So now we know. It’s not just lying politicians, thieving bankers, treacherous hacks or light-fingered rioters. It’s all of us.

According to recent research from the University of Essex, the British are, on balance, less honest than we were a decade ago.

The survey says the Britons of 2011 were more likely to tolerate extramarital sex, drink-driving or failing to leave a contact after damaging a parked car than those of 2001. The only transgression of which people had become less tolerant was benefit fraud. And it looks like it will get worse, with the study reporting that young people were more likely to condone bad behaviour than older ones.

It is not hard to see the flaws in such research. Abstract, decontexualised questions make a dubious foundation for comprehensive, ethical assessment. No matter how virtuous you think yourself, unable to contemplate ever speeding or dodging your taxes, some sophist will be able to manufacture a scenario in which you find yourself lying, cheating and bribing like a tin-pot dictator.

That may be so, but it is also largely irrelevant when comparing longitudinal trends. If the questions have their problems today, they are no different to those of 2001. The trends in the data remain valid, and the trends are downward.

This is wonderful grist to the Christian mill. We warned you what happens when you ignore God’s commands, and now you can see for yourself. Secular ethics is inadequate. Moral progressivism in nonsense. We’ve all leapt on the liberal bandwagon only to find out it’s a handcart destined for hell.

However, it’s not as simple as that. While only the wilfully blind will deny that Britain is facing serious moral problems, they are not because – or not simply because – we no longer pay attention to the Ten Commandments.

The view that Christians read their ethics off the pages of scripture and do what they do because God tells them to is a myth peddled by those Christians who adhere to an outdated and ill-thought-through idea of moral practice, and by those secularists who want to portray Christians as unreflective automata.

The reality is that people, religious or not, behave well because of other people. We learn to behave, take our ethical cues and seek approval from one another. Ethics is grounded in communion. This is not an argument for moral relativism. The fact that people adopt the customs of their tribe is not necessarily to affirm those customs. If we behave well because of other people, we also behave badly because of them.

Rather, it is simply to state the fact. Being good is predicated on our sense of who we are, and who we are is shaped, predominantly, by the nature of our relationships.

The ethical problems facing Britain today are, then, indeed tied up with the decline of Christianity but not so much with the lightened social weight of Christian moral edicts as with the weaker presence of Christian communities, formed around and modelled, however imperfectly, on the example of Christ.

The same may be said of the multitude of other communities that dot the British landscape. These may be formed around less obviously ethical figures or pursuits, but they nonetheless sustain the relationships that make us good. From stable families to sports clubs, co-operatives to village halls, each in its own way incubates virtue and helps cultivate character.

For almost 50 years, we have dissolved the ties that bind – familial, community and economic. A half-century of social and economic liberalisation (and ensuing inequality), growing hypermobility, a shift from neighbourhoods to networks and an ethical discourse grounded almost entirely on rights has undermined precisely those structures of communion that moralise us.

Such trends were often well intentioned, and have sometimes been for the good. But they have come at a cost. Today, life is better for me, but worse for us.

The University of Essex research confirms what we suspected rather than tells us what we didn’t. The bigger and harder question is what we do about it. Re-moralising a society is much tougher than demoralising it. If this argument is valid, it will start not with preaching or punishing, but with nurturing and protecting those structures of commitment and co-operation in which we learn to live with trust, respect and integrity.