Filling the Religious Vacuum

We met them while we were recording our worship songs in the church garden.  They had heard the sound and come over to investigate – largely I suspect because, during lockdown, there was little else going on. A young couple in their twenties, they explained their interest in spirituality, the laws of attraction and such like. They realise there was something missing in our pre-Covid society, with its hollowed-out materialism and consumerism. Instead, they hoped, the crisis, through disrupting patterns of shopping and working from home, would enable people to realise the true inner values. As we discussed where people might find these spiritual values, while they pinned their hopes on this amorphous non-specific spirituality, I was able to suggest it could only be through Christ.

There does appear to be an increased interest in spiritual things as people’s foundations have been shaken during the pandemic. Apparently searches on Google for ‘prayer’ have increased. But what does this really signify? No doubt a good thing. God does respond when people search and reach out for him. But is this not also a searching on our own terms, out of desperation? While it might presage a turning to Christ, how many will do so? Some have said to me that they’d like to come to our church when we return to public services. They may actually do so. Yet how much is this just a search for comfort, not itself a bad thing, but again non-specific. How many will remain when they become aware of the cost which discipleship requires, the relinquishing of personal and societal idols and behaviours?

Is it not more likely that any spiritual ‘revival’ will follow non-Christian routes, as with this couple? Something to warm their hearts, and not challenge the heart idols? And how real is this hope anyway? Although many have not returned to the level of in-store shopping before Coronavirus, consumerism has not vanished. It has been transferred to on-line shopping. In a way, this is a purer form of consumerism. The effort has been done away with. We purchase with a click. Deferred gratification has been abolished, as we can buy whatever our immediate desire, or rather, the advertisers and algorithms, conjure up. Moreover, this consumption is encouraged by the government, despite the risks to health, as we congregate on the high street. The national, and international economy demands that we spend. Jobs and profits depend on it.

The pathway to genuine revival lies only along the road of our self-abasement. It’s common for postmoderns to insist they are not religious but are ‘spiritual’. But Paul admits that he is ‘unspiritual’ (Ro. 7.14). So am I. All our pretensions must go out of the window. To be sure, we discover that Christ meets the authentic needs of our inner self. But the problem is we don’t know what those needs are, until confronted with the Law. Then, in our failure, we can reach out to the only one who can bring deliverance (Ro. 7.24-25).