July 19, 2005

When Lord Bromley Betchworth returned to the United Kingdom (U.K.) after living in the U.S. for 12 years, he returned to a culture that had dramatically changed.

"I was shocked at how moral values had changed in such a short time and how church attendance in mainstream denominations was in free fall," he said. "Four out of five churches were either declining or simply static."

Betchworth wrote those words in the forward to a fascinating new report that seeks to explain the moral breakdown in a once vibrant Christian nation.

A Moral Collapse

In many ways, what has happened in the U.K. may be in the future for the U.S., because the two nations have had a similar religious past, according to Christie Davies, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Reading, England, and author of The Strange Death of Moral Britain.

"At the end of the 19th century, there were comparable levels of religiosity in Britain and the United States. The British lived in a culture in which the assumptions of Protestant Christianity were taken for granted," Davies wrote in The New Criterion.

But he said that, generally beginning after World War II, the nation's morality collapsed, and the U.K. saw dramatically worsening trends in illegitimacy, substance abuse, crime and other sorts of behavior that were once considered sinful.

In 2000, the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. George Carey, also noted Britain's moral decline. "A tacit atheism prevails. Death is assumed to be the end of life. Our concentration on the here-and-now renders a thought of eternity irrelevant."

A year later, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, who as archbishop of Westminster is the spiritual leader for more than four million Catholics in England and Wales, agreed. Quoted in The Times (London), he spoke of the rising popularity of New Age and occult beliefs, and to the growing tendency of people to find temporary happiness in alcohol, drugs, pornography, sex and consumerism.

"It does seem in our countries in Britain today, especially in England and Wales, that Christianity, as a sort of backdrop to people's lives and moral decisions -- and to the Government, the social life of the country -- has now almost been vanquished."

'Let the People Speak'

How did such a spiritual catastrophe occur? Some might be quick to point to the rise of secularism in the late 1800s and throughout the first half of the 20th century, which culminated in the U.K.'s acceptance of a welfare state after World War II.

However, secularism may be a result, and not a cause, of the death of religion in the U.K. In fact, Davies traces the first major evidences of Christianity's decline to the 1950s, when religious participation began to droop, especially as evidenced by Sunday School attendance.

In order to delve into these issues, the interdenominational Ecumenical Research Committee (ERC), convened in 2002, designed and executed a year-long survey of churchgoers "of every denomination and theological persuasion." More than 14,000 people responded to the questionnaire, which was designed with open-ended questions, instead of the more traditional "check box" format. This was done to allow respondents to elaborate on their feelings, rather than being steered to a limited number of options.