Editorial

Stephen Bullivant, Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); 309 pp.: 9780198837947, £25 (hbk)

I have already reviewed this excellent book for the Journal of Contemporary Religion, so I will not attempt to review it again here. However, there is one part of Professor Stephen Bullivant’s explanation for this Western decline that is well worth noting ahead of this year’s Lambeth Conference. He makes particularly creative use of two linked anthropological concepts: credibility-enhancing displays (CREDs) and credibility-undermining displays (CRUDs). British and American Catholics in the first half of the twentieth century often lived in close proximity within urban enclaves, mutually reinforcing Catholic belief and practice (CREDs). Today, these enclaves have been largely dispersed and the Catholic Church in many countries has been rocked by numerous clerical sexual scandals (CRUDs). Safeguarding has inevitably become a ubiquitous priority – not exactly an ‘enhancing display’. Bullivant does not claim that this is the whole of the reason for decline, but he does think that it is highly relevant to Western Catholic decline over the last 50 years.

It is not too difficult to see that, from a Western perspective, there have been several serious CRUDs within Anglicanism over the last few decades that have acted against any CREDs that it might have to offer people in Britain, North America or Australasia. Most of these CRUDs revolve around gender and sexuality.

For many younger Roman Catholic laypeople in the 1960s, Humanae Vitae was a major stumbling block. Couples of childbearing age were forced to choose between the teaching of this papal encyclical, which forbade them any effective means of contraception, and their own consciences about overpopulation and an understandable desire (especially in a context of low child morbidity) to have smaller families. Population studies, even in highly Catholic Western countries, soon demonstrated just who had won that battle of wills. Anglicans did not have that particular problem (Peter Sedgwick suggests that the crucial 1930 Lambeth Conference decision helped with this), but many felt that their Church was slow to allow divorcees to marry in church and to allow women to be priests and then bishops.

The 1998 Lambeth Conference notoriously stumbled over affirming gay people. Anti-gay resolutions at that conference were popular among many non-Western bishops, but deeply opposed by many Western bishops. The latter knew that attitudes to gay people within their own countries (and among faithful churchgoers) were already changing and that such Lambeth resolutions would do nothing to enhance Western Anglicanism. Their Church would be seen, quite simply, to be out of touch.

High-profile cases of sexual abuse by clergy in the twenty-first century have now profoundly damaged Anglicans as well as Roman Catholics in the West. Under the leadership of giants such as Archbishop William Temple, the Church of England in the first half of the twentieth century could still see itself as a guardian of public morality. Adult churchgoing was slowly declining, but Sunday schools were still strong and a number of church leaders were well known and much admired (not least Temple himself). Archbishop Michael Ramsey could still ride on the edge of that wave and be admired for supporting an end to capital punishment and more compassionate laws on divorce and abortion.

According to Stephen Bullivant’s analysis, CREDs still prevailed half a century ago, but today Western Roman Catholics (and Anglicans) face mainly CRUDs. Ironically, their non-Western counterparts, in those areas of the world where homophobia and patriarchy still prevail, may still be enjoying CREDs.

The research of the sociologist Ronald Inglehart, reported in his 1990 book Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society, showed that there were very considerable differences on attitudes to gender and sexuality between the old and the young. He found these differences in many Western countries. Western bishops at the time would have been aware that their younger and older laypeople held very different opinions, say, on homosexuality, and that it was hard to please them both. Thirty years later, these differences may be more evident between Western and non-Western Anglicans (especially in countries where the latter live alongside Muslims). Anglican bishops in Singapore – at the crossroads between East and West – may be an interesting weathervane for this shift: very strongly opposed to gay people at the 1998 Lambeth Conference but perhaps more accepting today.

The bishops at this year’s Lambeth Conference are likely to find that these differences remain highly intractable. CREDs for one part of the Anglican Communion become CRUDs for the other. Addressing the criticisms of Muslim neighbours in one part of the world may do nothing to enhance the credibility of Anglicans (or Roman Catholics) in the West. Please one and offend the other.

PS: I had a delightfully witty email from Haddon Willmer assuring that, despite a passing comment in my January editorial, he is still very much alive. I do apologize for this idiotic error.