The British Social Attitudes survey, which has been running annually for 30 years now, was published yesterday and showed that, over the course of those 30 years, there has been a steep decline in the numbers who think marriage is important for raising children and those who identify as religious.

The numbers aren’t really surprising. Still, it raises the question; is the collapse in religious affiliation and the collapse in the family linked and do they have the same cause?

Traditionally, most commentators have presumed that they are and the weakening of religious practice came first.

But in a recent book, How The West Really Lost God, US author Mary Eberstadt has argued that the trend ran the other way, that the weakening of the family and marriage has driven the decline of religious practice.  

Eberstadt argues that the standard explanations of the decline of religious practice aren’t really convincing. In a recent interview to promote the book, she said “prosperity alone doesn’t drive out belief in God, and neither does education, rationalism, or science per se. Nor do the two world wars explain it, another commonly accepted explanation”.

Instead, she suggests that families were weakened by the social and economic upheaval unleashed by the Industrial Revolution and the attendant urbanisation.

It’s an intriguing thesis. It’s probably fair to say that the process hasn’t been all one way, however.  

For example, a look at the British Social Attitudes survey suggests that the decline in religious sentiment was further along the road in 1989 than the collapse in pro-marriage sentiment.  

Back then, 34pc of people said they had no religion. That’s risen to 48pc. That’s a pretty big change.

But the number of those who thought that people who want children should get married first stood at 71pc in 1983. That’s collapsed down to 42pc. Further, the number who strongly agreed with the idea that people should wait to get married before having children in 1989 was 25pc. The equivalent number now in nine percent.

Whichever way you look at it, it is certainly fair to say that both processes, secularisation and the decline of marriage, feed into each other. Hanging over both is a culture which exalts personal freedom above all other goods, and promotes a radical individualism.

It is this culture which is also partly behind the collapse in membership of political parties, trade unions, politicial participation, volunteerism and, in more recent years, the decline in newspaper readership.  

In such a society, paradoxically, the role of Government increases. as the State ends up taking the place which would have traditionally belonged to the family. (Interestingly, the British Social Attitude survey also found that people had become far more sympathetic to the welfare state, even as their attitude to traditional families had become more blasé.)

Unfortunately, the losers in this culture tend to be dependents; children and the elderly.