As for faith itself, we hardly give a prayer for the power of prayer – only 6% of people confess to being churchgoing (and the figures do not show how many of those attend to access a food bank…).
The homecoming of the willowy, teetotal, churchgoing patriot was marked by a tickertape parade in New York, with 100,000 people filling the streets and cheering.
Congregations have shrunk to an elderly tenth of what they were when churchgoing was a public duty often enforced by the local gentry on their servants and staff.
That's not so odd: most countryfolk, churchgoing or not, care about their church; not many even of the faithful worry just who's in charge of it, so long as the job's well done.Between her two churches, Ms Headley takes two or three services every Sunday, plus Communion on Thursdays at West Meon.
So Mr Gruber excludes an individual's own group from the measures, and instead calculates the density of "co-religionists", the proportion of the population that shares your religion but not your race.According to Mr Gruber's calculations, a 10% increase in the density of co-religionists leads to an 8.5% rise in churchgoing.
Anyone exposed to them, from speculators to churchgoing custodians of widows' pensions, tried to yank their cash out, causing a run that threatened another Great Depression.
For them, churchgoing is a matter of personal belief, not conservative activism.
Over 80% of the country's 7.3m people declare themselves followers of the Orthodox Christianity but only 10% see churchgoing as an important part of their lives.
The church runs 4,800 state-funded schools, of which about half are permitted to reserve some or all of their places for children from churchgoing families (which tend to be better-off).
Arabic is now used in the services of the Coptic Orthodox Church for the lessons from the Bible and for many of the variable hymns; only certain short refrains that churchgoing people all understand are not in Arabic.
Now churchgoing Tories are once again mightily displeased with the bothersome priests.
