The fate of churches

Derelict church near Ashford, Kent, jwfairley, 2008.

If it were possible to measure such things as the happiness or self-assurance of a nation, and if such records had been kept in Britain for the last fifty years or so, the resulting downward graphs would, I'm sure, closely match the graph of church attendance over the same period.

I'm not suggesting that the two are causally related – that the decline in regular churchgoing has been a cause of unhappiness, or vice versa – merely that a nation once confident of its place in the world also happened to be a churchgoing nation.

I use the word churchgoing rather than Christian in recognition that many worshippers have been less believers in Christ than in the bible-based moral codes that have grown up around the Church, and that have shaped our social and judicial systems over many centuries. In earlier times, attending church was a way of asserting one's commitment to the prevailing social and moral order, whether or not one believed in God. The desertion of the churches (especially the Protestant churches) speaks not only of abandonment of religion, but also of abandonment of social and moral conventions, i.e. traditional values. Because on top of the downward graph of church attendance we can overlay the steep upward graphs of crime, pornography, drug-taking, promiscuity and family breakdown.

A disused house of worship is unsuited to most other purposes, and usually the cheapest and most practical measure would be to knock it down and build from the ground up. So why is it that many unwanted churches have been expensively restored and converted, rather than demolished? Many of them are less than beautiful, and I suspect that the urge to preserve has more to do with collective guilt than with economics or aesthetics.

Walking in the hotel district of West Cliff, Bournemouth recently, I turned into a residential back road and was delighted to see in the near distance a striking little tower of red brick and carved stone, with intricate stained-glass windows indicating that it was a chapel or church. My delight was short-lived however, for as I approached I noticed a gaudy sign outside bearing the legend "Cabaret Restaurant", and a poster advertising an upcoming show – a "drag" version of the musical Grease, featuring what appeared to be a lumberjack in a dress in the lead role of Sandy.

Such incongruous usage of old church buildings isn't all that unusual. In Doncaster, an "LBGT" club now occupies a former church, as do bars and nightclubs in Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool and Salisbury. In recent years, countless other places of worship have been deconsecrated and turned into shops or yuppie apartments. But perhaps most disturbingly of all, former churches in towns up and down the country (Crayford, Clitheroe, Dudley, Manchester, Southend and Swansea, to name a few) have been, or are likely to be, converted into mosques.

So it transpires that in once holy places where people used to commune with the Almighty, gay men and women now "hook up", stubbly transvestites cavort before boozy audiences, and imams turn youngsters against the Christian "infidels".

The "repurposing" of British churches may seem like a practical solution to a problem of empty and unwanted buildings. However, the conversions are more than mere stone and mortar, they are symbols and reminders of a spiritual void in our society, a void that is being filled by alcohol, drugs, sexual excess and opportunistic Islam. Which is why I would rather see disused churches demolished than desecrated.

If only I had a time machine. I would bring back the masons who lovingly hand-carved the ornamental stonework on that fine old chapel in West Cliff. I would bring back the bricklayers and carpenters, and the men who crafted the beautiful stained-glass windows. I would bring back all the vicars who sermonized there in the last century and the century before it. I would bring back the people who married or mourned there, and the lady volunteers who decorated the altar with flowers. And I would buy them front-row tickets for All Greased Up.