Off Message

More statistics emerge to defy the picture of the world Christians paint. I mentioned this in the context of the Bishop's study morning back in November; now we are told that teenage pregnancies are now at their lowest ever recorded level, and have halved since 1999. Why this might be is a matter for debate: they talked about it on the Today programme (2.48 onwards, if you're interested), and while naturally enough the Government agencies charged with reducing pregnancies among the pre-20s are adamant that their campaign is responsible, I do wonder whether it isn't one of a piece with similar declines in crime, drinking, drug use, and other markers of delinquency over the same sort of time. 

We're having a considerable deal of annoyance from a little knot of local teenagers at the moment, minor disruption to the smooth running of the church which is most frustrating. But the few lads who hang around the village centre are conspicuous precisely because they're so unusual. All the others, perhaps, are either involved in various worthwhile activities, doing homework out of fear at the consequences of academic failure, or sequestered in their bedrooms plugged into social media, all of which keep them out of certain sorts of trouble, anyway.

So teenagers are behaving better, the social group perhaps furthest from the ministrations of the Church. Here is presented most starkly the paradox which Christians really must take account of if we are to recover any sort of intellectual credibility: that social order and goodness is not only apparently unrelated to anything we do, but directly increasing at the very time our influence has declined. In theory, it shouldn't be like this, should it? Without us, without God, society ought to be going to hell in a hand-cart. But it's not.