Is God indeed our shelter in the stormy blast? The churches on Wall Street are full. More and more young people are putting themselves forward for ordination to the Church of England. Politicians are calling for a return to spiritual values and bankers are demonised for their pursuit of Mammon. Has the economic downturn driven the West back to religion? Or are we merely seeing a plaintive echo of Matthew Arnold's “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”?

Counting the numbers who go to church is a poor measure of faith: in Britain, at least, religion has become a contentious political issue, with argument raging more on television, in the press and on the internet than from the country pulpits of the Church of England.

And it is from the internet that a striking statistic has just emerged: some 71 per cent of those surveyed by Faithbook, a new multifaith page on Facebook, believe that a spiritual recession is more worrying than a material recession. And 80 per cent do not see the financial situation as a crisis but an economic watershed with moral and social opportunities.

Of course, those who seek out a website devoted to faith are more likely than most to be concerned about being beached on Arnold's “vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world”. But they, like everyone, are facing job losses, a housing slump and mounting debt. And it seems that when the going gets tough, the tough get praying: the survey by the PR company Global Tolerance also found that 27 per cent of respondents have prayed more since the downturn and 42 per cent had received a positive effect from praying or meditating.

The survey is valid not only for Christians. Facebook already asks users their religious views in their personal profiles. Faithbook posts commentaries from the nine main religions in the UK: Bahai, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Sikhism and Zoroastrianism. Since it began in June, about 1,100 visitors regularly exchange blog comments, arguments and interpretations of their religion's scriptures and texts.

What all - along with the Prince of Wales - seem to share is the insistence that any faith is better than none. For those exchanging posts and commentaries, the enemy is not apostasy, sectarianism or heresy. It is indifference.

This explains why religious leaders stick together when railing against materialism, why Muslims defend a Christian's right to display Christmas decorations and why bureaucrats attempting to muzzle the expression of Christian sentiment for fear of giving offence provoke only derision among Muslims, Hindus and Jews.

Do wars, slumps and natural catastrophes help or harm the cause of faith? In the two world wars of the last century, God was invoked on each side. And for men rotting in waterlogged trenches, dying in camps or bleeding to death in no man's land, religion may have been the only available comfort. Organised religion was tested as never before.

The evidence is not statistical, but there are plenty of indications that those who are bombed or hungry or despairing return to the faith of their childhood. Even Stalin, himself a former seminarist, invoked Russian Orthodoxy in the dark days of 1942 to rally his nation's collapsing morale. And governments everywhere recognise that spiritual fervour can be the crucial motivating factor - whether this means sending young Iranian “martyrs” across the Iraqi minefields or leading a charge in Flanders “for God and the King”.

Similar surges in religious observance have been reported after earthquakes, the devastation of a tsunami or the atrocities of 9/11 and the London and Madrid bombings, as well as the random fate of their victims.

And from such catastrophes comes an upwelling of altruism, a will to harness human goodness to public policy. The First World War inspired the League of Nations, the Second led to the United Nations and, through the original vision of reconciliation between France and Germany, to the European Union. Gordon Brown called yesterday for a new resolve to forge from the current economic turmoil a unity of purpose to create “a truly global society”.

What is less clear is whether the return to faith at times of social and economic crisis is enduring. Barack Obama controversially claimed during his campaign that people clung to religion, as well as guns, family and hostility to immigrants, when frustrated. Atheists insist it is merely a blip. They point to a natural wish for solace, from whatever source, by those thrown out of work. And they argue that those who turn to God are really only looking for a stable and secure attachment figure as part of their coping behaviour - a conclusion similarly reached, to prove the very opposite point, in a study by Temple University in Philadelphia.

What is beyond dispute, however, is that faith generally has returned to the fore, in Britain and America and, spectacularly, across the Muslim world. Britain, one of the least religiously observant countries in Europe, has witnessed furious debate over faith in the past decade - partly in response to Islamist terrorism, but partly also because of the attempt to grapple with multiculturalism, to define Britishness and examine the values of our Christian heritage.

Little wonder, therefore, that here, as elsewhere, the economic turmoil has shaken not only markets but the materialist complacency on which today's prosperity is built.

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