According to the most recent census, less than half of individuals in England and Wales identify as Christians. This is the first time a minority of people have practiced the nation’s official religion.
In the ten years after the last census, Britain has gotten less white and less religious, according to data from the 2021 census released on Tuesday by the Office for National Statistics.
On the day of the 2021 census, 46.2% of the people in England and Wales identified as Christians, down from 59.3% a decade earlier. The percentage of Muslims increased from 4.9% to 6.5% of the overall population, while the percentage of Hindus increased from 1.5% to 1.7%.
37% of respondents, an increase from 25% in 2011, claimed to have no faith.
The census results for Scotland and Northern Ireland are reported separately from the rest of the United Kingdom.
Campaigners for secularism stated that the change should prompt a reconsideration of how deeply ingrained religion is in British culture. The monarch is the “defender of the faith” and the head of the church in the United Kingdom, which also has publicly funded Church of England schools and houses Anglican bishops in the House of Commons.
According to Andrew Copson, CEO of the nonprofit Humanists U.K., the U.K. is now “probably likely one of the least religious countries on Earth” as a result of “the huge expansion of the non-religious.”
The disparity between the people and the state itself, he claimed, is one of the results’ most striking features. “No state in Europe has such a religious setup in terms of legislation and public policy, while yet having such a nonreligious populace,” said the author.
Stephen Cottrell, the Archbishop of York and one of the most senior clergymen in the Church of England, said the statistics was “not a tremendous surprise,” but it was a reminder to Christians to be more active in spreading their faith.
We are past the time when most people almost always identified as Christians, but other polls consistently demonstrate that the same people are still looking for spiritual guidance, wisdom, and a set of principles to live by”,he said.
In the census, almost 82% of persons in England and Wales identified as white, a decrease from 86% in 2011. Nine percent of respondents identified as Asian, four percent as Black, three percent as coming from “mixed or numerous” ethnic backgrounds, and two percent as belonging to another ethnic group.
