The Great Liberal Death Wish Revisited
By David W. Virtue, DD
www.virtueonline.org
September 10, 2024
I first heard Malcolm Muggeridge deliver himself of The Great Liberal Death Wish in England back in the 60s, a takedown of Western hopes and aspirations based on the fantasy of progress and the false notion of mankind's basic goodness. I have built on this premise that the churches of the West today are destroying themselves with bad theology and morals; killing themselves from within. They have become sand castles of decadence slowing being washed away with the evening tide.
By any reckoning all the Western branches of Anglicanism are in serious trouble, and, short of revival, they will all be gone by 2050...at the very latest.
Anglican Futures blog recently revealed that the Church in Wales is on the skids and will be gone in 15 years if it continues down its present course. Liberalism, or more accurately what we now call progressivism but is really revisionism, will have sunk the Welsh church, aided, and abetted by the prevailing sexual sin of sodomy and all its attendant parts including the full range of pansexual behaviors - LGBTQI - with homosexual marriage fully blessed by the church.
Reparative therapy is being outlawed in most Western countries and the Anglican churches in those countries have agreeably gone along with it. Persons coming forward saying they voluntarily want to rid themselves of their same sex attractions will be told they are living in denial and should live out their orientation with the blessing of the church. God, we are now told by the scholarly father and son duo, Richard, and Christopher Hayes, has changed His mind and all is now well in the land of gaydom.
Will God be told that fornication and adultery are now exempt from His judgment, and the unholy trinity of sexual sins are now no more and we are free to live as we please with the blessing of God almighty? It would seem so. The church will bless the unblessable and Jesus will weep. C.S. Lewis warned that God demands "either complete abstinence or unmitigated monogamy."
By today's standards Lewis would be deemed a homophobe and summarily fired from his academic position as a hater, and reported under the government's anti-terrorism program, with a visit for his views from the local Thought Police.
Why is sexual intercourse outside of marriage sinful? Simple: it breaks the design of God. God designed a man and a woman to be a "single organism," like a violin and bow are one instrument, or a lock and key are one mechanism, said Lewis.
DATA DO NOT LIE
It was revealed recently by the Anglican Journal that the Anglican Church of Canada is in serious decline.
Data gathered in 2018 by the Rev. Neil Elliot, a priest in the diocese of Kootenay who has a PhD in sociology, revealed that if the decline since 2001 continued the church would run out of numbers in two decades. "We've got simple projections from our data that suggest that there will be no members, attenders or givers in the Anglican Church of Canada by approximately 2040," he said.
The Episcopal Church is in a parlous state. The death of The Episcopal Church is near, writes Ryan P. Burge, Eastern Illinois University church statistician. He now has data from 2020 and his conclusion is that The Episcopal Church is in serious trouble. "Some of it may be pandemic related, but some of it is clearly not. The end is coming fairly rapidly for the TEC as it exists today," he says.
"The implications for the Episcopalians are dire. Recall that the average Episcopalian is in their late sixties today, (actually it's 69), which means that the average attendance (which was about 550,000 in 2019) will likely be around 300,000 in 2030. That's an average loss of 25,000 per year just through death. The church will be baptizing less than 10,000 infants per year. We know that retention for the mainline is just about 50% now, which means half those children who are baptized will eventually leave the church. When 25,000 people are leaving through death and only 5,000 are being replaced through children who stick around -- the end is near. I don't think that it's an exaggeration at all to believe that the Episcopalians will no longer exist by 2040."
The latest 2021 domestic statistics show that there are 1,522,688 who identify as Episcopalians of which 19.2% show up for weekly church services across 6,294 American churches. Only 292,851 people warm domestic Episcopal Church pews during any given week.
The biggest news in recent months is diocesan mergers. We call it mergers and purge's, with many dioceses having to sell off their headquarters and move into simpler quarters to save money. It is death by a thousand cuts.
Most Episcopal bishops are theological junkyard dogs who could no more lead a drug addict to Christ than whisk mice out of a cathedral nave. They are lost souls leading other lost souls to Christless eternities.
The Church of England is heading for extinction writes John Hayward a university mathematician. The Church of England faces extinction within 40 years because the faith it proclaims is not "contagious" enough, he says.
He analyzed attendance data from between 2000 and 2020, and found that Church of England and Roman Catholic churches across the UK have statistical numbers that mean their congregations could vanish by 2062.
Sunday church attendance is just 80 per cent of what it was in 2019, Telegraph analysis revealed, despite the Church of England claiming that it has "bounced back" after the pandemic.
The figures reveal that church attendance has more than halved since 1987, prompting clergy to warn: "This is a doom spiral of the church's own choosing."
In 2023, The Telegraph published an investigation which revealed that parishes are closing at a record rate, prompting fears that the Church had been "dealt a death knell".
The investigation found that almost 300 parishes have disappeared in the past five years alone -- the fastest rate recorded since 1960.
The Scottish Episcopal Church is on a downward trajectory. In terms of official membership, Episcopalians constitute well under 1 per cent of the population of Scotland, making them considerably smaller than the Church of Scotland or Catholic Church in Scotland.
The membership of the church in 2023 was 23,503, of which 16,605 were communicant members. The attendance at Sunday worship, as counted on Sunday next before Advent was 8,815. With 303 congregations the average size church draws less than 29 people. The church is in terminal decline. While no date has been set, it is hard to imagine the church making it much past 2035.
The Anglican Church of Ireland is also in decline. The Church of Ireland, the main Anglican church in Ireland, has experienced a decline in membership over the years, but has remained relatively stable in recent years. The Church of Ireland has experienced a major decline in membership during the 20th century.
The Church of Ireland remained largely static between the 2016 and 2022 census, with 2% of the population identifying as Church of Ireland.
A survey conducted by the church itself found that participation in Church of Ireland services continues to drop. For example, in 2016, 64,700 people attended Easter services, compared to 76,000 in 2013.
In New Zealand, because of the Church Missionary Society's early arrival, and also because most early settlers were Anglican, the Anglican Church has traditionally been New Zealand's largest. However, the proportion of Anglicans in the population has dropped by two-thirds since the 19th century. In 2013 the Anglican Church was overtaken by the Catholic Church and became the second-largest denomination. It now has a much smaller share of the New Zealand population than those who have no religion at all.
The church has gone from 43 percent of the population down to 12 percent of the population. The liberal Anglican church is fading. The birth of the Church of Confessing Anglicans Aotearoa (CCAANZ) under a new bishop Jay Behan holds promise that Anglicanism still has a future in that country of five million people.
The Anglican Church of Australia saw the greatest fall of any Christian denomination or faith between 2011 and 2016, with around 3.1 million Australians (13.3 percent) identifying as Anglicans in 2016, down from almost 3.7 million (17.1 percent) in 2011. The loss of around 579,000 adherents is more than double what the Anglican Church lost between 1996 and 2011. Between 1991-2016 Anglicans in Australia went from just over four million to 3.1 million.
Even in the evangelical Diocese of Sydney, the Anglican church has seen adult church attendance decline by seven per cent over the past ten years, or by 14 per cent against population growth, according to a recent report.
While numbers are not everything, they are not nothing. The massive growth in the Global South and decline in Western Anglicanism cannot be passed over in an embarrassed silence. The shrinking provinces of North America and Britain need a new humility. Any attempt at "business as usual" will lead to the spectacle of mostly white bishops from mostly declining Western dioceses holding disproportionate influence at Lambeth, writes David Goodhew in The Living Church.
Such optics would render the deliberations at future Lambeth conferences invalid, presuming of course that there will be future Lambeth conferences if Western Anglicanism is in such decline and the Archbishop of Canterbury is no longer primus inter pares with fellow archbishops.
Mercifully Justin Welby will be gone, but one cannot imagine a thorough going orthodox archbishop replacing him in this historic moment. But it's not just humility the Western churches need. It is a revival of "sound teaching" or more bluntly orthodox theology.
Theology influences behavior, and there has been a substantial theological drift over time in the older churches. The data suggests that the declining churches are unlikely to survive unless they change their beliefs back to that of their founding fathers. In short, no faith, no future.
Article 19 of the 39 Articles reads thus: Of the Church. The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ's ordinance, in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same. As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, have erred, so also the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith.
One might add the Western churches that have capitulated to the world with its woke take on things including and especially sexuality.
The future of Anglicanism from a Western perspective looks grim. If it were not for the Global South there would probably be no Anglican communion. "Saved by the Africans" might yet be a banner hanging over Lambeth Palace walls.
The bottom line is obvious; No gospel, No future. No hope. Just hell.
END