It's a strange question for a church magazine, and, this being a church magazine, the answer is not hard to guess! But in many countries, including this one, religion (meaning a faith in Jesus as Lord and Saviour, and measured by a commitment to knowing God in activity, word, prayer and worship) seems to be in decline. Something has changed (perhaps several things), and it may make our own witness stronger if we ask ourselves what these changes are.
People once looked to religion to provide answers to questions about the world surrounding us. The idea that God was good, and had created a world that was good, meant that everything could be (indeed, had to be) explained as an act of God's wisdom.
But to believe this weakens our witness. We may thank God for fine weather or good health, but to say that God has provided these for us goes too far. It raises the question of whether God provides earthquakes and floods in which thousands die, whether God sends incurable diseases to old and young, whether God causes accidents, famines, and all manner of things which cannot easily be attributed to our own wickedness. We may thank God for the beauty of the rose. But what do we say when people are eaten by sharks, stung by wasps, made ill by ticks, by bacteria or by viruses?
People once looked to religion to provide moral certainties. We still talk of the Christian ethic - helpfulness, generosity, honesty, respect for our neighbour.
But humanism shares the same ethic - the only major differences lie in the field of sexual ethics: divorce, children born outside marriage, abortion, homosexuality. And here, we Christians are not all united in our vision of how Jesus would have seen some of these situations, of how we can really show love to our neighbours and "do to others as we would others would do to us". Still less do we have a clear view of some of the ethical questions of the 21st century - care for the environment, nuclear power, immigration, animal rights.
And people looked to religion to fill a gap in their lives. "Religion is the sigh of the soul, it is the emotion of an emotionless world, and ... the spirit of a spiritless system," wrote a nineteenth century philosopher.
But this philosopher saw the gap as caused by poverty and exploitation, by the political system of the time. In fact this particular sentence ends: "just as it is, as it were, the spirit of a spiritless system, so religion is the opium of the people", and the writer was Karl Marx. His words, often lifted out of context, do not mean that governments encourage religion to keep people enslaved. It means that people in need seek liberation through religion.
And here is the easiest answer to our question. Marx took a limited view. He saw people's needs as mainly material needs. And indeed, as we have become richer, we have tended to turn less to religion. Other needs have been shaped by the entertainment industry: how many people prefer attending sport or watching television to going to church? But the need for true freedom remains, the need to be freed from our sinful state, to be loved and to be blessed by one who "gave himself for us", who "loved us to the end." And this true freedom comes only through the total self-giving which we can know through Jesus, our Liberator and Lord.
We need to know God. We do not need to know what God wants for the rest of the world, or how God acts in the world. If we concentrate on these, we restrict our witness to the world. We need to share God's love for the world, in our prayers, in our actions and in our lives. For that is what lies at the core of true religion. May we keep it ever in our minds.
HD