In yesterday’s Guardian, they report that a majority of people no longer identify as religious in Scotland. The most significant decline appears to have come in the Church of Scotland. The paper report:

The census found the number of people who identified with the Church of Scotland had slumped by more than a third over the decade, falling from 32.4% of the population in 2011 to 20.4%, or 1.1 million people, in 2022.

The number of Catholics in Scotland also fell, though less dramatically, from 15.9% to 13.3%, or 723,000 people.

This should not come as a major surprise for two principal reasons. First, the Church of Scotland has now embraced liberalism to such a degree that it offers absolutely nothing unique compared to the secular world around it. The Catholic Church, by contrast, has not quite embraced liberalism to the same degree and therefore will appear to offer something that cannot be accessed almost anywhere else.

The second point of fact is that Scotland simply hasn’t benefited from the levels of immigration that have been seen in England. Many of those who have come to England are already Christian and typically of a conservative theological bent. Not only has Scotland not received as much in the way of immigrants as England, the conservative-minded immigrant is less likely to attend a liberal Church of Scotland congregation and will instead find a more theologically suitable home. Those who come from non-Christian backgrounds and convert in the UK, again, find a happier home in a church that actually values and aims at conversion, something of a dirty word to liberals.

These observations shouldn’t really be all that surprising to anyone who has paid any attention to these things. A liberalising church is a dying church which as all but admitted it has nothing unique to offer the world and, in lieu of anything positive to contribute, figures it may as well ape the world as best it can. Unsurprisingly, most people choose the liberal offering of the world over the liberal offering of the church, where they can have all the same values and access all the same things without having to sit through all the seemingly anachronistic ceremony and droning homilies that seem rather incidental to the rest of proceedings.

What surprised me a bit more was the comments of the convener of the assembly trustees of the Church of Scotland. Rather than recognise this painfully obvious reality, he said ‘the data was “sobering” and reflected longer-term trends. But he said the church’s relevancy was not simply measured in numbers.’ Which, of course, is true. The church’s relevancy is not measured in numbers alone. But that rather misses the fact that the church’s relevance has been weighed and found wanting.

Indeed, submitting the evidence of the church’s relevance, Rev David Cameron goes on to list a whole load of things the Church of Scotland does that one can access in any number of other places. That is to say, although it may offer some worthy things, they are not uniquely worthy things that can be found in the Church. They are apparently quite worthy things that people can access in lots of other places without having to suffer all the religious stuff they don’t subscribe to anymore. And this, he fails to realise, is what makes the Church of Scotland less relevant. Not the numbers of themselves, but the lack of any unique offering at all.

To be fair to him, this is no different to the liberal denominations the world over. The more they subscribe to the ideas of the world, and ape the world, the more those who once found those churches relevant increasingly determine they aren’t. If they don’t offer anything other than what they can get in the world, and they sideline the one unique thing the church can offer – namely, the undiluted Word of God – it isn’t that surprising, is it? It somewhat fails to understand why anyone goes to church at all and it isn’t because they do what everyone else does.

This is the problem with such a chasing of relevancy. The desperate rush to relevance inevitably means you will not find it. By aping what can be found anywhere else, the church renders itself utterly irrelevant. It is a lesson that all churches, the world over, should sit up and take notice of. Ditch the one unique thing we’ve got and consign yourself to irrelevance; offer it wholeheartedly and you may well find that those who have grown dissatisfied with what the world has to offer may yet find relevancy within.