{"id":21898,"date":"2017-09-05T11:19:40","date_gmt":"2017-09-05T10:19:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=21898"},"modified":"2017-09-05T11:19:40","modified_gmt":"2017-09-05T10:19:40","slug":"the-current-state-of-religious-belief-in-britain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=21898","title":{"rendered":"The current state of religious belief in Britain"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/natcen.ac.uk\/news-media\/press-releases\/2017\/september\/british-social-attitudes-record-number-of-brits-with-no-religion\/\">latest data<\/a> on religious belief in the UK comes from the 34th British Social Attitudes BSA) survey conducted by\u00a0the\u00a0National Centre for Social Research. It might surprise many non-Britons who think that the UK is still basically a religious nation and it might surprise some Britons who seem to think that the UK is going Muslim.<\/p>\n<p>Some 53% now declare that they have no religion. Only 15% call themselves Anglican, while 9% are Catholic and a further 17% opt for the category of other Christian. This means that the majority of the population is non-religious and only 41% in total are Christian &#8211; so the UK can no longer be regarded as a Christian country.<\/p>\n<p>Those who say that they belong to non-Christian religions are a mere 6%, so to view Britain as increasingly Islamic is a massively exaggerated and irrational fear.<\/p>\n<p>I am a member of the 53%, but I have family and friends who are religious and respect their beliefs. So: does religion matter? It depends. There are problems with religion, as I have discussed in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/religion.html\">this short essay<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The latest data on religious belief in the UK comes from the 34th British Social Attitudes BSA) survey conducted by\u00a0the\u00a0National Centre for Social Research. It might surprise many non-Britons who think that the UK is still basically a religious nation and it might surprise some Britons who seem to think that the UK is going [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-current-affairs","category-my-life-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21898","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=21898"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21901,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21898\/revisions\/21901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}