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 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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