The tide can still come back in for Christianity

Even with Anglicanism at its lowest ebb, it would be wrong to give in to fatalism. There are reasons for hope

Religion is “moribund” and Christianity has “probably gone for good” as Europe’s default faith, a gloomy survey told us last week. It found that a majority of young people in a dozen Western countries have no religious affiliation whatsoever. The Victorian poet Matthew Arnold once described the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the sea of faith. This Holy Week, the tide is so far out as to be barely audible.

It’s dismal news, but it won’t surprise British churchgoers. Over the years, they’ve seen the decline with their own eyes. As a young chorister at Salisbury Cathedral, I was struck by how grey-haired the congregation was that packed the nave at the Sunday Eucharist. Later on, at my monastic secondary school, the surviving monks were mostly in their dotage. To be raised Christian at the turn of the millennium, at times, felt like witnessing the end of something.

If there is ever to be a religious fightback, it is worth being brutally honest about where we are now. Each census shows the collapse of religion to be the biggest single social trend in Britain.

Last week’s survey found that 70 per cent of 16- to 29-year-olds in the UK identify with no religion. And just

7 per cent call themselves Anglican. The first figure suggests atheism and apathy are snowballing together, and that the decline of our national religion will accelerate. The second shows that the Church of England now has fewer young adult members than the Catholic Church in the UK, which could undermine its established status. Soon, the study implied, young adult Anglicans will be outnumbered by their Muslim counterparts.

It’s no wonder the Prince of Wales, who will one day be “Defender of the Faith”, has emphasised that as monarch he will stand up for non-Christian faiths, too. When the Queen promised to “maintain the Protestant reformed religion” at the 1953 coronation, things were different: Her Majesty knew that more than two thirds of the English population were baptised Anglicans. That world has vanished.

To a degree, immigration flatters other denominations and faiths. Catholic numbers have been swelled by the million or so Poles in Britain, the vast majority first-generation arrivals. This Saturday, you might spot some of them carrying Easter baskets full of eggs and bread to be blessed at church. Muslim immigrants are notably more religious, too: bluntly, the lack of integration in some communities, as criticised by Dame Louise Casey’s government report, helps to insulate their faith.

Even so, it’s overwhelmingly likely that the children and grandchildren of today’s immigrants will be less religious. Secularism is the dominant cultural force. For Christians, especially, the trends are alarming. If they continue, we are only decades away from complete statistical invisibility and near-total atheism.

But it would be wrong – and surely un-Christian – to give in to fatalism, or to the Marxist historical view that we are subject to vast, impersonal forces and can’t do a thing to resist them. There are points of light scattered about and reasons for hope.

For a start, young people become parents – and when they do, they’ll find faith schools dominating the league tables and achieving the best results for their children. They may even find themselves re-engaging with the Church to win a place at them.

There is also evidence of an emerging Christian counter-culture. Evangelical churches are springing up, partly thanks to a sympathetic Archbishop of Canterbury. The new Gas Street Church in Birmingham, based in an old warehouse, attracts hundreds each week. Good liturgy – tambourines for some, the music of Thomas Tallis for others – is for me the crucial factor. It helps to explain a wonderful fact: attendance at Anglican cathedrals is up over the last decade.

Christians have not yet disappeared from public life. It was cheering to see Jacob Rees-Mogg commit publicly to his faith on breakfast television last year. He didn’t want to impose his beliefs on anyone, he said. Nor would he abandon them for the sake of cheap popularity. It was quite a moment.

Who knows what other challenges lie ahead: a Catholic teacher recently told me that his greatest worry was how the beauty of church liturgy could ever compete with the excitement of the virtual reality games increasingly being played by his young pupils. But if Matthew Arnold’s metaphor seems fitting, we should remember the point of it – that tides do turn.