Letter: Churches in a secular society

Sir: Paul Handley is right to take issue with Fr Harper over the benefits of church-swapping (Faith & Reason, 28 June), but for more important reasons than those he states. What denominational vacillation obscures is the overall decline of religion in modern industrialised societies, which is now reaching critical proportions and seems irreversible.

This process of secularisation has been accelerating for the last 200 years, but more noticeably over recent decades. Various defensive strategies like ecumenical huddling have proved ineffective and the glowing proliferation of sects and cults does not alter the overall picture of numerical decline. There now seems little doubt that the situation which we now have to face is of survival in a post-religious society.

It is difficult for religiously inclined people to acknowledge this reality and its acceptance can be deflected by a variety of events, for example by the influx of immigrant groups for whom religion has always been an important attribute of ethnicity. Interestingly, the mantle of religious zealotry which was once borne by Catholic migrants is now being taken up by Muslims: but the pattern is always the same - after three generations it has become so threadbare as to be cast aside by all but a minority of increasingly eccentric or apocalyptic groups, fighting futile rearguard actions, as in the London eruv .

Rather than expend vast amounts of energy on swimming against the tide it would be more beneficial to chart new spiritual seas, like the prophets of Israel, which will enable us to address the needs of a new kind of pluralist society. What is needed is a commitment to ethical rationalism which recognises common need and civic justice leading to a transcendent humanism. The alternative of swapping denominations, like changing cabins on the Titanic, won't address the underlying issues, however good it makes you feel.

Fr DOMINIC KIRKHAM

Manchester