Lord Williams enters debate provoked by PM, saying UK is not a nation of believers, but neither is it full of dedicated secularists

Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, has declared that Britain is no longer a nation of believers and that it has entered a “post-Christian” era.

Entering a debate triggered by David Cameron’s declaration before Easter that Britain should be “more confident about our status as a Christian country” and “more evangelical” about faith, Williams said that Britain was “post-Christian”, but not “non-Christian”.

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Speaking in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, Williams – now Lord Williams of Oystermouth – said it was important to “pick your way quite carefully” in the debate about the nation’s relationship with Christianity.

“If I say that this is a post-Christian nation, that doesn’t mean necessarily non-Christian. It means the cultural memory is still quite strongly Christian. And in some ways, the cultural presence is still quite strongly Christian. But it is post-Christian in the sense that habitual practice for most of the population is not taken for granted.

“A Christian nation can sound like a nation of committed believers, and we are not that. Equally, we are not a nation of dedicated secularists. I think we’re a lot less secular than the most optimistic members of the British Humanist Association would think.”

Professor Jim Al-Khalili, president of the British Humanist Association, was one of more than 50 public figures who signed a letter to the Daily Telegraph criticising Cameron’s comments about Britain being a Christian country. They said that, apart from in a “narrow constitutional sense”, there was no evidence to justify labelling Britain as a Christian state and that to assert otherwise ran the risk of fostering “alienation and division”.

In his interview, when pressed for a yes/no response to the question about whether Britain was a Christian country, Williams replied: “A Christian country as a nation of believers? No. A Christian country in the sense of still being very much saturated by this vision of the world and shaped by it? Yes.”

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He also said that, in the future, awareness of Christianity might decline. “Given that we have a younger generation who now know less about this legacy … there may be a further shrinkage of awareness and commitment.”

But this could also lead to people discovering Christianity afresh, he said. “The other side is that people then rediscover Christianity with a certain freshness, because it’s not ‘the boring old stuff that we learnt at school and have come to despise’. I see signs of that, talking to youngsters … in school visits. There is a curiosity about Christianity.”

According an ICM poll for the Sunday Telegraph, 56% of people say Britain is a Christian country, compared with 30% who say it is a non-religious society. Some 14% of respondents told ICM that they saw themselves as practising Christian, 38% said they were non-practising Christian, 41% non-religious, and 5% members of another faith.

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Lady Warsi, the Foreign Office minister and minister for faith, told the paper that immigration was making Britain more Christian because “some of the biggest church-goers are people whose heritage is in Africa and the Caribbean”.

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