Christians a minority in England as Muslim population grows, 2021 census reveals

The New Arab Staff & Agencies

The 2021 consensus from the UK's Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed that Christians are a shrinking minority in England while the nation's Muslim population has grown by around 1.2 million since 2011.

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

However, a growing number of people described themselves as "Muslim," according to figures from the 2021 census released on Tuesday by the Office for National Statistics.

Some 46.2 percent of the population of England and Wales described themselves as Christian on the day of the 2021 census, down from 59.3 percent a decade earlier.

The Muslim population grew from 4.9 percent to 6.5 percent of the population, an increase of 2.7 million to 3.9 million since 2011. 

People who identified as Hindu grew to 1.7 percent from 1.5 percent. 

More than 1 in 3 people — 37 percent — said they had no religion, up from 25 percent 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".

"One of the most striking things about these results is how at odds the population is from the state itself,” he said. "No state in Europe has such a religious set-up as we do in terms of law and public policy, while at the same time having such a non-religious population."

Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell, one of the most senior clerics in the Church of England, said the data was "not a great surprise," but was a challenge to Christians to work harder to promote their faith.

"We have left behind the era when many people almost automatically identified as Christian, but other surveys consistently show how the same people still seek spiritual truth and wisdom and a set of values to live by," he said.

The area with the highest percentage of the population who described themselves as "Muslim" was Tower Hamlets. Another area with a high percentage of people responding to the census as "Muslim" was Blackburn.