By some measures, Britain is the least religious country in the developed world. Some 64 per cent of us do not set foot in any place of worship in a year, according to the British Social Attitudes survey, a higher proportion than anywhere else in the world. Only half of us say that religion is important in our lives, compared with 85 per cent of Americans, 89 per cent of Indians, 97 per cent of Brazilians and 99 per cent of Indonesians.

If the secret of success is to follow failure, then Justin Welby has had the perfect start as Archbishop of Canterbury. He was appointed at a time when the Church of England’s efforts to reach a conclusion on women bishops have collapsed and when its pews were emptying at the fastest rate in recorded history. It has fallen to a former oil company executive, a softly spoken Old Etonian with an unusual appetite for danger, to move to Lambeth Palace. His mission is not to run the church, but to save it.

By some measures, Britain is the least religious country in the developed world. Some 64 per cent of us do not set foot in any place of worship in a year, according to the British Social Attitudes survey, a higher proportion than anywhere else in the world. Only half of us say that religion is important in our lives, compared with 85 per cent of Americans, 89 per cent of Indians, 97 per cent of Brazilians and 99 per cent of Indonesians. Europe’s godlessness has little to do with the modern world. Beyond our secularising continent, the world is still very much at prayer.

In his first few days in Lambeth Palace, the Archbishop has shown that he not only realises that he has a fight on his hands but that he has no qualms about bringing the Christian challenge to a secularised country. In a sermon in Nottingham’s Trent Vineyard church, he declared that ‘we are at the greatest moment of opportunity for the Church since the second world war’ because ‘the state has run out of the capacity to do the things it had taken over’. It is hard to imagine his predecessor, Dr Rowan Williams, making the same point — he was more interested in levels of state spending.

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