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There has been a Census of the Population every 10 years since 1801 apart from the war year of 1941. In 1851 a question was asked on religion, but, unlike many other questions, it was not asked again (in a different way) until 2001. The 2001 question was repeated in 2011, allowing a decadal comparison.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) published details on religion in England and Wales from the 2011 Census just before Christmas 2012. The number of people calling themselves Christian in England alone declined from 35.3 million in 2001 to 31.5 million in 2011, a drop of 3.8 million people and, as a percentage of the population, a decline from 72% to 59%. In Wales it dropped from 2.1 million to 1.8 million, and from 72% to 58% of the population.
Funerals
Most commentators seem to assume that these declines reflect a falling away of belief in a secular age and, while that is bound to be part of the explanation, it may not be the major reason. The Church of England Research Department annually collects from its clergy the number of funerals they have conducted. In the 10 years between 2001 and 2011, their ministers conducted 2.2 million funerals, roughly half (49%) church funerals and half (51%) crematoria funerals. It is perhaps reasonable to assume that those wishing to have an Anglican minister conducting their funeral would probably have ticked ‘Christian’ on their Census form had they been alive at the time of the Census. In the same period there have been 4.8 million deaths in England, so Church of England clergy have presided at almost half (46%) of the country’s funerals.
Few other denominations publish the number of funerals taken by their clergy or deaths of their members. The Roman Catholic Church, however, is one which does, and in this 10-year period 0.4 million Catholics have died, and, again, one presumes that all these would have said they were Christian (irrespective of whether they regularly attended Mass) had they been alive to tick the Census form. In membership terms, Anglicans and Catholics accounted for 56% of (alive) church members in England in 2010. Were the death rate in other denominations to be similar to that of Anglicans and Catholics, then if 2.2 + 0.4 = 2.6 million deaths represent 56% of church deaths, total church deaths in the Census decade could have been some 4.6 million people, much greater than the actual drop in Christian adherents recorded by the Census. However, the actual number is likely to be somewhat less, say 4.3 million (90% of those who died), as some denominations, like the Pentecostals, are much younger and have fewer deaths.
Those joining
Offsetting the decline in the number of Christians is the number who have joined the church in this period. This is more difficult to evaluate but in the period 1998 to 2005 it was estimated (in the book Pulling out of the Nosedive) that 850,000 people joined the church in England. That rate of joining over those 7 years might not be as great in the period 2005 to 2011, so that perhaps between 2001 and 2011 say a million people (rather than 1.2 million which is the pro rata figure) joined the church. The overall equation then becomes, in millions:
1.0 who joined – 4.3 who died – 0.5 other leavers = –3.8 decrease.
If this equation is approximately true, it shows that the large bulk of the decline in the number of Christians between 2001 and 2011 is because of the number who died, rather than a dropping away for other reasons. The equation also explains the catastrophic forecast given at the Church of England July 2012 Synod that their attendance is expected to decline by almost 60% by 2030, since the number joining the C of E is so very much smaller than the large number who are dying. It also puts the church’s total evangelistic work into context, and highlights the enormous urgency to increase it, in fact, to quadruple or even quintuple it.
In 2005, 35% of Anglicans were aged 65 or over. The proportion of Baptists aged 65 or over at that time was 25%, lower than the Church of England, and thus fewer Baptist deaths pro rata can be expected in the days ahead. But it is still likely to be true that people joining the Baptist churches will be fewer than the number dying, so a decline in the number of Baptists will occur, unless action can be taken to change the situation. Baptist attendance in England declined 8% between 1998 and 2005.
What is ‘Christian’?
In a very helpful article about the Census results, Linda Woodhead, Professor of Sociology of Religion at Lancaster University, suggests the simple range of answers to the Census question does not really indicate religious identity. She refers to recent publications which break down the ‘Christian’ category into:
Furthermore, research has found that at least 12% of Census Christians do not consider themselves religious, only 54% believe in a personal God, and, according to latest attendance figures, 90% do not attend church.
No religion
In a study of immigrants in 2000, 21% said they had no religion which, if true of the 3.8 million coming in the inter-Census period, would mean that some 12% of the increase in those saying they have ‘No religion’ in the 2011 Census would be simply due to the new immigrants in our midst.
Almost certainly many of those saying they had no religion in 2011 would be young people, some of whom in a previous generation would have joined the church. Again the scale of the loss of young people to the church is put into some sort of perspective.
Linda Woodhead quotes Theos think-tank surveys to indicate that ‘No religion’ does not necessarily mean secular. In fact, Theos research suggests No-religionists divide into three categories: the non-attenders, the atheists and the non-religious. However, 44% of the non-attenders believe in a soul and 35% in God or a higher power, 23% of atheists believe in a soul, and 34% of the nonreligious believe in life after death and 10% that God designed the world. In other words, many of those indicating ‘No religion’ in the 2011 Census mean they have no formal adherence to any religious body, though they may have certain religious beliefs of their own.
Some of those ticking ‘No Religion’, as well as some of those not answering the question at all, might still say they were ‘spiritual’, even if the meaning of such is indeterminate, since other research has shown that more people identify themselves as “spiritual” rather than “religious.” The increase seen in ‘No Religion’ might suggest a more secular population, but only because ‘secular’, ‘spiritual’ and ‘religion’ lack any clear definition.
Other religions
A very large number of people living in Britain were not born here. The Census found that 3.8 million out of the 7.5 million total immigrants in England and Wales arrived between 2001 and 2011. The religion of these incomers will doubtless be analysed and released by ONS sometime next year, but in a study of immigrants in 2000, it was then found that 31% of immigrants were Christian and 24% Muslim.
As may be seen in Table 1, the number of people who said they were Muslim increased from 1.5 million in 2001 to 2.7 million in 2011. If the same percentages on religion of immigrants hold for those coming more recently, then 0.9 million of them were Muslim, a number accounting for the majority of the increase of 1.2 million Muslims between 2001 and 2011.
Table 1: Population by Religion, England and Wales, 2001 and 2011
Of all the different religions in the UK, the rate of change between 2001 and 2011 is greatest amongst Muslims, and in Wales their number has more than doubled, as may be seen in Table 2. In his book Slippery Slope: The Islamisation of the UK, Patrick Sookhdeo, General Director of the Barnabasfund, warns of the increasing numbers. He launched “Operation Nehemiah” in February 2011 to alert political and church leaders of this. Numbers from the 2011 Census show Muslims are already almost at the level previously predicted for 2020!
Table 2: Percentage change in number of adherents 2001 to 2011
While Muslim numbers are 5% of the English population (and 1½% of the Welsh), all the other religions together amount to just over 3% in England (and just over 1% in Wales). The Census category ‘Other religions’ is a summation of many groups, the largest of which (England and Wales together) is Pagan with 57,000 people. This is followed by 53,000 Spiritual/Spiritualists, 24,000 with ‘Mixed religion’, 20,000 Jains, 12,000 with Wicca, 11,000 Ravidassians, 8,000 Rastafarians, 5,000 Baha’is, 4,000 Druids, 4,000 Taoists, and 4,000 Zoroastrians, with over 30 other smaller categories.
The group ‘No religion’ includes 177,000 Jedi Knights, 32,000 Agnostics, 29,000 Atheists, 15,000 Humanists, 6,000 Heavy Metal followers, 500 Free Thinkers and 350 ‘Realists’.
In general, Welsh Christianity has declined slightly more than in England, and other religions, especially Islam, have increased faster (except for the Buddhists and Jews). There were many more, pro rata, who said they had no religion in Wales than in England (32% to 25%), but the proportion following other religions is much smaller than in England (3% to 9%).
The final generation of Christians?
With the increase in other religions and those with no religion, will Christianity in Britain die out? If Christians are dying at such a rapid pace, will there ever be future Christian generations? Will ‘Christian’ be demoted to ‘Other Religions’ in future Censuses? A generation is technically the time before one generation gives birth to the next. The average age of giving birth by British women is currently about 30, and life-expectancy is about 80 years (announced by ONS in 2010 as 78.2 years for men and 82.3 for women). A third of English churchgoers are 65 or more which suggests most will die out in the next half-generation. Of the other two-thirds, half (that is, one-third of the overall total) are aged between 40 and 65.
As current churchgoers die in the next 15 years, so the following generation will become 15 years older, some of whom will (naturally) be dying before others. The Church of England’s actuaries’ forecasting that Anglican church attendance could drop 58% by 2030 is about right for many of the other denominations also.
Many church leaders and Christian families in the past 20 or 30 years have found it hard to pass on their faith to all their children. Many have seen some of their children follow them in the faith, but few have seen all their offspring do the same. One study of Manse children found that the second child was often least likely to be a Christian adult.
The challenge today for these families extends likewise to their grandchildren – will they follow them in their faith? Should churches hold Grandparents’ Days’ to alert grandparents to this issue and help them in their spiritual hopes for their offspring?
We are not yet in the final generation of Christians, and the next generation will not be the last either, but the Christian scene is likely to alter very considerably over the next 20 years or so. While this may be a sobering thought, it is also always true that “the church is one generation away from extinction,” but the final arbiter on the life and death of the church is not statistics, but a risen Lord Jesus, the harbinger of Life, Immortality and Continuation!
Age and gender of the population
Figures have also been released by the Scottish and N Ireland statistical bodies of their Census results showing the age and gender of their respective populations. They show that on average Welsh and Scottish people are a year older than those living in England or N Ireland. They also show that the proportion of those aged 20 to 39 living in Wales is less than in England (25% to 27%) and the proportion aged 45 to 64 living in Scotland is higher (28% to 25%), in a context where a 1% difference is significant. N Ireland has fewer aged 60 to 79 (16% to 18%). Figure 1 graphs the proportion of the population at five-year intervals.
The graph shows a drop from the numbers aged 0 to 4 compared with those aged 5 to 9 9 (that is, there are more in the population now aged 0 to 4 than aged 5 to 9), for all four countries, reflecting the population boom that has occurred in the UK in the last few years.
Figure 1: Proportion of population by age, UK, 2011
Between the ages of 40 and 59 both Wales and Scotland have fewer men than in England (49.1%, 48.7% and 49.5% respectively). The number of churchgoing men by age is not known in Wales, but it is for England and Scotland and the following two charts below compare these. Since these percentages change slowly, the difference in years will not be a significant factor. The percentages for women are these taken away from 100, that is, the reverse position applies for them.
Figure 2: Comparison of men by age in England; and Figure 3: Comparison of men by age in Scotland
In England, the proportion of male churchgoers matches that of the population for those between 15 and 19, and exceeds it for those 85 and over. An actuarial exercise on Church of England clergy (mostly men in this exercise) for pension purposes found that they lived on average 4 years longer than other men, and the English Church Census figures reflect this. Male churchgoers are least represented for those aged between 45 and 74.
In Scotland, the male shortfall is apparent across all age-groups, but particularly for those aged 30 to 44, followed by those under 12 and between 45 and 64.
In both England and Scotland there are fewer boys under 10 (England) or under 12 (Scotland) in church than the proportion in the population. Does this mean that it is girls who tend to be taken to Sunday School more than boys, or are more amenable to being taken? How does the church attract more young boys? In England the boys catch up with the population when they are teenagers, with more boys than girls in church at that age (51% to 49%), the only age-group when this happens.
What does all this mean?
What are the implications of these statistics for the church in the immediate future?
1. The figures show how many deaths have occurred in the Christian community because of ageing and these will continue at a high level for a while as churchgoing generations of yesteryear die out. The proportion of churchgoers 65 and over is twice the proportion of this age-group in the population at large. Numbers of members and attenders therefore are likely to continue to drop for the foreseeable future.
2. The numbers converting to Christianity at present are far too small to match the number of deaths. Evangelistic efforts therefore need to increase very greatly if the enormous drop in numbers is to be rectified. Such, however, is hardly the right motive! We have the Great Commission to take the Gospel to the whole world, and this, and the future destiny of the millions in Britain, must surely be our deepest concern.
3. The increase in other religions in the UK is largely driven by the numbers of immigrants, and the number of children they have, rather than conversions. Nevertheless this is an area of significancve if numbers should continue to increase rapidly as some suggest they might.
4. Christian families currently seem to be weak in transmitting their faith to their children and grandchildren. How can churches strengthen the sharing and expression of faith in Christian homes?
5. There are certain age-groups where men seem particularly hard to reach (aged 30 to 75). How can churches with men in these age-groups enable them to reach out to their peers at work, or in their leisure or personal activities?
Peter Brierley may be contacted at peter@brierleyres.com or via his website www.brierleyuconsultancy.com
You are reading Making Sense of the Census by Peter Brierley, part of Issue 58 of Ministry Today, published in August 2013.
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