Census: Christians are a minority in England; non-religious grow

LONDON (AP) — Fewer than half the people in England and Wales consider themselves Christian, according to the most recent census — the first time a minority of the population has followed the country’s official religion.

Britain has become less religious — and less white — in the decade since the last census, figures from the 2021 census released, Tuesday, by the Office for National Statistics revealed.

Some 46.2% of the population of England and Wales described themselves as Christian on the day of the 2021 census, down from 59.3%, a decade earlier. The Muslim population grew from 4.9% to 6.5% of the total, while 1.7% identified as Hindu, up from 1.5%.

More than one in three people — 37% — said they had no religion, up from 25%, in 2011.

The other parts of the UK, Scotland and Northern Ireland, report their census results separately.

Secularism campaigners said the shift should trigger a rethink of the way religion is entrenched in British society. The UK has state-funded Church of England schools, Anglican bishops sit in Parliament’s upper chamber, and the monarch is “defender of the faith” and supreme governor of the church.

Andrew Copson, chief executive of the charity Humanists UK, said “the dramatic growth of the non-religious” had made the UK “almost certainly one of the least religious countries on Earth.”