Christian culture will not fade away any time soon

Published date01 December 2022
Rather it is because the number of those who identify as having 'no religion' has soared to 22.2 million

Ireland is a long way off reaching a similar position. According to 2018 data, four out of five Irish people identify as Christian. The numbers are trending in the same direction as Wales and England, however. Non-practising believers already outnumber churchgoers. And between the 2011 census and the 2016 one the number of Catholics declined by 132,220.

The numbers in Ireland may appear less dramatic, but this is in fact a far more acute sea-change than in Britain. Only recently has Ireland begun to buck its supine relationship with the church, spurning its most illiberal strictures at the ballot box twice in the past decade. Britain might be a tale of the slow ebb of Christianity from public life, but in Ireland this mode of liberalisation has been rapid and precipitous.

Decades of ruinous behaviour

Of course, in Ireland there are good reasons to want to dismantle the structures of the Catholic Church and practices that enabled decades of ruinous behaviour. The recent revelations about the extent of sexual abuse in Spiritans-run schools, including Blackrock College, are among the many reasons.

Abuse of unmarried mothers, further stories of sexual abuse, institutional cover-ups - all of these have left an indelible stain on the character of an institution that has wielded outsized power for far longer than should have ever been tolerated, whether by society, the State, or individual acolytes. That Ireland has been beleaguered by an institution with a rotten core for so long should hopefully point to the hastening of its demise, at least in its current incarnation. The irony, of course, is that the church will undo itself precisely by its un-Christian actions.

But the influence of the Christian church on all of our lives is far harder to shake than simply ticking a different box on the census. A steady decline in the number of churchgoers does not rid society of its Christian architecture, as if by divine magic. The influence of Christianity echoes through western society whether we like it or not, in good ways and bad. It will take far longer than we might admit - in Britain and Ireland - to bid Christianity farewell for good.

Quantifying the religious identity of a country is a far more complicated task than analysing census data. Of course it is patently clear that institutional religion's grip on Britain is loosening. Even in 1997, the historian...

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