Asked by Sir David Frost whether he believed Britain was Christian, he replied: “I think I really want to question that. Large numbers of people describe themselves as believing in God. Large numbers still would say that they are Christian. How they then express that Christianity has changed enormously.”

Hope, who will leave office in February to work as a parish priest in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, blamed “secularist tendencies” for the country’s abandonment of Christianity. “Commitment to the Christian church is less than it was,” he admitted.

Hope said he acknowledged that some Christians find the doctrine of the virgin birth difficult, but argued that belief in the resurrection was essential for faithful followers of the Christian religion.

Hope also waded into the debate over David Blunkett, the home secretary. He said Blunkett’s affair raised serious questions about the public’s trust in politicians and said there was a link between private conduct and public office.

“I don’t think it’s quite so easy to have clear blue water between what you might call the private and the public,” he said, adding: “The one impinges upon the other.” He continued: “Integrity seems to me quite crucial here. One senses people are beginning to feel ‘how can you trust?’, ‘what about integrity?’ I think those are big moral questions for us.”

Hope was the only senior cleric in Britain to support the war in Iraq but said that he regretted it now. He also expressed disappointment about the misleading information given to the public before the invasion.

He said he had become disillusioned because of the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. He had based his theological justification for the war on the now discredited claim that Saddam Hussein could launch weapons within 45 minutes.

Frost asked Hope why, if Britain is not a Christian country, is Tony Blair choosing his successor as archbishop. Hope replied that the prime minister’s role was confined to choosing only between two names submitted by the Crown Nominations Commission, in which the church played the leading role.

Meanwhile, a summit of the world’s Anglican bishops in South Africa has become the first big casualty of the church’s schism over homosexuality. The Lambeth Conference — a 10-yearly congress of bishops that has been meeting regularly since the 19th century — was to have been held outside Britain for the first time.

However, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, took the advice of a church steering committee last week and cancelled the Cape Town event. A slimmed-down conference is planned at Canterbury in 2008.

It is understood that there was concern about holding the conference in Africa, where the opposition to the ordination of a gay bishop in America has been the strongest. Altogether 22 churches of the Anglican communion have broken with the American church.

The cost of holding the conference in Cape Town had spiralled to £7m, which has also influenced the decision to switch the venue.

The African churches are unhappy that the meeting would have been forced to rely heavily on financial support from the Americans, who support gay bishops.

It is proposed that costs may be reduced at Canterbury by limiting the event to only diocesan bishops. Senior church figures are still concerned that the conference in Britain may degenerate into a public slanging match if the row over gay bishops is not resolved.

# A nativity scene at the Madame Tussaud’s waxworks in London that features David Beckham and his wife Victoria as Joseph and Mary has been condemned by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, as “disrespectful” and “tasteless”. He said that the display damaged the culture of Britain and that Muslims and Jews would also find it offensive because they knew the importance of religious symbols.

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