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Notes -
C. S. Lewis quite explicitly believed that his Christianity was not shared by the majority in his society. He is very clear that he believes that Christians are a minority in Britain, even though it was the middle of the 20th century and the number of people writing 'Christian' on the census was an overwhelming majority.
See, for instance. Mere Christianity p. 62, where he writes, "My own view is that the Churches should frankly realise that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives." That book was published in 1952, and the passage I quoted was based on a radio talk he gave in the early 1940s. Lewis believed that as of 1952 most British people were not Christian.
For Lewis, being Christian in a meaningful sense is very much not just a matter of identification, nor of lip service. He understood himself to be counter-cultural.
I bumped into an earlier example when reading G. K. Chesterton's autobiography. Born in 1874, he writes that he was taught Christianity at a mainstream school by teachers who were not themselves Christians. This took me by surprise. We are talking about around 1890, and there is a Cathedral near where I live, built 1879, spires added 1913-1917. There is a contradiction between Chesterton's account of his post-Christian upbringing at a time when people are still building Cathedrals.
Chesterton doubles down, proposing that enthusiasm for Empire was a substitute for loss of Christian faith. People need to believe in something, and if Christianity has faded, they will latch on to something else.
My guess at the social history involves Darwin and the debates following his 1859 publication of The Origin Of Species. The London intellectuals of the generation before Chesterton respond by quietly giving up on Christianity. Meanwhile, others are participating in various Victorian Religious Revivals. Christianity looks healthy, but society's thought leaders have abandoned it. Christianity rots from the top down, and elites, such as C. S. Lewis experience a post-Christian country, while others are still happily attending Church.
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Seems like Lewis was in retrospect correct.
Yes, quite probably. He was certainly a critic of merely cultural Christianity.
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Hear, hear.
There’s a statement which I’ve heard semi-frequently in church and on Christian radio, and I know not its provenance: “God has no grandchildren.” It means that people may be culturally similar to their Christian parents and ancestors, but faith in Jesus as savior and God as father is an individual matter, not a familial/cultural one. For example, my father’s stories of his conversion have been vitally important to my own faith, but my faith has a different genesis (pun intended) and is inextricably mine.
Institutional churches, like the Church of England, tend to lose sight of this fact and settle for children inheriting the faith of their fathers, putting it on a shelf for safekeeping like the family china and bringing it out on holidays.
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