There is a hushed silence as a dozen of us, bleary-eyed, trickle in for Matins. It is 7:30am on a Wednesday. Few seem to pay much heed to the vaulted stone ceiling above, the stained-glass windows, the intricately carved memorials and paintings on every wall. The service begins almost imperceptibly, as a black-cassocked priest, sitting quietly in the back row, starts to lead his tiny congregation through the prayer book. For the next 20 minutes, we murmur liturgies and psalms, and listen to Bible readings and canticles. At the end of each section, we recite in unison: “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now and shall be for ever. Amen.” And then it’s over, and we file back through the cathedral and out into the brightening morning, a single bell pealing high above us.

That afternoon, David Monteith, the dean of Canterbury and one of three priests to join the worshipers during Matins, tells me it was an unremarkably normal service of morning prayer, a service which has taken place every day at Canterbury Cathedral for nearly 1,400 years. This daily rhythm, which winds through a lunchtime communion and ends with choral evensong in the evening, is what Monteith calls the “heartbeat” of the institution. It might seem quaint, even banal, reading out the same words, day after day, to much the same tiny group of people. But for Monteith, it’s precisely this “tried and tested means of prayer” that “sustains you for the long haul”.

We may soon discover if he’s right. For today, the cathedral’s stone-flagged floors will go from empty to heaving, as thousands attend the enthronement of Sarah Mullally as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury. It’s a historic moment for the C of E, which for the first time ever installs a woman as its chief priest. Yet more than her sex, Mullally will ultimately be judged on whether she can steady the listing ship that is her Church. She takes over an institution reeling from years of abuse scandals and dangerously low on trust from the nation it claims to serve. And even if she can begin to turn things around, it will count for little if she cannot also find a way to resolve the bitter internal conflict between liberal and conservative factions, still at each other’s throats over gay marriage. And then there’s perhaps the biggest question of all: can Mullally find a way for this ancient institution to survive in modern, secular Britain, all without losing its soul?

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If all eyes are today on Mullally, Canterbury owes its fame to another woman. Back in the 6th century, a Christian Frankish princess called Bertha married the pagan King Æthelberht of Kent. When, 17 years later, the Pope asked Augustine to re-Christianize the English, the monk headed straight for Bertha as one of the few known believers in this godless land. Augustine  ended up founding the cathedral and becoming the first ever Archbishop of Canterbury, in a line which now stretches all the way to Mullally. Bertha’s own personal chapel still sits just beyond the ancient city walls, and indeed remains the oldest active church anywhere in the English-speaking world.

Canterbury’s close association with the Church has not always been easy. In 1647, townsfolk revolted against the Puritanical abolition of Christmas and attempts to confiscate their much-loved festive treats, storming the cathedral in what are now called the Plum Pudding Riots. But this was nothing compared to the turmoil of 1170, when four knights hacked Thomas Becket, one of Mullally’s more ill-fated predecessors, to death with their swords.

Mullally will no doubt be hoping for a less tumultuous reign. But the former chief nurse is taking over the C of E at a profoundly challenging moment. Perhaps the most urgent item in her in-tray is safeguarding. Wracked by never-ending abuse scandals, England’s national church has lost the trust of the nation. At the depths of the crisis last year, after Mullally’s predecessor Justin Welby was forced to step down in disgrace, accused of failing to report an abuser, a poll revealed just one in four people had a favorable view of the Church. In the 18 months since he left, meanwhile, there has been a cascade of new revelations, notably when the Bishop of Liverpool was accused of sexual harassment by one of his peers.

Mullally herself has skeletons in her closet. Some abuse survivors distrust her because during her time as Bishop of London, there was a case which saw a retired (and blameless) vicar kill himself during a botched safeguarding inquiry. Even since she was named as Welby’s successor in October, she’s faced fresh complaints about her handling of separate abuse allegations. “I can’t pretend that those shadows aren’t real and aren’t pressing,” Monteith admits. He himself has been called a “paedo” while walking down Canterbury High Street in clerical garb.

All the same, he sometimes feels as if the Church is “carrying the can” for all of society’s failures. The Bishop of Dover, who acts as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s deputy running the Diocese of Canterbury, says much the same. Sitting in her office nestled up against the cathedral, Rose Hudson-Wilkin accepts that the “furor” around abuse is reasonable. Even so, she fears it wrongly gives the impression that today’s C of E is mired in corruption and cover-up. Instead, she argues, these old cases are emerging precisely because the Church is getting its act together.

Perhaps. But I can’t help but feel like Monteith and Hudson-Wilkin both seem oddly relaxed about the crisis their Church has just weathered. To be sure, they represent a view common within the C of E establishment: that this is primarily a PR problem, and that a handful of high-profile failures don’t speak to a deeper issue. And it’s also true, of course, that crimes have been uncovered everywhere from the BBC to the NHS. But it obviously angers the public much more when the Church — supposedly a paragon of morality and involved in the education of millions of children — is revealed to be as riddled with abusers as anywhere else.

As for what’s next, Hudson-Wilkin parades a number of improvements, notably outsourcing safeguarding to an independent charity. That’ll suit Mullally just fine. A dyed-in-the-wool bureaucrat — long years in the NHS guarantee that — her response to the abuse crisis will be administrative rather than charismatic. Instead of grand gestures, she’ll likely get stuck in with regulation, seeing salvation for the Church in enforcing best practice and ever more bureaucracy. The problem, though, is that the C of E is drowning in procedure already, and all the red tape in the world does little to stop flesh-and-blood humans from flouting the rules. If, then, Mullally can reclaim the bedside manner of her nursing days, giving the Church a softer public image than the sometimes-abrasive Old Etonian Welby, it’s distinctively unclear if managerialism can bury the abuse scandal once and for all.

Certainly, managerialism seems hopeless for the other big item on Mullally’s agenda: the simmering tensions over gay blessings. First announced in 2023, after years of agonizing consultation and spearheaded by Mullally herself, these services have sparked a civil war within the Church. Despite her evangelical background, Mullally has carved out a cautiously progressive approach, pushing for the blessings but refusing to chart a path to full-fat gay marriage. Conservatives have fought a ferocious rearguard action against these so-called “Prayers of Love and Faith”, succeeding in limiting much of the reforms. Initially invigorated by the reforms, their liberal opponents have themselves become disillusioned at the lack of progress, as embittered against their bishops as their traditionalist opponents.

The hierarchy tried to draw a line under the conflict at the synod in February, formally ending the 9-year project. But unwilling to entirely abandon the idea of gay marriage in church, the bishops immediately launched a new working group on the issue. Ever the consensual team player, Mullally won’t pursue anything she fears could lead to further splits, particularly when her bishops are almost as divided as the rest of the Church. It’s more likely, then, that the Church will head for the safety of the long grass, delaying a final decision on gay marriage still further. But this essentially bureaucratic approach again comes with risks. Liberal congregations — including Canterbury Cathedral, now led by its second dean in a row to openly live with their civil partner — will gradually feel their way towards something more accommodating. Yet all the while, conservatives will continue to drift the other way, even if a formal schism currently seems unlikely.

Yet if Mullally’s cautious liberalism just about holds the center in England itself, she’s also the unofficial head of the global Anglican Communion, a family of 42 independent Churches spanning a huge spectrum of convictions. Canterbury itself may be relaxed about gay relationships, but there are Anglican Churches in Africa which vociferously back the criminalization of homosexuality; in 2023 Welby chastised his Ugandan counterpart for backing a bill that imposed the death penalty on gay people. Further complicating the uneasy post-colonial position of the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Communion is the fact that it’s these same deeply conservative Churches in Africa and Asia which are growing fastest — while their liberal Anglican cousins in the West dwindle away. One renegade movement called Gafcon has already denounced Mullally as an unacceptably liberal Archbishop, pledging to boycott official Anglican institutions in protest (though they recently scrapped plans to anoint one of their own as a kind of Anti-Mullally).

Besides, even if Mullally can somehow tempt Gafcon back into the fold, it will count for little if she can’t keep the show on the road closer to home. What, to be blunt, is the use of being “first among equals” in global Anglicanism — if there are no Anglicans left in England? In this, the final issue for the new archbishop to grapple with as she settles into Lambeth Palace is surely the most existential. For generations, the C of E has died before our eyes. Church attendance in 1980 was about 1.5 million. Despite significant population growth, last year it had more than halved to 700,000, with the decline only accelerating during Covid.

Fewer and fewer bums on pews means less money in the collection plate, crumbling buildings going unfixed, and less to pass on to regional dioceses (most of which are now in financial crisis and running up multi-million pound deficits). There are also fewer clergy than ever before, forcing bishops to spread their vicars thinner and thinner: most now look after at least two or three parishes at once. In rural areas, it’s not uncommon for as many as 10 churches to all share the same stressed and overworked cleric.

In the face of this crisis, the church is trying to reinvent itself for the 21st century, and find new ways of bringing the English back to their national religion. The Diocese of Canterbury, like most, has an ambitious target to start 200 new types of church by 2030, one for each of their traditional parishes.

Less than a mile north of the cathedral’s Gothic arches is a shabby and unremarkable place called All Saints. Once the garrison church of the local army barracks, it’s an unpretentious and tatty building, full of peeling paint and flanked by a scrubby car park and blocks of postwar council flats. This is Ignite, which runs most Wednesday afternoons both in Canterbury and five other locations across Kent. Plasticky folding tables have been laid out across All Saints’ faded carpet, and about 30 locals are tucking into baked potatoes smothered in chili con carne and cheese.

It couldn’t feel further from the reverent glories of Matins in Our Lady Martyrdom. And as I sit down for lunch, it becomes clear the people at Ignite are not your usual C of E types either. There are immigrants and the elderly, the disabled and people on benefits. Some are confident Christians, but others are unsure; one man describes himself to me as a “pragmatic spiritualist” (though the vicar later says he’s in fact Ignite’s most faithful attendee). Whatever they are, they very much are not plugged into the agonies of the institution this meeting is technically part of: one person on my table hadn’t even heard there was going to be a female Archbishop of Canterbury.

The service, such as it is, is a far cry from Anglicanism’s prayer book traditions too. The vicar, Patrick Ellisdon, dressed in a jumper and jeans, begins with some ice-breaker games. The heart of today’s event is a five-minute reflection on how Desmond Doss, the pacifist war hero of the film Hacksaw Ridge, tried to live for God. It ends with a contemporary soft rock worship song, with lyrics projected onto a screen: “I fall on my knees and I fight like a warrior, I call on the name of the One who is conqueror…”

After the service, Ellisdon explains that Ignite — which he pioneered with his wife at their previous ultra-deprived church in Margate — was designed to appeal to those on the margins with no religious background: unlike the overwhelmingly middle-class parishes of the C of E. He calls it “drip-feed evangelism”, giving hints of Christianity in accessible language and style for people who would never cross the threshold of an ordinary Sunday service. It may seem like another world to the worship up the road at the cathedral, but it has been backed with a £1 million grant from the C of E’s national endowment fund, allowing the Diocese of Canterbury to hire a handful of staff to roll Ignite out across Kent.

Hudson-Wilkin is unapologetic about her diocese’s hopes to transform the face of Anglicanism for the 21st century. But the main challenge, she suggests, is not about finding the right evangelistic strategy: but rather reinspiring hope and enthusiasm. Far too many churchgoers cringe and hide their faith out of embarrassment, lacking confidence in the gospel they’re supposed to be proclaiming. “If we don’t sing the song of joy and peace and love and forgiveness, then we may as well pack our bags up and hang our dog collars up.” Her people are “holding up and holding on”. But, Hudson-Wilkin says, it’s time to go on the offensive again.

More than that, Hudson-Wilkin says she can spot signs of a turnaround. This is the so-called “quiet revival”, after a 2025 survey by the Bible Society claimed that churchgoing was rocketing among the young. Albeit in a different way to All Saints, even the venerable cathedral has been trying to tap into this trend, offering silent discos and graffiti installations to tempt younger folk. But whether any of this actually works is another question entirely. A slew of social scientists have expressed doubt with the Bible Society’s figures, noting that more rigorous surveys have shown only a continued decline in churchgoing, including among the supposedly faith-curious young. And there is more than a hint of the cringe-inducing “trendy vicar” trope here too — are Gen Zs really going to be drawn back to Christ through graffiti and discos?

Some think the Church shouldn’t even try, and instead more keenly look backwards. “The good thing about a place like this,” says Monteith, gesturing through his office windows to the hulking 1,400-year-old cathedral next door, “is that I’m reminded that all things pass.” He believes both old and new are attractive, pointing to hundreds attending a Latin mass he lately put on for Ash Wednesday. Even Gen Z, Monteith says, finds the “solemnity and gravity” of traditional church worship appealing. Relatively speaking, cathedrals seem to thrive because they invest in high-quality music, liturgy and preaching, mixing transcendence with a down-to-earth cheeriness.

Yet though it’s true that cathedrals have escaped the collapse of country parish churches — we’re still not talking about large numbers. The total weekly attendance from Exeter to Ely only comes in at roughly 17,000. And though it’s true that a handful of Anglo-Catholic churches have found success in tradition, this feels more like the exception that proves the rule. The fact is that most twenty-somethings are spending Sunday evenings scrolling TikTok in their overpriced flatshares, not at choral evensong.

What, then, of the future? Rosie Duffield, the independent local MP and an occasional worshiper at Monteith’s cathedral, says it would be a tragedy if the C of E withered away to nothing. The cathedral isn’t just a heritage site for Canterbury — it’s “our beating heart and our soul”. “Just the idea that it would turn into a museum would rip the soul out of what we are.” Besides, Duffield argues, the wider church is still a bulwark of stability and moral guidance in a confused and volatile world, harking back to a now famous sermon Welby gave from the cathedral’s pulpit in 2022, decrying proposals to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda as un-Christian.

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Yet again, though, there are risks here for the Church here, as it tries to project relevance and weigh in on contemporary politics. For every Duffield delighted by Welby’s condemnation of the Rwanda scheme, there was a Conservative MP castigating the prelate’s intervention as symptomatic of a Church gone woke. Four years on, the country is even more divided, as Reform top the polls and the Greens win by-elections.

Debate over how England’s established church should respond to the recent surge of Christian nationalism has also reached East Kent. Monteith says that nearby coastal towns Whitstable, Sheerness and Margate are full of those sympathetic to Tommy Robinson’s newly Christianized far-Right. The dean, for his part, is open to building bridges rather than dismissing it all as racist bigotry. But Hudson-Wilkin — the first black woman to become a bishop in the C of E — scoffs at what she calls the “disingenuousness” of activists waving crosses while protesting Islam. The Church, she insists, isn’t dying because of Muslim immigration. It’s dying of neglect because white Britons who claim to be believers are staying at home. This is probably true, but also the kind of hectoring unlikely to nudge apathetic agnostics off their sofas and into church. The constant tension facing today’s genteel and overwhelmingly middle-class C of E is that the liberal centrism its current worshipers appreciate — and which Mullally herself epitomizes — is precisely what puts off an increasing number of would-be parishioners.

And on the Matins go. For 1,400 years Anglicans have been intoning that same liturgy: “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now and shall be for ever.” But can this really go on forever? Will there still be people murmuring these ancient words inside Canterbury Cathedral, let alone All Saints down the road, on into the next century? These are questions that would daunt even a Becket or an Augustine — let alone a Mullally.

Such an experience is starkly at odds with the world we inhabit today — one that has, over recent centuries, been progressively disenchanted by its subordination to the instrumental logic of science and technology. Medieval Christianity viewed the world as a book of signs, written by God and open to poetic or mystical interpretation. It was only around the 17th century — the age of Bacon and Descartes — that we began in earnest to lose the capacity for this kind of thinking. Then God first withdrew to the status of “watchmaker” for the world as mechanical watch, and finally — for many — disappeared altogether in favour of science and logic.

The shift away from the medieval mindset toward the scientific one is usually seen as a positive one. But it has left us poorly-equipped (unless we’re on mushrooms) to grasp just how different the thought-worlds of our forebears were, and how thronged with the uncanny. As folklorist Francis Young recounts, until relatively recently the British Isles was alive with “godlings”: spirits, creatures of legend and folklore. Young recounts the record of 6th-century Welsh St Samson of Dol, who reportedly encountered a terrifying “theomacha”, a “God fighter”, while travelling through a Welsh forest – an entity in the figure of an old woman who attacked and injured St Samson’s companion. Nor were such eldritch encounters only a feature of the so-called “Dark Ages” that preceded the medieval era. The 12th-century Gerald of Wales recounts meeting a man who would converse with “tiny huntsmen” who would tell him people’s secret sins.

Sometimes on woodland dog-walks after dark, the gleam of my torch will catch the eyes of a hidden muntjac and I’ll realise with a jolt that the woodland has been watching me all the time. When I try to picture life with all those non-human watchers, but without the comforting beam of light, it’s easy to imagine knowing that fairies are real.

At the very least, perhaps such beings represent a poetic way of expressing something indisputable: that there exist life-forms unfathomably different from our own, but deeply bound up with ours. The scientific explanation for the “fairy ring” circular pattern of mushroom growth is the underground presence of tiny threads called mycelia, that grow through the soil in a circular formation. As the biologist Merlin Sheldrake argues, such mycelia together form a primordial “mycorrhizal network” — a vast, underground matrix. And while this is not an “intelligence” in any sense we’d recognise, it is essential to plant life: an “ancient association” which “gave rise to all recognisable life on land”.

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More than two centuries on from William Paley’s “watchmaker theory”, the received mainstream understanding of the world has little to say about mysterious underground mycorrhizal networks. Rather, it tends to describe a mechanistic universe, made of atoms, and devoid of governing intelligence or telos. For someone raised with this worldview, being stripped by hallucinogens of this frame of logic and causality can be exhilarating, eye-opening or simply terrifying. But even accepting that mind-altering substances can, well, alter the mind, even those who indulge would generally view the change as a mere chemical effect.

Last weekend, though, I found myself in just such a mind-altering experience without any such help. Trudging along a muddy path, I passed a “fairy ring” of mushrooms, and fell to thinking about my own hallucinatory adventures and what they suggest about perception. It struck me that even in the most mundane patch of woodland there’s still always something eerie at the edge of vision. As with the gleam of deer-eyes after dark, in the woods it takes only a minor shift in consciousness for all the godlings to creep back out from behind the trees.

Walking on, I passed a gate that seemed familiar and yet strange. I turned again, kept walking, and thought: oh look, another fairy ring. It wasn’t until several minutes further on that I realised that strange-looking gate was the exit, a route I’ve taken hundreds of times. The world suddenly resolved itself into the familiar again: I had passed the fairy ring twice, and was well on my way for a second lap round the woods.

Was it a fit of absent-mindedness? It felt as unmistakably an altered-state experience as being on mushrooms – except it was Saturday morning, and I was stone cold sober. It was like a message from the godlings: a reminder that the world only seems inert, because we’re used to seeing it that way.

And also, perhaps, a reminder that our age of disenchantment is on its way out. For inhabitants of mainstream modern British culture, raised in the birthplace of science and engineering, this may seem counter-intuitive. Fragments of old godlings may cling on in the very wild places, but Britain expelled our last major outbreak of millenarian religious fanatics to the New World, in the century of Bacon and Descartes. Our established church is so doctrinally tepid and reflexively conflict-averse, that hosting “silent discos” or installing helter-skelters in Anglican cathedrals prompts only the mildest of objections.

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Those Anglican thinkers troubled by this are sometimes to be found yearning for a return of some sense of mystery. In “Re-Enchanting Christianity” the priest Dave Tomlinson speaks of how “Our world longs for numinosity: for a sense of awe and mystery, for sacredness, spirituality and enchantment, for something ‘more’ than the purely rational and cerebral”. And, he argues, “If the church fails to engage with, and cater to, this longing, it has no real future”.

Despite such efforts, there’s little of the numinous to be found in mainstream modern Anglicanism. But the wider world is on the opposite trajectory. I suspect the future belongs not to the sedate, polite mindset of logic and science to which Britain gave birth, and which by and large we still prefer, but the far more slippery, immanent, and enchanted one of millenarian religious narratives and wild forest beings.

My evidence for this is less the rise in religious extremism, noticeable though this has been especially in recent weeks. Rather, it’s signs that we’re losing the ability across the board to see the world in mechanistic terms: for example losing our ability to build or maintain complex systems, or even keep the roads repaired.

My best effort at explaining this phenomenon is that it’s happening because we are — at least compared with recent predecessors — simply ever less interested in the world of atoms, and physics, and cause and effect. Instead, leaders today are fixated on moral or symbolic dimensions. Evidence of this shift in priorities is everywhere, but perhaps its starkest instance might be what’s sometimes denounced as a “woke takeover of science” — but which could just as accurately be described as the re-subordination of empiricism to moral doctrine.

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Even geopolitics has not escaped this re-subordination of reality to grand narratives. The neoconservative American wars, for example, were impelled at least in part by a religious impulse to globalise liberal democracy at gunpoint. Over the same period, too, they’ve been joined by other competing apocalypses. Believers in the climate variant conduct an escalating campaign of dramatic public protest. And the bitter dispute between Israel and Palestine has also, since the Nineties, accrued increasingly eschatalogical religious overtones.

The conflict in Palestine is of course complex. But contra the assertions of groups such as the New Atheists in the early 2000s that all forms of faith were destined for the scrapheap, grand apocalyptic narratives are growing not less but ever more influential. Along with the now endemic re-moralisation of governance, education, and science, this all presages a world that still (at least for now) has cars, and guns, and smartphones — but that runs not on the mechanistic logic of cause and effect, overseen by a remote divine watchmaker, but far more mercurial and sometimes violent logics of faith.

Is there any good news, amid this unsettling re-moralisation of the world? Well, if my Saturday-morning mushroom moment has a lesson it’s that mind-bending shifts in perception may be unnerving, but rich in insight. “Apocalypse” doesn’t just mean “end of the world” but also “revelation”. In Sheldrake’s view, the networked life of fungi can teach us to see ourselves as more porous ‑ something that, he argues, can help us to grasp our interconnectedness with other species, and thus perhaps to find new inspiration for tackling the ecological crisis.

We can perhaps extend this into the re-enchantment of public life: it may re-entangle us in frightening ways, but perhaps we’ll also be less lonely with it. Even so, those Anglicans calling for “re-enchantment” should perhaps be careful what they wish for. Outside the lamplight, the godlings were always looking back.

So into that one word a whole pile of very deep stuff collapses — our relationship to the ultimate nature of things, our relationship to religion, our relationship with our own fathers. You don’t have to be Freud to find it unsurprising that Stephen Cottrell, the Archbishop of York, touched a highly sensitive nerve when he worried out loud that there might be a problem with “Our father”.

Many commentators inwardly groaned, spotting another depressing bout of Church of England wokery. And yes, the Archbishop did inevitably rehearse the idea that God is the apex predator of the patriarchy. But actually, what he said was worse than that. Much worse.

This is exactly what he said: “Yes, I know the word ‘Father’ is problematic for those whose experience of earthly Fathers has been destructive and abusive.” And he is clearly right that if your father beat or molested you as a child, then the word “father” will have disturbing connotations. But what the press did not pick up on was the fact that “Father” is also how many of the clergy style themselves. And if Father so-and-so abused you as a choirboy, then yes: “Our Father” may well be a problem.

In truth, things were already difficult for the Archbishop and the church he leads. For the current meeting of the General Synod in York has witnessed a crisis for the Church of England on an almost unimaginable scale — a full descent into acrimony and chaos, which will take a generation to recover from. “The Church often does the work of Satan,” one Priest wrote, after witnessing events unfold on Sunday.

He was referring to the Archbishops’ Council having decided to disband the church’s Independent Safeguarding Board, and sack its members. This is the body tasked with, among other things, looking into clerical abuse and supporting those who are victims of it. It is supposed to be independent because the Church of England has a long history of covering up its own mess. But it turns out that when its members say things that the Archbishops’ Council do not like, they can be fired and the board closed down.

As the Bishop of Birkenhead, the Church’s own deputy lead for safeguarding, put it: “Today the church is less accountable. To remove, at short notice, the strongest independent voices holding the CofE to account for its safeguarding failings makes us look resistant to robust scrutiny and challenge — which, of course, we are.” When the sacked Safeguarding officials were eventually able to speak — after much wrangling over whether they should be allowed to — they told the Synod that they had indeed been “silenced”. This is extraordinary. If the Church can silence its own Safeguarding body, what hope do survivors have?

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Even under the full glare of synodical scrutiny, it was hard to get a straight answer. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, was asked directly if he had personally voted to disband the Independent Safeguarding Body. His reply indicated he has clearly been spending a lot of time around politicians (fellow Old Etonians, perhaps). “Both Archbishops wished to wait a bit,” he said, which gives the very strong impression that he and the Archbishop of York had voted against the move to disband. Later, under more pressure, the church admitted that they had both voted for it. Had it been made in the House of Commons, Welby might have faced accusations of misleading the House.

With all this in mind, let us return to Cottrell’s little aside on “Our Father”. As it happens, both of us get called Father by people to whom we have no relationship of biological kinship. It has taken me many years to adjust to this. Sunday-school children, at one of my early parishes in the Black Country, used to think it sounded hilariously like Farmer Giles. I didn’t.

But the main reason it sits uncomfortably with me is that it smacks too much of perhaps the deepest sin of the church: clericalism. Father knows best. At the time of the Reformation, clergy were known as “Sir”. In this country, it was only towards the end of the 19th century that Father became a widespread form of address for the Catholic clergy. It’s a kind of modern affectation. For the likes of Cardinal Manning, who promoted it, Father indicated some kind of exulted spiritual status, a special alignment with the ultimate Father, God.

This is odd when you come to think about it. Being celibates, Catholic clergy do not themselves father children — at least, they are not supposed to. Instead, Father indicates a spiritual kind of responsibility, akin to fatherhood, but not the same as it. Still, in some contexts, being called Father became, too easily, a mark of membership to a club — a club to which many lonely men without families would turn, for company, whiskey and good gossip. Personally, I love my membership of this club. But there is a shadow side to its exclusivity, which, to be clear, is nothing to do with its campery. One for all and all for one can ingrain a certain omertà, a sense that we look after each other through thick and thin, even when the clergy fail.

Of course, it is not just Catholics and Anglo-Catholics who abuse those in their care. Alleged perpetrators of abuse include 242 clergy, 53 church officers, and 41 volunteers who work with children. Creepy, charismatic pastors having secret “wrestling matches” with young men, or authoritarian evangelicals giving naked beatings to vulnerable adults – many of these were extremely well-connected people, with friendships at the highest level.

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What was so depressing about the “Our Father” aside was not that it was woke, but that it was absolutely true. Those who are victims of abuse cannot trust the church. And what has been the official response to all of this? Yet another report has been called for. “Mistakes have been made,” the Archbishop of York admitted, “and we need to review that and learn from them”. As he was speaking, survivors were placing ribbons and posters on the fence outside, to remember victims. The next day, this little protest had disappeared.

The church is in total crisis, defeated by defensive managerialism and a clerical circling of wagons. On Sunday evening, many had had enough. The Director of Communications for the Anglican Communion, Gavin Drake, resigned from the Synod. “I joined the Synod to make the Church of England a safer place. I have failed, because the central machinery of the Church of England will use all its power to block the Synod from doing what it exists to do.” Many in the church are fast losing trust in our leadership. Because it is our spiritual fathers that are the problem — not our heavenly one.

Nonbelievers may be tempted to celebrate this prospect. They shouldn’t. In pulling loose the religious thread in our national settlement, we’ll unravel the whole fabric — and we may not like what’s underneath.

Though I wasn’t raised in a churchgoing family, my husband and I joined our small-town Anglican church when we moved here. I’ve come to treasure it: the slow turn of the liturgical year, the opportunity to sing with others (a rare pleasure in the age of headphones and Spotify) and space to be serious with no particular goal in mind.

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By Giles Fraser

I was surprised at my own grief and anger when we were locked out of all this. In Mexico, worship mattered to large enough groups of people that clandestine lockdown services were organised, their times and locations passed on by word of mouth like illegal raves. But in Britain, faith is not considered worth the risk of illness — even by the church itself. Nevertheless, lockdown seems to have given faith a boost, at least in its ersatz digital form: a quarter of Britons attended some form of online religious service during lockdown.

No one knows, though, if that revive the fortunes of in-person Sunday services in Britain – or kill them dead. If the latter, it will be the culmination of a long-term trend. From a peak of over 10 million in the 1930s (then some 35% of the population), the proportion of Britons who are church members has been declining steadily. And the slump is not just in active church members, but believers in general. A 2019 British Social Attitudes poll suggested only 38% of Britons today even describe themselves as Christian, down from 66% in 1983. This fall is especially steep among the young: 2018 research shows that only 22% of UK young people today describe themselves as Christian.

This rings true. When we returned to church last Sunday, for the first time since lockdown, our daughter was the only child there — in fact, she was the only person under 40. This is par for the course. Parents keen to get their young children into the attached Church of England school show up once a month to the religion-lite family service (which is mostly biscuits and Pritt Stick) and otherwise on Christmas Day at a pinch. There are never any teenagers. Twenty-somethings turn up sometimes, but generally only for a few weeks as the banns for their wedding are read.

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Counting the grey heads around me in the pews (25 in total), it struck me that this church will probably cease to be a living community in my lifetime. Because ultimately a church isn’t its surroundings, it’s the people who turn up — and if that doesn’t renew, then it’s not a church at all, just a building.

Today there are many such buildings. Some have been repurposed as gyms, restaurants, houses or even offices. Others have been left to crumble, or maintained, empty, by volunteers. Ed Sirett, an elder in Britain’s last Mennonite church summed it up sadly in 2016 when the last, ageing remnants of his Wood Green church ended Sunday worship for good: “As with many Christian churches, we failed to convince the next generation that following Jesus was the best way. We lost the next generation.”

I fear the same fate is approaching the Church of England. I feel acutely sad about it. But another part of me wonders if I’d have loved it in its heyday as much as I do now. For our established Church wasn’t always the mild-mannered institution it is today, desperate for bums on seats, with congregations that smile indulgently when your toddler demands Pom Bears during the Eucharist.

In 1533, Henry VIII split from the Catholic Church to marry Ann Boleyn, and installed himself as head of a new Church of England. It was a time of religious ferment: Henry dissolved the monasteries, doling their property out to allies and triggering a pro-Catholic peasant rebellion. Meanwhile, radical Protestant sects multiplied, each with its own idiosyncratic take on the right way to believe and worship; names such as the mystical “Ranters”  and the group of Protestant sects referred to as “Enthusiastic”, convey a sense of a Christianity full of zeal and fiery vigour.

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Barely more than a century after Henry VIII secured his royal succession at the price of excommunication, this heated atmosphere caught fire in the English Civil War. The conflict, which lasted from 1642 until 1651, was more a series of civil wars: bloody internecine struggles over the proper roles of faith, the monarch and the established church that divided families and killed 200,000 people — around 2.5% of the then eight million inhabitants of the British Isles. The equivalent death toll today, as a proportion of the population, would be close to two million.

The scars left behind by the Civil War were unimaginably deep. In the ensuing decades, people blamed the febrile religious climate for its horrors. Fearful of relapsing into intra-Protestant infighting, the battle-weary of the 17th century establishment opted instead to unite against an easy outgroup: Catholics.

In 1688, facing the prospect of a Catholic dynasty under James II’s newborn son, seven politicians and an Anglican bishop mounted a coup against him — an event referred to since as the “Glorious Revolution”. In effect, they booted James II out of London, then replaced him with his son-in-law, the Protestant William II, claiming that James’s deposition was an abdication. Having gifted William the throne, they took the opportunity to clip his royal wings: under the Bill of Rights English monarchs would be constrained by Parliament, while the 1701 Act of Settlement barred Catholics from the throne. And thus was born the modern constitutional monarchy, with Anglicanism (and anti-Catholicism) baked in.

We get a hint of the deep fear of religious sectarianism this era left behind from the way the word “Enthusiasm” became a pejorative term, denoting religious excess or displays of elevated feeling, religious or otherwise. Other countries stereotype the British as emotionally uptight. What’s less well understood is the way our national aversion to heightened emotion dates from the horrors of the English Civil War. Buried in our collective national memory is wall-eyed terror at the possibility that we might one day get overexcited and start fighting each other again.

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Against this background, the Church of England’s militant centrism is easier to understand. In its pomp, it was like a tyrannical patriarch, banging cousins’ heads together and expelling dissenters — Catholic or otherwise — to enforce something like cohesion across a quarrelsome extended family. In middle age, it was sure of its righteousness and sternly conventional. In its latter years, it’s been criticised for a new and incongruous wokeness.

But throughout that evolution, it’s remained committed to the normie bourgeois morality and political establishment of its day. And by installing a degree of doctrinal flexibility and (importantly) middle-of-the-roadness in our moral and political centres of power, while expelling other beliefs to the margins, the Church of England has for centuries made it difficult for religious radicals to get a grip in the British Isles. In effect it functioned as a kind of vaccine against more extreme religious passions.

But even the most determined family peacemaker gets old eventually. It’s hard to make a case for political legitimacy when only a handful of retirees turn up every Sunday. This isn’t to say that faith is disappearing from Britain — as I argued recently, religiosity is growing weirder and more vigorous — but it’s no longer finding expression in our established Church.

I’m not optimistic about that changing. Towards the end of lockdown, a group of people finally agreed that something moral mattered enough to risk spreading infection by gathering in public. But that group wasn’t a church; it was Black Lives Matter. Whatever you think of that development, movements which change the world are those whose members are willing to risk death for their cause. In Britain right now, Christianity isn’t on that list.

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Humanists have long called for the Church of England to be stripped of its role in our political establishment. The smaller its congregations become, the harder it is to defend. And yet we underestimate at our peril the historic role it’s played since Cromwell’s day in keeping our religious passions in check.

I suspect the humanists will get their way, and also that we’ll end up regretting their victory. I’ve seen no evidence to date that the decline in Christian belief and church membership is delivering a less credulous, less volatile, more rational and more measured public life. We may find that our departure from Anglicanism doesn’t so much liberate us from faith as trigger a new proliferation of sects and pseudo-religions, all competing for dominance.

Without the relatively low-key hegemony of the Church of England, all limp handshakes and theological mildness, we can only hope we turn out to be less enthusiastic (in both old and new senses) than our 17th century forebears. Otherwise, the passing of Anglicanism as a political force may not be the end of English theocracy, but the moment it became a possibility.

It is interesting, therefore, to see that according to the data published by UnHerd today, the city remains far more religious than the countryside. Respondents were asked whether or not they thought morality is rooted in religion (my answer: it’s not). But I am going to assume that, generally speaking (and unlike me), the more religious you are, the more likely you are to think that morality is rooted in religion. As a result, the survey gives an idea of the distribution of religious belief around the UK.

It is no surprise to me that faith is more vigorous in the cities, especially in places shaped by migration. This is partly about the impact of Islam in the West Midlands and elsewhere. But also about the extraordinary growth of Christianity worldwide and its return back to the places that first sponsored its evangelisation.

Take the patterns of church growth/decline within the Anglican communion, which has doubled in size in the last 50 years. There are now some 86 million Anglicans worldwide. Western liberals might keep telling themselves the story of secularisation, but in truth this is bubble thinking: religion is growing fast and expected to keep on growing. From China to India, in post-Soviet Russia, throughout the Middle East, religion has been growing fast since the mid 20th century. It was not that long ago that only a couple of hundred thousand people went on the Hajj to Mecca; it is now 2.5 million. And no, this growth is not just in poorer places – South Korea has gone from 1% Christian to 30% in half a century.

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As with the first Urban Christians, faith is pulsed around the world via the arteries of migration. And so it is, within the Church of England for instance, that church-going is declining fastest in those Dioceses that are furthest away from the big cities. And even though the overall picture is one of decline, this conceals as much as it reveals. For example, between 1990 and 2010, adult membership in the Diocese of London grew by a whopping 70%.

My own congregation near the Elephant and Castle is a good example of why. Looking back at parish photographs of 50 years ago, a large congregation of exclusively white faces tells the story of the important role that religion played in the lives of working-class Londoners. Today, my congregation is mostly black, many originally from West Africa, and I host packed services of Christians from Zimbabwe to Sierra Leonne.

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My boss, Bishop Woywin Karowei Dorgu, was born in Nigeria, where Anglicans grew from 3 million in 1970 to 20 million in 2010. When there is trouble in the congregation, it is in Yoruba that the Churchwarden tips me off: “Wahala” she whispers. I suspect there is no place in this country that is as diverse as a London church. Just down the road from me, the other side of the Elephant and Castle, is a growing Church of England congregation that has Mass in Spanish to cater for the large numbers of people who have come to settle here from South America.

Not that urban Christianity is the best way to understand this survey. For a while, I was Vicar of a parish in North Walsall, number 2 on the list. It was a great big barn of a church and very few people came. It is Islam that best explains many of these figures. In 1961 there were 50,000 Muslims in England and Wales. In 2017, there were 3.4 million. And the Muslim population continues to grow some 10 times faster than the rest of the population, generally in the cities.

One familiar explanation for the religiosity of migrants is that faith is a way of maintaining a connection with the places and culture from which people have travelled. There may be something to this, but the bigger story is surely that the world is a much more religious place than the western secular imagination often recognises. If Brexit happens, and the UK is forced to face more towards a world outside of Europe, it will be engaging with a world that is far more religious than it is used to and perhaps comfortable with.

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It is not insignificant that many of the places in this list that are the ‘least religious’ — Cambridge, Edinburgh etc — are also the most Remain-y. For the secular minded, the EU is a safe little space where the fantasy of religious decline can still be maintained. Stuck in a mid-20th-century narrative of secularisation, Remainers are trying to ward off the realisation that they may have to contend again with an idea that they believed to have been dead and buried – that of God.

As David Goodhew, director of The Centre for Church Growth Research, has put it: “The assumption that everywhere will eventually become like the West has a strong whiff of imperialism about it. We should be sceptical of the idea that the future belongs either to the ‘modern’, the secular or the West.”

It is interesting to note where religion is renewing itself in the UK, many of these places are traditionally Labour seats. Now, I would not describe Labour as the least religion-friendly of the main political parties – that prize is clearly won by the Liberal Democrats who have, for example, just deselected a candidate for being a Roman Catholic. But Labour, more Marx than Methodism, is often tone-deaf to a great many religious sensitivities – as Corbyn’s failure to understand anti-Semitism so obviously demonstrates (Finchley and Golders Green is number 23 on this list).

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When Labour tries to address the subject, it talks obliquely about ‘communities’ – as with the recent launch of its “Race and Faith Manifesto”. This includes a commitment to set up a new body to teach about the legacy of colonialism. I wonder if this body will explain how colonialism also helped spread Christianity throughout the world, a legacy that is now returning home as those who were originally converted by the British are now arriving here to remind us of the faith we have abandoned.

“We don’t do God” as Alastair Campbell famously put it. Unless they are content with being the party of the few not the many, they had better find a way to do precisely that.

I was there, at the Court of Appeal, to fight an Electoral Commission fine of £20,000 for alleged irregularities during the referendum. The case had propelled me to a sort of notoriety, and had I lost this appeal, it would have ruined me – both financially and professionally.

It was the culmination of a long journey. A few years ago, in my early twenties, I would have called myself a staunch libertarian and atheist. I thought that religion was just a form of coercion and control, and to believe in some mystical pixie in the sky – when science has explained away any need for the divine – made you a deluded fool at best.

Fast forward to 2018, and aged 25, I had become a churchgoer, attending a service each week in which robed choristers processed through clouds of pungent incense. Here, within the walls of what had been a medieval priory and hospital, I witnessed the elevation of the gilded King James Bible above the priest’s head and listened to the sung Latin of the liturgy.

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It was Twitter, of all things, which had brought me to God. As my public infamy grew, my phone would go ping-ping-ping, as message after message flashed up with the vilest abuse, much of it dripping with homophobia. There were endless variations on me going to prison and what would be done to me there. I don’t know if these twitterers would have said the same to me in person, but this was the internet, the context was Brexit and so all bets were off.

As the saga dragged on, I lost friends, relationships and income. I felt isolated and helpless. There was a great deal of anger and shock over the referendum, which I understood, but it was strange, as a student from a working-class background in the north-east, to be in the public glare.

And so, for me, social media was a digital sewer. Yet, paradoxically, it also introduced me to Fr Marcus Walker, rector of St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield, just inside the City of London. It was Fr Marcus who would set me on a journey to God, for which I will always be grateful. I had followed him on Twitter for a while and enjoyed his takes on everything from history to politics – so when a friend suggested I attend a service at St Bart’s I did.

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This was an unexpected path. I grew up in Stanley, in Co. Durham, and, like a lot of people in that part of the world, most of my family were originally Irish and devoutly Catholic. My granddad’s family were Protestant and he used to go and sit in church sometimes when he was younger. But all this I only found out last year after he died: the family had all turned against religion long before I came into the world.

I had been curious about religion as a child, but my mother’s visceral reaction to my questions was enough to warn me off for many years. She had gone to a Catholic school that was, by all accounts, intensely pious and strict. Whenever I’d ask her about it, she’d tell me that religion was the root of all evil and not worth indulging.

I attended my first service at Great St Bartholomew’s one Ash Wednesday, having never voluntarily given up an evening to go to church before. Until then my experience with religion revolved around singing “Hosanna to the King of Kings” in an assembly hall, and sticking cocktail sticks into oranges at primary school once a year.

As I left with the ashen cross on my forehead it would have been the natural thing to rub it off and rejoin the crowd of office workers milling around me. But, and I’m not sure why, I chose to leave it on. There was something intensely powerful about that reminder and symbol: that dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. I told a colleague about my experience and how surprised I was by my stubborn attachment to the ashes, and a few days later he gave me a copy of atheist-turned-theist C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.

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This became my “Christianity for Dummies” guidebook; I had no real understanding of what it was about at all before that. But then, perhaps, as Lewis said, there is something to be said about that zeal of a convert, the power of finding Christ on your own terms, of accepting the love that only God can offer when you’re ready. Thus inspired, I took up Confirmation classes a few months later.

Then, last year, my grandfather passed away. He was my political and personal hero and when he died I was in a dark place; it was the Church that offered me comfort and meaning. Words are not empty things. The simple act of a parish community offering their thoughts and prayers through such a time of turmoil had a profound impact on me. I felt, for possibly the first time in quite some while, that I had found my home in London – a city in which it is easy to feel lost and alone. It occurred to me that I belonged to something much bigger than myself, and my Sunday mornings of prayer and reflection, followed by coffee in the cloister with my new church community, became a grounding experience that has done so much to enrich my life.

I was worried about what my mam would make of it, given her hostility to religion. But when she came down to London for the first time, she saw the support network that the Church had built around me. It was such a relief for her, because up until that point I think she had assumed that I was alone in the wilderness. Perhaps it also helped her deal with her own feelings about what she had experienced; she actually got a bit emotional after the service and remarked on how comforting it was to see so much love in that Church, to see me make my commitment to it, and the beginning of my journey with God. When I was baptised and confirmed, despite it being into the Anglican faith, my mother gave me my great-grandmother’s rosary beads.

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The Church is a great bridge. Each Sunday, I join with people of all political opinions – Left and Right, Leave and Remain. We share a common baptism that transcends our trivial divisions, differences that in the wider scheme of eternity are nothing.

I do worry that society’s loss of faith is one of the things helping to drive us apart. But while some people take great delight in the decline in churchgoing, I wouldn’t count on its fall quite yet. I think that in the not-too-distant future there will be a crisis of confidence in what we’ve replaced it with – a competition for likes and retweets instead of a sharing together of community and moral values. The signs are already here; there’s a reason why so many of my generation long for the perceived authenticity of politicians like Jeremy Corbyn or Jacob Rees-Mogg. They’re seen as the genuine article, the real deal.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s line that “God is dead” is often interpreted as an atheist broadside, but that’s not how I read it. He said: “God is dead and we have killed him”, and “we’ll never find enough water to wash away the blood”. That, to me, has a very different meaning. It wasn’t that Nietzsche was proclaiming it triumphantly, but rather lamenting a catastrophic loss of meaning. His words were prophetic, and especially to my generation – with our online, on-demand culture that can order a hook-up as a fast as a Chinese takeaway.

But meaning has been forgotten, not destroyed. It is still there to be found. I feel eternal gratitude to St Bart’s for helping me find it – and for rescuing me.