The Valley Of Meh

I can feel something inside me say, I really don't think you're strong enough, no

We often talk about our beliefs with great confidence but is that confidence misplaced?

Some people claim to have subjected all their beliefs to rigorous logical and empirical scrutiny but frankly that sounds like a lot of effort and I’m not sure I believe them anyway. Speaking personally, my beliefs are a mix of:

• Things that I have rigorously investigated (whether there is a god, the most fun way of making meat ragu).

• Things I am moderately sure about (drinking and driving is bad, gravity).

• Things I am vaguely aware of (cricket, quantum mechanics).

If it’s difficult to fully comprehend our systems of beliefs as individuals then it’s completely impossible to do so for a population. But that’s OK because most of the time, most of our beliefs don’t matter that much. My beliefs about drinking and driving are less important when I am in a swimming pool. Unless I have drunkenly driven a car into the swimming pool - which I suspect would be very bad for everyone concerned.

And then if we’re going to make it impossibility cubed, trying to track the beliefs of populations over time is a complete freakin’ nightmare. Luckily most of the people in the past are dead so it’s not an immediate concern. My late grandfather cannot drunkenly drive a car into a swimming pool. Although that time when I was 7 and he fell asleep at the wheel did scar me for life (but only psychologically - the rear left door of his Datsun Cherry was less fortunate).

All of which is just setting the scene to discuss the topic of this post: religious beliefs.

What we know about wide spread religious beliefs are either gathered from surveys or inferred from behavioural measures like religious service attendance. Only God can see inside hearts. If she exists.

There are two sources of research on Australian religious beliefs that I have located:

• The religious affiliation questions in the national Census that is conducted every five years: https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/religious-affiliation-australia

• The Australian Community Survey (ACS) undertaken by NCLS (National Church Life Survey) Research - e.g. the 2018 edition available here.

Some initial comments:

• 2021 marks the first year that self-identified Christians no longer make up a majority of the Australian population. This number has been dropping for decades but seems to have accelerated in the last 10 years. There’s only a 5% gap between Unaffiliated and Christians.

• And the news is not looking good for Christianity in Australia. Unaffiliateds outnumber Christians among those under 40. So absent mass conversions or mass Christian immigration the above trend will continue.

• Before atheists get smug, a vanishingly small proportion of Australians identify as “atheists”. Most Australians don’t care enough about religion to actively oppose it.

• Only 20% of Australians actually attend a religious service at least once a month, dropping from around 45% back in the 1950s.

• Only about a quarter of Australians think there is a personal god.

• 44% of Australians think that faith or spirituality is important in making important life decisions.

Regardless of what they identify as, the majority of Australians live in the Valley of Meh. Religion is not important enough to love or hate.

For advocates of Christianity in public life, they face a fate worse than persecution: irrelevance. At least persecution implies that someone cares enough about you to hate you. I am going to contradict Justin Brierley and say that - in Australia at least - there is no Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Also the decline in religious adherence has not been accompanied by a civilizational collapse - which seems to disappoint certain Apologists*.

However the news for the Anti-theist community is not necessarily a cause for celebration either. People have not rejected Christianity and religion so much as ignored it. And just because they have drifted away from organized religion, that does not mean that they have accepted a wholly materialist view of the world or that they are going to go off an get PhDs in the hard sciences or whatever the likes of Dawkins or Dennett want. People do seem to be arguing a lot online (which would presumably please Hitchens). And lots of people are listening to Sam Harris’s podcast - which I'm sure will make him happy.

As GK Chesterton did not say (but Émile Cammaerts** did): “When men chose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything.” Although I suspect that people have always believed in Anything. Sometimes God gets caught up in Anything. People need churches. They need communion with others. They need rituals. But whether or not they need a god is a moot point. And probably only weirdos with Substacks like St Augustine need a theology.

*Some people are messy b-tches who live for drama.

**Cammaerts sought to balance the interesting parts of his life (marrying a noted stage actress, translating Ruskin and Chesterton) by becoming a Professor of Belgian Studies.