“Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen.”
The words of the angelic messengers to the women at the empty Tomb, in Saint Luke’s account of the first Easter Day, echo across the Christian centuries. Faith in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ — the very heart of the Christian faith — is not, cannot, be subject to the normal arc of history. Empires decline. Ideologies fade. Economic dominance is temporary. Even claims for the End of History pass. But not so the Christian faith. Church attendance and the public influence of churches may indeed decline, as we have seen in the West in the decades since the 1960s. Christian faith, however, does not, cannot, die. It cannot because of the truth and reality of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The power of the Resurrection always bursts forth; the proclamation of Easter always overcomes the forces of decline and death.
There is a hint of this in the recent Bible Society report “Quiet Revival” — so much so, indeed, that even the secular media had to take notice. Gen Z — those born between 1997 and 2012, a generation which came of age in a thoroughly secular Britain — are leading a rediscovery of Christianity in the United Kingdom. In 2018, a mere 4 per cent of 18-24 year olds attended church regularly. That figure is now 16 per cent — above the average for the entire population (12 per cent) and approaching the figure for the least secular of generations, those aged 65 and over (19 per cent). With all the caution and nuances necessary when interpreting such figures, it is still the case that something important is happening: the intensely secular public culture of the contemporary United Kingdom, with all of its rigid indifference and enormous condescension towards Christianity, has not prevented a significant proportion of Gen Z from turning towards and exploring the Christian faith.
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Secularist ideologues, trumpeting the supposed inevitable death of Christianity in the United Kingdom and eagerly seeking a banal public realm divested of any and all references to the role of Christianity in shaping the United Kingdom over centuries, might very well wonder if the angelic messengers of Easter Day are also addressing them: “Why seek ye the living among the dead?”. Grumpy secularists, treating the works of the New Atheists as canonical, are now uncomfortably confronted by the younger post-New Atheist generation, many of whom regard the pronouncements of the New Atheist celebrities of the noughties as the tired and empty doctrines of an exhausted secularism.
In Nigeria and Pakistan, Christians demonstrate the power of the Resurrection by their faith in the Risen Christ
There also appears to be something similar occurring in France. The Catholic Church in France will be baptising over 10,000 adults this Easter, a 45 per cent increase since last year and the largest number since records for Baptism of adults were established in 2002. 18-25 year olds are now the single largest age group amongst those being baptised, 42 per cent. Amongst teens under 18, there has also been a 33 per cent increase since last year in those seeking baptism.
Two centuries after violent Jacobin de-Christianization, amidst the programmatic secularism of laïcité, and with an alarming pattern of criminal attacks on churches, young French people are, like Gen Z in the UK, rediscovering Christianity. A representative of the French Catholic Church, referring to the impact of the pandemic and the current international context, pointed to this as setting the scene for these young people desiring to explore and embrace the Christian faith: “Many are looking for reasons to hope within all this instability”. To a generation discovering that an exhausted secularism is incapable of offering meaning, roots, and hope, the churches can repeat the message of the angelic messengers at the empty Tomb, “Why seek ye the living among the dead?”.
Alongside the signs of a rediscovery of Christianity in the West, there is another yet more potent witness to the Easter Gospel. Our fellow Christians in other parts of the globe faithfully, bravely witness in the face of terror, persecution, and harassment. According to Open Doors, an organisation which supports persecuted Christians, 1 in 7 Christians across the globe face persecution. In 2023 4,998 Christians were killed for faith-related reasons, the vast majority of these in Nigeria. We might also think of the faithful witness of Christians in Pakistan. After an outbreak of violent attacks on Christian communities in the city of Jaranwala in 2023, the Moderator of the Church of Pakistan, Bishop Azad Marshall, spoke of his visit to these communities: “With tears, we sang, prayed and read scriptures seeking understanding and experiencing the presence of Jesus among us”.
In both Nigeria and Pakistan, Christians are demonstrating the power of the Resurrection by their continued faith in the Crucified and Risen Christ. Their witness declares that Christian faith, because the Resurrection of Christ is at its very heart, can never be a story of inevitable decline, atrophy, and disappearance. Whether in the face of persecution, or the cold indifference of an empty secularism, the power, light, and life of the Resurrection of Christ will always burst forth: “Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen”.
For the churches in secular cultures, there is a profound challenge to heed the witness of both those in Gen Z rediscovering Christianity in the West and of persecuted Christians elsewhere. Reducing Christianity and the Church’s proclamation to the latest fad, whether Net-Zero, “Adolescence”, or any other fashionable progressive cause, or encouraging a belief that being anti-Woke equates to Christian faith (it isn’t: one is a political stance, the other is saving faith) is to seek for the living among the dead, amongst that which cannot give life, meaning, and hope. Here too, then, is another sign of the Resurrection of Christ bursting forth: churches in secular cultures setting aside the faddish causes and the ideological crusades, to boldly, confidently point to the empty Tomb and proclaim the faith of the Easter Gospel. “He is not here, but is risen.”
