The surprising truth behind the ‘death’ of Christian Britain

We are told regularly by our media that the Church in the UK is in terminal decline. Our numbers have been steadily slumping since the 1960s. Religious affiliation is lower than ever; greater numbers of young people say they have no faith than in the past. The number of people who go to church occasionally continues to go down. One common narrative in our culture is that there was a point in British history when the Church was a dominant force affecting the vast majority of people. The big churches around our city centres were full and vibrant. Village churches were attended week by week by whole communities. A combination of the social shocks of two world wars, followed by the sexual revolution of the 1960s, led to the steady erosion of Christian faith and practice. Today this continues as fewer people pass on the faith to their children.

It may surprise you that a good deal about this narrative is questionable, if not downright inaccurate. For a start, the idea that most people were avid churchgoers in the past is not true. In his seminal book The Death of Christian Britain, Callum Brown demonstrates that huge Victorian church buildings were rarely filled. They were sometimes built in the hope that people would come, often designed to be focal points in new communities. In the countryside many would attend church only rarely; for example those in domestic service would only have a rare Sunday when they were able to go. The world wars certainly shook many people’s faith, but there was a huge outpouring of prayer during World War Two, with national services of thanksgiving following the Dunkirk evacuations, and the Church of England spearheading enormous prayer initiatives during the blitz and the Battle of Britain.

It is unquestionably true that fewer people attend church Sunday by Sunday than in the past. Many church leaders and theologians would argue that this has more to do with the end of the cultural dominance of the Church and less to do with a lack of appetite for faith. Recent surveys suggest that the emerging Gen Z identify themselves as more spiritual than any generation since the post-War Baby Boomers; they just do not necessarily know that their local church can help them on their journeys.

It is also arguable that it is not the quantity of your congregation that counts; it’s the quality. Alongside the decline of nominal church membership has gone a deepening of Christians’ engagement with their faith. Today’s Sunday church attenders are much more likely to be involved on other days, in a small group or volunteering with a ministry. They walk the walk rather than just talking the talk. Thus it is highly questionable that we actually see less Christian faith in the west today than ever before; what we see is less nominal faith and a small core of genuine believers.

Students of church history would also attest that the Church operates best when it is on the margins of society, not when it is in a position of cultural dominance. In his book The Patient Ferment of the Early Church, Alan Kreider analyses the early Church from the book of Acts through to the adoption of Christianity as the state religion by the late Roman Empire in the fifth century. He shows that the Church grew enormously during its early centuries, from a position of weakness and vulnerability, and he argues that this was because of the qualities of patience and perseverance which Christians cultivated. If you face arrest, imprisonment or death because of your faith, you have to rely on God for what you need.

By contrast, when the Church became the dominant force in European society, it got involved in all sorts of areas of culture at the cost of many of the values which made it great in the first place. This dominance led to horrific pogroms of Jews in the middle ages, involvement in the Crusades, imperial conquest, the corruption and decadence of the pre-Reformation Roman Catholic Church, transatlantic chattel slavery and much more. Many German churches backed the Nazis in the 1930s (with numerous brave exceptions); today the Russian Orthodox Church supports the war with Ukraine wholeheartedly. It may be surprising to read a Church of England minister saying that religion established within a state system is a huge challenge to purity within that religion. This problem is not unique to Christianity; just look at the terrible abuses of Islam as the state-sanctioned religion of Iran and Afghanistan.

Of course, the narrative of church decline is, in any case, a western one. In the global majority world the Church is thriving, often in countries where it is very risky to be a Christian. The evidence suggests that the countries which have seen the greatest growth in Christian faith include Iran, India and China. If you have ever heard stories of what people in those countries endure because of their faith in Jesus, you may feel ashamed at how easy we have it in the UK. The churches which are under the same kind of pressure which the early church experienced are the ones most likely to be growing.

It is good news, then, that the Church is under greater pressure in the UK. We are very far from being a persecuted minority, but we more often find ourselves at odds with our culture, such as in the current debate about assisted suicide (or ‘assisted dying’ as our parliamentarians put it). Christianity thrives on the margins when it is under pressure; that is when we are forced fully to rely on God. We should be wary of having too much political power; this affects how we think about, for example, whether our bishops should retain their seats in the House of Lords if and when it is reformed. It is much harder to speak truth to power when you are the ones in office. Christians will advocate most effectively for the least, the last and the lost when we are down there with them, not when they feel far removed from us.

We can see, then, that our cultural narrative of the steady decline of Christianity is not the whole story. Faith was always further from being a dominant force in our society than we might think, and it is nominal faith rather than absolute faith which has declined most strongly. A numerical approach will only take you so far; church membership today is much more likely to be a significant and meaningful part of someone’s life than in the past. We are seeing a renewed spiritual hunger among younger people, and a greater openness to the Christian faith, without preconceived ideas inherited from our culture. It turns out that a Church on the margins of our national life might just be much more impactful than a Church which is dominant.