What does the decline of religion have to do with the current leadership battle in the Conservative party? In our strange constitutional arrangement this is not a petty incident of political squabbling, but a much more important contest which will decide who our prime minister will be.
CS Lewis, in his essay “The Decline of Religion”, written in 1946, said, “the decline of ‘religion’ is no doubt a bad thing for the ‘World’. By it all the things that made England a fairly happy country are, I suppose, endangered; the comparative purity of her public life, the comparative humanity of her police, and the possibility of some mutual respect and kindness between political opponents.” Yet again, Lewis has been proved correct in this prediction that a decline in religion makes our public institutions worse for the public.
