{"id":14815,"date":"2014-06-05T11:06:36","date_gmt":"2014-06-05T10:06:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=14815"},"modified":"2014-06-05T11:06:36","modified_gmt":"2014-06-05T10:06:36","slug":"is-britain-still-really-a-christian-country-and-if-not-how-can-we-be-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=14815","title":{"rendered":"Is Britain still really a Christian country? And, if not, how can we be good?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>According to the research by Peter Brierley, whose second edition of &#8220;UK Church Statistics&#8221; is due to be published soon, in 2013, there were 5.4 million church members in the UK, a mere 10% of the adult population, taken as 15 and over, 300,000 fewer than five years previously in 2008, when it was 12%. This low proportion is likely to continue to decline at about the same rate for the next 12 years, reaching 9% by 2020 and a mere 8% by 2025, if present trends continue.<\/p>\n<p>Further information <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2014\/jun\/03\/church-attendance-propped-immigrants-study\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Does this decline in Christian church membership matter? Can one be good if one is not religious? I think so, as I have argued in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/good.html\">this short essay<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>According to the research by Peter Brierley, whose second edition of &#8220;UK Church Statistics&#8221; is due to be published soon, in 2013, there were 5.4 million church members in the UK, a mere 10% of the adult population, taken as 15 and over, 300,000 fewer than five years previously in 2008, when it was 12%. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14815"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14821,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14815\/revisions\/14821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}