Thought for the Day IS boring

For once I find myself in theological agreement with John Humphries - Radio 4's TFTD is mostly boring. I know, I know, there are some great religious minds that go on the show and I do not want to demean them BUT I find myself using its regular 7.50am prompt to switch off the radio and go and get dressed. 

It's just so annoyingly anodyne and the biased toward nice liberal progressive speakers who seem to say nothing more than shouldn't we all just be nice to each other. Now, there is nothing wrong with saying that live on radio - but really it's so bland and samey. It feels as if almost every broadcast begins with some drippingly earnest antiphon like "In the UN today....". The portrayal of religion is therefore not much more than a sort of top-up for life, like having chocolate sprinkles on your cappuccino. A nice extra option but not too demanding. 

This "progressive" theological voice buys into the myth behind modernism. Every society has its myth or what postmodernists call meta-narrative, the overarching big story. For me, the myth we being sold was best put over by the Disneyland 'Carousel of Progres' an educational ride which I first witnessed as an 11-year-old back in the later 1970s. As marvelous as our technological progress is I felt this humanist happy-clappy worldview did not add up. There was a lot of about the Twentieth Century which was catastrophically awful - including two world wars, mass genocide and so on. 

The sort of theology being proposed by the TFTD embraces the core ideas in the Magic Kingdom's Carousel of Progress. Here our salvation is not really with God but with human endeavors. At best we might be asked by our speakers to correlate this progress as a 'work of the Holy Spirit'.  Its chocolate sprinkles on the cappuccino, decorative religion that seems earnest but has little to offer bar platitudes about justice and inclusion.  

Rod Dreher author of the popular Benedict Option (2017) calls this pseudoreligion Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD). Some basic tenets to MTD are..

1. A God exists who watches over the world

2. God wants people to be good, nice, fair as taught by most world religions.

3. The central goal of life is to be happy and feel good about oneself.

4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except in emergencies.

MTD is colonizing existing Christian churches at a viral rate. The problem is that MTD is mostly about improving one's self-esteem and subjective happiness. There are many ecclesiastics in the West who wholeheartedly believe that the more we market the Christian life as MTD the more the pews will be filled. Supposedly the return of the masses to faithful Church attendance will come when the institutional Church embraces MTD and progressive theology. They will flood in apparently. I have to say that over 49 years of church attendance I think that this is a very flawed hypothesis. Most middle-of-the-road mainstream churches make almost no demands. In the Church of England, for example, a lay person can have pretty much whatever lifestyle or opinions they want. The buffet is wide and extensive. "C'mon in you can be whoever and whatever you want." Yet, our core mainstream continues in to experience a decline. For me, this graph sums up what is an inconvenient truth, progressive MTD ideology bleeds membership.

My personal experience is that the wider population do not mind a liberal-progressive congregation and in some ways are reassured by its benign presence. However, the same folks are indifferent to having much more to do with it.  The implication is that there is no reason to go - aside from the aesthetic appeal of Sunday services, meeting other people and some vague sense of spirituality. To be frank, people will say that going shopping or sleeping in on a Sunday is more rewarding. If it is not absolutely critical to go to something then Western minded people, who are quite conscious of their time constraints, will not be that moved to participate. If my life does not depend on the Gospel then why should I entertain it? MTD religion sounds good on paper but the reality is that a religion which pushes the idea of an undemanding faith will not get many adherents. Such a religious grouping may try and sound "relevant" by espousing fashionable causes but will struggle to persuade people to sign up. 

In frustration, the progressives will argue that one more push is needed, one more reform, and the crowds will rush back in. This  also lends itself to a Freudian cynicism of institutions which so easily plays into the hands of those who espouse themselves to be "spiritual but not religious." Here 'religion' and 'Church' are on the bad side of the equation because they are deemed to get in the way real spirituality.

However, MTD progressive liberal theology is not only bad for numbers in the pews - it is in my opinion poor theology per se. Even if it were successful in its own right in amassing loads of young adults back to Church I would still question its basic tenants. It has not only an overly simplistic relationship with modernity but it also lacks a coherent moral worldview and vision for the future. In tut-tutting fundamentalism, it is in danger of becoming equally blinkered. We see this all the time now with illiberal liberals. It lacks what modernity lacks, what moral philosophers call 'teleology' - a sense of where we are going as a culture. It is akin to arguing for a game of football without any goals. Yes, it is nice that no one loses but in the long-term... no one also wins. Christianity is founded and grounded on hope and without the scaffolding of hope, there can be no Gospel, no good news. We keep going round and round on the Carousel of Progress until the carousel breaks down or our AI successors take it over and throw us off. 

So as for TFTD - I hope that they open it up to anyone, and especially the critiques of faith and religion. Why not? Do they no have 'thoughts' too? The world is not going to end if Richard Dawkins has a go at the 7.50am slot on Radio 4. What TFTD is robust and even uncomfortable "thoughts" rather than safe sanguine sanctimonious mutterings with nice left-wing sentiments. What I want to hear is not what happened in the UN today but why I should or should not believe in something and what the speaker believes is going to happen to me if I do share his or her beliefs. Roll on the day when a contributor opens with "I do not think Jesus is Lord because..." or "I do not hold that Mohammed is a prophet because...:"  That will be refreshing. I might cough in my cornflakes and actually carry on listening.