Christians in England and Wales are no longer a religious majority and up to a third of the people there follow no religion at all, according to census data.
Christians form 46.2 percent of the population of England and Wales, according to 2021 census figures by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which also showed that 37 percent of people said they followed no religion. Almost four in ten have no religion—37 percent— said they had no religion, up from 25 percent in 2011.
The proportion of Christians in England and Wales in the 2021 census is a sharp decline from the census held a decade before, which reported that 59.3 percent of people identified as Christians.
Besides Christians and non-religious people, the Muslim population grew from 4.9 to 6.5 percent of the population. In the 2021 census, 1.7 percent of people identified as Hindu, up from 1.5 percent the decade before.
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."