To critics, the church’s actions may seem emblematic of a wider “secularization” of Lent: in which an originally spiritually focused religious observance becomes more about anodyne notions of “wellness” and “doing good.” It’s fair, too, to critique the movement as a bid for relevancy by a fading institution: A 2016 poll found that the number of Britons attending a weekly Church of England service fell for the first time to fewer than 1 million (or less than 2 percent of the UK’s population).
Those criticisms would be valid. But at the same time, the Church of England’s actions reflect a wider willingness among many mainline Protestant and Catholic Christian groups to focus on combating structural or global issues — from income inequality to environmental stewardship — alongside individual misdeeds. [...]
Francis’s notion of sin as something collective and structural, not just individual, has informed much of his theology, from his environmentalism to his fervently anti-capitalist stance, a dynamic also at play in the way the Church of England is talking about its own initiatives.
It’s worth noting that these initiatives, which tend to be popular with Catholics and mainline Protestants, are not necessarily shared by all Christians. American evangelicals, in particular, have long been wary of environmental causes, seeing them as a threat to what they envision as man’s God-given dominion over the earth.
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