The shift in religious and Christian allegiance within the population was always predicted to arrive around about now, and here it is. Suddenly, numbers, being implacable as they are, tell us that those who identify as Christian are fewer than 50 per cent of the population according to the latest census.
There is no earthquake, no civil unrest, no torching of churches and murdering of priests as there was in both Spain in the 1930s and France in the 1780s, when a more intense repudiation of religion erupted in Europe. But the tipping of a balance can be just as dramatic a shift, even if it takes longer to work its way into the bloodstream of the body politic. How serious then are the implications of this shift in the balance of belief and unbelief?
