How do you survive as a Christian believer – and even preserve something of that faith in your children – in a society where Christianity is so drastically on the wane? The Church is being pushed to the margins, the practising Catholic population is ageing (despite bursts of youth enthusiasm), and Britain (according to a 2014 Gallup survey) is one of the world’s most irreligious countries. Reflecting on these questions puts me in mind of Philip Larkin’s half-ironic, half-sincere poems such as the often quoted “Church Going”, and of a scene in Kingsley Amis’s novel The Old Devils, which was published in 1986 and won the Booker Prize. There is a crucial episode half-way through Amis’s book in which two central characters, already sad about something else, drift into a wistful meditation on our collective loss of religious sense. Decent, boring Malcolm, preoccupied with his bowels, is reunited with an old girlfriend from student days, lovely Rhiannon Weaver, long-since married to an upmarket media Welshman. They drive along the coast to visit spots from their briefly shared romantic past that Malcolm hopes might jog Rhiannon’s memory, but they don’t and Rhiannon is upset and blames herself. They come to a deserted church (Amis’s biographer Zachary Leader says it is based on St Illtyd’s on the Gower Peninsula); it is closed up, and, as the church-spotter Malcolm explains to Rhiannon, a service hasn’t been held in it since 1959. “Do you believe in it yourself, Malcolm?” asks Rhiannon. Malcolm replies: “It’s very hard to answer that. In a way I suppose I do. I certainly hate to see it all disappearing.” A bit later he confides: “I like to come here occasionally. It helps me … no, it’s impossible to say without sounding pompous. Anyway, it’s a wonderful spot. Peaceful.” Anyone reading The Old Devils will have already been primed to hear echoes of Amis’s friend Larkin: for example, a character has reflected that life is “first boredom, then more boredom”, adapting “Life is first boredom, then fear” from Larkin’s elegy on ageing, “Dockery and Son”. Now the Malcolm-Rhiannon scene plants hints of other poems (mainly “Church Going” and “An Arundel Tomb”) in which Larkin’s poetic voice blends sophisticated irony and scepticism with sincere feeling – mainly that nostalgia for the institutional Church which the poet described (in “Aubade”) as “that vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die”. The poem “Church Going” (“Once I am sure there’s nothing going on / I step inside … A serious house on serious earth it is”) is a mature reflection, from the mid-1950s, on sentiments that Larkin had explored 10 years earlier in the Dylan Thomas-style “A Stone Church Damaged by a Bomb”: “Planted deeper than roots / This chiselled, flung-up faith / Runs and leaps against the sky … I have worshipped that whispering shell.” The image of the shell pops up again in “Church Going”: “this special shell … this accoutred frowsty barn”. Discerning Larkin’s real beliefs is not straightforward, however. He was irritated when an American God-botherer tried to convince him that “Church Going” was, deep down, an assertion of religious faith. On the other hand, he reassured his girlfriend Monica that the poem’s authorial voice was not his own and was intended “to exhibit an attitude … the attitude of the ‘young heathen’ ”. What’s more, when he was old and ill he bought an OUP Bible for £120 and set it up on a lectern in his bedroom. Larkin described himself as an Anglican agnostic and that’s not surprising, since his father Sydney drummed it into him never to believe in God. But can parental influence work the other way round? What can I do to prevent my children drifting into indifference, as the sea of faith retreats? Our son goes to a mildly Anglican school (I think he is more likely to stay close to the Church if he doesn’t go to a Catholic school). He has friends who already, aged 12, confidently declare themselves “atheist”. Meanwhile, for summer holiday reading the teachers prescribe Northern Lights by Philip Pullman, which presents a “church” that commits atrocity as official policy. But I am not downcast. In attacking organised religion so virulently – in trying to “kill” God – Pullman reveals how absorbed and preoccupied he is by it. You could see his book as proof that theology is still thrillingly alive. Pullman, whose grandfather was a vicar, resembles Larkin, in that both have a memory of institutional Christianity, but the belief that helped to sustain it has gone and only the “shell” is left. That sort of cultural Christianity, universally practised, is probably gone. But in its place we may get something more sincerely felt, where powerful individual Christian witness is more important than numbers. Andrew M Brown is The Daily Telegraph’s obituaries editor