Christianity is collapsing everywhere except London!!!!

THE English church of most people's imagining is rural, and so is the English Christian. “The modern town-dweller has no God and no Devil,” complained the dean of St Paul's Cathedral in 1919. True then, perhaps, but the landscape of belief in England is changing fast. The latest report of the English Church Census, an independent count of bums on pews which is carried out every seven to nine years, contains the surprising news that London, the modern-day Gomorrah, is now more devout than almost everywhere else.

In 1979, when the first census was carried out, London was the least observant region of Britain. One in ten Londoners could be found in church on a given Sunday. That compared with one in six in poor northern counties such as Cumbria and Lancashire and with one in five in heavily Catholic Merseyside. The wealthy Home Counties, which surround London, were almost as godless.

The most recent church census shows a reversal of this pattern. Churchgoing in London has declined in the past few decades, but only slightly: in May of last year 8.3% of people went to church on Sunday. Elsewhere, especially outside the Home Counties, Christianity has been routed. In Cumbria 7.1% of people went to church, and in Lancashire 6.5% did. Almost by default, London has become the second-most observant region of Britain after Merseyside, and will soon overhaul it.

There are two main reasons for Christianity's peculiar survival in the capital. The first is immigration. In the past few years London has imported the descendants of many of the people who were converted abroad by 19th-century British missionaries. Kingsway International Christian Centre, which attracts more than 10,000 people to its Sunday services, claims that 46 nations are represented in its congregation, many of them African. Black African immigration is the chief reason for the rapid growth of Pentecostal churches in London (see chart).

Immigration has slowed the decline in almost all denominations, including Catholicism and Anglicanism. In England as a whole, 12% of Anglicans and 17% of Catholics are now non-white. And a growing number of white Christians are immigrants too. Croatians and Poles have opened churches in London. One of the capital's biggest congregations is Hillsong, an Australian import with a notably Antipodean congregation. It meets at the Dominion Theatre in between performances of “We Will Rock You”, a musical tribute to the sexually unorthodox rock band Queen.

The other reason London still goes to church has to do with the city's odd social mix. The city has relatively few working-class whites—the group that has lost faith most dramatically in the past few decades. It does, however, have plenty of wealthy whites. Churchmen are ambivalent about them, partly because of a saying about camels and needles, partly because they suspect that some middle-class folk only come to church because they want to get their children into religious schools.

But come to church they do. Some of the capital's largest congregations, such as the evangelical Holy Trinity Brompton, are stuffed with young professionals. The church has dealt with young people's tricky habit of moving frequently by “planting” new churches, thus creating a London-wide network. Such initiatives, together with the piety of young black Londoners, explains the most striking finding of the English Church Census. Fully 57% of all people in their 20s who went to church in May last year did so in the capital.

As English Christianity's centre of gravity moves away from crumbling rural churches and provincial cathedrals towards the multicoloured congregations of the capital, it will face pressure to change. In the past three years the worldwide Anglican church has faced bitter arguments over homosexuality. These have revealed how hard it is to reconcile the views of liberal Americans and Britons with those of conservative Africans. Such fissures are gradually being imported into domestic churches too.