Bishops ... had begun to admit, rather coyly to start with, that they were not sure about the existence of God or the truth of their religion’s central beliefs." It would not be long before "the Bishop of Durham, Dr. David Jenkins, would speak of the resurrection as ’conjuring tricks with old bones,’

"If our ancestors had been like us they would have lost at Trafalgar and Waterloo and given up on the attempt to colonize North America, because of the absence of safety nets, sexual equality and proper child care."

This had dire consequences because "a world without God meant no punishment for sin, and therefore no sin ..." The church tried very hard to stay "relevant" but if no one believed in God or souls or sin, "how was it to become ’relevant’ to the new age without becoming completely irrelevant to its purpose of saving souls?"

As in virtually every institution, the rot started at the top, and "the Church, like the railways or the government, was more and more being run for the benefit of its own employees rather than for the mere churchgoers or the nation itself." As a result, congregations that were perfectly content, had all manner of noisome changes foisted on them.

Rather than slow the defection of worshipers, "modernization" has hastened it, but this has not slowed the pace of destructive innovation. As Mr. Hitchens explains, the church once understood it must be conservative:

"Thomas Cranmer [author of the 1662 Book of Prayer that was until recently in common use] and the great translators consciously built their books to last, just as the architects of church buildings had done, and continued to do. They believed that some ideas lay outside normal time and could therefore be expressed in a way that defied passing fashion. This belief survived until the late 20th century," when it was done to death with trendy new liturgy, music, doctrine, prayers, and church decorations.

Mr. Hitchens explains why the old, majestic liturgy had to go: "The glories of the language were offensive to the modernizers because they reminded them of what they owed to the past, because they reinforced the bonds of tradition, but above all because they constantly reminded them of a view of religion which was not theirs. It did not offer salvation through the Overseas Development Agency, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, Amnesty International and the Social Security budget. It offered it in an entirely non-political way, through the faith and deeds of the individual." Mr. Hitchens points out that the old confessions vividly evoked the wretchedness of man caught in the toils of sin whereas the new versions "sound like the apologies offered by railway companies for late trains."

Mr. Hitchens explains that "a man’s moral worth is now measured by the level of taxation he is willing to support, rather than by his faith or even his good works. Other tests - opposition to apartheid or General Pinochet - are valued more highly than personal adherence to the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount."

As the church subsides into irrelevance, "many young children entirely deprived of a tradition passed on without thinking by twenty previous generations have no idea at all of what goes on in churches . . . ."

Mr. Hitchens notes that nowhere has there been greater change than in British attitudes towards sex, which were always much more conservative than those on the continent. Now, there are no social sanctions against fornication, which has brought with it soaring rates of divorce, illegitimacy, abortion, and disease. "Now the entire country seemed to be obsessed," Mr. Hitchens writes, "with staring at naked female chests, swearing and making dirty jokes. Like the pagans of old, unaffected by climate, the British were now dancing round a giant phallus. Unlike the pagans theirs was a sterile phallus, disarmed by condoms and pills - the first heathen sexual cult to be based around sterility rather than fertility."

Mr. Hitchens notes that the sex revolution has changed our vocabularies, not least by dignifying youthful copulation as "sexual experimentation:" "What, by the way, are these ’experiments’ and the other ’experiments’ in drug-taking seeking to prove or disprove, which is not already known? It is interesting that this word is so frequently used for wrong actions taken by the young." Likewise, the disappearance of social sanction means we no longer talk about "unmarried mothers" or "broken homes," but instead of "one-parent families," as if they were just as good as the other kind.

Wittingly or not, government promoted bastardy by lathering promiscuous mothers with uplift and benefits that remove the penalties for reckless procreation. Of course, the helpless "one-parent family" is the perfect client of the state. Completely dependent on the Social Security budget, its members have dismantled the last bulwark against serfdom. As Mr. Hitchens reminds us: "The greatest fortress of human liberty, proof against all earthly powers, is the family. . . . All serious tyrannies have sought to undermine or infiltrate it, socialist tyrannies most of all."

Mr. Hitchens concedes that the lot of the "fallen woman" was a harsh one, but accepting illegitimacy only made it more common, and condemned millions of children to the impersonal cruelty of fatherlessness: "Shame and stigma, which once both defended respectable marriage and heaped misery on the poor bastard and his wretched mother, have disappeared. Instead, there is the slower, vaguer, more indirect misery of a society where fewer and fewer children have two parents, and where more and more women are married to the State."

Even the left is now groping towards a realization that there is such a thing as depravity, and that a hereditary class of welfare recipients is not a blessing. However: "If you do not believe in sin, then you can hardly be expected to use up much energy fighting against it. And if you do believe in sin, then you are ’judgemental,’ and automatically excluded from the debate."

Interestingly, Mr. Hitchens calls all this "the Americanization of our sex lives," claiming that "[Elvis] Presley dug beneath the fortifications of British sexual reserve, leaving them so weakened that John Lennon and Mick Jagger could knock them down completely."

The destruction of the family was yet another cause and consequence of monolithic liberalism: "[The family’s] defeat during the last five decades has helped to produce the most conformist and least individualist generation in known history. Without a strong family, the growing child is much more easily influenced by his own age group, themselves under pressure from TV programmers, advertisers, teachers and fashion."

A nation that now approves of sport sex of all kinds can hardly disapprove of homosexuals, whom Britons dare not criticize but must "sentimentalize . . . as modern heroes." Mr. Hitchens notes an asymmetry: "Smoking and buggery can both kill you," he observes, but smokers are foolish people who take dangerous risks while homosexuals are victims and martyrs. No one officially recommends "safer" smoking-low tar and nicotine. Complete renunciation is the only option for smokers, but "there is not even a hint of disapproval of anal sex or illegal drugs in official or semi-official propaganda about AIDS."

Much of what Mr. Hitchens opposes is the miasma of modernism common to all Western countries, but he has specifically British concerns. He thinks a small island is not a good place for automobiles, and that by supplanting an extensive train system cars have destroyed much of the countryside. He regrets the disappearance of regional accents. He is sorry that "specifically local or specifically British styles of architecture have given way to the international blandness of concrete and glass." He also mourns the loss of British weights and measures and of the old currency system of shillings, florins, and crowns: "[I]t is an odd truth that this sort of measure, highly practical and tested as it is, rarely survives any sort of revolution. It requires deference and tradition to survive. Without it, the toe-counting simplicity of decimal and metric systems is all that is left."

Now, of course, Britain is debating whether to join the European Monetary System and thereby lose not only the pound sterling but economic independence. For Mr. Hitchens, a false step means no return: "If we are what we used to be, then this is a last unrepeatable moment at which we can halt our extinction as a culture and a nation."

What Mr. Hitchens is describing is nothing short of tragedy. Like all men of the West, the British are a denatured people, so weakened and bewildered they are unable to resist even what would be genuine abolition: displacement by aliens. What makes it tragedy is that the British have done this to themselves. Mr. Hitchens recalls that to Evelyn Waugh, having Labour in power in 1945 was "similar to living under foreign occupation." As for the current state of decline:

"A real occupation would almost certainly have produced a resistance, the circulation of banned texts and the holding of secret religious services. But a county which ploughs under its own culture, without violence or open suppression, has no such resistance. The objects of the attack are unaware that they are under attack, and there are no martyrs, no persecution to bring resistance into being."

The revolution has been non-violent-so far: "I cannot guarantee that it will not lead to bloodshed in the end, as revolutionary ideas so often do, but it has been restrained up till now. For this has been a very British revolution, perhaps the last thing we shall do that is British."