A Covid Revival? (This should come with a health warning to whoever reads it!)

Apparently there is an upsurge in British people reporting that they’ve prayed during the epidemic. Others have joined online-services. The trend has even been noticed by secularist, left-wing, media, like New Statesman and The Guardian. Among Christians, there is consequently much rejoicing, as they/we seem to identify signs of an impending revival, a nation returning to God.

But I don’t think so. I hesitate as I write this, because I too long for a revival in Christin faith. We have experienced such a long drawn-out “recessional” (as Rudyard Kipling called it), a seemingly perpetual ebb of Matthew Arnold’s “sea of faith”. I also fear that my negative comments may disappoint and discourage those I lead in my church, and whom I actually want to urge on in their witness during this crisis, so that some may return to Christ, or come to him for the first time. But I suspect that Christians are so desperate to discover any signs of change, that they/we are willing to believe anything if it hints at hope. 

The specifically Christian expressions of faith are in fact part of an overall religious-spiritual response. Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, all report the same finding: an increase in adherents returning, and more inquiries from seekers. This may well be positive, but it’s not the same as a ‘revival’ of Christianity as such. It seems to be more of a general crying out for help, from somewhere, from someone. It’s an instance of the old WW1 saying, that there are no atheists in a foxhole. But how much of that ‘foxhole faith’ outlasted the end of the war? A. J. P. Taylor, the historian, noted, for example, that one of the most important social trends of the inter-war period was the collapse in church-going. Christianity has lost its Durkheimian sociological function of integrating (British) society.

What happened through the 20^th Century is that faith migrated internally, and became a privatised preference, separated from any social embodiment in a community: i.e church-going. While evangelicals always pointed out that ‘going to church’ doesn’t make someone a Christian, nevertheless belonging to the community of faith is still an important expression of faith. Among those I’m personally aware of whose faith has come alive during the crisis, they are mainly those who are returning to a faith, which they had fallen away from, or gone lukewarm over.

This is not to denigrate the importance of such ‘prodigals’. Indeed the literature on revival stresses that before it affects the unbelievers, revival involves a quickening of the faith in lapsed believers. Furthermore, it may be that those churches and leaders, who are more evangelistically gifted than me, may be seeing more outright conversions. For example, the Alpha course reports higher attendance; and Friends International, working among overseas students, have invited people to online discussion about the meaning of life – seeing several commitments to Christ. For many of us, however, our connection with non-member has ceased with lockdown. Nevertheless, I still hope – against hope; theology over sociology.