CANTERBURY, England — Britain’s former Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently caused a mini-uproar by saying the Church of England’s failure to fill “an aching spiritual void” had led to large numbers of British citizens “gorging themselves” and becoming obese instead. 

While he was being deliberately provocative about a widespread disorder to which Johnson, by his own admission, is not immune, the connection between spiritual need and societal ills is one that others have also noticed as the country suffers from a well-publicized and growing socio-political malaise that extends well beyond obesity.

“If you spend time in pubs talking and listening to people,” said Sebastian Morello, an English Catholic philosopher and writer, “you’ll find everybody is desperately unhappy in England.” 

Each week news stories from the U.K. seem to emerge of public disorder and violent crime, a pervading culture of death seen most recently in proposed assisted suicide legislation or bans on praying outside abortion facilities, rising rates of divorce and cohabitation, totalitarian forms of government, an epidemic of mental illness, a loss of faith in the country’s institutions, and an economy in decline. 

British society has become distinctly more socially liberal over the past 30 years leading to the observation of a steep moral decline. The proportion of the British public who think abortion or homosexual relationships are morally wrong, for example, has over halved since 1989.

Widespread dissatisfaction among citizens relates to economic hardship and failing public services; taxes going to wasteful and “woke” causes; a national identity torn between traditional institutions and secular liberal values; increasing tension between different ethnic and religious groups often because of uncontrolled immigration; and a growing divide between a wealthy elite and the general population. 

But with the advent of a deeply unpopular new Labour government, increasing numbers of citizens, sometimes referred to as the “silent majority,” are waking up to the problems even if they don’t connect them with moral and spiritual decline. 

“It’s heart-breaking, as an American who loves Britain, to see what has happened to it,” Orthodox author and commentator Rod Dreher told the Register. “I learned many years ago, on my first visit, that the England of Tolkien and Lewis was no more, but this gloom shrouding the U.K. today seems existential. Britain, like the rest of the West, will not recover unless it recovers the Christian faith that formed it.”

The chances of that currently look slim as Christianity in the country appears to be in freefall. The percentage of people in England and Wales identifying as Christian has plummeted from 72% in 2001 to 46.2% in 2021. Liturgical services in the Church of England, the country’s established church, are now attended by just 1.2% of the population (36% of whom are over the age of 70), and many are wondering if the institution, currently in turmoil, can survive. 

Meanwhile, mathematical models based on current trends predict Catholic Mass attendance in England and Wales potentially halving by 2040 and between a quarter and half a million Mass-goers by 2050, down from 1.75 million today. 

Such a clear trend of de-Christianization has, for some time, prompted the country’s Catholic leaders to warn about a societal “vacuum” being left in its wake and the risk of the nation succumbing to dangerous ideologies and other religions. The growth of Islam in the country, driven by higher birth rates and uncontrolled immigration, is viewed as one of those consequences. 

“Once you take God out of the picture,” said English priest Father Paul Haffner, professor of theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, “you have a godless society, a society which descends into greater darkness, decay, violence and a diabolical end.” 

Our Lady’s Dowry

But do the causes of the nation’s current and most pressing ills principally owe themselves to a turning away from the Catholic Church, and might the solution lie in the country — known as Our Lady’s Dowry since Anglo-Saxon times — one day returning to her? 

Blaming the nation’s decline on a rejection of Catholicism is historically “very hard to prove,” said Father Ezra Sullivan, a professor of moral theology at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. “A compelling argument would have to show that the sort of values inculcated by Catholic culture were lost in principle by Protestants, even if they were maintained practically for centuries.” 

He believes some convincing historical evidence exists for that, such as professor Eamon Duffy’s 1992 seminal work The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580, which, Father Sullivan said, demonstrated that “popular piety was with the Catholics.”

But he stressed that if the decline is identified in morals and belief, the causes are “easier to explain,” adding that he had no doubt those seeds were sown at the Reformation. St. John Henry Newman identified them as “a hidden secularism, a love of the world, a loss of placing God first, and I think he is right,” Father Sullivan said. 

Professor John Rist, an English emeritus professor of classics and philosophy, is of a similar opinion.

“I certainly agree that the collapse of traditional — i.e. Catholic — Christianity is an important factor,” he told the Register. “The Church of England, being Erastian [a church ruled by the state] from the start was bound to collapse into its components. The fact is that since Anglicanism tried to retain some, but not enough, bits of Catholicism, it was inevitable that the ‘holes’ would become apparent and the whole thing would be discredited.” 

Rist, author of Confusion in the West: Retrieving Tradition in the Modern and Post-Modern World, observed that the long and steady decline of Christianity in Britain has led to objective morality, exemplified in the virtues, being replaced by rights and entitlements so that “what matters is the mere power to enforce your desires.” Coupled with a nihilism derived from a steady descent into atheism, he sees a “potentially totalitarian conclusion.” 

Recent government legislation, for example, has prioritized censorship under the guise of safety and inclusivity. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government is also considering plans to criminalize "misgendering" and to potentially outlaw criticism of Islam under the guise of combating Islamophobia.

The country’s contemporary social ills can be traced back to the pragmatist and empiricist roots of 17th-century English Enlightenment philosophy, said Father Haffner, which permeated the “whole English-speaking world” and conflicted with the Catholic Church’s understanding of objective and immutable truth. 

Father Haffner, the author of The Mystery of Reason, a book that underlines how the Catholic faith can be related to human reason, believes the country will continue to decline until it recognizes and understands the importance of faith-inspired reason — a truth, he said, that was lost during the Enlightenment. 

“Britain is very obviously in the dark and without its fingers on the light switch because many of its citizens don’t have a way of relating to faith and reason,” he said. “They are therefore unable to see how faith guarantees human freedom against totalitarian regimes.” Pope Benedict XVI, he said, made a similar point in 2010 in his historic address to the Houses of Parliament when he spoke of the faith and reason needing one another “for the good of our civilization.”

‘De-Sacralization’ of the Lambeth Conference

Some analysts place the blame on the fact that Britain was an early-industrialized but now substantially de-industrialized post-imperial power facing the consequences of loss of status both politically and economically. Others cite a more recent catalyst connected to the pragmatism of the Enlightenment: The Anglican Communion allowing the use of contraception at the Lambeth Conference of 1930. 

“It might seem a bit arcane to blame the collapse of civilized culture in the U.K. on the Church of England and its rejection of Catholic teaching and morality, but arcane does not mean mistaken,” said Gavin Ashenden, a former Anglican chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II and now a Catholic. Allowing contraception was a “fundamental repudiation of Christian teaching” and launched a “series of consequential changes in the ethics of nation and culture” stemming from the “seismic shift” in the way sexual relations were understood and practiced. 

It led, he said, to a “de-sacralization of the human person” that paved the way for abortion, pressure to adopt euthanasia and, more recently, to a de-sacralization of freedom of speech. “The pill and the condom,” he said, “had become the artifacts and instruments of totalitarianism.”  

For Sebastian Morello, one of the chief causes of the nation’s decline is postwar liberalism, which led to the introduction of abstract secular values, expressed nowadays in the form of buzzwords such as tolerance, equality, diversity and inclusion, but which are “utterly incompatible” with Britain’s sense of nationhood rooted in an organic way of life that is embodied in the country’s institutions — Parliament, the Church of England (before it adopted “wokeism”), and the monarchy. 

This has led to a kind of national “schizophrenia,” he said and, echoing Rist’s point, has manifested itself in ever increasing authoritarianism and totalitarianism aimed at enforcing those secular values on a large section of the population unwilling to accept them. This became especially apparent last summer when the government jailed hundreds of citizens for posting “wrong” opinions on social media. 

The return of President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement in the U.S. has exposed the bankruptcy of these secular "woke" values and shown how they can be overcome. Britain has the ascendant Reform Party led by Nigel Farage as an equivalent political force, but whether they can be as effective remains to be seen. Observers say that any such movement will be short-lived without a concomitant revival of the Catholic Church in the country.   

Morello nevertheless sees hopeful signs. Even though the Catholic Church is “undergoing the same purification” as other Western nations are, he sees change is on the horizon, and noted “something very mysterious” in Britain, which is that “every 100 years it has a spiritual revival, and that spiritual revival is nearly always something Romanizing.” He gave as examples the 17th century reign of King Charles I who aligned himself with Catholic practices and sympathies, and the 19th century Oxford Movement that sought to reassert the Church of England's Catholic heritage and apostolic identity. 

“I am strongly of the view that we’re very ripe for such a revival right now,” he said. “There’s something bubbling under the surface.”

But perhaps for that revival to take hold, the answer lies in the Church recovering the sense of the supernatural that it lost after the Reformation. 

Dreher, who in 2024 wrote Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, believes this is paramount, and that recapturing “the more ancient, ritualistic, counter-cultural and wonder-filled” Christianity of old is vital. 

“If Christianity wants to have a chance, it is going to have to lean in, and lean in hard, to the supernatural core of the faith,” he said, adding that it will need to “speak of miracles, of healings, of signs and wonders, and of spiritual warfare.” But Christianity as “chiefly a source of the therapeutic or moral virtue is going to have to go.”

What is needed above all is for the Catholic Church in Britain to return to fundamentals, and to resolutely fight for the faith by standing firm, said Professor Alan Fimister, a British native who teaches dogmatic theology at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Connecticut.

Quoting St. John Henry Newman, who once said the Church has “nothing more to do than to go on in her own proper duties, in confidence and peace; to stand still and to see the salvation of God,” Fimister pointed out that when the Church was doing this and “teaching, sanctifying and governing without fear or favor,” the powers of this age had “no choice but to simulate her virtues in the hope of leading people away from Christ.”

But when the Church “forsook the reproach of Christ in the hope of befriending the world,” the powers of the age “had no more need to fear. Contraception, abortion, pornography, sodomy, euthanasia, et cetera have all been driven forward without opposition by the enemy and his minions. 

“All we need do,” Fimister said, “is take up again the Sword of the Spirit and the enemy will flee before us.”