Conclusion

In the autumn and winter of 1940, as German bombs rained down on the City of London, St Paul’s Cathedral stood amidst the devastation, not unscathed but substantially intact. At the height of incendiary raids on the night of 29 December, Winston Churchill sent a message to the Lord Mayor that the cathedral must at all costs be saved. ¹ Implicit in the Prime Minister’s concern was an awareness that St Paul’s had become a powerful symbol of national resistance to the attacks of the Luftwaffe and that its destruction would have been a serious blow to morale. The visual image of the cathedral during the blitz that is reproduced on the cover of this book is complemented by reflections in a commemorative volume published by The Times:

In recalling the war years at St Paul’s it will be necessary constantly to remind ourselves that it was at all times a living spiritual centre in the life of the City, of the nation, and, indeed, of the entire free world. There were long months when the way in which the dome of St Paul’s emerged from the smoke and darkness after each successive raid, apparently indestructible however great the devastation around it, seemed like a miracle. Londoners came to regard it as a symbol of their own endurance and continuing faith in the future. That was the time of ‘their finest hour’. ²

At first sight it might appear paradoxical that, at a time when organized religion was in decline, a conspicuous expression of traditional Christianity could nevertheless become so central a focus of popular sentiment. The analysis carried out in the preceding pages, however, has provided many clues as to why and how such symbols continued to be important. It remains in this concluding chapter to bring together the main threads in the book and to relate the discussion to other interpretations of the pattern of religious change and national development in the United Kingdom and Ireland. ³