When I was preparing to leave London for the south Welsh countryside early last year, a priest friend warned me not be complacent. “People lose their religion when they move to the country,” he said. I wouldn’t, after all, have been the first person to stop going to Mass on finding myself in a village over an hour away from the nearest church with anything resembling a parish priest or a congregation. The fact that I was moving to Wales was even more of a worry given that it is the least religious country in Britain, and increasingly so according to censuses published over the past 20 years.