In the heyday of the Christian revival just over a century ago, preachers of Baptist and Methodist persuasions dotted the Welsh landscape with the chapels they built, leaving an architectural legacy as nonconformist as their congregations.
The state of these buildings, once numbering 6,500, is now one of the starkest manifestations of declining Christian faith in England and Wales. As pews have emptied and ministers died, many of these places of worship have fallen into dereliction or into the hands of estate agents who have sold them on for conversion into homes. In one instance in the town of Rhyl, one became a pawnbroker’s shop.
For those interested, you can do virtual “flythroughs” thanks to a digital archive created by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales. But in the real world, the religious foundations of the chapels are crumbling.
“I meet a lot of kids who don’t know the Lord’s Prayer,” says Chris Bryant, Labour MP for Rhondda in south Wales which along with the nearby local authority of Caerphilly, recorded — at 56 per cent and 57 per cent, respectively — the highest proportion of people with “no religion” in the national census data for England and Wales published last month.
A mountain of slate overshadows the town of Blaenau Ffestiniog in Gwynedd, Wales. The census revealed that less than half of the population of England and Wales describe themselves as Christian.
Christianity’s grip on the national psyche has been loosening steadily for more than a century. The release of the 10-yearly census data on November 29 has nevertheless sent shockwaves through the clergy and beyond, revealing a startling acceleration in this decline over the past two decades, and raising profound questions about the evolving nature of society.
The census revealed that, for the first time, less than half of the population of England and Wales, at 46.2 per cent, describe themselves as Christian, down from 59.3 per cent in 2011 and from 72 per cent in 2001. The second-highest proportion of people were those not identifying with any religion at 37 per cent, up 12 per cent over the decade.
Populists on the hard right, including Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence party, sought quickly to weaponise this data. They blamed immigration for the shift, pointing to cities such as Birmingham and Leicester where people from black, Asian and other minority ethnic backgrounds together make up the majority, also for the first time.
“There’s a massive change in the identity of this country that is taking place through immigration. You may think it’s a good thing, you may think it’s a bad thing,” Farage said in a video message, which echoed around social media.
When it comes to religion, however, his explanation for the changing demographics flew in the face of the data. In cities like London, immigrant populations from Africa, Asia and eastern Europe, are in fact helping to prop up the number of Christians. The rise in people identifying as Muslim — at 6.5 per cent of the overall population and 15 per cent in London — was a relatively marginal factor in change.
Instead, it is places like Rhondda, where the population is almost exclusively white and working class, where the Christian faith has declined the furthest and secularisation is accelerating fastest.
‘Sleepwalking into irrelevance’
The independent, non-hierarchical character of the nonconformist chapels which were the prevailing religious force in Wales, and the dependence of each one on the communities in their immediate surroundings, has hastened their demise. But the Church of England is also struggling to maintain its network of some 16,000 churches, despite its financial firepower and capacity to consolidate congregations, as the number of practising Christians dwindles.
In less publicised data that emerged after the census, average weekly attendance figures at Anglican churches in England had yet to recover from the pandemic. At 605,000 in 2021 this was just over 1 per cent of the population — a figure seized on both by the National Secular Society, which campaigns for the separation of church and state, and by members of the clergy critical of the Anglican leadership.
“Christianity is falling over a cliff,” says Peter Owen Jones, vicar in the picturesque village of Firle, tucked under the South Downs, in the southern county of East Sussex.
Owen Jones, who found his calling in his late twenties after a brief career in advertising, compared village churches like his to the village shops and pubs that are closing weekly across the country: “Sweet traditions that adhered to and gave a sense of place.”
But the Anglican church, he says, was “sleepwalking into irrelevance”, its leadership weak, and its parish branches withering through neglect.
“These parochial institutions are fading — they cannot cope with the call to a much broader view . . . of how we express our common humanity.”
At once enervated by the philosophical challenge this poses and despairing at how behind the curve he says the Anglican leadership had been in keeping up with societal change, Owen Jones argues that the church needs to “completely reframe” its ambitions for the 21st century.
This means engaging more with other religions, more boldly with big questions of the day such as climate change, diversifying the clergy to become more representative — or at least less old and male — and disentangling itself from state institutions that were themselves, he says, “rotting from the top”.
Peter Owen Jones, vicar of Firle, compares churches like his to the village shops and pubs that are closing weekly across the country.
The church has too easily lost its grip on some of the traditions that provided a sense of community and belonging, he adds.
“Christianity has very meekly surrendered its main rituals. Lent was the first to go,” Owen Jones says. “Christmas was overtaken by the market, and Easter is now just a few days off to go somewhere else. These points of cohesion have been subsumed.”
While the church has often taken a moral lead in opposing the Conservative government on some of its harsher approaches to people on welfare benefits and refugees, for example, it has appeared more divided, and therefore indecisive, on highly charged issues surrounding homosexuality, same-sex marriage and women clergy.
One of the difficulties for the Anglican church has been in providing convincing leadership while combining both global and national roles. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is the leader in England and in more socially conservative countries, notably those in Africa, which hold vastly different views on everything from sexuality to the death penalty — a legacy of colonial times.
Arguably far more damaging to public trust, however, has been the handling by all the churches — Catholic, Protestant, in Wales and England — of abusive priests.
The long-running independent inquiry into child sex abuse in the UK, which published its final reports in October, found all the churches wanting and said the Church of England had “failed to protect children and young people from sexual predators within their ranks”.
“In neglecting the wellbeing of children in favour of protecting its own reputation, the Church of England was in direct conflict with its own underlying moral purpose; to provide care and love for the innocent and the vulnerable,” the inquiry said.
Social safety net
For many clergy, repairing this damage — and putting in place safeguards to prevent its reoccurrence — is a priority, if the church is to regain the moral high ground.
“When in history have there not been divisions in the church?” says Philip North, the outspoken bishop of Burnley in Lancashire. “A far bigger problem for me has been the church seeming hypocritical. The child abuse scandals have been a disaster. One thing you can’t do in this culture is say one thing and do another.”
In an age of prevailing uncertainty, he goes on, the place of religion in society is not to dictate the answers.
A far bigger problem for me has been the church seeming hypocritical. The child abuse scandals have been a disaster
“We need to create spaces where people can bring questions and conversation. When you look at Jesus, he answers questions and draws people into relationships. The church has been too interested in declaring truths,” he adds.
The irony, he says, is that just as there appears to be “this drift away from the Christian faith”, vulnerable members of the population have become, during the cost of living crisis, more dependent on churches than ever for their basic wellbeing.
On Sunday, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that the Church of England had seen a 400 per cent increase in people coming to its food banks in the past 18 months. But that doesn’t necessarily translate into growing congregations.
In north London, the Freedom’s Ark church has seen a comparable rise in need and is providing food to between 500 and 600 people a week.
The church operates out of a rented room in the old town hall in the London borough of Haringey. Its pastor and founder, Nims Obunge, presides over a committed congregation of around 100 people — relatively small by comparison with some of the evangelical megachurches, such as Ruach and the Kingsway International Christian Centre, which draw thousands of worshippers from the African and African-Caribbean community each Sunday.
Nims Obunge, pastor of Freedom’s Ark Church, in debate with Philippa Stroud, co-chair of the Race Equality Commission.
Obunge, whose parents were from Nigeria, went up against Farage on GB News in the wake of the census, refuting some of his notions about what is driving Christianity’s decline.
He explains that minority ethnic communities like his are still transferring the Christian faith from generation to generation. Moreover, they are playing an almost missionary role in keeping faith alive in England.
“The Afro-Caribbean and other migrant churches have a strong expression of worship that in some sense dates back to the missionary input in our nations many years ago,” he said. “There is a sense we are obligated to reinvest those values of faith back to the British.”
Obunge sees being a pastor as far more than conducting Sunday worship and has taken a lead in London, for example, in the fight against knife crime.
“I have always felt that our responsibility is to be a church without walls actively participating in issues facing the community, and not only addressing these locally with families but representing the perspective of the community at a local and national level,” he says.
Like many Christians, however, he is also preoccupied with what happens should the religious underpinnings of public morality continue eroding.
“Once we neglect those core values, society is generally at risk of spiralling out of control. We owe it to our Judeo-Christian foundations to remember the values that brought to society,” he says.
Separation of church and state -
On the political front, one obvious question raised by Farage’s intervention, is whether populists on the hard right will seize on trends outlined by the census to stoke the flames of English nationalism and increase their political influence.
The answer, according to academics and charities who track extremism online, is there is not yet much evidence of the UK importing the kind of Christian nationalism that underpinned Donald Trump’s rise in the US.
For the likes of Farage, meanwhile, there is only so much value in plugging a religious angle when the dominant national trend is now towards secularism.
When it comes to the Conservative party, it can no longer rely to the same extent for bulk votes from followers of the Anglican church, traditionally known as the “Tory party in prayer”, given the overall decline in numbers. It now targets Christian votes more broadly.
“In the long run there is a risk that the Conservatives will lose voters because of the declining number of Christians,” says Ekaterina Kolpinskaya, lecturer in British politics at the University of Exeter, and co-author of Religion and Euroscepticism in Brexit Britain.
The Tories have broadened their base beyond Anglicans to include Christian groups that did not support them in the past
“But on current showing, we do not see either a decline in support for the Conservatives among Christians, or the effects of decline in the number of Christians, as the Tories have broadened their base beyond Anglicans to include Christian groups that did not support them in the past,” she adds.
Does the overall decline in religious identity, so pronounced in places like the Welsh valleys, augur chaos and fragmentation?
Secularists point to Scandinavian countries such as Denmark and Sweden where Christian identity is in even more advanced decline, as models of progression.
Meanwhile, in England, unlike in France and Germany, where the number of people identifying as Christian is still much higher, the Anglican faith remains the constitutionally established state religion, In the House of Lords, which has 786 sitting members, there are 26 bishops representing the Church.
All pupils in English state schools are, in theory, supposed to take part in some form of collective worship every day.
These legacies of a more Christian past can seem anachronistic when only a little over 1 per cent of the population attends Anglican church services.
“We are almost at the point where it starts to look ridiculous and embarrassing,” says Stephen Evans, head of the National Secular Society.
He acknowledges however, that the disestablishment of the church is not yet a priority for English voters. It would occupy huge amounts of parliamentary time to accomplish, and it is not clear any political party is ready to stick its neck out on the issue.
Evans thinks it more likely that over time those voices within the Anglican church, like that of Peter Owen Jones calling for the separation of church and state, will grow louder.
“It is about pursuing their own mission with integrity without being restrained by entanglement with the state,” he says. In Wales, that has already long since happened.
