No religion is the new religion

Jan 20, 2016 by

By Andrew Brown, Guardian:

For the last 1,700 years, to be English has meant to be Christian. This now seems to have changed for ever. “No religion” has now overtaken “Christian” as the majority position among white British people; and the younger they are, the more likely this is to be true.

Polling carried out by YouGov for Linda Woodhead of Lancaster University shows that if you’re under 40 and British, you are far more likely to report being “no religion” than either Christian or anything else. But if over 40, the proportions are reversed. What’s more, the children of no-religion parents are overwhelmingly likely to remain nonreligious themselves (95% do so), whereas the children of Christian parents will probably stop labelling themselves Christian – only 40% do.

These “nones”, as they are known in the jargon, are not all fervently atheist: only 40% are convinced that there is no God or “higher power”, and 5% of them are absolutely certain that He does exist. The figures neatly reverse the proportions among those who identify as religious, only 5% of whom are convinced atheists.

All this will make little sense if you think that religion is primarily a matter of belief. But Woodhead does not. She thinks that religions are made up of practice, ritual and self-understanding quite as much as theology. I should declare an interest here, since she and I are about to publish a book on the collapse of the Church of England, for which we discussed these very issues.

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