Matthew Arnold lived at the high tide. The English poet wrote his famous “Dover Beach” when churchgoing was at the flood. In 1851, the national census recorded an unequaled high-water mark in church attendance: half of England was in church each Sunday. But, perhaps prophetically, he could feel the tide going out. As he looked out at Dover beach he saw it as a parable for something shifting in his day:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
That was his view in 1851. I wonder how he’d respond 173 years later, when church attendance is more like five percent than fifty..
We can frame the West’s secularization in many ways. One is to note that the percentage of “exvangelicals” in the United States is higher than the percentage of evangelicals in Britain. This has come about due to “the great dechurching,” where 40 million Americans have left the church this century. Just how far out is the tide now?
And what should we do about it? One response is to prayerfully await the tide’s turning. After all, tides don’t only go out; they also come in. Perhaps there are signs this is occurring. Justin Brierley’s book and podcast The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God expertly chart the terrain of our changing faith landscape. It also points to stories of recent adult converts like Paul Kingsnorth and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or Christian-friendly intellectuals like Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson.
But critics have pointed out that the “rebirth” Brierley sees may be a triumph of hope over experience. Historian Tom Holland, one of the key figures of The Surprising Rebirth, seemed less than optimistic recently when he pointed out to Brierley in an open conversation that we no longer have truly Christian public figures. In the 20th century, we had Martin Luther King Jr., C. S. Lewis, and Billy Graham. Nowadays, whom do we have?
Those who point to the popularity of Peterson, a Jungian psychologist famously resistant to church, only reveal we live in a vastly different age. Perhaps the successor ideology has unstoppably gained ground, and we must make do with Arnold’s pessimism: “neither joy, nor love, nor light.” What can we say as Christians?
Ultimately, the tide will turn—at some point. One day, the knowledge of God will flood the earth “as the waters cover the sea” (Hab. 2:14). And we might well see revival in the West in our lifetime. For this we pray. But in the meantime, there’s something else we can do. Low tide isn’t only the portent of a return. Low tide reveals the terrain of the land that the sea has shaped. High tide covers the sea’s effects, but when the tide is low we see things that had before been obscured.
In the same way, secularization has revealed Christendom’s effects in a new way. Perhaps the influence of the Jesus Movement has never been more starkly apparent. Those with eyes to see it have a fresh opportunity to appreciate the power of Christ’s kingdom and the dangers of spurning it.
High-Tide Humanism
High tide can be a time of spiritual complacency. Think, for instance, of the humanistic Deism of Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin. As they wrote the Declaration of Independence, they were founding a nation on the powerful idea of inalienable human rights—rights they considered “self-evident” (although the first draft of the Declaration referred to those rights as “sacred and undeniable“). But the self-evident nature of human rights is the kind of belief you can only hold when it’s supported by Christian assumptions.
T. S. Eliot articulated the problem. In his 1929 essay “Second Thoughts About Humanism,” he wrote that when faith in our Creator recedes, these “self-evident” human rights also disappear: “If you remove from the word ‘human’ all that the belief in the supernatural has given to man, you can view him finally as no more than an extremely clever, adaptable, and mischievous little animal.”
This removal of “the supernatural” is exactly what low tide has revealed. Without the Creator’s endowment, the only thing self-evident about rights is that they aren’t self-evident. They are, and have always been, biblical.
As Tom Holland put it in Dominion,
That all men had been created equal, and endowed with an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, were not remotely self-evident truths. That most Americans believed they were owed less to philosophy than to the Bible: to the assurance given equally to Christians and Jews, to Protestants and Catholics, to Calvinists and Quakers, that every human being was created in God’s image. The truest and ultimate seedbed of the American republic—no matter what some of those who had composed its founding documents might have cared to think—was the book of Genesis.
This is the sort of truth only really felt at low tide. “Those who had composed” the Declaration–thinking of Jefferson and Franklin–were buoyed up by a Christianity they felt themselves to be rejecting, or at least transcending. In truth, Christianity was so all-pervasive it had become invisible to them. But it’s becoming more and more visible to us. A quarter of a millennium on, we’re starting to understand the “high-tide humanists” better than they understood themselves.
Between the two poets we’ve mentioned—Arnold and Eliot—we could place a third. Friedrich Nietzsche certainly wrote poetry alongside his philosophy, but perhaps most of all we should think of him as a prophet. At the end of the 19th century, the tide was still high as regards church attendance. But Nietzsche didn’t only prophesy the death of God; he also foretold the death of high-tide humanism. In Twilight of the Idols, he contends the two are profoundly linked:
When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident. . . . By breaking one main concept out of Christianity, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands.
High-tide Christianity and high-tide humanism rose together. And they would fall together. Nietzsche was sure of it, and he was right. But it takes a lot to convince some people. It takes low tide. But that’s one of the curious blessings of low tide—it reveals certain things. Let me name some of them.
Three Low-Tide Attractions
Come with me to three tourist attractions where low tide draws a crowd. Let’s see what they have to teach us about evangelism. First stop: New Zealand’s Curio Bay, near the southernmost tip of the South Island. At high tide you won’t see it, but when the waters recede an alien world is uncovered: the Petrified Forest. These tree fossils preserve a long-dead habitat, dating back to when New Zealand was part of Gondwana. Low tide reveals what’s ancient. As institutional Christianity recedes in the West, we’re repaganizing. Older, non-Christian ways of framing the world return and can be seen in all their stark difference to the way of Jesus. Though it’ll probably be a grudging admission, this aspect of low tide makes you realize, “Nietzsche was right!”
Next let’s go to Ko Nang Yuan, Thailand. Here low tide reveals a sandbar featured in 10,000 Instagram posts. This sugar-white beach is what you get—eventually—when the waters grind down the coral. Low tide reveals the sea’s power and shaping influence. With respect to Christianity, low tide reveals the church’s power and shaping influence over millennia. We no longer see our values as “self-evident.” They turn out to be the inheritance of our Christian history. In response, you might exclaim, “Tom Holland was right!”
Finally, let’s visit Mont-Saint-Michel, just off France’s Brittany coast. At high tide, the water cuts off this tiny village on a hill. At low tide, a bridge is exposed that takes you from the mainland to the island—and to the church at its summit. If you were bobbing along in a boat, or even on a surfboard, high tide might have you drifting toward the church with little effort or even intention. At low tide, that’s not possible. But what appears at low tide is an ancient pathway. It’s the way that pilgrims have walked in the past. You don’t have to build this bridge. The bridge is already there. But low tide shows you how things connect, and it creates the possibility of consciously making the journey.
In evangelistic terms, low tide means we cannot drift toward faith. Like it or not, when the tide is going out, simply to be a Christian means to go against the flow. And to embrace Christianity becomes a conscious journey. But it’s a journey that makes sense. The connection holds, and as you walk the path you’ll own it for yourself. At that point, you might just say, “Jesus is right!”—and mean it in ways that high-tide “drifters” never could.
Seven Steps Along the Low-Tide Path
I’ll conclude this essay by addressing the kind of people beginning to awaken to low tide. They’ve been alarmed at what’s beneath and cried, “Nietzsche was right.” They’ve been impressed by the influence of Christianity and cried, “Tom Holland was right.” And they’re now at least open to the possibility that Jesus is right.
Let’s briefly walk through seven steps along this path revealed by the low tide. They’re the sort of halting steps that bring a person at least into the orbit of the church.
1. I hold strong beliefs (in things like human rights) that orient my life in substantial and sometimes costly ways.
In the past, I might not have seen myself as a “believer,” but now “belief” seems a good description of my strength of feeling concerning these powerful, life-conditioning values.
2. I haven’t arrived at these beliefs via logical proof or scientific evidence—they’re plausible to me because of my particular culture.
I might’ve considered myself a rational individual, choosing my values. I might’ve considered my values natural, obvious, and universal, but now I realize I’d been tricked by high-tide humanism (buoyed up by Christian assumptions). Looking at other cultures around the world and down through history, I no longer believe in my rationalism and individualism. Low tide has revealed I’m far more intuitive and communal than I’d ever imagined. In particular, I now realize I’m part of a community of fellow believers (in the West), and I’ve intuitively absorbed a particular story (or collection of stories).
3. I believe Western culture has arrived at these beliefs because the dominant story for centuries has been the Christian story.
In the past, I basically thought of the church as “the bad guys.” I had a vague notion that Christendom equals the dark ages, but now I’m doubting that Enlightenment propaganda. (I might even own a copy of Dominion, and one day I’ll get around to reading it!) I’m now happy to concede the Jesus Movement’s extraordinary historical influence, and it seems most plausible that it’s Jesus (not self-evident reason or some United Nations declaration) that stands behind our belief in, say, a compassion ethic.
4. I’m beginning to recognize the societal dissonance between our Christian-ish values and our godlessness.
I see a society that mouths platitudes about compassion, service, and protection of the weak while hailing a life philosophy of “You do you.” Low-tide humanism is looking less and less plausible. There’s a Jesus-shaped hole in our culture.
5. I’m beginning to recognize the personal dissonance between my Christian-ish values and my godlessness.
I once believed that I’m a “mischievous little animal” and that I have inviolable human rights. I once believed that I’m a gene replicator and that I must be kind. I once believed that my destiny is compost and that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. I now feel an existential dissonance between the good, true, and beautiful values I prize and the godless story I’ve believed. You could say there’s a Jesus-shaped hole in me too.
6. I’m starting to see that I believe in these Christian-ish values far more than I believe the secular story.
Show me the picture of a weak, dispossessed victim of injustice, and I’ll feel the rightness of his cause infinitely more than I feel that this is a godless world. I had believed this is a purposeless, uncaring universe (and often I still do), but I experience a vastly greater certainty regarding these I now recognize as Christian in origin. This has given me a much greater respect for, and interest in, the Christian story.
7. I’m now drawn to the Jesus story in profound ways.
I’m more drawn to this story than to any competing story. Increasingly, what strikes me as “self-evident” isn’t “humanistic values” but the goodness and truth of the Jesus story. If it’s not true, it’s at least the truest truth I can think of. I seem to be encountering in Jesus the original music, where before I was living off the memory of an echo of a tune. I want this to be true, and sometimes I believe it is.
And now . . . given these seven points, I’m starting to think I should lean into the Christian story—read the Bible, pray, go to church, the works.
These are the kinds of people who are showing up in churches in the UK––at least in my experience. They are ordering Bibles from Amazon, bingeing long-form podcasts and YouTube videos on spiritual matters, and showing up in church wanting something rich, deep, ancient, substantial, embodied, and challenging.
They still have doubts and concerns. The following seven are substantial:
I worry that supernaturalism is impossible for me.
I worry that it’s hypocritical to go to church.
I worry that I can’t conjure up the requisite belief.
I worry that I don’t believe 100 percent.
I worry that this is instrumental (using Christianity to get what I want).
I worry that this is wish fulfillment.
I worry that my beliefs can only stretch to Christian morality but not to Christian metaphysics.
Perhaps I will address these concerns at another time, but one thing to note about such worries: they are not stopping people from engaging with faith. For those who are treading this path they are, in spite of themselves, surrendering to the Christian story—in Scripture, worship, community, prayer, and discipleship. Exploring Christianity has become the obvious way forward. For many they see it as the only way forward. They can’t go back. Low tide has revealed too much.
This is a real opportunity for the church. Secularization isn’t only a challenge (though it’s certainly that). With the sea of faith so far receded, possibilities emerge. As we pray for a “rebirth of faith,” we might find it comes not despite low tide but through it.
The Gospel Coalition