Religion is in rapid decline, but this is no moral malaise

Secularism is on the rise, but youngsters today are generally better behaved than their parents were

At 3pm today, all across the country, fewer people than ever will be commemorating the crucifixion of Christ. This weekend, churches will attract the smallest ever Easter Sunday congregations. Religion is in rapid decline in Britain, with the number of Christians dropping by about 8,000 a week. Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi, estimates that Europe is more secular now than at any time since the conversion of Constantine in the 4th century. If Easter means anything to you, rather than a long holiday weekend, then you’re in the minority. And you’d best get used to it.

This has been the rather sad story for Christians in Britain, myself included. The country has changed at a staggering pace and going to church is seen as being just plain weird. Religious education used to involve teaching children about the Bible; now, it’s also about preparing teenagers for the soft and not-so-soft hostility they’ll encounter.

For those who have lived through decades of this extraordinary secularisation, it can seem like part of a wider collapse. There’s a temptation to imagine that the younger generation has become rootless and nihilistic, with the country in the grip of rapid moral decay.

But here’s the thing: it is, now, impossible to make this argument. When I started out in journalism 20 years ago, there was no shortage of stories suggesting that things were falling apart. The party that started in the Swinging Sixties was ( just about) still going. Divorces were rising, single parenthood surging. There were fewer marriages, and they lasted for an ever-shorter period of time. Government ministers fretted about soaring drug and alcohol use. Scary trends could be extrapolated to project a country heading for a debauched, promiscuous, narcissistic and debased future. To many churchgoers, the link between all of this and the emptying pews seemed obvious.

But something then changed: some time around the turn of the century, social problems stopped growing. The number of divorces started to fall. Family breakdown, the proportion of children raised without a father, has been falling for six years now. Teenage pregnancy stands at the lowest rate since records began in 1969. My elder son is almost 10: in his short lifetime, the amount of crime committed by teenagers has fallen by more than half. He might soon be running out of wrong crowds to fall in with.

Then, drugs. The street price of cannabis, LSD and anything else you could ask a dealer for has collapsed from the days of my youth: a line of cocaine now costs about the same as half a pint of cider. But this owes more to lack of demand than a glut of supply. Drug use among teenagers has halved over the past decade. School pupils even seem repelled by cigarettes: only one in four thinks it’s acceptable to so much as try smoking to see what it’s like. The drugs that are going up in use are legal study drugs: the young are more interested in working hard than partying hard. The number of nightclubs has halved since 2005.

Smoking might be going out of fashion generally, but drink isn’t. It’s still there but being taken more in moderation, at least by the young. Binge drinking rates among under-25s have almost halved over the past 10 years; just 2 per cent of them now drink alcohol on five or more days a week. Teetotalism is on the rise. This certainly isn’t a national trend. The middle-aged are as keen as ever on the bottle, while pensioners now spend more money on booze than the under-30s.

There is a bottomless supply of such studies and surveys, adding up to an undeniable phenomenon: we have somehow managed to produce a generation of young people betterbehaved than their parents. The very idea was, until recently, a joke. It was the basis for Jennifer Saunders’s Absolutely Fabulous, a series about a louche mother despairing at a daughter, Saffy, who preferred homework to men. (“I don’t want a moustached virgin for a daughter,” she tells her in one episode, “so do something about it!”). Even this gag has proved prophetic: the young now take a harsher view of adultery than their parents’ generation. The Saffyisation of Britain has proved relentless.

Perhaps they’re rebelling against their parents’ liberalism, in the way their parents once rebelled against the church. Perhaps the ubiquitous smartphones have killed off the booze by providing better entertainment than a quarter-bottle of vodka. The idea of “keeping up appearances” has also taken on new meaning in the social media age, where so many young people carefully curate their social media profile. The phrase “the internet never forgets” wasn’t around in my youth: I could make my mistakes at a time when no one was digitally documenting them. Then, of course, the debt: it’s far harder to treat university as a three-year-long party if you’re borrowing £9,000 a year for the fees.

This might, in time, lead to a religious revival too. My godson (who isn’t religious: I have some work to do) says his churchgoing classmates are teased mercilessly but have grown adept at defending themselves. Which, he thinks, makes them stronger in their faith than they might otherwise have been. Things are pretty bad: four fifths of those brought up Anglican now say they have no faith, and most children are not even nominally Christian. But if churches manage to adapt to their recently acquired minority status, things might recover. Stranger things happen.

While Britain now has an undoubtedly secular culture, it’s still one that was marinated in Christianity. The values survive, even if churches are abandoned and converted into pubs. So it perhaps ought not to be surprising that the new ways do look an awful lot like the old ones, just with an emptier Sunday morning schedule.

There is plenty of reason to worry about the church, but it’s hard to argue that its collapse is part of a wider moral malaise. Instead, Britain is midway through a phase of social repair – one of the most extraordinary and under-remarked-upon stories of our time. We should still, perhaps, worry about the adults. But the kids really are all right.