The Archbishop of Canterbury has said that we have become a nation of atheists. Is he surprised? Twenty-six years ago Parliament granted the General Synod of the Church of England control over its orders of service. The Synod sidelined the Book of Common Prayer which we had been using happily enough for 400 years and introduced new forms of service which, they said, would halt the decline in church attendance. But since the new books came out the church has suffered a catastrophic loss of membership.

In 1980 the Synod published the Alternative Service Book and claimed this as "the greatest publishing event in 300 years". The pews began to empty even more rapidly.

So what's the answer? Return to the Book of Common Prayer and the Authorised Version of the Bible? Not a bit of it. The church is in a great big hole and the solution proposed by the bishops and the Synod is to go on digging. They have just produced another set of services called Common Worship and these surpass even the Alternative Service Book for banality.

Common Worship is a travesty of the Christian faith and a failure even before it reaches the pews. Birth, sex and death are the most serious events in life, but the rites of Baptism, Marriage and Funeral are effete, euphemistic services. Sin is so much played down in Baptism that the washing away of sin seems hardly necessary. The service is only a sentimental prelude to the booze up and the cake. In fact what the real Prayer Book calls The Public Baptism of Infants has been renamed Initiation Services - a title that will only make people think of late night witchcraft films on television.

The Marriage Service is touchy feely new age stuff in which adults have to listen to such sentimental lines as, "Let them be tender with each other's dreams" and "All that I am I give to you"? This is marriage Disneyfied. The spectacularly effective six words of one syllable which go back to the time of Geoffrey Chaucer, "with this ring I thee wed", have been thrown out and replaced by, "I give you this ring as a sign of our marriage". Is this supposed to be some sort of improvement? Didn't we understand the original, or what? In a statement of arrogance and condescension Bishop David Stancliffe, who is Chairman of the Liturgical Commission and therefore chiefly responsible for this rubbish, has said that people on council estates will have difficulty in understanding the Book of Common Prayer. Well, David, my grandmother left school aged 12 in 1894 and she knew whole chunks of the BCP by heart.

At the Funeral, the most heartbreaking quote from the whole Bible "Jesus wept" is replaced by "Jesus Christ was moved to tears" - as if he had just seen Leonardo diCaprio and Kate Winslet go down on Titanic for the umpteenth time.

The new Holy Communion Service replaces those old, memorable, terrible words "He took bread, brake it, gave it to his disciples..." with, "He had supper with his friends". What Savoy Grill or Chinese takeaway? The new book is full of left wing bias and distortion. It says: "Your son was born in poverty in a manger." He wasn't. He was born of his mother and laid in a manger. His earthly father Joseph was a tradesman of the respectable middle class. Does the Synod really imagine that it was a greater act of divine condescension for Our Lord to have been born in a stable than if he had been born Mayor of Hartlepool?

We must end these mad experiments with new rites, restore the Book of Common Prayer and reverse the shameful decline of the English Church