Reversing secularization: Africans in Britain

When we look at the trajectory of the contemporary west, it is easy to give way to despair. The process of secularization, which has been slowly emptying the churches of Europe and North America for the past two centuries or so, seems relentless. Even those churches that retain an element of vitality too easily fall prey to the allure of the latest manifestation of secularism. In our case this takes the form of what some call expressive individualism, which alters the message of the gospel from one of repentance and conversion to an affirmation of one's subjective proclivities. Small wonder, then, that parishioners would abandon churches that do little more than parrot the latest faux-redemptive stories of the larger society. What would be the point of getting up in the morning to attend such a church when one could just as easily sleep late and imbibe the same message elsewhere?

Yet what we see in the western world is by no means a global phenomenon. As Philip Jenkins has pointed out in his writings, the average Christian today is a female African, not a male European. Although the Christian faith is more vital outside the west than inside, there are strong pockets of vitality in the major cities where non-European immigrants have settled. This is true of London, capital of the United Kingdom and one of the world's major urban centres, as recounted here: The future of Anglicanism is African. An excerpt:

The future of the Christian religion in England is not to be found in the southern shires or the former mill towns of the North. Out there, the voice and tenor of the Bible is a thinning force, a hoarse whisper. In London, the most multicultural part of Europe, it is closer to a deafening roar . . . .

Christianity is collapsing throughout Britain. A British Social Attitudes Survey from 2018 concluded that this decline is “one of the most important trends in postwar history”. More than half of the British public now say they do not belong to any religion, compared to 31% in 1983. But there are parts of the country where the flame of the religion is still bright.

You have to go to London, especially the inner-city, to find England’s most vigorous forms of Christianity. It is largely West African immigrants who fill the pews of decaying churches from Peckham to Woolwich, who renovate new churches in Brixton and Lewisham, and who volunteer for Christian centres and charities up and down the capital. If you want a solid sense of the sacred, a connection to Britain’s ancient Christian past, you are more likely to find it while eating jollof rice in a big tent in Kennington than eating a Yorkshire pudding in a small room in Harrogate.

I find this very encouraging. God works in ways that repeatedly surprise us. For more than a century Europeans and North Americans evangelized the global south. Then the carnage of the first half of the twentieth century, along with technological developments tempting us to imagine ourselves gods, sapped the churches and left a certain nihilistic spirit in their wake. Now the process is reversing itself, and the global south is re-evangelizing Europe and North America through immigration. Much as the paschal season reminds us of Jesus' resurrection from the dead, so also is God bringing new life to his churches in the midst of a dying culture.

Of course, the fact that I quite like jollof rice but am hesitant to try Yorkshire pudding only adds to my gratitude to God for the faithful witness of these immigrants to a secular culture!