Introduction
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.
WHEN THE VICTORIAN POET Matthew Arnold published his famous poem “Dover Beach” in 1867, it served as a eulogy for the certainties of a bygone era, especially religion.
One hundred years earlier the Enlightenment had swept through Europe, and its philosophers and scientists had announced the death of the age of superstition and the birth of the age of reason. The industrial revolution was creating social upheaval as engineering geniuses like George Stephenson and Isambard Kingdom Brunel constructed a technological future. Natural history museums in the style of Gothic churches were being constructed as new cathedrals to the modern sciences. Charles Darwin had recently published his theory of naturalistic evolution in On the Origin of Species, and Karl Marx was about to publish his materialist manifesto Das Kapital.
The advance of science, secularism, and technology was the backdrop to Arnold’s haunting poem and its famous line about the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the “Sea of Faith.” The receding tide of religious belief that Arnold witnessed in his day has only continued at an ever-increasing pace in the Western world. In the 1800s, the church and its Christian teachings still dominated society. One hundred and fifty years later we are undeniably living in a post-Christian world where the picture looks very different.
In my own country of Great Britain, churchgoing has declined steeply in the past several decades. The beginning of the twenty-first century saw a sharp turn against religious belief in popular culture with the rise of New Atheism, with over half the population now identifying as nonreligious in a recent survey.[1] A similar picture is emerging even in the churchgoing strongholds of the United States, as younger generations increasingly choose to label themselves as “nones” when it comes to religious affiliation.
As a Christian who believes in the supernatural claims of the Bible about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, I find myself in the minority in the twenty-first-century Western world. Some believers have responded by circling the few remaining wagons and hoping things might change; others seem to have given up on church altogether. However, in my personal and professional life I have been keen to engage the secular culture around me rather than ignore or bemoan it. Hosting the long-standing radio discussion show and podcast Unbelievable?, which has brought many Christians and non-Christians together for weekly dialogue, has allowed me to chair hundreds of debates between the most influential voices on both sides of the conversation on faith.
My ringside seat has had the unanticipated but welcome effect of fortifying rather than weakening my faith. I’ve come to see the intellectual strength of the Christian story as it has been tested by atheists, agnostics, and people of other faiths who have appeared on the show (a journey you can read about in my first book, Unbelievable?: Why, after Ten Years of Talking with Atheists, I’m Still a Christian). My vantage point has also meant being able to follow how the most prominent questions and debates have evolved in the years I’ve been hosting these discussions.
Notably, in the past several years the conversations have changed in tone and substance quite dramatically. The bombastic debates between militant atheists and Christian apologists have been far less frequent. In their place have come increasing numbers of secular guests who are far more open to the cultural and social value of Christianity, even if they are not believers themselves. Some of these thinkers and personalities are concerned by the turn in society towards a cancel culture of identity-based politics and often find themselves more in step with their Christian interlocutors on these issues than with some of their secular brethren.
Most significantly, as the influence of New Atheism has waned, a variety of secular thinkers have been stepping forward to ask new questions about the value of religion and where the West is heading in the absence of the Christian story. Many of them have developed large platforms and have a huge influence on a younger generation searching for meaning. Many even seem to harbor a wistful desire for Christianity to be true. As their influence has grown, it has led me to wonder whether, even in the midst of our highly secular culture, we are witnessing a sea change in people’s openness to faith.
It was the journalist and author Douglas Murray who brought this home most powerfully during a conversation I hosted between him and New Testament historian N. T. Wright. Murray, an agnostic who describes himself as a “Christian atheist,” remarked that a number of highly intelligent friends and acquaintances of his had converted to Christianity in recent years.[2] Perhaps they were an exception to the rule, or maybe something else was going on. Were people becoming more open to the Christian message? Were we seeing a new opportunity for the church to speak (as Murray put it) into a “more receptive crowd”?
He went on to reference that well-worn line from Matthew Arnold’s poem and said something which, although blindingly obvious at one level, had never struck me before: “The interesting thing about the Sea of Faith is there’s no reason why it can’t come back in. The sea doesn’t only withdraw. You know, it’s the point of tides.”
In this book I will make a bold proposition —that Matthew Arnold’s long, withdrawing Sea of Faith is beginning to reach its farthest limit and that we may yet see the tide of faith come rushing back in again within our lifetime.
The reason I feel confident enough to make this argument is that faith has never really gone away. As I will argue in the rest of this book, people need a story to live by, but the stories we have been telling ourselves in the last several decades have been growing increasingly thin and superficial. Meanwhile, a plethora of thinkers have been reevaluating the Christian story and showing how it continues to undergird our most fundamental moral and cultural instincts. We may have forgotten the story, but it might be time to rediscover it afresh.
I believe we are seeing the firstfruits of the returning tide in the lives and stories of a number of public intellectuals who are finding themselves surprised by the continuing resonance of the Christian story. This includes people like the psychologist Jordan Peterson, the aforementioned journalist Douglas Murray, and the popular historian Tom Holland. You will find my exchanges with them and various other secular thinkers within these pages, along with the conversations I’ve shared with many other men and women who have crossed the line to Christian faith as adult converts. These include celebrated writers such as Francis Spufford and Paul Kingsnorth. The latter’s faith journey was driven by his love of nature but took detours via atheism, Buddhism, and Wicca before arriving at Christianity. There are academics such as classicist James Orr, who first discovered Jesus by reading the Gospel accounts about him in their original Greek, or the equally surprising story of famed actor David Suchet, who encountered Christ by reading the letters of Paul as if they had been written personally for him. And you’ll read the stories of everyday secular people such as Peter, Tamara, and Robbie, who had either rejected Christianity or never considered it to begin with. Yet they found themselves drawn towards a story that made sense of their deepest longings and desires. In sharing these stories I hope to show why Christianity can still make surprisingly good sense to twenty-first-century people and how the church can ready itself for those who may yet choose to walk through its doors again. But before we consider where I believe the conversation is heading, in the first chapter I will review how we got to this point, with the rise and subsequent fall of New Atheism.
Anybody who lives by the sea can tell you that tides go out and tides come in, but inexperienced holidaymakers can still be caught out by how quickly the water returns. If you are a person of faith, I hope that this book serves as an encouragement that the story is not over for Christianity. If you don’t consider yourself a believer, first, thank you for getting this far, and I hope that as you read further, you may discover why Christianity has made sense to so many in the past and continues to do so today. You may even be tempted to dip a toe in yourself. Come on in! The water’s lovely.