Think of England and you think of her cathedrals: great hulking battleships of stone that tower above our landscapes, offering us the reassuring solidity of permanence. A new report from the think tank Theos, Living Stones: English Cathedrals as Sacred Spaces in Changing Times, examines the roles, perceptions and challenges the Church of England’s cathedrals face now more than a quarter of the way through the 21st century.

The England of the 2020s is markedly more secular than 50 or 100 years ago, but cathedrals seem to be maintaining a hold on the public. According to the surveys commissioned in this report, 74 per cent of the public had visited a cathedral at least once in the previous three years. Thirty-eight per cent visited as often as two or three times a year, and 15 per cent every one to three months. “Cathedral visitation,” the report rightly points out, “is therefore not a niche behaviour.” Figures from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport show that only 41 per cent of the public visited a museum or gallery in person in the past year, and 30 per cent attended an in-person live sporting event. Cathedrals, then, remain one of the biggest physical interfaces between Christianity and the English public.

We know that public Christianity has diminished, even though the signs of a quiet revival are all around us. The report’s authors point out the complexity of a changing religious sphere: “British religiosity is not a straightforward narrative of decline; it is changing and remixing into new forms. Many younger seekers show an interest in spirituality on their own terms, outside traditional parish structures – precisely the kind of milieu where cathedrals, with their openness and anonymity, have an advantage. In an age when institutional trust is low, but hunger for meaning endures, this quality has only grown in importance.”

That hunger is deep-seated. These works of wonder could only be built because they were conceived, executed and sustained by the worship of Almighty God. Even in a country that no longer believes as it once did, England’s cathedrals continue to exert a strange power over the national imagination and act as a sustaining force for the personal soul.

Part of this is because cathedrals have undergone a change in perception. The Church of England may have receded from public life, but there is great value in that cathedrals are not seen as the exclusive property of a particular religious denomination – even if an Established one. Instead, England’s cathedrals are seen as a public resource and a good. As the earlier Taylor and Bourne reports (both 2017) have shown, they are social assets, centres of community life, repositories of national memory, engines of tourism and places of refuge and beauty.

For us Catholics, there is often bridling over Anglican mistreatment of what were “our” cathedrals – whether this dates back to the iconoclastic ravages of the Reformation or the silent discos of today. Many now charge entrance fees for visitors, often including pilgrims, though worship services as always remain open to all (beyond the obvious ticketed civic events). Catholic nitpicking about the activities of the Anglican Church can descend to quite unappealing levels, but it also reflects an essential truth: these buildings matter profoundly and what happens to them is important. Nonetheless, for every lay Catholic who says “they” should give our cathedrals back there is a Catholic bishop cowering in fear of the finances of looking after the running costs of these great monuments of the Christian Faith.

The uncomfortable reality is that England’s cathedrals survive in a permanent state of financial anxiety. While lottery funding and other state-backed ventures exist on a case-by-case project basis, there is no direct continual long-term taxpayer-backed state support for cathedrals, Church of England or otherwise. We should be wary of the constant bureaucratic desire to quantify everything, but HM Treasury’s Green Book methodology estimates that cathedrals contribute £50 billion to “national wellbeing”. However ridiculous it is to put a pound value on such things, the social and cultural benefits cathedrals provide cannot be separated from the religious purpose for which they were built.

The public, for its part, appreciates England’s cathedrals deeply but becomes ambivalent and even reticent when it comes to funding them from their own private pockets. Pressures on personal and family purses are plentiful in this economy, and 57 per cent said they were unlikely to donate if their local cathedral was in financial difficulty. Part of the flipside of seeing England’s cathedrals as such a public good, a community resource and an outpost of the Established Church is that the public are also likely to see them as something the state should provide for. Public misconceptions in how cathedrals are funded is amply covered in this report. The challenge to cathedral chapters is clear: evidence shows that those who understand that cathedrals largely function through public donations are also more likely to give. But it is difficult to accurately convey the financial workings of these institutions: it is not that they receive no state funding, but that the support of the taxpayer is almost always delivered through highly specific and project-oriented grants, usually time limited.

As bristling as it is to be charged to enter these great cathedrals, the fire at Notre-Dame reminds us that they are not as permanent as they seem. If a large Church of England cathedral suffered a catastrophic fire, it is quite easy to imagine an Anglican diocese deciding to preserve a ruin rather than undertake a comprehensive rebuilding. Notre-Dame de Paris had the backing of the French state and the generosity of significant private capital, firmed up by the cultural pride we expect from the French. It is impossible to imagine the English not responding likewise if St Paul’s or Westminster Abbey (admittedly not a cathedral) burnt to the ground – but what of smaller, more rustic cathedrals? Would the more sprawling and rural Anglican dioceses have the confidence to seek the resources to mount a full-scale restoration? We should hope so, but it does give pause for thought.

Frequent are the complaints from Catholics and others that our cathedrals are becoming commercialised – and the Theos report doesn’t shy away from confronting this aspect of cathedral life today. There is much to object to, but I believe we need to grin and bear it. The cathedrals do not “belong” to the present: they are God’s ultimately, but also ours. Part of this shared ownership means it is our responsibility to look after them physically, and this requires money. If cathedrals are forced to commercialise, monetise and fundraise in ways we find vulgar or spiritually unrewarding, I am afraid it is simply the lot of this generation to grin and bear it – and to put a fiver in the box on our way out. Our smugness at objecting is not going to keep a pointed arch from tumbling to the ground.

It is not that there aren’t mistakes made along the way. The Church of England’s move in 2021 to reclassify cathedral chapters – surely something sui generis in English canon and civil law – was a lamentable exercise in process-driven reform. Cathedral chapters now sit under the simultaneous supervision of the Church Commissioners and the Charity Commission, not to mention their local Anglican ordinary bishop. Rather than appreciating the unique status of our state church’s history and the flexibility it provides, the drive towards conformity with modern legal and corporate culture may prove a straitjacket in the long term.

The Charity Commission has proved itself in recent years to have become more interventionist while often possessing remarkably little religious literacy. Their treatment of the – admittedly weird and sect-like – Plymouth Brethren in the 2010s had all the hallmarks of a creeping fascist bullying, picking off the easy unpopular target that could then be used to establish a precedent and expand the Commission’s powers. It was only a savvy – and expensive – political campaign by the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church that staved off the attempt to remove charitable status from this awkward denomination’s trusts.

The move to establish cathedral chapters as charitable entities reflects a broader tendency in modern Britain to regard ancient religious institutions less as living inheritances requiring imagination and trust, and more as managerial problems to be standardised, regulated and audited into submission.

Nonetheless, the gravitational pull of England’s cathedrals remains strong and reflects something deep within our human psyche. Man was made for God, and the Church established by Christ gave men and women the tools to commune with Him and live with Him. Deprived of these tools as much of our society now is, the human desire for transcendence remains. The Church of England’s cathedrals, on the whole, still provide spaces where stillness and quiet are not just welcome, but normal, where contemplation is socially acceptable, and where a sense of sanctuary from the outside world is provided. In an age of constant communication, interruption and distraction, cathedrals provide a place where we can stop. Their very stones are visual evidence of the rootedness of England’s history and whether through Christian faith, civic engagement or mere curiosity they can allow newcomers to this realm to form a bond with the England of eternity.

Theos’ polling repeatedly suggests that many visitors are seeking something deeper than heritage tourism. Reassuringly, of those who visited cathedrals, a majority – 54 per cent – did so in the context of a religious service. These include regular services like Evensong or Anglican Eucharists, but also remembrance services, carol services, funerals, weddings and christenings. Christians – and especially Anglicans – remain the most frequent visitors to cathedrals, but even of those non-religious surveyed, two-thirds had managed to visit a cathedral at some point in the past three years. A majority of the non-religious also specifically agreed that public worship should remain the key function of a cathedral – giving a much more open-minded and tolerant picture of non-religious England than the scolding voices of the National Secular Society or Humanists UK might like to portray.

This may be because people continue seeking transcendence even when they no longer possess the theological language to describe it. The report repeatedly speaks of visitors searching for silence, calm, beauty, stillness and sanctuary. One third of cathedral-visiting “Nones” even reported experiencing God through the calm and quiet of cathedral spaces. Modern England may no longer be fully Christian, but neither is it fully materialist. The appetite for sacred space clearly remains.

Ultimately, England’s cathedrals are not for us: they are for God. And like everything done for God, they also provide – however imperfectly, mirroring the wounded fallen state of our humanity – immense good for ourselves. Conceived as reflections of Heaven, England’s cathedrals are very English and reflect an English vision of Heaven. Their great value is that they can still feel like home to so many different people, while also pointing beyond this world towards what should, God willing, become our eternal home with Him.