Less than half of the people of England and Wales consider themselves Christians, according to the most recent census, the first time that 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, 2021 census figures released Tuesday by the Office for National Statistics revealed.
Around 46.2% of the population of England and Wales described themselves as Christian on census day 2021, up from 59.3% the previous decade. The Muslim population grew from 4.9% to 6.5% of the population, while 1.7% identified as Hindu, up from 1.5%.
More than 1 in 3 people, 37%, said they had no religion, up from 25% in 2011.
The other parts of the UK, Scotland and Northern Ireland, report census results separately.
Secularism campaigners said the change should prompt a rethinking of the way religion is embedded in British society.
The UK has state-funded Church of England schools, Anglican bishops sit in the upper house of Parliament and the monarch is “defender of the faith” and supreme governor of the church.
Andrew Copson, chief executive of the Humanists UK charity, said the “spectacular growth of the non-religious” had made the UK “almost certainly one of the least religious countries on Earth”.
“One of the most surprising things about these results is how much the population disagrees with the state itself,” he said. “No state in Europe has a religious setup like we do in terms of laws and public policy, and at the same time has such a non-religious population.”
Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell, one of the highest-ranking clergy in the Church of England, said the data was “not a huge surprise” but it did challenge Christians to work harder to promote their faith.
“We have left behind the era where many people almost automatically identified themselves as Christians, but other surveys consistently show how the same people are still searching for spiritual truth and wisdom and a set of values to live by,” he said.
Nearly 82% of people in England and Wales identified themselves as white at the census, up from 86% in 2011. About 9% said they were Asian, 4% black and 3% of “mixed or multiple” ethnicities ”, while 2% identified with another ethnicity.
