I found this in my drafts, I thought I’d published it already!

When televisions first came out in the UK, there was one broadcaster: the BBC. In 1954, aware of the monopoly the BBC had on broadcasting, Parliament passed the Television Act creating another network: Independent Television (ITV). ITV would operate locally, providing regional news and documentaries funded by advertising. Today, however, ITV shows programming such as “the X-Factor”, “the Xtra Factor”, “WAGS boutique”, “Love Island”, “Celebrity Love Island”, “Loose Women”, “Paris Hilton's British Best Friend”, “CelebAir”, “Katie & Peter”, “Katie & Peter: Stateside” and “Peter Andre: Going It Alone”. It really isn’t worth watching.

So, I was shocked when I found myself watching “The Duchess on the Estate” on ITV1 the other week, a two-part documentary following the Duchess of York’s attempt to fix so-called ‘broken Britain’. Most critics focused on the fact that the problems faced by Britain couldn’t be solved in a two-hour fly-on-the-wall documentary, but what I found remarkable was how the government was often cited as not only the cause but the solution to the problems faced by locals. One man commented…

To be quite honest I got laid off from work last week…something needs to be done because it’s not getting any better and government after government are just leaving it and it’s getting worse and worse and worse and eventually we’ll end up like America won’t we?

And another…

Don't you think the Government wants it to carry on like this?
It keeps everyone happy.

In the first case, yes unemployment is bad at the moment but it’s not like the government’s not doing anything to help. The latter statement is completely absurd, the idea that our government tries to keep the poor impoverished is completely unfounded. In fact, I’d say that the Labour government has done more this decade to help those less well-off than has been done since the establishment of the NHS. Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA), generous student loans, Child Trust Funds, Tax Credits and the Sure Start Maternity Grant all benefit those on low-incomes – compare this to the Poll Tax under Thatcher.

What does this have to do with Catholicism?

This “blame-the-government” culture links with the idea of sin. The UK has become a “surveillance society”, where there are fourteen CCTV cameras for every citizen, at a total of 4.2m cameras. These cameras have aided in many high-profile cases, but they’ve also created a kind of “parent” in the government, someone who tells us off for littering or bunking off work.

In child development, children move from having an heteronymous moral authority to an autonomous one. That is, they move from judging right and wrong based on the praise or punishment of a parent to passing their own judgement as they grow up. With the increase of CCTV, we seem to be going backwards. Now it’s the government’s job to tell us if we’ve done wrong based on what they’ve recorded. We’re losing that sense of personal moral integrity. If we can “pull one over” on the government then good for us.

As a Catholic this is interesting because (generally) we’re bought up with a strong sense of moral integrity. We’re taught that a sin is a sin is a sin, there’s no justifying wrong-doing. There’s no need for a heteronymous authority like the government, we know when we’ve sinned and we feel guilty about it. Even if nobody knows about what we’ve done, we still feel guilty. If anything, God is the authority before which we feel guilty.

Final thoughts

I’m ending this post on a pretty pessimistic note. As I write this I’m aware that this post lacks a real point because it feels pointless to even attempt to talk about overhauling the system we have in place. I am by no means against a welfare state or government intervention, in fact I’m for it. I just think that CCTV’s prolific take-over of our streets has gone too far. I remember reading the other day of government plans to move troublesome families out of their homes and into government-run compounds (temporarily) where they’d be under twenty-four hour supervision. Where has personal moral integrity gone?

In the media: this post is part of a feature discussing how Catholicism links with, or is portrayed by, the media. View other posts in the series…

Labels: britain, commentary, media, review

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Update: The video should be working now. Sorry for the delay.

What’s the best way to introduce more people to the Christian faith; stand on a street corner shouting about eternal damnation and how Jesus loves us all, or living a life like Christ, letting people see your Christianity through your actions? Is there a point in locking yourself away from the world in order to contemplate God? Does religion out of its setting make us uncomfortable? Why is there a link between religious belief and mental illness? Can people heal the sick and speak in tongues?

All these questions and more were dealt with in a BBC TV series aired about one year ago called “Am I normal?” in an episode called ‘spirituality’. Dr Tanya Byron explored what some consider the fine line between religious devotion and psychiatric disorder. She saw what happens when rational scientists try to analyse religious phenomena like speaking in tongues and hearing voices. And she considered the beliefs of faith healers who claim miracles happen, and those who believe they can cast out the malevolent spirits of the dead from within the living.

Unfortunately, the programme isn’t available on iPlayer and hasn’t been broadcast on telly since. Luckily, I have a copy I recorded last year. I’d love to make it all available online, but I don’t want to anger the copyright police.

Carmelite Monastery visit

There was plenty of interesting stuff in there about other faiths and other manifestations of faith, however it’s the Catholic stuff that we’re concerned about. The doctor visits a Carmelite monastery and ends up chatting to an older and a younger nun. It’s interesting hearing their experiences, have a watch:

It may take a while to load, please be patient... it's worth the wait! It's a high-quality clip, that's all. For some reason I couldn’t get an Adobe Flash player clip to work, so you’ll need Microsoft Silverlight instead. It’s a free download that brings desktop experiences to the web. More and more sites are using Silverlight, so install it now to be ahead of the crowd!

There’s one thing I must dispute with the younger nun in the clip, faith is an intellectual thing. Saint Anselm’s most famous dictum is “fides quaerens intellectum”; faith seeks understanding. It’s not enough to believe in God blindly, we must always be trying to reason his existence because it’s in our nature to do so.

I’m not too sure about her comments about the power of prayer either, she said that the power of prayer can make impossible things happen. However, prayer without action is toothless. There’s no point praying for exam success if you’re not going to study.

I’m not going to make any other comments about this clip, I’ll leave it up to you to draw your own conclusions from it. I wish I could upload the rest!

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Labels: britain, commentary, multimedia, religious life

So, reading today’s The Times this morning I came across something that I thought I should share…

Church attendance in Britain is declining so fast that the number of regular churchgoers will be fewer than those attending mosques within a generation, research published today suggests.

Honestly, this didn’t shock me. I shan’t tell you in which part of the UK I live, but there was a particularly strong Catholic tradition here thanks to the Irish influx at the start of the twentieth century; it’s partly thanks to that influx that I’m here! With the Irish came Catholic churches and schools. Now more Muslims are moving here, as is their right, more mosques and Muslim schools are being built. Generally, Muslims are ‘more practicing’ than Christians, so there’s bound to be more of them going. What got me was this…

The fall - from the four million people who attend church at least once a month today - means that the Church of England, Catholicism and other denominations will become financially unviable. A lack of funds from the collection plate to support the Christian infrastructure, including church upkeep and ministers’ pay and pensions, will force church closures as ageing congregations die.

Emphasis mine. First, the article is not just discussing the Church of England, as is often the case here because the CoE is the state religion, but Catholicism as well! I know that the Methodists in particular have an aging congregation, but I’ve always thought of Catholicism as ‘sustainable’. When I go to mass, there are many young people, especially young families. In contrast, when passing my local Methodist church on the way to the supermarket, their church hall always seems to be full of old ladies rushing around with jam jars, pots of tea and cakes.

Second, the timescale of this demise is within my lifetime. In 2050, I’ll be in my sixties. It’s scary enough thinking of myself being that old, never mind the fact that I might not be able to get to mass on Sunday because the local churches have closed. The loss of historical and culturally valuable buildings is bad enough!

My main concern, however, is much more important. Britain’s Christian identity is fading. When people think of Christianity they probably think about the United States but I would argue that Britain is the world’s most Christian country. People complain that our social security system is too expensive, that our National Health Service (universal healthcare) treats too many foreigners, that our borders are always open and that our army sorts out too many conflicts.

However, realistically there are very few British people who would allow people to starve by depriving them of their benefits, or who would deny medical attention or refuge to a person simply because they are foreign. In fact, people take pride in the fact that our NHS trains doctors (at our expense) who eventually go on to work in less developed countries, and in the fact that our armed forces are involved in more peace-keeping operations than any other. As a nation, we care. It reminds me a lot of Matthew 25:35-26…

For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you made me welcome, lacking clothes and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me.

If that sense of duty and respect for others within Britons disappears, we will be left with the ‘me’ culture of consumerism that seems to be spreading around the world. If ‘stuff’ could make us happy, we’d buy something we really wanted and not have to buy anything else. The fact that we have to continue buying shows that these things don’t truly make us happy. God does. People are selling God for money and consumer goods. This is echoed by His Holiness, Benedict XVI…

I think about today's young people, raised in an environment saturated with messages proposing false models of happiness; these boys and girls risk losing hope because they often seem to be orphans of true love, which fills life with meaning and joy. Adolescents, youths and even children are easy victims of the corruption of love, deceived by unscrupulous adults who, lying to themselves and to them, draw them into the dead-end streets of consumerism.

Can these figures be disputed?

From the article:

The Church of England disputed the forecasts last night. Lynda Barley, its head of research, said: “These statistics represent a partial picture of religious trends today. In recent years church life has significantly diversified so these traditional statistics are less and less meaningful in isolation.

“There are more than 1.7 million people worshipping in a Church of England church or cathedral each month, a figure that is 30 per cent higher [than the Sunday attendance figure used by Christian Research] and has remained stable since 2000. We have no reason to believe that this will drop significantly.”

That’s cool, I suppose. A better criticism would have been that immigration trends change. Before me, it was the Irish Catholics; now it’s Muslims from the Middle-East; in the future it could be anyone, perhaps we’ll get another lot of Catholics. The recent wave of (pretty small) Polish immigration has bolstered Catholic church attendance in poor areas. Who knows what the future holds? Maybe we’ll see a complete reversal of these trends.

The figures

For those of you interested, here are the proposed figures. I hope this blog is still online in 2050 so I can check. 

By 2050 there will be just 3,600 churchgoing Methodists left in Britain, Christian Research predicts. Anglicans will be down to 87,800, Catholics to 101,700, Presbyterians to 4,400, Baptists to 123,000 and independents to 168,000.

At least we Catholics will still be the top dogs.

Labels: britain, church-attendence, commentary, multi-faith