Alun Williams

For me, faith has existed in the realms of hope, aesthetics and the historical legacy of Christian spirituality rather than in certainty or conviction. So perhaps it was never real faith at all. I can be moved, almost to tears, by the Maundy Thursday liturgy, without ever really knowing why. I am sad that my faith has withered and wish it would return. The church has always been part of my life and I still love the trappings: Romanesque architecture, Anglo-Catholic traditional liturgy, the English choral tradition, evensong, the Book of Common Prayer, incense, vestments, worship, the priest celebrating ad orientem. All that. To experience High Mass is to be surrounded by a warm and intoxicating numinosity, ineffable and almost wildly beautiful. I am part of it and it became part of me. And how I yearn for it, but it is now elusive.

For it is overshadowed, overwhelmed you might say, by the dark heart of evangelical Christianity that seeks to dominate the faith: arrogant, shameful, uncritical of itself, intolerant, racist, homophobic and misogynistic. Those who voted for Trump or who supported Brexit, those who use phrases like ‘I’m not a racist, but…’ All these are to be found in Christianity’s bigoted core. Worst of all (perhaps) is the assumption that evangelicals should impose their faith on others, even on those who practise sacramentalism or liberal theology. Humility is crushed by zealotry and by bogus dehumanising assertions of superiority. 

My great friend and spiritual champion lost his faith and longed to have it restored. There were circumstances surrounding this, including the tragedy of being robbed of a fine son in a climbing accident, but the retreat from faith was insidious, or at least subliminal. My friend was a research engineer, and during his working life was tasked to make aeroplanes safer. He knew that he could not make them safe, just safer. Nothing could be safe, nothing could be certain. So, in the realm of faith, we might believe, as we both did in those days, but we could not know. For the evangelicals (the ‘rough boys’, as he called them), this would not do.  And so his faith, and perhaps mine too, began slowly to perish. He died in 2019 and I wept at his loss and mine. His wife holds his legacy, the fragments, of his search for understanding.  The ebb of faith is not about the injustice of tsunami or the anger of personal loss, it is about believing what you are told and, although evangelicals pretend to listen (the pretence at exploration of the Alpha course), they do not. In any other discourse we might be willing (in principle at least) to move a little, understand a little more, assert a little less. W.B. Yeats urged us to ‘tread softly’. Sound advice for anyone prone to overweening certainty.