Christians in England and Wales are no longer a religious majority and up to a third of people there follow no religion at all, according to census data.
Christians form 46.2 per cent of the population of England and wales, according to 2021 census figures by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which also showed that 37 per cent of people said they followed no religion.
The proportion of Christians in England and Wales in 2021 census is a sharp decline from census held a decade before, which reported that 59.3 per cent people identified as Christians.
Besides Christians and non-religious people, the Muslim population grew from 4.9 to 6.5 per cent of the population. In 2021 census, 1.7 per cent people identified as Hindu, up from 1.5 per cent the decade before.
More than 1 in 3 people —37 per cent— said they had no religion, up from 25 per cent 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. 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.
He said, "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."
Almost 82 per cent of people in England and Wales identified as White in the census, down from 86 per cent in 2011. Some 9 per cent said they were Asian, 4 per cent Black and 3 per cent from "mixed or multiple" ethnic backgrounds, while 2 per cent identified with another ethnic group.
(With AP inputs)
