The Telegraph, a United Kingdom center-right broadsheet, recently ran this headline: "Britain is no longer a Christian country and should stop acting as if it is, says judge."

It topped a story about the findings of a two-year study on the place of religion in official British life in today's multicultural milieu. The judge referred to is an ex-judge, who's also a baroness, who chaired the study conducted by the Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life, a non-government body.

Good piece of work, I thought the first time I read the head (an abbreviation cherished by newspaper copy editors in a universe fading, alas, into the far, far past). Then I read the story. And I concluded that, as with so many headlines that try to compress a complicated story line into a few words, it actually mislead.

Journalism truism: Headline writing is much more difficult than it looks.

OK, enough with the Journalism 101 stuff. Let's get to the meat of the story.

Yes, British churches have witnessed a steep decline in attendance. Nearly 60 percent of the British population still calls itself Christian, but only 25 percent say they are religious, according to a 2011 national census report.

Church of England attendance decline has been particularly steep. Sunday attendance was reported in 2012 to be about half of what it was 45 years earlier.

But where the aforementioned headline failed is in its conflating traditional Christian belief and practice with the more nebulous, and harder to measure -- but still critically important -- touchstone of cultural Christianity. Cultural Christianity may fall short in the minds of church officials and traditional believers, but it's still the ground of self-identity for the majority of Brits.