demographics

Changing Politics, Changing Country

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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

A densely detailed satirical illustration in the style of an eighteenth-century engraving. On the left, an angry crowd of working people brandish brooms and placards reading "Fair Wages!", "Tax the Rich!" and "Voices Heard!" beside a cracked classical column labelled "British Institutions". A woman in a red dress and white apron holds up an angel pendant, an angel embroidered on her apron. On the right, anxious men and women in suits and lanyards clutch clipboards, charts and phones as poll data, banknotes, ballot boxes and televisions showing shouting faces swirl away in a vortex between the two groups. Behind them, under a stormy sky, a small parish church with a square tower stands on a green hill, its door glowing with light as small figures climb the path. Signs read "The City of Confusion: where all is flux" and "Truth found only on the hill".

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 20th 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.

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Once Pentecostalism Rose in Latin America. Now the Churchless are Growing.

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There are three great stories in the demographics of the Christian world over the last two generations. One was widely heralded and remains much discussed, the other two are much less so.

One, is of course, the secularisation of the West. The second, a big part of my academic work, is the explosion in Christian numbers in Africa: from around 60 million at independence to something like 700 million today. The third is the move of millions of Latin Americans from Catholicism to Protestantism, usually Charismatic and Pentecostal forms of Protestantism, since around 1970.[1] Evidence is starting to build that, starting in the 2010s, there has been a change in direction. Catholicism has continued to lose both nominal and active adherents, but those leaving were less inclined to move toward Evangelicalism than out of organised religion altogether.

David Martin’s Tongues of Fire (1990) was the one of the first serious academic works on the subject in the UK, and has a place of pride on my bookshelf; in the USA, David Stoll’s Is Latin America Turning Protestant? of the same year possibly had more impact.[2]

A group of Brazilian Pentecostal worshippers participates in a baptism ceremony at the River Jordan. In the shallow, murky brown water, several people dressed in white clothing gather around a man in a light blue shirt who appears to be leading the service. On the riverbank, observers dressed in casual attire hold smartphones and cameras to record the event. The scene captures a moment of religious celebration, with participants smiling and engaged. Vegetation lines the water's edge in the background. The photograph, taken on November 16, 2022, by photographer Gerry Lynch, documents this spiritual pilgrimage to one of Christianity's most sacred sites. The joyful expressions and communal participation reflect the significance of baptism within Pentecostal faith traditions.
Brazilian Pentecostals being baptised in the River Jordan. © Gerry Lynch, 16 November 2022.

The gathering turn to Protestantism emerged during a tumultuous period in Latin American Catholic life, with the rise of Liberation Theology among what had been a reactionary clerisy in the 1960s and then its shattering from above under the pontificate of John Paul II. While Liberation Theology claimed to speak for the poor, it was during its ascendancy that the continent’s impoverished legions, long underserved by priests, started looking elsewhere for spiritual sustenance. “The Catholics opted for the poor and the poor opted for Pentecostalism” runs the old canard.

But departures to Pentecostalism accelerated further in the decades since Latin American Catholicism’s renewed tack to the Right: and it was a modest tack – the shift should not be overstated; there was no return to the reaction of the first part of the 20th Century.

How great is the scale of the departure from Catholicism in Latin America? Catholic identification dropped from approximately 90% in the 1960s to 70% in 2010, and further to 57% by 2020.

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