Changing Politics, Changing Country

How does the Church of England navigate a Britain of a transforming party system, transforming demographics, and increasing division?

Workshop presentation for the Diocese of Salisbury Clergy Conference, 8 July 2026, Bryanston School, Dorset

I. On radical cultural shifts

None of us interprets the world entirely as a blank slate. All of us see the world through a set of assumptions, values, and ways of understanding the world that a society or group takes largely for granted. We can call this a paradigm – a paradigm is the collection of usually unexamined beliefs through which people interpret the world, judge what is normal or plausible, and organise their collective life. These are never entirely fixed – they tend to change, gradually and organically, over time. We need these mental models, as reality is too complex for us to grasp in its fullness.  But every once in a while a paradigm that had been convincing starts to become very poor at describing the reality that people experience. When that happens, the paradigm starts not to evolve, but to collapse: the old ways of seeing the world no longer make sense, and for a moment all sorts of new ideas seem possible; after a period of uncertainty, even chaos, a new paradigm starts to congeal.

My argument is that we are inside one of those transitions in the way that people understand the world – a paradigm collapse. Even if you’ve never come across the concept, we have lived through major collapses of a paradigm within living memory. One of them happened to the Church; one of them happened in another part of the world but was of global importance. How the Church responded to the first, and how the world responded to the second, tells us much about how to respond to the one which I believe we are about to experience.

1963: the collapse of Western Christendom

1963 was a time of radical change – television had arrived in every living room, car ownership was increasing rapidly while Dr Beeching was taking an axe to the railways, and the Pill was just starting to rewire people’s most intimate relationships.

Philip Larkin fixed the hinge of the British 20^th Century in that year, in the poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’, which starts:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

The joke lands because it is true. Church historians of every stripe now locate in the early 1960s the moment at which a Christendom in place for over a millennium gave way with astonishing speed. Callum Brown, an atheist historian of religion in Britain who positively celebrates the change, insists the data show this “was not the long, inevitable religious decline of the conventional secularisation story, but a remarkably sudden and culturally violent event” – one which followed a 1950s of rising church attendance and sacramental participation. Sam Brewitt-Taylor, who laments the change, has shown that senior Christian leaders suddenly conceded the arrival of the ‘secular society’ in 1963–64, making the collapse of cultural Christianity all but inevitable. The collapse of Christendom was less a case of gradual erosion since the Enlightenment, more an avalanche.

The Church was changing rapidly in the years before the collapse too. After the Second World War, Churches across Western countries sought to construct a new vision for two reasons – firstly, to ensure such a horror would never be repeated, especially given the advent of nuclear weapons, and secondly to undermine the appeal of Communism. This vision was based on fair play, freedom, and co-operation between people of all social classes and political opinions, undergirded by a safety net for the poorest. Internationally, the United Nations would secure peace and make the world more equal and more harmonious. The Church of England not only embraced this vision but played a significant role in its emergence. It was a beautiful vision, and for a while it worked.

But over the last sixty years, the strong social bonds that made that vision possible weakened inexorably. It didn’t help that the Church lost faith in Christendom, and passed custodianship of the visions that undergird our common life to a secular, technocratic élite that seemed to represent the future. These highly educated, culturally on-trend people were admired by churchpeople – and were often genuinely admirable – so increasingly theology came to resonate with their value system, which was rational, materialist, and progressive. We constructed a Christianity aimed at appealing to their values: confident in humanity’s capacity to build the Kingdom on Earth, quiet about the Kingdom in Heaven.

And now the paradigm that displaced Christendom, the one we worked so hard to adapt the Gospel to, is itself in trouble.

1989: the collapse of Communism

The greatest rival to Western-style liberal capitalism in our lifetime was the Soviet system. Communism was not merely an economic system but a totalising paradigm that sought not only to create economic equality, but to make people morally better. In its own eyes, it was not only a political system but a scientific one, and it believed its triumph to be inevitable. Its opponents could never be sincere and decent, as only the bad, mad or ill-educated would reject such a transparently superior way of organising the world.

At the start of 1989, Communism seemed the settled and secure system for around a third of the world’s population; by the end of that year, it was clearly in trouble, and by the end of 1991, it had collapsed everywhere in Eurasia, while the Far Eastern countries that remained Communist in name soon became robustly capitalist in practice.

The deeper lesson is in why it collapsed. People once genuinely believed in Communism: my old Soviet politics lecturer at Queen’s spoke of her grandmother in Leningrad, who served years in the Gulag because a quota needed filling, yet still wept when Stalin died. Then, from around the 1970s, long before the system fell, people stopped believing. One sign of that was the way middle-aged Soviet men, bereft of hope for the future, began drinking themselves to death at pitifully young ages. Paradigms depend on faith; loss of faith kills them.

Interestingly, a similar deaths-of-despair phenomenon among middle-aged men has been visible in America since around the turn of the century.

And now: a third collapse?

That’s one of a number of reasons why I believe we are living through another such collapse of a paradigm – the paradigm that displaced Christendom in the 1960s. This took advancing technology and widespread prosperity for granted, and in Western countries it elbowed away older and more collectivist visions of progressive politics, promising a better future not through collective action but through self-realisation and individual liberation: liberated from outmoded social constrictions, people would become better people. The utopia of the Summer of Love and John Lennon’s Imagine proved elusive, however, and had by the 1980s morphed into credit card consumer capitalism, a far more successful form of materialism than Communism had ever been, and which became globally dominant in the 1990s. We need to read our turbulent politics and disquieted society through the loss of faith in this paradigm – people no longer believe that it will lead them to a better future.

Like Communism, this materialistic, individualistic form of liberal capitalism didn’t believe it was a political perspective at all but simply what any rational, decent person believed, and like Communism, its supporters believed they represented an inevitable future. That’s perhaps why progressives overreached so dramatically in the 2010s and early 2020s even as their populist opponents built strength, and were defeated in country after country by insurgencies they never took seriously.

Of course, we can’t have a discussion like this without mentioning Donald Trump, but I don’t want to spend too much time on him either. In many ways he is a late arrival in a populist wave that began to build as early as the 1990s in countries as disparate as India, Israel, and Italy. But I can’t help thinking of a comment made in 2018 by Henry Kissinger – a smart cookie regardless of what you think of him – “I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses.” The fact that Donald Trump defeated the establishment in both major American parties, twice, despite opposition from every significant cultural institution from Hollywood to Wall Street is a sign that the existing order is living on borrowed time.

All societies are sustained by visions; when people stop believing the vision, politics and culture shift, sometimes at lightning speed. The contempt for and fear of the broad mass of the population that is now shot through establishment, centrist discourse shows that they too are losing faith that liberal democracy will lead us to a better future. In particular, free expression, traditionally a liberal axiom, the extension of which was a progressive organising point, has become a source of fear, something supposedly demanding tighter regulation.

The signs of collapsing faith and changing times are all around us. Let’s explore some of them.

II. What is happening now?

Populists versus technocrats

The organising conflict of Western politics is no longer left versus right in the 20^th Century sense, but populists against technocrats: those claiming to speak for a betrayed people against those claiming to govern by expertise. Progressives and technocrats still believe in the old modernist faith of progress through reason; the populists opportunistically advance where people are losing faith in that vision, without themselves being able to generate any new organising principle for society. The conflict is fuelled by something measurable: a collapse of faith in democratic institutions.

Loss of faith in democracy and politics

The British Social Attitudes survey has asked the same trust questions since the mid-1980s. In 1986, around 40% of people trusted governments to put nation before party all or most of the time; the latest report puts it at 12%, the lowest ever recorded, with a record 58% ‘almost never’ trusting politicians to tell the truth in a tight corner. The 2025 Ipsos Veracity Index found just 9% trust politicians to tell the truth. And the young are the most alienated. A much-publicised Channel 4 study in 2025 reported 52% of Gen Z agreeing the UK would be better with a strong leader who need not bother with parliament and elections. Now, don’t be too despondent about that: the gold-standard British Election Study finds only 13% agreeing with a near-identical question, and when King’s College London spelled out what dictatorship means, support fell to about 6%. It is not that the young want a Führer, but that a generation which cannot buy a house is deeply disillusioned with democracy’s lack of delivery.

A fragmenting party system

Consider the combined Labour-plus-Conservative share of the vote at every General Election since the war. In 1951 it was 97%: virtually the whole nation voted for one of the two big parties, then a gradual but sustained fall ran across decades, before a resurgence of two-party politics in the “Brexit elections” of the late 2010s. At the time many saw that as a temporary phenomenon, and they were right: in 2024, only 57% voted for either Labour or the Tories – the lowest two-party share of the universal-suffrage era. Labour took a landslide of seats on 33.7%, the lowest winning share on record, on the second-lowest turnout since 1885. On current polling, the two main parties between them are below 40%, and both are behind Reform. In the Scottish Parliament election this year, the combined Labour plus Conservative vote was under 27%, while in the Welsh Senedd election, the two traditional main parties fell from 61% in 2021, to just 21% this year.

In current opinion polling, five parties sit within a dozen points of each other, under an electoral system designed for two: the next General Election will either involve an unpopular party gaining a majority on a low share of the vote, or a coalition, probably a particularly complex and messy one.

This is not unique to the UK: the Dutch establishment parties have shattered; the French Socialists and Gaullists are now political bystanders; the German Volksparteien that once shared 90% of the vote struggle to reach half, while the far-right AfD contests first place. 20^th Century party systems built on class and confessional identities are dying everywhere.

Loss of faith in the experts

The technocrats are losing authority too, though unevenly. Nurses, engineers, and doctors remain overwhelmingly trusted. But trust has polarised politically in a way new to Britain: Reform supporters trust judges eighteen points less than the national average, with double-digit deficits for scientists, teachers, professors, and civil servants. ‘The experts’ are no longer a shared national resource; for a large minority they are the political priesthood of the other side.

The new gender divide

Something genuinely novel is happening within the young: men and women are diverging ideologically. Across the developed world young women have moved sharply left while young men have stayed put or moved right; Gallup data show American women aged 18 to 30 now around thirty points more liberal than their male peers. The gap in the UK is not yet dramatic – but academic literature shows it is widening, driven mainly by young women moving left faster. The Greens now lead among 18-to-24-year-olds on the strength of young women, while Reform is competitive among young men. For where this can lead, look abroad. In South Korea’s 2022 presidential election roughly 63% of men in their twenties voted for the right’s Yoon Suk-yeol against 26% of women the same age – a 37-point chasm inside one generation, in a country with the world’s lowest birth rate; the two facts may be related. In Spain, Vox draws support from young men at roughly twice the rate of young women, and similar phenomena are seen with the far-right parties in Germany and Sweden. Increasingly, young men and women do not see their interests as aligned – with obvious consequences for family formation, loneliness and religion.

Radical demographic change: race and religion

Demographically, the UK has been transformed in a generation. The 1991 census – the first to ask about ethnicity – found around 6% of the population belonged to an ethnic minority. By 2021, that had risen to 19%; in London, to around 46%.  According to the Department for Education, 33% of school pupils in England in 2026 are from backgrounds other than White, and 22% have a first language other than English.

The religious change is even more dramatic, and of course driven by many factors as well as immigration: 72% called themselves Christian in 2001, 46% in 2021 – fewer than half for the first time – with ‘no religion’ at 37%. On current trends, census Christians will be under 40% within five years. Despite all the hysteria, Muslims were only 6.7% of the English population in 2021 – but that had more than doubled from just 3.1% in twenty years, and is almost certainly close to 8% now.

That’s partly because of the ‘Boriswave’, which saw net migration peaking at nearly a million in 2022 alone. It has since fallen dramatically, to 171,000 in 2025, but effect on the balance of the population is permanent: around 19% of the UK population is now foreign-born, against roughly 7% in 1991. We now serve a nation profoundly unlike the one most of our congregations grew up in, and the political salience of that is not going away.

Radical demographic change: the birth dearth

While the country diversifies, it is ceasing to reproduce itself. The total fertility rate peaked in 1964, when the average woman in England and Wales could expect to have 2.93 children in her lifetime – at the very moment, note, the collapse in Christendom began. In 2025, the England and Wales fertility rate was 1.39, a record low for the fourth year running; Scotland stands at 1.25; replacement is 2.1. This is a global crisis: fertility has collapsed almost everywhere since the early 2010s. In South Korea, the average woman can expect to have 0.75 children! We may think this is a positive in an overpopulated world, but these numbers don’t always communicate how dramatic the medium-term change they represent is. If present trends continue, every 100 people in Britain today will have 44 grandchildren. In South Korea, the equivalent number is 13.

Let me make two observations. First, sustained sub-replacement fertility is likely to make migration a permanent structural pressure, not a policy blip, so the politics of demography will intensify, and the politics of ethnicity may in time replace the politics of populism and anti-populism, as that replaced the politics of class and religion. Secondly, look at who is still having children: just the English local authorities with the highest fertility – Luton, Barking and Dagenham, and Slough – are precisely the most religious. The future belongs to those who show up for it, and the intensely secular are not showing up.

Radical technological change: AI

Into this crisis of meaning arrives artificial intelligence. I will not pretend to prophesy, but serious estimates include the IPPR suggesting up to eight million UK jobs exposed in the worst scenario, concentrated among the routine cognitive work that gave the educated middle class its security, and the entry-level rungs by which the young climbed. AI companions are already substituting for human relationships among the lonely, and synthetic content – so-called AI slop – is dissolving our shared sense of what is real. A society already suffering a famine of meaning is about to have its two great secular sources of meaning – work and usefulness – destabilised. This is a threat to what it means to be human – and also the largest pastoral opening of our lifetimes.

What people really believe – ‘ietsism’

If people no longer believe in Christianity, we should explore what they actually do believe, because mostly they aren’t convinced atheists or materialists. Many people in this country and across northern Europe hold to a worldview that is definitively post-Christian, and self-consciously anti-religious, yet not atheistic.

Researchers in the Netherlands call this worldview ‘ietsism’, from the Dutch word ‘iets’, which simply means ‘something’. The term ‘ietsism’ covers a range of beliefs ‘in something’ held by people who believe there must be something beyond the mundane while not accepting any established belief system; James Elliott defines it as a belief that there is a transcendent reality, yet that little more can be said about its nature.  While rationalist atheism is concentrated among the most highly educated, ‘ietsism’ is concentrated further down the socio-economic and educational spectrum.

Ietsism also has some points of contact and commonality with Christianity. Look, for example, at the way angels still saturate popular iconography. Angels are also something Christians share with two of the most rapidly growing faith traditions of 21^st Century Britain: New Age beliefs and Islam. It’s pretty common to be unsure if there’s a God but definitely convinced of experiences of angelic intervention.

A necessary reminder: social liberalisation has not reversed

Whatever is collapsing, Britain is not reverting to the moral world of the 1950s. In 1987, 64% told the British Social Attitudes survey that same-sex relations were always wrong; today the figure is in single digits. In the same year almost half agreed that a man’s job is to earn money and a woman’s to look after the home; that is now a fringe view, and attitudes to mixed marriage have been transformed beyond recognition. Only 3-6% of people agree that you have to be White to be British. On race, gender, and sexuality Britain remains dramatically more liberal than a generation ago – including among Reform voters.

Is there a Quiet Revival?

You will all have heard of The Quiet Revival, the Bible Society report of April 2025 claiming, on YouGov polling, that monthly churchgoing among 18-to-24-year-olds had quadrupled. You may not have heard how the story ended: this March, YouGov admitted the 2024 sample was faulty – key anti-fraud controls were never switched on – and the findings were retracted. The gold-standard British Social Attitudes data show monthly attendance falling from 12% to 9% of adults between 2018 and 2024, young adults included. So there is no hard statistical evidence of a revival, and we should say so plainly.

But there is hard statistical evidence that there is new growth in Christianity. In France, Roman Catholic adult baptisms at the Easter Vigil have more than tripled in a decade, from 4,124 in 2016 to 13,234 this year, with 8,152 adolescents besides; most are aged 18 to 25, most from families of no religious tradition, and – note well – 62% are women. Asked why they came, 40% cite bereavement, illness, or hardship; 32% a powerful spiritual experience; and only 11% online influencers. In England, Roman Catholic dioceses recorded their highest catechumen baptisms in over a decade in 2024. In Sweden active adult entries to the Lutheran national church have climbed from five or six thousand a year in the late 2000s to around fourteen thousand in 2024, with 2025 reportedly higher again; worship attendance among young Swedes doubled between 2020 and 2024, and belief in God among the young is at its highest recorded level.

Our own Church of England Statistics for Mission show adult baptisms at a ten-year high of 8,700 in 2024 – plus 2,400 11-17 year-olds being baptised – and confirmations up 5.3%.

None of this reverses aggregate decline – our Sunday attendance remains a fifth below 2019. The growing numbers of young people arriving in our churches don’t outweigh, not yet anyway, the number of older worshippers passing to glory. But something real is happening: a small but young cohort of new believers is turning to Christ against the grain of their upbringing.

III. What can the Church do?

Honesty about our biases

Let me start an exploration of what the Church can do with an uncomfortable question about class. Populism draws strength simultaneously from the poor and the rich – insurgent movements are bankrolled by wealthy men and voted for by the left-behind – while anti-populism and technocracy are above all the creed of graduate professionals. And it is from that class that our clergy, synods, and activist laity are overwhelmingly drawn. Since the 1960s we have courted the rational materialist progressives, from the same sort of social background as most of us – and they have not come to Faith, because we were offering them nothing the secular world did not already provide. Meanwhile the group who might be most open to the transcendent – working-class people who are sure there’s something more than this but are suspicious of organised religion – have rarely been people whose worldview we’ve tried to understand.

Most clergy I know react to the upsurge in populism with horror, and wish they could somehow suppress it. We should be honest enough to admit that may simply be pursuing our class interest.

Facing our weakness honestly

The second requirement is honesty about our actual strength, because every demand for Church action I hear assumes a Church far stronger than the one we actually have. Usual Sunday attendance was around 1.2 million in the early 1980s; average Sunday attendance in 2024 was 581,000, and our whole worshipping community of just over a million is under 2% of England. Roman Catholic Sunday attendance numbers have collapsed even faster than ours over the last fifty years. Entrants to ordination training have not maintained their late 2010s peak. As noted, census Christianity has fallen from 72% to 46% this century. And the public does not want more political intervention from us: surveys consistently find large majorities – including of self-identified Christians – saying religious leaders should not try to influence the government or how people vote. Put bluntly, most people do not care what the Church thinks, whether about abortion or taxation, immigration or homosexuality.

The hard question

Which brings us to the question I most want you to sit with. Since the 1960s the dominant instinct of our Church has been to read ‘Thy Kingdom come’ primarily as a programme of political and social transformation. Whatever its theological merits, that strategy silently assumed two things: that we were strong enough to help shape society, and that society wanted us to. Whether or not those assumptions were ever valid, they are now clearly false. A Church that stakes its identity on being a political and social actor, in a nation where it is too weak to act decisively and unwelcome when it tries, has made itself twice irrelevant: the state and the secular charities do the social action with vastly more money, and the public does not want our intervention.

If the desire to build the Kingdom on Earth that motivated us for the last sixty years is now nugatory, and the political realm itself is on the verge of radical change, what should the Church of England do now?

Adapting to a new future: five suggestions

Here are five suggestions – not intended as a programme of action, but provocations for discussion.

1. Don’t waste energy defending what may collapse. The paradigm shifts of the 1960s West and 1980s East seem unstoppable in hindsight. If we are currently undergoing a similar collapse in worldview, the Church of England is not strong enough to make a meaningful impact on it. Yet many of us seem to think our job is to stop populism – would that be a wise idea even if we could, or would it merely risk social pressures venting more dangerously further down the track?
2. Re-tell the tough Gospel. We live at a time when people are losing faith in the recently dominant story of enlightened progress. Perhaps we need to respond by re-telling the old, old story in unvarnished form. Surveys of new converts in France show they aren’t coming for either progressive or populist political agendas, but out of bereavement, dread, and spiritual hunger. Preach what people cannot get anywhere else — Judgement, Grace, the Cross, a Gospel in which Christ gives eternal life, and claims the right to judge the living, the dead, and the whole world.
3. Go where the openness to Faith is: “not many of you were wise by human standards”, wrote St Paul. The Church should explore how to evangelise the ‘ietsists’, the believers in angels, down the social scale; and the young adults of all social classes walking unasked into churches across Europe, and often unsatisfied with what the secular establishment tells them. The Archdiocese of Paris is revamping its structures to cope with catechising its growing number of enquirers. If God sent your parish or benefice fifty adult enquirers next year, would you know how to nourish them? A serious adult catechumenate in every deanery is a more urgent reform than anything currently before Synod.
4. Support the concept of an institutional Church without embarrassment. A bad habit born in the 1960s was to dismiss the institutional Church as a distraction from authentic faith. Six decades of ever-strengthening individualism have taught us that societies with weak institutions see the strong trample the vulnerable. In an age of dissolving parties, unions, and associations, a parish that is simply, reliably there: worshipping faithfully each Sunday, keeping the doors open for prayer, and committing the dead to God isn’t a relic but a rock in an avalanche.
5. Stand with the poor without becoming a party. The Church’s social witness is a Biblical imperative but it is credible only when it flows visibly from worship, offered by people who manifestly believe in the Passion and Resurrection. The moment it reads as the religious wing of any class’s politics, populist or technocrat, it is discounted to zero. People can tell the difference between a Church that serves the poor because it fears God, and one that performs politics because it fears irrelevance.

Conclusion

If we look at the three collapses together, 1963 teaches us that collapse can follow growth with terrifying speed, and that the confident futurology of élites – including clerical élites – is usually wrong; 1989 teaches us that systems die when faith in them dies, long before the structures fall; the present moment teaches us that the paradigm our national life has assumed for two generations is likely dying in front of us – politics, demography, and technology are all shifting radically at once.

But do remember this. The Soviet Union did not survive the collapse of Communism. The Church of England has already survived the collapse of Christendom: humbled and diminished, but alive, and at the margins showing green shoots. We are not custodians of a paradigm; we are witnesses to a Kingdom that has outlived the fall of every earthly kingdom and empire, because its King has already conquered death.

When I write these pieces on paradigm collapses for secular audiences, I often say “adapt or die”. For us, it might be more appropriate to say, adapt – and look for signs of the Resurrection!