Bypassing Canterbury

In The Alien at Saint Wilfred’s, Adrian Plass imagines “Nunc,” named for the Nunc Dimittis, a little white alien who turns out to be the Holy Spirit, arriving at a small parish church and deciding to stay. There are only a handful of parishioners, and their lives are, shockingly, transformed by being taught to pray and read the Bible. The biggest transformation is of the vicar, David, who becomes a Christian, as it were, for the first time.

It is a funny book that, decades ago, painted a precisely correct picture of the state of the England’s state church—elderly, apathetic, and lacking basic knowledge about God. It is, therefore, a little bit surprising that, as the Bible Society reports, “Church attendance in England and Wales is on the rise.” The authors of the study, Dr. Rhiannon Mcaleer and Dr. Bob Barward-Symmons, describe it as “a startling change to the decades-long trends and presumptions.”

Even more startling is that “the most dramatic increase” is “among young people, particularly young men.” For Americans, the numbers doubtlessly appear astonishingly small, but they are, in fact, cataclysmic: 16% of 18-to 24-year-olds say they are “monthly churchgoers compared to 19% of those aged over 65.” Suggesting a shift across the Western world, young people “show above-average levels of warmth to spirituality, the Church and spiritual practice.” 18–to 24-year-olds are more inclined toward prayer. They are “the group most interested in learning more about the Bible.” While the Bible Society in the United Kingdom confined its research to England and Wales, gathering data from 13,146 participants surveyed online, similar numbers are filtering out of the United States. 

The study found that more men than women are going to church. “Over a fifth of men aged 18-24 (21%) now say they are attending church each month, far higher than their female peers at 12%—though in both cases, this is a substantial rise in comparison to 2018.” This tracks with my own local Anglican church in upstate New York. We recently ran the numbers and discovered that 60% of our congregation is under 40, and 60% are men. Even in the last six months, there’s been a rash of single men walking into church and, of all things, staying.

As a lifelong Anglican, I’m embarrassed to say I never thought I would see anything like this in my lifetime. Church, so many are in the habit of assuming, is a feminine pastime. If the man goes, he has to be drug there by a woman, and once there, will be reluctant to sing or pray aloud.

While these findings are marvelous for the sake of Christianity in the West generally, the news is depressing as ever for the Church of England. In 2018, “Anglicans made up 41% of churchgoers,” but as of 2024, the number is down to 34%. In the same period, Roman Catholics grew from 23% to 31%, and Pentecostals now make up a tenth of all churchgoers in England and Wales. When you consider the crucial demographic, 18- to 34-year-olds, “only 20% of churchgoers are Anglican” whereas 41% are Catholic and 18% are Pentecostal.

The inexorable slide into apostasy by the Church of England has produced the tragedy that so many have predicted. If you try to tell people that the living God is a cheap icon for leftist politics, you shouldn’t be surprised when nobody wants to go to your church. Atheist adjacent views of climate change, sexual politics, and social justice at the expense of the actual gospel of Jesus Christ are not attractive to the old, the middle-aged, or the young. Any church that forgets the reason for which it exists is going to decline. But those, like the Church of Rome, that hang on to some semblance of the truth, however obscured, will survive times of intense sifting and emerge stronger.

Looking over the Bible Society report, it isn’t the numbers that are heartening so much as seeing, in real time, the spiritual laws of the cosmos reassert themselves. The gates of hell, Jesus promised, will never prevail against the church. When it falls into error, it will be shaken out like a garment, but it won’t be destroyed, because, startlingly, the Holy Spirit himself appears, sometimes when one least expects it.