Britain: Immigrants, Old People Keep Church on Life Support

It is no secret that lip service to faith is in serious short supply in Europe. Churches in Britain particularly have been bitching about decreased church attendance for years now (which obviously carries with it collection plates that are less filled).

Well it seems that the British preachers are reaching for any good news they can get. Immigrants from Africa and senior citizens are slowing the hemorrhage of bodies from the pews, at least temporarily:

One of the biggest surveys among Britain's 37,000 churches, published today, finds that the growth of immigrant-led churches has partly offset dwindling congregations elsewhere.

The news will cheer Church leaders. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, said the phenomenon was having a healthy impact on mainstream Churches.

So immigrants and minorities are getting their pray on. But the whites continue to be less and less keen on Jesus. You know, in Britain, for the most part, whites are more wealthy and educated than the minorities. Why do I get the feeling that significant part of this church attendance difference is based not on ethnic, but on income/class lines? It would be hard to figure it out without prying into everyone's income levels, but I bet that at least a big chunk of this minority/white attendance discrepancy is merely a side effect of an income-and-education-level-based discrepancy.

By the way, click on the link to see a picture of Dr. Rowan Williams. The guy's hairstyle and beard make him look like a cross between a mad scientist and a skinny Santa Claus. It's truly a baffling sight. I don't think that look has been in style anytime since the 1800s!

But enough ad hominem. Even this little morsel of good news for the church is laced with cyanide:

But the survey also shows that congregations are getting older as young people continue to abandon the pews, which could have a devastating impact in a decade.

...

The research, based on questionnaires from 19,000 churches, finds that 29 per cent of churchgoers are 65 or over compared with 16 per cent of the population.

It also finds that nine per cent of churches have no one aged under 11 in their congregations.

This statistic implies that the light at the end of the tunnel is more likely the hot white light of worldly secularism and materialistic atheism. Of course, no other proverbial light bulb shines as bright as the light bulb of atheism, and accordingly, when allowed to shine, it drowns out the black lights of theism with its radiance.

And that's why the youth in Europe are particularly averse to getting on their knees and opening their mouths (and wallets) for Jesus. In a secular world, you get to fuck real humans and spend your money on yourself. Theism simply can't compete.

The old people in Britain cling to the church the way Strom Thurmond clung to racism. He's dead now, and the old British ninnies will be dead soon as well. It looks like across the western world, these concepts of Jesus and Original Sin will die off with the old, just like sexism and racism have done. Who nowadays thinks that slavery is just, or that women shouldn't vote? Only fringe lunatics, poor ignorant trash, and old farts from a by-gone era think like that.

The future for Britain looks bright. These unchurched youth will eventually take the reigns of their homeland, and rule it without false values like racism, sexism, nationalism, and theism. When these youth are all grown up and working in the media, they will write articles about low church attendance with a positive slant, instead of an alarmist slant. They will refer to Christianity as a mythology from a more ignorant time.

But what of the immigrants? Well that depends on how much they can integrate and progress in Britain's society. If they are treated more inclusively by the whites, and given fair opportunity to increase their security and happiness and such, then these immigrants' children will likely follow the secular path that their more-well-off white peers did a generation before. Prosperity = less churchin'.

But perhaps most importantly, the future of Britain will have less Dr. Rowan Williams mad scientist hairstyles.