Allan Massie: ‘Hum of divinity’ lost among modern Babel

The waning of Kirk influence is an undeniable but regrettable fact, for it still has a role as a moral leader writes Allan Massie

In a report which deals with the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, and also in Asia, the think-tank Civitas warns that “there is now a serious risk that Christianity will disappear from the biblical heartlands”. In countries where Christians have co-existed peacefully with Muslims for centuries the new brand of militant and intolerant Islam is driving many out. There has been an exodus of Christians from Iraq, and if the Syrian rebels overthrow the Assad regime, more Christians will follow those who have already left the bitterly divided country.

Things are nothing like as bleak for the Christian churches here in Scotland. Nevertheless, the influence they used to enjoy is seeping away. Scotland is a far more secular and less religious country than it was half a century ago. Neither opposition to a new humanist and anti-clerical morality, nor accommodation to it, has arrested the drift away. Fifty years back Scotland was, despite the strength of the Roman Catholic Church, especially in and around Glasgow, a Presbyterian country. It took its tone from the Kirk and its ethos was, by and large, that of the Kirk. This is no longer the case.

Of course the Kirk still commands widespread support. It claims to have more than 500,000 members, and we are often told, truthfully, that many more people attend Church services than football matches. It is less often remarked that churchgoers display much less enthusiasm than football fans, or that there is more animated discussion about goals than about sermons or the qualities of ministers of the Kirk. In any case, one has only to remark on the number of churches converted to other uses, or on the number of rural parishes that must now share a minister to register the decline in the importance and influence of the Kirk in the nation’s life.

There are many who are indifferent to this, many even who welcome it. For a long time the description “life-denying” was routinely attached by the Kirk’s critics to its Calvinist faith, and Robert Burns who mocked the “unco guid” was the poster-boy of the opposition – even though Burns himself was in his own way a religious man.

Calvinism in its strictest form is now, I suppose, dead, or at least moribund. How many Church of Scotland ministers would still affirm a belief in Predestination, in the arbitrary division of mankind into the Elect and the Rest damned to all Eternity? No doubt ministers still engage in theological arguments, but the general public no longer appears to be much interested. In his autobiography John Buchan recalled how the interval between the morning and afternoon, or evening, service, was spent in animated discussion of the sermon preached at the first of these. How many engage in such argument now? To the outsider it seems as if the Kirk is now more concerned with social than religious matters, with bodies rather than souls.

Whatever charges may have been levelled against the Kirk, some of them justified, there used to be a high seriousness about its message. Even long after its ministers stopped speaking of Scotland as a nation that had made a Covenant with the Almighty, they spoke of duty and service and reverence, and insisted that there was a high purpose to human life, that it was about things more important than getting and spending. This message is muted today. Are we, as a society, the better for this?

In an essay, “The Foreigner At Home” where he remarked on differences between Scotland and England, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote: “About the very cradle of the Scot there goes a hum of metaphysical divinity”. The English catechism, he remarked, began by “tritely inquiring, ‘What is your name?’; the Scottish by striking at the very roots of life with, ‘What is the chief end of Man?’ and answering nobly, if obscurely, ‘To glorify God and enjoy Him for ever.’” Well, that “hum of metaphysical divinity” has died away; and with its dying has departed, a noble, if obscure, seriousness from Scottish life. What is the chief end of Man? Which of us has an answer today?

Of course a reaction is possible. It is a grave error to suppose that things will continue the way they are going now. Ages of licence, such as that in which we now live, have in the past been regularly succeeded by ages of revived and – often sadly narrow – faith. This may happen again, with, one hopes, any reviving faith taking a more generous and inclusive form than it has often done. Such hopes might be vain. If we look at the religious revival that is so evidently gathering strength in the Islamic world, one sees narrowness, intolerance, bigotry. One would not wish to see that sort of religion return here in Scotland. For the moment the tide is still going the other way, and the Kirk is withering.

“Good riddance”, many will say, happy to see Scotland become a post-Christian country. Others who recognise that much of value is in danger of being lost, who fear that a society dominated by “Money Power” can never be a good one, might be happy to see the Kirk regain some of its lost moral authority. Even those who do not, or cannot, believe in a personal and caring Deity may recognize that, as the eighteenth century English Deist, the Rev Conyers Middleton concluded, after having demolished all the arguments in favour of biblical miracles, that the simple moral teaching of Christ was a social necessity which must be inculcated by an established Church.

This surely is the proper role of the Kirk today. How it fulfils it, how it attracts to its ministry men and women of the highest moral and intellectual quality, how it articulates its message in the Babel of our world – these are its problems. But even those of us who are not churchgoers may think that our society will be better if it finds answers to such questions, worse if it fails to do so. And we may agree that Scotland would be in a worse state if Christianity were to disappear from the land as it is in evident danger of doing in the Middle East.