So, reading today’s The Times this morning I came across something that I thought I should share…

Church attendance in Britain is declining so fast that the number of regular churchgoers will be fewer than those attending mosques within a generation, research published today suggests.

Honestly, this didn’t shock me. I shan’t tell you in which part of the UK I live, but there was a particularly strong Catholic tradition here thanks to the Irish influx at the start of the twentieth century; it’s partly thanks to that influx that I’m here! With the Irish came Catholic churches and schools. Now more Muslims are moving here, as is their right, more mosques and Muslim schools are being built. Generally, Muslims are ‘more practicing’ than Christians, so there’s bound to be more of them going. What got me was this…

The fall - from the four million people who attend church at least once a month today - means that the Church of England, Catholicism and other denominations will become financially unviable. A lack of funds from the collection plate to support the Christian infrastructure, including church upkeep and ministers’ pay and pensions, will force church closures as ageing congregations die.

Emphasis mine. First, the article is not just discussing the Church of England, as is often the case here because the CoE is the state religion, but Catholicism as well! I know that the Methodists in particular have an aging congregation, but I’ve always thought of Catholicism as ‘sustainable’. When I go to mass, there are many young people, especially young families. In contrast, when passing my local Methodist church on the way to the supermarket, their church hall always seems to be full of old ladies rushing around with jam jars, pots of tea and cakes.

Second, the timescale of this demise is within my lifetime. In 2050, I’ll be in my sixties. It’s scary enough thinking of myself being that old, never mind the fact that I might not be able to get to mass on Sunday because the local churches have closed. The loss of historical and culturally valuable buildings is bad enough!

My main concern, however, is much more important. Britain’s Christian identity is fading. When people think of Christianity they probably think about the United States but I would argue that Britain is the world’s most Christian country. People complain that our social security system is too expensive, that our National Health Service (universal healthcare) treats too many foreigners, that our borders are always open and that our army sorts out too many conflicts.

However, realistically there are very few British people who would allow people to starve by depriving them of their benefits, or who would deny medical attention or refuge to a person simply because they are foreign. In fact, people take pride in the fact that our NHS trains doctors (at our expense) who eventually go on to work in less developed countries, and in the fact that our armed forces are involved in more peace-keeping operations than any other. As a nation, we care. It reminds me a lot of Matthew 25:35-26…

For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you made me welcome, lacking clothes and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me.

If that sense of duty and respect for others within Britons disappears, we will be left with the ‘me’ culture of consumerism that seems to be spreading around the world. If ‘stuff’ could make us happy, we’d buy something we really wanted and not have to buy anything else. The fact that we have to continue buying shows that these things don’t truly make us happy. God does. People are selling God for money and consumer goods. This is echoed by His Holiness, Benedict XVI…

I think about today's young people, raised in an environment saturated with messages proposing false models of happiness; these boys and girls risk losing hope because they often seem to be orphans of true love, which fills life with meaning and joy. Adolescents, youths and even children are easy victims of the corruption of love, deceived by unscrupulous adults who, lying to themselves and to them, draw them into the dead-end streets of consumerism.

Can these figures be disputed?

From the article:

The Church of England disputed the forecasts last night. Lynda Barley, its head of research, said: “These statistics represent a partial picture of religious trends today. In recent years church life has significantly diversified so these traditional statistics are less and less meaningful in isolation.

“There are more than 1.7 million people worshipping in a Church of England church or cathedral each month, a figure that is 30 per cent higher [than the Sunday attendance figure used by Christian Research] and has remained stable since 2000. We have no reason to believe that this will drop significantly.”

That’s cool, I suppose. A better criticism would have been that immigration trends change. Before me, it was the Irish Catholics; now it’s Muslims from the Middle-East; in the future it could be anyone, perhaps we’ll get another lot of Catholics. The recent wave of (pretty small) Polish immigration has bolstered Catholic church attendance in poor areas. Who knows what the future holds? Maybe we’ll see a complete reversal of these trends.

The figures

For those of you interested, here are the proposed figures. I hope this blog is still online in 2050 so I can check. 

By 2050 there will be just 3,600 churchgoing Methodists left in Britain, Christian Research predicts. Anglicans will be down to 87,800, Catholics to 101,700, Presbyterians to 4,400, Baptists to 123,000 and independents to 168,000.

At least we Catholics will still be the top dogs.

Labels: britain, church-attendence, commentary, multi-faith