An abridged version of this article has been published in Evangelicals Now (July 2015).
WHAT HAPPENDED TO THE
SCOTTISH CHURCH?
Christian
identification in Scotland has now fallen below that in England.
From
being one of the great bastions of evangelical Christianity (‘the land of the
Bible’), Scotland has now overtaken England in seeing a decline in Christian
identification.
According
to recent figures 50.6% of the Scottish population now have no religious
affiliation whatsoever, in England the figure is 43.7%. Correspondingly levels
of Christian identification are now lower in Scotland than in England - 44.6%
opposed to 48.5%.
Some
estimates now put the number of conservative evangelicals in Scotland as low as
50,000 – a tiny minority of around 1% of the total population. Its white indigenous
population, who in the past were the recipients of unparalleled gospel witness
and blessing, are now among the most unreached and gospel resistance people
groups in the world today.
Scotland
hasn’t just caught up with England in its rejection of Christianity but has surpassed
it. Why? What happened in Scotland to cause this accelerated falling away from
its historic faith? As one church pastor who had worked in England in the 1990s
and then in Scotland in 2000s put it, ‘When
I was in England, Scotland was 10 years behind England’s decline, but now it’s
10 years behind England’s growth’.
Culturally
Scotland has changed rapidly in recent decades. It’s once white and
Presbyterian dominated culture has given way to an increasingly multi-ethnic,
politically liberal and secularised society. That, however, doesn’t explain why
the decline in Christian identification, which for some time lagged behind
England, has so significantly overtaken it. After all most of the wider
cultural changes experienced in Scotland are ubiquitous throughout the UK.
There are, however, a number of factors that may explain why the Scottish
church was particularly vulnerable to experiencing such a contraction.
IMMIGRATION
Scotland
has an enviable record of absorbing immigrants with goodwill and generosity. People
from around the world have settled in Scotland and found a home without many of
the tensions and indeed conflicts that have arisen in other parts of the UK.
Interestingly, however, most of Scotland’s post-war immigration has been from
Asia and in particular from Muslim communities.
In
contrast, England along with similar Asian immigration also received large
numbers of people from Christian (often evangelically Christian) cultures,
especially in its Afro-Caribbean communities. So that while Scotland has an
Afro-Caribbean population of under 1%, the equivalent population in England is
3.5%.
This
meant the Scottish church did not receive the same ‘shot in the arm’ from
immigration in the way the English church did, nor has it benefitted from the
evangelical energy and convictions often brought by such ‘newcomers’. In many
churches it is those from immigrant backgrounds who have acted as ‘a brake’ on
the theological liberalism that has been so destructive to Gospel growth elsewhere.
None
of which is to be negative about the immigration Scotland has had, which as
noted has largely been a great civic success. But it is a significant way by
which evangelical Christianity has been boosted and its decline offset in
England in contrast to Scotland.
SECTARIANISM
‘Too many
Protestants, too many Catholics, and not enough Christians’, was the rueful observation
of one commentator on the west of Scotland. Another comedian described Glasgow
as ‘Belfast lite’. The deep sectarian
divisions in Scotland, exemplified by the worst of the Celtic and Rangers
rivalry, undoubtedly had the effect of ‘poisoning the well’ of Christianity for
many Scots.
Sectarianism
meant that in a rapidly secularising culture ‘Christianity’ could be presented
as not just irrelevant but as a real social menace – the cause of hatreds and
division. The bigotry of many on both sides was ‘grist to the secular mill’ –
in that, it could be claimed that the sooner all Christian affiliations were
jettisoned the better Scottish society would be. The tragedy, however, was that
few of its Saturday afternoon activists ever actually set foot in a church or
chapel on Sunday morning.
Sectarianism
has been a blight on Scottish society and its demise is something to be
celebrated. The cost for the Scottish Church, however, was to be regarded by
many as part of a past that Scotland was all the better to leave behind.
MARXIST POLITICS
Potentially
dangerous ground this! It’s no secret that Scotland is a ‘left of centre’
nation when it comes to politics. That in itself need be of no great
consequence when it comes to the church – after all godly men and women of all
political persuasions attend churches and are equally passionate about the
Gospel. However, there is perhaps a significance in some of the strands of hard
left politics that have been influential in Scotland.
Scottish
Socialism like its English counterpart emerged as a consequence of the
Industrial Revolution, the development of urban Britain and the gathering
together of massed labour. As a movement it contained both those who saw
Socialism as an essentially Christian response to the inequalities of society
(Christian Socialists), and those saw religion as part of the problem (‘the
opiate of the people’).
The
industrial make-up of many Scottish cities and towns resulted in Socialist politics
becoming a dominant force in many parts of Scotland. A Socialism that in many
instances was of the radical Marxist variety. In the 1920’s Glasgow was
famously called ‘Red Clydeside’ and in commenting, on that period of near
revolutionary ferment in the city, the ‘International Socialist Group’ notes: ‘Clydeside
threw up a generation of working class intellectuals versed in Marxism whose
impact would be felt in the British working class for years to come’.
The
strength of such politics can be seen in that Scotland has returned two of the
only three Parliamentary seats ever won by the Communist Party in Britain. Even
as recently as 2003 the Marxist ‘Scottish Socialist Party’ had six candidates
elected to the Scottish Parliament.
The
significance of this for the Scottish church is the proportionately greater
influence that strong Marxist thinking has had north of the border. As far back
as the 1890s Socialist Sunday Schools were being organised in Glasgow. These classes, which
spread across the country and were open to all ages, sought to provide a
secular alternative to their Christian counterparts. A socialist, and pointedly
divine free ‘10 Commandments’ was even produced to accompany these classes.
It
is not that such Marxist politics have been absent in England (you only need to
think of its northern industrial cities like Liverpool) – or that Scotland
hasn’t had Christian Socialists. It is that anti-religious political ideas have
had a proportionately greater foothold in Scottish society than in the UK as a
whole.
PRESBYTERIAN
FRAGMENTATION
As
with political parties the general public have little time for fractious
churches. Disputes and splits (even when unavoidable) are almost always
damaging to the reputation of the church and drain huge amounts of time and
energy away from its ability to focus on mission.
Sadly
the history of Presbyterianism in Scotland has involved a succession of
disputes and splits – with each offshoot claiming to be the true ongoing
‘custodian of the truth’. Of course other church groupings, such as the
Brethren or Pentecostalism, have taken such factionalism to even greater
extremes. The difference in this case however, is that Presbyterianism has
prided itself in being ‘national face’ of the church in Scotland.
The
Scottish people have consequently been onlookers to a ‘national church system’ marked
by successive divisions for over a century. The physical expression of that,
which is impossible to miss, is the multiplicity of Presbyterian churches vying
against each other in even the smallest Scottish towns. Contrastingly its national
counterpart in England has shown, for better or worse, a quite remarkable
capacity to hold itself together.
In
more recent times, of course, the tensions underlying that English unity have
become clearer and seem increasingly stretched. However, even if England should
yet see the ‘national face’ of its church breaking-up – it has had the
advantage, until now, of Christianity being less tainted by such ‘national
level’ church schism than has Scotland.
One
further point is that for all its virtues Presbyterianism tends, by its very
structure, to ‘flatten out’ the beliefs and energy of the church as whole – if
not to the lowest common denominator, certainly to that which is tolerable to
what might be a very theologically diverse grouping. In contrast
Episcopalianism, for all its faults, does allow an evangelical bishop much more
scope to lead and influence the churches he oversees in a positive and Biblically
rooted direction. That is, the national church in England has had more
potential, at least from time to time, to buck the trend of liberalism than has
been the case in its Scottish counterpart.
LACK OF INDEPENDENT
CHURCHES
Historically
Scotland has had a smaller constituency of Independent churches relative to
England. The dominance of Reformed Presbyterianism, and a more theologically
conservative culture across denominations in general, meant there was less
space (or perhaps need) for large numbers of autonomous evangelical churches. Whereas
some Independent chapels in England can trace their origins back to the 17th
Century, the first tangible Congregationalist (Independent) churches don’t
register in Scotland until the 18th Century. Indeed it wasn’t until the
early 19th Century before such churches became established in any noticeable
numbers in Scotland.
The
significance of this is that larger institutions (including church
denominations) have a tendency to become less effective over time. The pull in all
such bodies, religious or otherwise, is to become inward looking, self-protective
and attractive to people looking for security rather than challenge.
Now
of course within Scottish denominations there are many praiseworthy exceptions
to this – men and women who stand out in their passion and vision to evangelise
and impact the nation for Christ. However, the sociological fact remains that large
organisational structures as a whole tend towards atrophy.
For
Scotland the dominance of such groupings meant smaller numbers of independent ‘entrepreneurial’
churches and leaders. The church historian Rodney Stark in examining the high
level of Christian identification in the USA, argues that it was the lack of
establishment Christianity in the ‘New World’ that instilled the need for
churches to be much more driven in seeking growth. The argument being, that in
such an environment a local church will ‘stand or fall’ (and its pastor be paid
or unpaid) on the basis of the people reached and gathered. Thus the spiritual
impetus across all churches to evangelise is augmented in Independent churches
with a pressing pragmatic edge.
In
other words, the Scottish Church has not had England’s historical advantage in
having the same level of self-starting, culturally flexible and
missionally-urgent churches that a larger Independent constituency provides.
REFLECTIONS &
REASONS TO BE HOPEFUL
All
the above are suggestions (speculations) on why Scotland’s ‘fall from faith’
has been so severe. Some are doubtless more significant than others and all of
them fit into the larger context of an overall decline in Christian affiliation
throughout the British Isles. Nonetheless together, they may give some insights
into why a country until recently so apparently strong in its Christian
identification has so quickly crumbled in the face of secular challenge. There
are however, signs that many of the weaknesses are being addressed and reasons
for renewed hope.
Immigration
patterns into Scotland are changing with increasing numbers now coming from ‘Christian
backgrounds’. The sharp rise in the numbers of ethnically diverse churches
being a clear sign of that.
Sectarianism
is slowly being squeezed out of Scottish life so that it no longer divides it
in the way it once did. This a change that is good for civic society but is
also freeing the church from many of its past toxic associations.
The
second largest Presbyterian denomination the ‘Free Church of Scotland’ is
growing and giving Presbyterianism a clear national voice again in Scotland for
the Gospel.
Finally,
the number of Independent churches is growing – some coming out of
denominations, some new Church Plants, others being founded by the Scotland’s
new immigrant communities. Each one, along with existing Independent churches, having
the grassroots flexibility, impetus and necessity to adapt itself to the task
of engaging the great unreached Mission Field that Scotland has now become.
Christmas
Eve afternoon and the remainder of my day will be structured around the
Christmas Eve service at my home church. For others Christingles, Family Carol
services and Watchnights will be complemented tomorrow by a Christmas Day morning
service. These times to pause, and reflect on the story behind the tinsel and glitter,
give substance to what otherwise could easily become a rather superficial binge
of materialism and self-indulgence.
