CHARLES BANNERMAN: Our 'while I have your attention' columnist laments how the church became irrelevant to large sections of society and suggests the vacuum left by the decline of Christianity and church attendance may have stoked 'woke' culture

My childhood memories of Inverness on an early ‘60s Sunday morning are of traffic jams and church bells summoning hordes of worshippers, many clutching Bibles whose size and number I always took as a measure of the bearer’s righteousness.

It was a mass invasion of a multitude of churches along the riverside, representing many denominations, but with the Church of Scotland conspicuously dominant.

That ecclesiastical concentration was the legacy of Inverness’s early growth along the banks of the river, but new suburban churches like Hilton and Dalneigh were already creating an outward diffusion of the devout. And then, the attendance slump. Between 1966 and 2018, Church of Scotland membership fell by three quarters and typical Sunday attendance is now estimated at a predominantly elderly 137,000 – 2.5 per cent of the population.

In an inevitable riverside rationalisation, Queen Street, St Columba High and the West Churches were all abandoned, although the name of St Columba continues in the Inverness peripheries. But now we have the deepest cull of all in the Church of Scotland’s latest proposed massive clear-out of premises and congregations. The potential loss of no fewer than 18 churches around Inverness and Nairn could include Church of Scotland cornerstones like the East, Trinity, St Stephen’s and Kinmylies. And, despite decades of charmed existence, that totem which is the Old High looks doomed.

We attended St Columba which was so crammed with a generally amiable congregation that they had to add a balcony in the early ‘60s. Less than half a century later, and almost devoid of humanity, the place was closed.

The Church of Scotland’s decline is not unique. The reasons are many and complex but, I believe, partly self-inflicted. For centuries, the coercion of the penitent stool, Apocalyptic visions of hell and damnation, the power of the bleakly austere church elder and even the law, kept churches full to the brim amid a complacent delusion of eternity.

However society changed and a better educated and more enlightened population gradually became no longer prepared to endure or accept half-hour-plus lambastings on fire and brimstone, or visiting the iniquities unto the third and fourth generations.

Oh, the Kirk has changed and modernised, but not enough to remain attractive and relevant to a society now highly sceptical about someone in black from head to foot droning on at length, amid dramatic, pregnant pauses, about some obscure aspect of theology. That was what eventually did for me, alongside a very personal episode of disillusionment and developing my own individual belief system. It took a while for the penny to drop, but it dawned on me that if, despite the benefit of a pretty extensive education, whatever theological abstrusity a minister was banging on about still totally eluded me, where did that leave those less fortunate?

Scotland’s national church is now attended weekly by only one in 40 of Scotland’s population, hence this latest massive downsizing in Inverness and elsewhere.

The general decline of Christian religion has also created a vacuum, because it largely no longer has the clout to dictate to us what we must think, say, do and believe.

And that, I’d suggest, is a moral vacuum being filled by the forces of ‘woke’, desperate to impose its own brand of self-righteousness and frequently cranky, coercive orthodoxy.

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