Something very bad has happened, and almost no-one seems to want to talk about it

What have we become? What might God make of this? And where do we go from here?

Dear Church Leaders (and everyone else)

When I look back upon my life, it often occurs to me that I have perhaps known a greater than average number of people who have died young, at least by modern peacetime standards. As a child, I remember a close friend of my father being killed in a motorbike accident in his 30s. And at around the same time my aunt died at a similar age.

When I was at university, another student, my “college father”, died in a mountaineering accident in his early 20s. And several years later, one of the three others with whom I had met to pray regularly died of leukaemia shortly before his 30th birthday. I have also known several people who have died in their 40s and 50s — not least my mother, as I described in the introduction to A dark day.

Coming to terms with the loss of a friend or relative can be hard enough, but the death of someone who has “died before their time” is often particularly difficult to bear for those left behind. Not least children who go through adolescence and into adulthood without their father or mother. And parents who are left grieving for an adult son or daughter.

I suspect that my own experience is somewhat unusual. But on an individual level, it is reasonable to expect that, all other things being equal, some of us will know more people who have died relatively young, and others rather fewer. In contrast though, the number of younger people dying at a population-wide level does not usually vary very much.¹ A rise or fall of more than 3% from year to year would ordinarily be considered unusual.

That is what makes 2021 so striking. For in that year in England there were around 15% more deaths among those aged 25-64 compared to pre-2020 levels. In absolute terms, that means that the number of people of working age who died in 2021 was well over 10,000 more than expected. If it helps to comprehend the scale of this, that’s roughly the numerical equivalent of an average passenger plane crashing every single week and leaving no survivors.

The purpose of this fairly brief article is not to discuss in any detail the reasons for those thousands of extra deaths. For the record, it seems likely to me that there were multiple factors involved, and that some of those factors were much bigger than others. It is worth noting too that people aged 25-64 are at relatively low risk from respiratory viruses. But what I want to focus on here is how we have collectively responded (or not) in the context of such an exceptionally large loss of life among people who would ordinarily have been expected to live for many more years.

---

---

While the cause of death is not always clear, death itself is unambiguous and generally easy to track. It is essentially a matter of counting bodies. And we have been able to count bodies reliably for a long time. So the fact that the number of working age people who died in 2021 was at least 10,000 more than usual is not a matter of opinion. It is not something that we can reasonably agree to differ about. Or something that we need to leave to experts.

One of the most striking things about the behaviour of the government, the public health authorities and the media is the contrast between the reporting of deaths in 2020, “the year of the pandemic”, and in 2021, during which “covid restrictions” were lifted and life returned to something resembling normality. In 2020 the number of “covid deaths”² was widely and relentlessly reported day after day, even when it dropped to close to zero during the summer. Yet in 2021 there was curiously little discussion of the unexpectedly large number of working age people dying.

In the five years or so since, little has changed. And I find the ongoing silence eerier than ever. But what I find most troubling is that it is not only the government, the public health authorities and the media that appear to want to act as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. It is also, in my experience, church leaders. Which I find rather odd, not least because death — surely a spiritual issue if there ever was one — is something that they are ordinarily more ready and willing to talk about than almost anyone else in society.

When I have sought to raise with various members of my local church leadership the issue of the unexpected deaths of thousands of working age people in 2021, I have been met with denial, indifference, and silence. And in at least some cases there seems to be an element of wilful blindness. I wonder how many subjects there are today in the church that are more taboo. As with institutions of the world, I detect little or no interest in looking back openly and objectively at what happened in 2021, let alone learning lessons. Instead, the stated desire is to “move on”, which seems essentially to entail brushing under the carpet what has happened. This seems to me a long way from the counter-cultural approach espoused by the man who is God.

Each November in the UK we rightly remember those who have died in conventional wars and conflicts, including, in the past 60 years or so, around ~1,800 military personnel and ~2,050 civilians.³ But it would appear that, when an unexpected extra 10,000+ working age civilians are lost in a single year, almost no-one wants to talk about it. There is no public prayer — from the leaders of any religion — for the many missing mums and dads, sisters and brothers, daughters and sons who sit no more at familiar tables of home. There is no acknowledgement of their departure long before their time. And so far at least, there is little by way of indication that, at the going down of the sun and in the morning, will we ever collectively remember them.

What have we become?

What might God make of this?

And where do we go from here?

---

---

Related

Re the figures:

The unanswered question of why so many young(ish) people died in 2021

Why are so many people dying in their 40s, 50s and 60s?

Re the silence:

The Sound of Silence [2026 update and re-issue]

The Day the Dam Broke [2025 re-issue]

Also:

Minority reports [2026 update and re-issue]

A bit of the Bible that some Bible-believing Christians don’t actually believe?

Further reflections on Remembrance Sunday

The Trusted News Initiative

And this post based on Jeremiah 5:

An appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land: the prophets prophesy falsely [and] my people love to have it so...

---

---

Dear Church Leaders (and everyone else) homepage

Some posts, including a version of this one, can also be found on Unexpected Turns

Revealing Faith: Seeing and believing the revelation of God

The Big Reveal: Christianity carefully considered as the solution to a problem

1. In England, the annual figure for those aged 50-64 is around 60,000, and, for those aged 25-49, around 25,000

2. A “covid death” was defined as any death within 28 days of a positive covid PCR test; but NB for context that the Nobel Prize-winning inventor of the PCR test, who died unexpectedly in August 2019, is on record as stating that “with PCR… you can find almost anything in anybody”

3. Based on these figures on Wikipedia: ~800 military (plus ~1900 civilians) in the Troubles in Northern Ireland; and ~1000 military (plus ~150 civilians) in the Falklands conflict, the Gulf War, the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq