Britain cannot be called Christian, says Archbishop

London, England – The second most senior churchman in England has announced that Britain can no longer be considered a Christian country.

In an admission that his church no longer reaches large sections of the population, David Hope, the Archbishop of York, said: “I’d be a bit hard pushed to say we were a Christian country.”

The unusually candid remarks were made during a pre–recorded interview for BBC1’s Breakfast with Frost program.

Asked by Sir David Frost whether he believed Britain was Christian, he replied: “I think I really want to question that. Large numbers of people describe themselves as believing in God. Large numbers still would say that they are Christian. How they then express that Christianity has changed enormously.”

Hope, who will leave office in February to work as a parish priest in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, blamed “secularist tendencies” for the country’s abandonment of Christianity. “Commitment to the Christian church is less than it was,” he admitted.

Hope said he acknowledged that some Christians find the doctrine of the virgin birth difficult, but argued that belief in the resurrection was essential for faithful followers of the Christian religion.

Hope also waded into the debate over David Blunkett, the home secretary. He said Blunkett’s affair raised serious questions about the public’s trust in politicians and said there was a link between private conduct and public office.

“I don’t think it’s quite so easy to have clear blue water between what you might call the private and the public,” he said, adding: “The one impinges upon the other.” He continued: “Integrity seems to me quite crucial here. One senses people are beginning to feel ‘how can you trust?’, ‘what about integrity?’ I think those are big moral questions for us.”

Hope was the only senior cleric in Britain to support the war in Iraq but said that he regretted it now. He also expressed disappointment about the misleading information given to the public before the invasion.

He said he had become disillusioned because of the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. He had based his theological justification for the war on the now discredited claim that Saddam Hussein could launch weapons within 45 minutes.

Frost asked Hope why, if Britain is not a Christian country, is Tony Blair choosing his successor as archbishop. Hope replied that the prime minister’s role was confined to choosing only between two names submitted by the Crown Nominations Commission, in which the church played the leading role.