Our relationship with the Church in terms of marriage, for example, was fundamentally altered by another piece of Conservative legislation that seemed minor at the time. The Marriage Act of 1994 gave hotels, museums, stately homes and anywhere else with a licence the right to host a wedding. Many people asked themselves why they should sit through services they didn’t want to be in, when the local hotel manager was offering all they wanted, and a glass of chilled champagne, too. In 1981 there were 351,973 weddings in England and Wales, but by 2007 there were only 231,973. Religious weddings dropped from more than half to a third. It wasn’t hard to see where people were going: in 2007, hotels and other venues hosted 100,000 services. Baptisms have fallen out of fashion and the market for funerals has also opened up, so that only 40 per cent now involve the Church of England. Its claim to be the place where we go to be “hatched, matched and dispatched” is now slender, and this will weaken it further – perhaps terminally.