The growth among Muslims is easy to understand. Allow a people to enter the country freely who still reproduce naturally”€”while you have lost the knack to do so”€”and this is what will happen. But the growth in atheism and agnosticism speaks not only to the incompetence of the country’s religious authorities, but also to the evil-mindedness of her media and education elites. It is a universal complaint made of government education throughout the Anglosphere that it does not teach history, civics, or literature well. All three of those things, from Sydney to New York, from Cape Town to Toronto, and from Wellington to Birmingham, shriek of Christianity. The entire wealth of British and European culture is a testament to Christianity’s truth, and all the atheists from Nietzsche to Hitchens could not between them equal its beauty”€”though the Nazis and communists have shown what European non-Christians in power can build. Powerful belief will motivate more than mere self-interest, which is why even the most disbelieving of Western governments happily patronize military chaplaincies.

The dilemma is not restricted to Britain. But despite the gains made by fanaticism on one hand and ignorant skepticism on the other, there are signs of hope. Some of the Catholic Church’s more orthodox British members”€”such as Fr. Aidan Nichols in his Christendom Awake and The Realm“€”are beginning to think of ways to reconvert their country. An important step in that direction has been the creation of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham for disaffected Anglicans who have rallied for Rome to preserve a coherent British Christianity.

Although anti-popery has become as British as bad cooking, it would be well for Britons of whatever belief to hope that these initiatives bear fruit. Otherwise they may have to seek out the numerous Middle Eastern Christian refugees in the country for dhimmi survival tips.

Image of Westminster Abbey courtesy of Shutterstock