England Will Miss Our Church When It’s Gone

UnHerd ➨The Church of England is on its knees, and not in a good way. Before the pandemic, physical congregations were already sparse, and getting sparser: in 2019, estimates put the average Sunday service attendance at just 27 people.

Mary Harrington

When Covid-19 reached these shores, the Anglican leadership responded by closing churches even for private prayer, and they’ve issued barely a squeak for months on end. No one knows whether physical congregations will ever recover.

Nonbelievers may be tempted to celebrate this prospect. They shouldn’t. In pulling loose the religious thread in our national settlement, we’ll unravel the whole fabric — and we may not like what’s underneath.

Though I wasn’t raised in a churchgoing family, my husband and I joined our small-town Anglican church when we moved here. I’ve come to treasure it: the slow turn of the liturgical year, the opportunity to sing with others (a rare pleasure in the age of headphones and Spotify) and space to be serious with no particular goal in mind.

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