This was helped to varying degrees by explicitly ‘Christian’ periods in the work of Dylan, Van the Man and, more latterly, Cave. Dylan’s conversion came about through the Vineyard Church movement which also impacted musicians such as T Bone Burnett, Bryan MacLean, David Mansfield, Maria McKee, and Stephen Soles. 

Musicians such as After The Fire, The Alarm, The Alpha Band, Burnett, The Call, Peter Case, Bruce Cockburn, Deacon Blue, Extreme, Galactic Cowboys, Inner City, Innocence Mission, Kings X, Lone Justice, McKee, Buddy & Julie Miller, Moby, Over The Rhine, Phillips, Ricky Ross, 16 Horsepower, Mavis Staples, U2, Violent Femmes, Gillian Welch, Jim White, and Victoria Williams rather than singing about the light (of Christ) as CCM artists tended to do, instead sang about the world which they saw through the light (of Christ).  

As rock and pop fragmented into a myriad of genres, this latter approach to the expression of faith (which was first articulated by Burnett) continues in the music of Belle and Sebastian, Eric Bibb, Blessid Union of Souls, Creed, Fay, Brandon Flowers, Good Charlotte, Ben Harper, Held By Trees, The Killers, Michael Kiwanuka, Ed Kowalczyk, Lifehouse, Live, Low, Neal Morse, Mumford and Sons, Joy Oladokun, Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus, Robert Randolph and the Family Band, SAULT, Scott Stapp, Sufjan Stevens, Stormzy, The Welcome Wagon, and Woven Hand. 

With his latest album Wild God, Cave is using rock music to conjure sacred space. ‘Joy’ begins, “I woke up this morning with the blues all around my head” but its key moment of transition comes when he falls to his knees calling out “have mercy on me please” and “a voice came low and hollow” saying “we’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy”. In ‘Wild God’, the antidote to “feeling lonely” and “feeling blue” is to “Bring your spirit down” so that He moves “through your body like a prehistoric bird”. 

In his examination of the roots of rock and roll, James Cosby notes that the entire purpose of Pentecostalism was to play music that most let its adherents feel the Holy Spirit in their bodies. It was that spirit that was transposed into the feel and flow of rock and soul and it is this that gives rock and soul its affective nature. This is where “the heart, joy and sheer exhilaration of rock 'n' roll comes from” and it may also be “one of the best examples of America’s ability to draw from both the sacred and the secular”. 

 

Many of the artists mentioned above feature on the author's Closer to the Light playlist on Spotify.

 

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