Cardinal: Britain Must Not Be 'God-Free Zone'

By Ethan Cole, Christian Post Reporter Monday, May 12, 2008

British public life must not be a "God-free zone," said the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor warned on Thursday that the country is heading towards being a "world devoid of religious faith" and urged Catholics to prevent this from happening by engaging in a deeper relationship with God, according to U.K.-based newspaper The Guardian. He made his comments during a lecture at Westminster Cathedral.

The cardinal also expressed concern about the "considerable spiritual homelessness" in Britain, where even if people wanted to believe they felt faith was not an option.

"Many people have a sense of being in a sort of exile from faith-guided experience," said Murphy-O'Connor. "This is the effect of the privatization of religion today: religion comes to be treated as a personal need."

He denounced attempts to "eliminate the Christian voice" in the public square, and said modern culture has painted religious commitment as a "step back from being independent and mature."

But Christians are partly to blame for modern atheism, the cardinal acknowledged.

"What did we do to generate unbelief? We need to examine what we might have done to give people a misleading idea of God," he said. "Faith in Britain might be improved by a deeper grasp of the mystery of God on the part of our believers."

He also called on believers to hold better and more respectful dialogue with non-believers rather than reject them because of differences.

A recent study, by Christian Research, of the country's religious trends showed that church attendance in Wales could decline to less than a quarter of its current level in the next four decades, according to icWales.

According to the predictions, by 2050 Wales will have the smallest church-attending population in Britain. During this time period, church attendance in England is expected to fall from 3 million to 700,000, while Scotland will see its church-goers fall from 550,000 to 140,000.

The report warned that 4,000 churches could close by 2020 if congregations continue to lose members at the current rates.

It also predicted that by 2035, the number of practicing Muslims will outnumber worshipping Christians in Britain, according to the Telegraph. There will be about 1.96 million active Muslims in Britain, compared with 1.63 million church-going Christians, according to the think tank.

Christians make up 71.6 percent of the U.K. population, according to the country's 2001 National Census. But a U.N. report published earlier this year opposes that number, claiming that two-thirds of the population said they have no religious affiliation – a finding that supports research that show a drastic decline in church attendance.