Changing Britain: Whilst the non-religious are growing, new religious life is flourishing in urban areas
by Grace Davie, LSE:
Grace Davie’s 1994 book Religion in Britain Since 1945 has been one of the leading resources in the field of the Sociology of Religion. A revised edition, published in 2015, describes the religious situation in twenty-first century Britain, taking into account the changes that have taken place in the last two decades. Here Davie explores the nature of these transformations.
Twenty years after I published Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging an extensively revised edition appeared under the title Religion in Britain: A Persistent Paradox.
The paradox can be summarized as follows: at one and the same time Britain is becoming steadily more secular (no serious scholar disputes that), but the significance of religion as a topic in public debate is rising rather than falling. In short – and like many of our European neighbours – we talk more about something that we do less. The consequences of this situation are worked through in the revised text.
Quite apart from this, a twenty year gap between the two editions permitted an assessment of the wider changes taking place in modern Britain. Some of these I had anticipated, others caught me by surprise. I will deal with each of these in turn.
I expected and found a mixture of continuity and change, which has resulted in a broad spectrum of activity, ranging from the religiously committed (of different faiths) at one end of the spectrum to articulate unbelievers at the other. Both religious and secular views can at times be sharp – unsurprisingly the extremes provoke each other. Much grey remains, however, not least the blurring of the lines between nominal believers and their secular equivalents. That said the proportion of people placing themselves in the no-religion category continues to grow, mostly at the expense of nominal Anglicans.
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