What are church buildings for? What use are they to the majority of the population who never go inside them? It has been decades since it was true that almost everyone in the country would have been in a church at least once, for their baptism, even if they had to be carried out, screaming, after the experience. Yet the exterior of an ancient church still moves us in a way that no other kind of architecture does, and the interiors are some of the greatest works of art that have ever been created in Britain. It would be an act of vandalism and defilement to allow them to rot. Even if their purpose is very difficult to articulate, and impossible to fit into a spreadsheet, they still speak to unbelievers in a way that nothing else can. They may no longer save souls, but they point to what it means to talk about a soul.

The age and intricacy that makes old churches wonderful also makes them fragile. They demand endless skilled and expensive repairs. The annual cost of major repairs to listed churches is estimated at around £100m. Last year about a quarter of that figure was met from lottery funds dedicated to the preservation of places of worship – which means, overwhelmingly, Anglican churches. Now the Heritage Lottery Fund is ending that programme, to furious protests from the Church of England.

The Heritage Lottery Fund claims that it is simplifying and debureaucratising the grant application process, and that the same proportion of its funds will go to churches under the new system. The church points out that this will be the first year since 1977 when there is not a ringfenced pot of state money for churches, and worries that the new system will disadvantage unfashionable buildings in places without fundraising expertise.

This is not so pressing a problem in the case of cathedrals, which increasingly must function as tourist attractions and charge admission if they are to keep going. That works almost well enough for the magnificent and ancient ones – Winchester, Salisbury, Durham and other wonders of the world, even if they too struggle to keep afloat. But the great majority of the listed churches in this country are not in tourist cities or, if they are, they are not in the much visited part. The Church of England boasts of having a presence in every community, but what is to be done with the presences when the communities have disappeared? In many country villages the church is the only public building left, now that the shop, the post office and the pub have all closed.

A managerial approach to this problem would close thousands of churches. This is what the markets have already done with Victorian chapels. It is what the Roman Catholic church is being forced into with part of its Victorian heritage. The trend in fundamentalist congregations is to make use of any buildings, so long as they are warm and cheap. That might be the purely religious, or at least puritan, answer to the problem, but it is not one that either the state or the wider community can go along with. Nor could the church agree to a solution that valued these buildings merely for their architectural and aesthetic merit, rather than the purpose for which they were intended. Whatever the outcome of this present spat, some undogmatic way must be found for the state to help preserve these splendours which are so much a part of Britain.