Churches are the obvious place for revived localism yet their potential remains locked behind regulatory clutter and spiralling costs
The "big society" will be on annual parade this Sunday. Uncomfortable though it is to atheists, Christianity is still the largest affinity group in Britain, with probably four million attending services in 47,000 buildings that pass as churches. We cannot ask why, be it faith, habit, a desire for comradeship or Britain's extraordinary tradition of granting privileged choice of state-funded school to "practising" Anglicans. While regular church attendance declines, it is actually rising on high days and holidays. However we view the obsession with next week's royal wedding, it remains a church service.
People do not attend churches just to worship. The most extensive ever survey of British churches, published last week, shows that 1.6 million people now use them as a base for local voluntary work. Mostly this is classified as "community activity", with faith-based activity some way behind. Since the number of churches vastly exceeds any other local institution – four times the number of post offices or village halls – the status of these buildings as a potential focus of communal Britain cannot be ignored.
The survey was conducted by the National Churches Trust to beg for cash. It points out that 80% of places of Christian worship are used for non-church activities and yet are in receipt of little or no public money. It might have added that the one area where attendance is growing is among migrant communities, notably Catholic Poles and Pentecostal West Indians and Africans, in parts of cities where the church is virtually the sole agency of social and family cohesion. It must save social services millions; the Anglicans once claimed their own contribution was worth £1bn a year.
As neighbourhood facilities such as the post office, the shop, the pub, the surgery, the police house, the branch library and the village school disappear, it is ironic that the one ubiquitous beacon of local community in a secular society is one that has stood since the middle ages, the church steeple. Its architecture may seem archaic, even alien. It might stand guard over a bleak cavern of a nave, filled much of the time with bats and ghosts. Its churchyard might be a gaunt, unusable waste, defying property developer and diocesan treasurer alike. But there it stands, a majestic, incontrovertible, everlasting fact – 10,000 Anglican churches alone are listed and untouchable.
The difficulty for the church, and especially the Church of England, is to find some synthesis between often furiously opposing views on the future of these buildings. Antagonism is not confined to atheists, to whom churches can anyway be places of beauty, but within the faith community itself. To many Christians, old buildings are irrelevant to belief – a distraction, an expense and a historical encumbrance, summed up in the evangelical catchphrase, "The church is not a church". I have lost count of the number of vicars, churchwardens, guidebooks and notices all vigorously asserting "this church is not a museum".
Anglican churches are museums, and should be proud of the fact. They are not just buildings devoted, in some sense of the phrase, to the muses of learning and the arts. They are also places for the display and enjoyment of the relics of a community's past and present. The church is where the rituals of life and death take place, where the dead in war and peace are remembered, where family is respected and recorded.
Forget religion for a moment, and concentrate on the buildings. Here, surely, is where to reconnect the sinews of local Britain, the political flavour of the month. The fascination with church ritual suggests a craving not for "faith" but for a bonding communal experience. The church is also usually the only thing of beauty for miles around, an exhibition of the arts of architecture, carving, woodwork, painting, embroidery and music, a national gallery of vernacular art, locally on display.
Many churches are at last being put to new uses, more akin to their pre-Reformation status. They are reviving as concert halls and theatres, meeting places, cafeterias, schoolrooms and even markets. I recall Tamworth church in Staffordshire on market day, with stalls and tea urns spilling over into the nave, or Blickling church in Norfolk, with each local institution given an aisle bay in which to advertise its wares. Ever since the church in Leicestershire's Sheepy Magna opened its post office in 2004, others have followed suit, joined by village shops, secondhand booksellers and even, in Toxteth, a bingo hall and launderette.
Such buildings were originally financed from the tithes of local people and continue to rely on their support. They are always short of money but, in my experience, remarkably adept at finding it. Only 8% of those covered in the survey were recorded as in poor state, and they were mostly in towns. Some may have to go, while many need some architectural imagination for their reuse, which is why I find it difficult to object to churches ripping out hard Victorian pews in favour of more flexible seating.
The greatest financial burden on churches is not their upkeep as such but the regulatory clutter that surrounds it. The nuns of Tyburn, who were told to close the convent if they could not pay £400,000 for ramps and lifts under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, may be an extreme case of Whitehall protection racketeering. But the ban on ladders in favour of scaffolding to repair windows and roofs, defying centuries of local practice, has increased the cost of many repairs tenfold. There is no question that the greatest menace to the survival of parish churches today is government.
The overwhelming majority of Britons say they do not want to see these loved landmarks disappear. The reoccupation of much of rural England by wealthier residents has given many churches a new avenue of rescue. I reckon that within a mile of every dodgy steeple is a millionaire with a guilty conscience. Such consciences built these places; they should be harnessed to restoring them.
In Germany, Switzerland and other European countries, a hypothecated local tax is used to support the church, from which taxpayers can opt out. Most do not. This system should apply in Britain, and be extended for good measure to other such taxes, to keep open local libraries, schools and clinics. It would be the one reform most likely to reinvigorate parish government. Only a control-obsessed Treasury stands in the way of such invigoration. Unless the purse strings of such local activism can be released, all talk of neighbourhood empowerment is hot air.
This may seem small change in the context of the "big society", except that the phrase itself is contradictory. There is no such thing as a big society, just thousands of small ones. Only a big politician such as David Cameron, talking big, taxing big and heading big government, could regard bigness as a term of approval. If churches are to act as a physical focus for a new localism, it is because the communities at whose heart they sit are small. They are harbingers of a small society, the only sort that means anything.