St Hilda’s College in Oxford is set to become the first undergraduate college in the University to cease having a dedicated Anglican chapel, transitioning instead to a multi-faith prayer room.

This is an interesting move given the college’s history. Dorothea Beale, the pioneering educationalist who founded it, was a church-goer of high church principles, motivated by deep religious feeling in her courageous fight for women’s suffrage and women’s education. She named the college St Hilda’s after a seventh century Abbess, St Hild of Whitby, who oversaw a double monastery of monks and nuns dedicated to learning and wisdom.

In most other ways, this is a pragmatic decision and should be uncontroversial. Times change. Proportions of religious students are going down (although if Brexit leads to an increase in international students from beyond the EU this trend may well reverse), and a smaller proportion of those are Anglican or even Christian. Catholics now make up an almost equal proportion of church-attending Christians, and Theos' recent research on faith and belief student societies found that there are now more independent Pentecostal or Charismatic societies than Christian Unions, and almost an equal number of Islamic societies as Christian Unions, indicating a diversification of the student religious landscape. As the Chaplain at St Hilda’s sensibly points out, “Christians can worship or pray in any space”- as can, of course, Muslims, Jews and most other faiths.

What the decision does reveal is the increasing pressure on the established church, as it seeks to hold on to its role as a welcoming host to other faiths in a diverse society. Anglican college chapels have long been used for prayer and religious practice by groups of students from other denominations and faiths, and most chaplains have seen creating inclusive spaces for all kinds of religious practice a key part of their role. There are some specific needs for religious minorities that universities need to meet – washing facilities and prayer space for Muslim students for example, but these provisions shouldn’t be difficult and frankly should already be in place.

The change then is not so much in how the space is used as in how much tolerance there is for particularity, however hospitable. St Hilda’s former chapel (demolished in a building project, with promises of a rebuilt chapel) was no great loss, architecturally, but the soulless ‘neutrality’ of multi-faith spaces tends to be the cost for the gain in perceived fairness.

A multi-faith prayer room being ‘fairer’ is assumed, but never proven. It is unclear what has driven the decision – whether non-Christian and non-Anglican students did in fact want a multi-faith space instead of a chapel (which would be a reasonable thing to respond to) or whether college authorities were making assumptions that neutrality is always the way to inclusion.

When Theos researched the role of the Bishops on the House of Lords in 2011, the overwhelming feeling was that the presence of the established church protected, rather than pushed out other faiths, and that it was playing its ‘welcoming host’ role well. Similarly, our research into English Cathedrals in 2012 found that their visitors, including non-religious people, non-Christians and non-Anglicans found them inclusive and welcoming whilst they maintained a distinctly non-neutral identity. Over 90 per cent of the ‘non-religious’ group (generally the most hostile) said they felt connected with history and tradition in cathedrals, and the majority of people agreed that “[cathedrals] reach out beyond the Church of England” and that they function as “a ‘hub’ to engage the life of the wider community”. When we studied attitudes to a future coronation in 2015, support for a Christian coronation even among non-religious and (more tellingly) non-Christian religious people was consistently stronger than support for a secular or multi-faith coronation. No such research exists for college chapels but I would expect to see similar results.

It’s an easy mistake for those who aren’t religious to assume that people of faith want perceived “neutrality” in order to feel welcome, but it could be avoided by actually asking them. St Hilda’s may find that in this well-meaning move they lose much, and gain little.

Elizabeth Oldfield is director of the think tank Theos