People Still Want Faith
MORI Global Poll & its Lessons for Church
In the age of secularism, does faith still matter to people? A new global study by Ipsos MORI has found that it does - and to a higher degree than some might have imagined.
A full 70 percent of 18,000 people surveyed in 24 nations say that they have a religion and that faith is important to them. This belies the claim made by many militant atheists that in the age of science faith has become redundant.
What's more, 73 percent of people aged below 35 said that their religion or faith was important in their life. Faith, it seems, is far from dying out.
Indeed, as the chief executive of Ipsos MORI, Ben Page pointed out: 'The survey is a good reminder to many in western Europe of how much religion matters - and is a force for good - in much of the world.'
For people of religious faith, these results will not necessarily come as a surprise - though there are lessons to be learned, as we shall see.
People of faith will argue that religion offers them things which science, for all its many benefits, cannot, the first being transcendent meaning.
The more science tells us about how things work the more we want to know why this is so. We want to find reasons for the apparent consistency in the natural order. C. S. Lewis reminded us that historically people began thinking in a scientific way because they expected to find order in the natural world. They expected to find order because they believed in an orderly creator, he said.
In the West, modern scientific method was born out of a Judaeo-Christian worldview, several centuries before Darwin. Many of Western science's most respected early figures were committed to a religious faith.
It is not only meaning in nature that we seek, but a sense of purpose for our human nature - and existential meaning for our individual lives. Science may be good at answering the 'how' questions relating to processes but it is not equipped to answer the deeper 'why' questions which have played on the minds of theologians, philosophers and, yes, everyday people since the dawn of time.
Faith also offers hope. Science too does this, but in quite a different way.
The hope science offers is necessarily based on two assumptions. One is that nature will remain largely benign toward us. If science is based on observing and manipulating the natural order, it requires that nature plays ball by remaining consistent over time; that nothing too cataclysmic happens to break expected patterns.
To offer us hope for the future, science must also assume that on the whole human beings can be relied upon to do the right thing. This, of course, runs counter to some of the most profound lessons of history.
Humanity is capable of tremendous nobility and selflessness, but it is also able to turn to extreme acts of selfishness and destruction, sometimes on the smallest of pretexts.
Religious faith offers hope that is based on something (or Someone) who controls nature - because He is outside of it - and who is higher in motive, stronger in resolve, more able and more dependable by nature than we are.
The MORI poll also revealed that in Muslim-majority countries, 94 percent of those with a religion agreed that their faith was important in their lives, compared to 66 percent in Christian-majority countries.
Muslims were also more likely to claim that their religion was a key primer in their giving time and money to people in need - 61 percent compared to 24 percent in so-called Christian societies.
A cursory reading of the results might suggest that Christianity is losing ground overall, especially in the light of other studies which indicate more rapid numerical growth for Islam than Christianity worldwide.
We must remember, though, that this poll samples the widest cross-section of various populations. We can assume that many of the respondents were religious but in quite a nominal way. That is, their feelings of religious affiliation were based in large part on their cultural history or on the fact that they're living in notionally Christian or Muslim nations, for example.
It's worth noting that most branches of Islam probably tend to be more proscriptive in terms of details of personal behaviour than do Christian traditions.
From the time of the Apostles, Christianity has allowed wide latitude for the expressions of different cultures. The New Testament gives only very light restrictions on cultural expressions, though of course it is very strong on core moral issues.
Nominal Christians are, then, less likely to treat their religion as a key reference point in their daily decision-making. That aspect of the study should not surprise us.
The findings of this poll may well cause disquiet, though, if read alongside other studies dealing with the comparative growth in world religions. Some seem to indicate that Christianity is losing ground to other faiths, especially in its former strongholds such in the West.
Much of the time, though, people read these statistics without making any allowance for differences in birth rates among religious groups.
It is no secret that birth rates are generally much higher, for example, in Muslim communities than in Christian communities. This is certainly true in much of the developed world, where Muslim families still tend on average to be larger than non-Muslim. It is especially true in the Third World.
My point is that not all of the growth represented in global studies is coming through proselytising or evangelism. Some of it - I'd suggest a healthy part of it - is coming through simple natural reproduction.
If you're a Christian, this might still be seen as cause for concern. Yet it can also be seen an opportunity - if the Church is willing to lift its game in terms of genuine, culture-friendly mission (as opposed to cultural colonialism) and evangelism generally.
Therein lies the biggest lesson for the Church in this MORI poll.
Those of us who profess a Christian faith must perhaps do more to demonstrate how faith impacts every part of our lives. Christianity may not be as tightly proscriptive as some other religious systems, but we must ensure that we don't treat our faith as an optional add-on to western lifestyle and values.
We need to be true to the often radical demands of our very robust faith. And we need to do this in a way that positively surprises people.
This must surely be the challenge for Christians in today's global environment: to live in a way that provokes positive curiosity and respect.
The Apostle Peter instructed first century Christians to be ready always to give an answer to anyone who asked of them a reason for the hope within them. Our problem much of the time is that no one is asking the question, because we've inspired apathy or even hostility instead of positive curiosity.
Only a very committed, thoughtful and compassionate faith will inspire people in a pluralistic and globalised West to ask of a Christian, 'Why do you live this extraordinary and exemplary life?'
© Copyright Mal Fletcher, 2011
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