Beer, Wine and the Future of Christianity in Britain

A recent piece here by Joanna Gray got me thinking. I had the pleasure of attending a Royal Air Force adjacent dinner the other night. That’s to say, the host was ex-RAF, there were some relatively senior RAF personnel in attendance alongside one or two ex-RAF types and three USAF officers, one serving, two retired. I sat next to a currently serving Squadron Leader. At some point, the conversation between us turned political. My companion told me of his contempt for those who suppose that a man could give birth or that man could, in fact, be a woman.

“What percentage of your peers feels the same way?” I wondered.

“All of them. It’s just that I’m the only one who says so. People just keep their mouths shut.”

It turned out that my dining companion had such strong views about such matters that he had told his wife firmly, at the beginning of their marriage, that he did not want children.

“The country is in too big a mess. You wouldn’t want to inflict on them all the bloody nonsense going down these days.”

Apart from the gender stuff, he was disdainful of the provenance of most recent immigration to Britain.

“People should understand that this is a Christian country, with Christian values and customs. They should respect the fact and fit in. If they don’t like them, they should get out rather than start trying to change them.”

When, however, I told him that I couldn’t see things turning around in the way he would like, absent a revival of Christianity itself, the conversation petered out. I made the point that if the churches of this country are not used for Christian worship, it seems very likely they will be taken over and turned into mosques, but that didn’t really land. He went on, subsequently, to say that he was a materialist and didn’t hold with any notions of God or of the supernatural.

I didn’t much want to spend the rest of the evening debating the limits of materialism. Nor did I want to push harder my view that if England is to be saved it will be by St George the dragon-slayer not by clever people attempting to ground Christian values in swirling clouds of atoms and molecules and nothing besides.

Still, I would quite like to have a go at persuading the man at some future event of the fault in his thinking. Should the occasion arise, I would have him drink pints of Lucky Saint – that evil brew that claims its zero alcohol rating as a virtue – while I drink pints of full-fat Guinness. This would hurt him, I know, because he was boozing enthusiastically throughout the evening and fully on board with the general jollity of the occasion. But I would stipulate this condition in the hope of getting him to see that Christian values without Christian faith are as likely to succeed in bringing about a cultural revival as alcohol free beer is likely to bring about a revival of pub culture in England.

It’s true that, just as you need reasons to go to a pub – conviviality born of the consumption of alcohol being chief among them – you need reasons to go to church. For a minority, the search for meaning will lead them there. There is anecdotal evidence that the decline in church attendance is bottoming out on account of this search becoming generalised. But one fears that most people don’t have the time or the energy to go looking for meaning in this way. And who could possibly get excited by what they are likely to find when they get there?

So if the search for meaning is not going to be enough to fill the pews once more, what would do it? Unfortunately, it seems likely that responsibility for revival falls on the shoulders of the few of us who still go to church. It’s up to us to make it attractive, to give people reasons to show up. This is going to be hard. It is going to be especially hard given that the majority of existing congregations are old and increasingly decrepit. But there is one effective move that takes very little organising and with which I have had some success in the past. It takes the form of a men’s group, the purpose of which is to Slake The Thirst After Righteousness and entails a visit to the nearest boozer immediately after attending the chosen service. When such a group exists, suddenly the whole business of church going comes to seem that little bit more worthwhile, the sermon not to drag quite as it used to and a new sense of purpose is imparted to the enterprise.

To my mind, it’s not insignificant that the central event of Christian worship, the Eucharist – or, if you want, Holy Communion – involves the consumption of wine. The fermented juice of grapes, it turns out, stands at the very heart of Christian tradition. “Wine,” we are told in one of the Psalms, “makes glad the heart of man.” Surely this is a clue, and not just a theological one. It’s a practical pointer to how the church community gets built. Fasting and abstinence have their place, but the first thing is rejoicing. And for that, you are going to need something decent to drink.

Alexander Norman is the author of Captain de Havilland’s Moth.