In JL Carr’s A Month in the Country, the story of a young survivor of the First World War, set in the unusually hot English summer of 1920, the Reverend JG Keach delivers a rather melancholy verdict on the prospects for evangelism. “The English are not a deeply religious people,” he observes. “Even many of those who attend divine service do so from habit. Their acceptance of the sacrament is perfunctory: I have yet to meet the man whose hair rose at the nape of his neck because he was about to taste the blood of his dying Lord.”
When it comes to Christianity, a cursory look at statistical measures of religious practice lends weight to Keach’s conclusions. The percentage of the population that attends a Church of England service today stands at just over 1 per cent, reflecting a decline of more than 50 per cent since Carr published his novel in 1980. John Hayward, a mathematician at the University of South Wales, has suggested that most UK denominations are “heading for extinction”, with some, including the United Reformed Church, likely to expire within the next 15 years. Most of us are no longer baptising our babies, or getting married or having our funerals in Church.
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