This evening, if you have time and are around central London, there is an interesting lecture at the British Academy by the admirable sociologist of religion, Linda Woodhead, whose book with Andrew Brown on the CofE, The Church We Left Behind, is as depressing as it is largely to the point. The title is ‘Why No Religion is the New Religion’, and that is pretty much the size of it: the default identity of Brits is no longer reflexively CofE, but not-religious. (Actually, I am a Catholic of sectarian bent but I would personally hesitate to describe myself as religious, on the basis it is a bit of a self-regarding sort of identity, something you call other, smug, obsessive people you do not really approve of.) The lecture is backed by a YouGov survey which came out this week – based on a substantial 1500 respondents – that suggests most white Brits have no religion. Among the under 40s of all racial groups, 56 percent are non-religious and 31 percent are Christian.
Is anyone actually surprised? Based on my own entirely subjective experience, most of the people I know – all economic strata, Irish and Brits – who used to attend church regularly, now do so only rarely and most of their children do not attend church at all. And if you don’t practice, your sense of belonging starts to wither. Mind you, the trend is more decisive for Catholics, who are obliged to attend mass once a week, than for Protestants, who don’t set quite so much store by weekly attendance.
I suppose the reductio ad absurdum of those Christians who don’t bother actually going to church is the situation in Germany and Sweden, where people who vaguely approve of the church can contribute to it through their taxes without actually going anywhere near its services. Oddly enough, in Sweden, where approximately 2 percent of the church’s members regularly attend Sunday services, over 60 per cent of people support the church fiscally. Which means the church can end up simultaneously bloated and rotting. I’m not sure many of the non-attenders belong to that interesting non-denominational Christian group represented by the American novelist Marilynne Robinson, who is a Protestant but declines to join any institutional church.
The falling away from faith is the kind of thing that should be keeping us awake at night, because it is the biggest cultural shift of the age. The reasons for it are almost too obvious to talk about – the failure to transmit faith between the generations being the most obvious. In all this, the people who really get my goat are the kind of individuals who deplore secularisation, who talk earnestly about the importance of Britain being culturally Christian, who are very keen on the ethos of church schools but cannot be fagged to go to church or bring their children along. If you can’t make the minimal effort to attend even an Anglican evensong, the most perfect liturgy in English, and rub shoulders with the septuagenarians who really are keeping the faith, you don’t deserve an Established Church. And when we’re down to the last few thousand Christians in Britain, you can reflect that it’s all your fault.
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