A recent survey showed that two-thirds of the British public still profess to believe in God, although the church's own statistics indicate that rather fewer than one in 10 of us actually make it there on a Sunday. If there is a spiritual hunger - and periodic spasms of national emotion, such as the one following the death of Princess Diana, appear to indicate that there is - then it is of a peculiarly shallow and sentimental kind, and religion has little to do with it.
To be sure, the Anglican church remains Established. Mrs Parker Bowles only has to swim into the public ken for the Archbishop of Canterbury to hasten round to her house to ascertain her true intentions. But in the UK, Christianity appears to be fighting a losing battle with modern life and materialism.
Attendances are in sufficient freefall for the Church's leading statistician to predict that if current trends continue, in 40 years' time there will be no one in the pews at all. The American evangelist Louis Palau has gone so far as to describe Britain as a pagan country, but then he hopes to entice us to his rallies. We pagans nevertheless continue to publish religious books rather as Americans do self-improvement manuals. Dozens of new titles cross the desk each week, but do any of them help? What comfort do they offer for a faltering faith?
I looked forward to seeing Cardinal Hume's last thoughts, now published as The Mystery of Love (Darton Longman Todd, £9.95), in the hope that such a saintly figure would put me on the Path. The 94-page book contains the Cardinal's final thoughts for homilies and prayers, including perhaps his last meditation - written in the days before his death a year ago - on the opening sentences of the Lord's Prayer.
Alas, they are hard going; not in the sense of being intellectually or theologically demanding, but in that the rather trite gobbets look like notes for a sermon and read like aphorisms from a devout Christmas cracker. "Reading and reflecting, either alone or with others, on passages from the Gospel leads to our focusing our minds on Christ, his words and actions. It is the discovering of a friend. It is the beginning of prayer," reads one typical passage from the great spiritual leader.
Little help there, unless for the devout of a particular bent of mind. What of A Time To Heal (Church House, £9.95)? This is the Church of England's latest publication, the outcome of two years' study by a working party considering the healing ministry, advising churches and their congregations how to help those sore oppressed and in need of spiritual, perhaps even medical, advice.
This is not an easy read either, more because of its committee-constructed prose than its spiritual insights, although these too are muddled. In a fashion that goes beyond parody of modern Anglicanism, the working party can't make up its mind whether the church still believes in miracles or not and ends up recommending that those who believe they have been on the receiving end of one should go on taking the tablets.
If the healing ministry handbook illustrates some of the weaknesses of the current church, Monica Furlong's C of E: The State It's In (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99) provides a quite devastating analysis of a church in theological, spiritual and organisational palsy - and this is written by a supporter. It is an essential handbook to the shortcomings of a Church of England hamstrung by its past, frozen by its current position and riddled by the arguments and divisions that have characterised the last few decades.
Furlong follows the church's history, from the great schism of the Reformation and the Elizabethan settlement, through the rise of Methodism and the Oxford Movement, to such modern milestones as the Crockford preface row and the Church Commissioners' scandal - when, in the early 1990s, the church succeeded in losing at least £500m through ill-advised property speculation.
She shows a church paved with good intentions - to which she pays due tribute - but also an institution on the rack. It "often shrinks from doing what it knows it should," she writes, "because it dreads public scorn as well as internal dissension... it vacillates, goes forward, backslides, plays safe and makes itself morally contemptible as it defends itself by claiming that it is holding dissentient voices within it when it is simply frightened to make up its mind. Expediency too often is all."
It is a good job that the book was already at the printers when the church's latest wheeze - the summoning of focus groups to tell it what it was doing wrong - was unveiled at this February's Synod. The 70 Midlanders asked to speak for the nation told Church House that services were boring and went on too long, that the vestments were off-putting and that the personalities most associated with the C of E were Thora Hird and Cliff Richard (the latter scarcely a voice for youth, since he is only five years younger than the Archbishop of Canterbury). Previous generations of churchmen would have had a short way with focus groups.
Sex, or what priests tend to call the genital problem, has dominated church debate since the sexual revolution. The Church of England remains convulsed over women priests and homosexual clergy; Catholicism has the same problem. Its attempt to liberalise with the Vatican Council in 1963 occurred - whether through an accident of timing or divine providence - between the trial of Lady Chatterley and the Beatles' first LP, a fact unaccountably overlooked by Philip Larkin. If the Church of Rome has not suffered the rows and schisms experienced by Anglicanism, that is only because the Pope has no truck with democracy, as expressed by the C of E at its biannual synod.
Catholic women, like their C of E sisters, are on the march - though they have further to go, given that the Pope believes they are incapable of becoming priests. Paradoxically, as Nick Baty points out in Archbishop Cormac and the 21st Century Church (HarperCollins, £8.99), the Catholic church in England has remained relatively relaxed about homosexuality. Baty quotes one gay priest as asserting that up to 40 per cent of his colleagues are gay. Is this absence of angst because of the celibacy rule or because the church, in England at least, has adopted a relatively tolerant attitude to the sinners if not the sin?
Ostensibly a biography of Cardinal Hume's successor, Baty's book does for Catholicism what Furlong does for Anglicanism. Hitting the bookshelves only three months after the new archbishop was plucked from the decent obscurity of the bishopric of Arundel and Brighton, the book has limited things to say about the man who will be the de facto leader of the Catholic church in England and Wales for the next seven years. This is partly because Archbishop Cormac has hitherto led a blameless life (given to rugby and Gilbert and Sullivan in his youth, and now to golf and classical music), and partly because the over-zealous guardians of his office refused to allow the author in to interview the new man.
The biography part thus peters out after about 40 pages, leaving a lengthy survey of the problems facing British Catholicism. Here, too, congregations have been on the slide, though the new archbishop has countered that those who do attend are more committed than the multitudes used to be. This is, however, one of the problems the next Pope will have to solve.
For clues as to who that might be, see The Next Pope (HarperCollins, £6.99), updated and reissued six years after the death of co-author Peter Hebblethwaite by his widow, Margaret. This will become essential reading for those of us heading Vatican-wards in due course to watch for the puff of white smoke declaring that a new Pope has been chosen.
For a broader outlook, Christianity: A Global History (Allen Lane, £25) modestly seeks to encompass a global survey within 600 pages. Its author, David Chidester, is an American theology professor, now head of religious studies at Cape Town University. Like so many American academic studies, it accrues a thicket of facts through which it is difficult to discern the trees of spiritual and social development by which the religion has grown over 2,000 years. It is closely focused, but rather short on analysis or discernment.
Christ's life is dismissed in one paragraph on page 12; we then get an uneven route march through the development of Christian thought. Chidester barely mentions the Inquisition, or the English Reformation that sparked Protestantism in the Anglophone world. He does not notice Darwinism or the theory of evolution, which caused such a convulsion in belief in the 19th century and has repercussions today in American fundamentalism. There is no Bede, no Cranmer and virtually no hint of the dissensions that play such a large part in current Christianity. The author's eclecticism is such that Jack T Chick - distributor of Christian comics - gets as weighty a reference as Pope John Paul II.
Generally, sources are undifferentiated and given equal weight. The Gospels are taken as gospel and, even where the author is sceptical about a source, he still cites it as though it were genuine. The book is, however, useful in shifting the emphasis in Christianity's history away from Europe and across the world, to the Americas and Africa. As Chidester points out, when Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic in 1492, fewer than 20 per cent of the world's population was Christian and nearly all those who were lived in Europe. Now, 33 per cent of the world is Christian and 77 per cent of the global population has at least been in contact with some form of Christianity. Here then is a paradox: a worldwide success that, in its English incarnation, needs focus groups to explain where it is going wrong. Is there a parable there somewhere?
Buy The Mystery of Love at BOL
Buy C of E at BOL
Buy Archbishop Cormac and the 21st Century Church at BOL
• Stephen Bates is the Guardian's religious editor.
