December 10, 2004
Ananova
The Church of England's second most senior figure has said he would be "hard-pushed" to describe Britain as a Christian country.
The Archbishop of York Dr David Hope said people were now less committed to the church and secularist tendencies were on the increase.
He said large numbers of people still said they believed in God and described themselves as Christians but how they expressed their Christianity had changed enormously.
"I think I would be hard-pushed to say we were a Christian country because of the secularist tendencies, the fact that commitment to the Christian church is less than it was," he said.
Dr Hope is giving up his job to take up a post as a parish priest in Ilkley, near Bradford. He said that was what God wanted him to do.
"Deep down it is a response to what I believe to be the call of God to be a parish priest," he told BBC1's Breakfast with Frost. The fact that I have become bishop and archbishop came as a little bit a surprise really I suppose. God has these little surprises up his sleeve. I have always felt I would like to finish my ministry as I began it, as a parish priest."
But he said he would not miss the bureaucracy that came with his current post. "I think I shall be quite glad to go into something downsized, into something a little bit less large," he said.
Dr Hope, who has aligned himself with traditionalists in the Anglican church, also warned against a schism opening up over the ordination of gay vicars in the USA.
He said the unity of the church was fundamentally important. Dr Hope also touched on the fallout from Home Secretary David Blunkett's affair with married publisher Kimberly Quinn. He said "on the whole" people's private and public lives were separate.
"But it is not quite so easy to have clear blue water between what you might call the private and the public," he said. "I would therefore want to raise some questions about the impact of the private in the public sphere. The one impinges on the other."
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_1208290.html?menu=