Our charity has been promoting Christian knowledge for over 300 years – now Christians are in the minority

The 2021 Census reveals – for the first time in UK history – that less than half of the population would call themselves a Christian. As a charity who has spent the last 300 years promoting Christianity, we see in the rejection of nominal Christianity (people identifying themselves as Christian out of routine or family tradition, rather than necessarily practicing the faith), an opportunity born out of loss.

While the dismissal of cultural Christianity means the painful unpicking of a religion that has formed the moral fabric of our culture for over 1,000 years, it is also a chance to investigate the claims of Christianity anew, and ask – why do we believe what we believe?

Society is no longer a place where people are respected for adopting institutional labels. The UK’s political polarisation on everything (not least, gender identity), suggests a belief that our convictions should emerge from the fire of personal and intellectual wrestling, and that the maxims we adopt should reflect what we truly believe within.

This is good news for Christians who want to spread the faith, because the gospel is not a teaching that can ever fade comfortably into social norms and niceties. The idea that, as created beings, not a single breath is owed to us, but God Himself took on flesh and died an excruciating death to bring us to eternal life, was as radical in Jesus’ day as it is in ours.

If the gospel is “the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1), the loss of nominal Christianity is a chance to do away with any idea that Christianity equates ticking a box on a form, and reveal to the world why Jesus is worth giving up everything for. While the results of the census show that nominal Christianity has dropped from 59.3% in 2011 to 46.2% in 2021, research also shows that the number of people practicing the faith remains largely unchanged. This can encourage us, as believers, to pray about and work on leading people to truly trust in Christ.

While today’s culture often sees the abandonment of Christianity (a belief system often equated with outdated and backwards thinking) as liberation from oppression, many of the freedoms we enjoy in our society exist only because of Christian ethics. Even the basic belief that all human beings are equal, regardless of race, gender or ethnicity, and should receive justice and fairness, was – according to historian Larry Siedentop - a radical notion inspired by Paul’s teaching on the fact that the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ exists for every single individual: Jew or Gentile, male or female, slave or free (Galatians 3:28), countering the Roman belief in the natural inequality of different people in society.

Former Liberal Democrat MP Tim Farron, in his new book A Mucky Business: Why Christians Should Get Involved in Politics, points out that while you can adopt these values and still not accept the Christian faith, the belief that human dignity – and therefore human rights – can be ascribed to the fact that we are made in the image of a perfect and all-powerful God, gives us an objective reason to trust in the truth of these maxims. As Tim writes, “if there is no God, then those values are just made-up fashions of the age. They are pleasant notions, but they have no call on anyone”. Without them, we have a dangerous relativism and no real reason behind our belief in freedom, kindness, progress and equality.