In Kenya, Anglicanism offers social cachet; and in Rwanda, Anglicanism attracts those who prefer the Anglophone Commonwealth to the Francophone past.Some African Anglicans, such as Archbishop Henry Orombi of Uganda, reject the idea that they are clones of the Victorian missionaries, or of any other European model.
Britain is not necessarily becoming more godless – in the same period, the number of Muslims grew by a million, amounting to 2.4% of the population – just less the proportion of Anglicans.
Without becoming both more conservative over things such as gay marriage, and more left-leaning over things such as nuclear weapons or welfare cuts, Mr Cameron will be unable to capture much more of the Christian vote.But perhaps the bigger problem for him is that his traditional voting base of middle-class Anglicans is declining.
Theos, a religious think-tank, found in 2014 that practising Anglicans were more likely to vote Conservative (the exceptions being in 1966 and 1997), and in 2010 were more than twice as likely to vote for them than Catholics were.
This is a new outfit set up by Pope Benedict XVI for Anglicans unable to accept their church's decision this year to let women be bishops.The move follows a crisis in the early 1990s over ordaining women priests, which Anglo-Catholics saw as dooming their hope for eventual unity with the (male-only) Roman Catholic priesthood.
Some other Anglicans are pleased to be rid of a tiresome minority.
An ultra-conservative America-based wing of the Orthodox church has just split down the middle over the rights and wrongs of the case.As Rowan Williams, outgoing leader of the world's 80m Anglicans, has noted, the glorifiers won sympathy across a wide swathe of Imperial Russia, from conservatives to reformers.
Analysing the 2010 general election and all previous ones going back to the 1950s, it observed that self-described Anglicans had almost always been more likely to vote Conservative than Labour, except for a few moments when the whole nation swung left.
Whigs, Tories, Anglicans and many Catholics opposed James's intrusive and aggressive state apparatus.
However, three-quarters of Anglicans are now in Africa, and most of them are passionately opposed to the idea.
The issue that has led them to renounce their own national leadership is homosexuality; some of the minority of Anglicans (or Episcopalians) who object to gay bishops in American dioceses are aligning with conservatives in Africa.The most influential is Archbishop Peter Akinola, who leads the 17m-strong Anglican church in Nigeria, as well as his new congregants in Virginia.
