Barely 70 percent of the Welsh claim any Christian loyalty whatever, and only ten percent report regular attendance at church or chapel, a figure even smaller than in Godless England… The old core Dissenting churches – Independent, Presbyterian and Baptist – each claim around one percent of the population as members.

I am a fully certified Welsh person. In fact, other products of my hometown of Port Talbot include Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins, with Rowan Williams and Catherine Zeta-Jones born down the road. We specialize in high drama.

Through the years, I have also published extensively on Welsh history, which offers an interesting case-study in religious narrative. Until recent years, that history was recounted largely in terms that were not just religious but Protestant and evangelical, with an arc that culminated in a kind of millennium. It then stopped, or rather went into reverse, in a way that seriously subverts the older story.

Although I won’t relate that whole history here, it has a number of critical turning points, mainly connected with faith. In 1536, an Act of Union integrated Wales into England for administrative purposes, and aimed at a full integration of culture and language. One major reason that failed was the translation of the Bible into Welsh in 1588, an event that stabilized the language and prevented it degenerating into local dialects.

Even at this stage, though, the Reformation had made little progress. In the south, Protestantism spread through the innovative evangelistic efforts of Anglican leaders like Rhys Prichard, who in the 1630s presented Christian doctrine in the form of popular verses and songs, later collected as The Welshman’s Candle (Cannwyll y Cymry). The Great Awakening burnt fiercely in Wales, spreading Methodism and evangelical faith throughout the country.

From the 1780s, the Sunday School movement led by Thomas Charles of Bala advanced that project still further, to the point of making Wales overwhelmingly a Dissenting or Nonconformist (non-Anglican) nation. To adapt the old joke: “How can you not have heard of Thomas Charles? He is world-famous in Wales.”

Religion became intimately connected with national identity. According to the prevailing myth, the authentic Wales was Dissenting, as opposed to the Anglican church of the landlords and their minions. From the 1860s, Wales became the heartland of a Liberal Party rooted in the chapels, that is in Nonconformist congregations, whose greatest standard bearer was David Lloyd George. That political story even had international dimensions, as the Welsh Nonconformist Liberals who helped run the country during the First World War era had such an instinctive sympathy for the rights of the Jews, another oppressed nation that clung to Biblical truths. Of course they pushed hard for the Balfour Declaration.

The year 1904, meanwhile, brought a kind of apotheosis of the Nonconformist dream, with the national revival associated with Evan Roberts. According to legend still current today, Wales for one shining moment became something like a perfect Christian society, where police and courts almost closed for lack of business. The land was covered with chapels, the country suffused with evangelical values, and the Welsh enforced the Sabbath with Old Testament ferocity. The millennium seemed nigh. Of course, it was too good to be true – look at the brilliant contemporary satires of the greed and narrow-mindedness of Nonconformist Wales by the acerbic Caradoc Evans – but for all those problems, that evangelical society did exist, and that faith shaped values and cultures over decades.

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