British Anglican Bishop Paul Richardson says that "Christian Britain is dead", while author Hal Colebatch writes that proposed anti-discrimination laws further erodes Church control. Richardson criticised his fellow bishops for failing to appreciate the scale of the crisis spurred by declining church attendance and the rise in multiculturalism and warned that their inaction could seal the Church's fate, the Daily Telegraph reports.
Writing for The Sunday Telegraph, Bishop Richardson said: "Many bishops prefer to turn their heads, to carry on as if nothing has changed, rather than face the reality that Britain is no longer a Christian nation.
"Many of them think that we are still living in the 1950s, a period described by historians as representing a hey day for the established church."
He said the Church had lost more than one in ten of its regular worshippers between 1996 and 2006, with a fall from more than one million to 880,000. Newborn baptisms are down from 609 in every 1,000 at the turn of the twentieth century to only 128 in 2006/7, and church marriages have also dropped.
"At this rate it is hard to see the church surviving for more than 30 years though few of its leaders are prepared to face that possibility," said Bishop Richardson. "At present church leaders show little signs of understanding the situation. They don't understand the culture we now live in."
Meanwhile, evolving laws are further eroding the hold of the Church, according to author Colebatch, whose book "Blair's Britain" was chosen as a book of the year by The Spectator magazine in 1999.
"A sinister new equality bill is before a parliamentary committee. So far there has been surprisingly little about it in the British media, although the Catholic Church has called attention to the fact it would give the government unprecedented powers to police not only public but private religious and other activities," Colebatch writes in The Australian.
He said the bill would reportedly ban practices deemed discriminatory, such as Christian churches preferring to employ Christians in jobs which a wider public is qualified.
"The Catholic bishops of England and Wales have warned that religious schools and care homes could be forced to remove crucifixes, holy pictures or other religious symbols or icons from their walls in case they offend atheist or non-Catholic cleaners," Colebatch predicts. "Under the terms of the bill, Catholic institutions could be guilty of harassment if they display images offensive to non-Catholics."
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