Christianity

Just 30 per cent of Britons feel that their religion or faith is important to them, according to the 2017 Ipsos MORI survey of global trends. That puts us at the bottom of the international table: only Swedes (29 per cent), Belgians (27 per cent) and the Japanese (22 per cent) are more secular than we are, according to this poll. The global average, meanwhile, is 53 per cent. Muslim Indonesia heads the list with 93 per cent. Christian America is on 68 per cent, despite a recent slump in church attendance. (I’m always a bit suspicious of what Americans tell pollsters about their faith.) Even Australia – hardly a nation that flaunts its piety – is

Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I don’t remember the BBC running a documentary 100 days into Barack Obama’s first presidency and kicking him from pillar to post. Interviewing almost exclusively people who hated him, pouring scorn on his every utterance. They did it this week to Donald Trump, though, and even wheeled out Jeremy Paxman to present this travesty of a documentary. Because Jeremy was interviewing exclusively people with whom he wholeheartedly agreed, he didn’t get the chance to put on that famous supercilious expression we all used to love, back when he was good. Shame. With Obama, as I remember, it was a very different approach. The studio

For the benefit of Sky News, standard Christian doctrine says gay sex is a sin. It’s the sin that gives sinning a good name. There ought to be a stewards’ inquiry into why it didn’t make it into the Ten Commandments. But, yes, it’s one of those trespasses we ask to be forgiven.  Sky’s Darren McCaffrey demanded to know Tim Farron’s view on the matter at a Lib Dem event on Monday. In case you’re wondering, Farron hasn’t proposed banning the love that once dared not speak its name and now won’t shut up about it. Nor does he want to roll back any of the gains the gay rights

Christ is risen; happy Easter all round. It’s a pleasing festival in all sorts of ways, chief of which is that it’s wildly uncommercial, being the Sunday following the full moon following the spring equinox, if I’ve got that right. So, not a usefully neat date like 25 December, and one that retailers find much more difficult to exploit except as a means of flogging lamb legs (folks – lambs have only four legs, but they also come with shoulders, you know, which are even nicer) and obviously, chocolate eggs… though Eastern Christians do it better, with hand coloured eggs, which they get blessed at church. Anyway, it’s still a

Hannah Roberts, an English Catholic friend, was once telling me about her family’s long history in Yorkshire. She spoke with yearning of what she had back home and how painful it is to live so far away. I wondered aloud why she and her American husband had emigrated to the United States from that idyllic landscape, the homeland she loved. ‘Because we wanted our children to have a chance to grow up Catholic,’ she said. It’s not that she feared losing them to the Church of England — it’s that she feared them losing Christianity itself. She and her husband Chris, an academic theologian, are now raising their four young children

On this week’s episode, we discuss the future of Christians as a minority group, consider whether Trump has found an ally in Britain, and dissect the 21st century phenomenon of the ‘flake’. First, with Easter just around the corner, the fate of Christianity in an increasingly secular Britain came under scrutiny. In this week’s magazine cover story, Rod Dreher advocates for ‘the Benedict option’, where Christian communities develop stronger personal identities. But Matthew Parris argues against this proposal, and they go head-to-head on the podcast. As Rod writes: “The collapse of religion in Britain has been perhaps the most striking feature of the last generation. The sheer pace of the decline has been recorded by