If you feel that Christianity is a smaller (even waning) influence in American culture right now, it's weaker in the U.K. But the writer Francis Spafford sees the upside:
I'm only just old enough myself to remember the way things were before. The world I know, as a Christian, is the one in which we are a small minority. A small minority with an organic link to the symbolism, the buried logic and the dream-life of the wider culture, but still a minority without clout. I know there was another world before this one, in which Christianity was the unconsidered default state of the civilization, but it was dying when I was a child in the 1960s and 1970s, and it's gone now, and I don't think I would like it back. This way, Christianity is no one's vehicle for ambition.... This way, the strangeness of Christianity can be visible again. Without the inevitability, without the static of privilege fuzzing the channel, we can pick out again more clearly the countercultural call it makes, to admit your lack of cool, and your incompleteness, and your inability ever to be one of the self-possessed creatures in the catalogs, or the loveless calculator that is Homo economicus and to find hope instead; a hope that counts upon, is kindly raised upon, the mess you actually are.
Francis Spafford, Unapologetic, pages 220-21. Review coming soon
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