This book is one of the first publications of The C. S. Lewis Centre for the Study of Religion and Modernity, a research organization working to publish material concerning the relationship between the Christian faith and the modern world. The policy is to reach a broad market and so the Centre has among its Trustees members from Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican and House Church backgrounds. Two types of books will be published: some overtly defending Christian beliefs, others presenting empirical research concerning contemporary society not necessarily carried out by Christians. It is into the latter category that this book falls.
With the realization that the mushrooming population of the world is increasingly concentrated in rapidly growing cities, Christians are beginning to focus attention on the needs and challenges of cities. In the advanced industrial cities of Europe and North America the challenge is particularly that of relating the Christian faith to decaying inner cities.
Inner City God brings together two pieces of research which examine the frequently-observed phenomenon in inner cities of a continuing religiosity coexisting with a decline in church attendance.
The first paper, ‘The nature of belief in the inner city’, is by Grace Davie and was commissioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas. It is basically a review of the sociological literature relating to the nature of belief in contemporary Britain, and as such is particularly strong on bibliographical material. The underlying question is whether the nature of belief makes the task of the church in UPAs easier or harder, and Davie is at pains to stress that there are no simple answers and that great care is needed in evaluating available information.
The first chapter considers various sociological approaches to the nature of belief and relates to two contemporary questions—what takes the place of religious belief for moderns with the same problems as earlier generations, and what are the effects on society if traditional beliefs are discarded and not replaced. Davie favours Towler’s definition of ‘common religion’—non-organized, but with supernatural referents, and gives a useful critique of alternative approaches.
The second chapter deals briefly with the secularization debate in its British context and draws valuable contrasts with Latin Europe and America. This leads to a consideration of belief in a local context in chapter three, where Davie shows that differences in belief and practice are distributed through society in complex ways. She stresses that no one theory is adequate to explain the data and is alert to the role of researcher’s views in interpreting evidence. The final chapter considers the relationship between conventional and common religion and the challenges posed to the church. The orientation is entirely Anglican and various options are presented but not evaluated. Perhaps to do so would have exceeded her brief.
The second paper, ‘ “I do believe in Christmas”. White working-class people and Anglican clergy in inner-city London’, is by Geoffrey Ahern, from the Alister Hardy Research Centre in Oxford, and summarizes his research into the beliefs of these particular groups in Tower Hamlets in East London. In the course of five chapters he presents a vivid picture of white working-class attitudes to themselves, to God (‘Do you believe in a God who can change the course of events on earth?’ ‘No, just the ordinary one.’), and to the C of E (very definitely ‘them’). There is much valuable information presented, for example concerning soap operas’ replacing a sense of local community, and the correlation between the visibility and acceptance of the clergy. The attitudes of the Anglican clergy are also well explored, including their inbuilt competitiveness and ‘neurosis’ about numbers. The use of frequent quotations from those interviewed gives the results of this research a feeling of immediacy and vividness. The paper closes with recommendations which vary greatly in value, which is perhaps not surprising in view of Ahern’s agnosticism. In general they owe more to pragmatism than principle.
Although the two papers are entirely separate in their origins, they combine to provide a useful picture of belief in the inner city, and many of the attitudes would not be confined to UPAs. Both wisely stress the complexity of the situation and no easy answers are offered. The focus exclusively on Anglicanism is a drawback in both studies—there is little sense of anything happening elsewhere—and it is unfortunate that writers such as David Lyon and Alan Storkey are entirely absent even from the bibliographies. Nevertheless Davie and Ahern present much food for thought by those called to proclaim the reign of Christ in a city context.
