Post Religious Decline

A recent report indicated that Muslims have the strongest faith in modern Britain .....

Britain's Main Religions ....

..... with 88 per cent of Muslims believing there is a God, while only the Christians from the smaller evangelical (often Black) churches come close to the same levels of certainty, with 71 per cent of those questioned believing in Gods existence. 

After that the figures for belief in God drop off dramatically. So for example just a third of Roman Catholics in the study believed in God. A figure which is very surprisingly low, considering that Catholics generally go to church more often than many of the Anglican and mainstream Protestant churches. On that side of the Christian divide, only a paltry one in six who identify with Anglicanism, or other mainstream Protestant churches, are convinced of the existence of God.

Atheism and Agnosticism are now the professed majority creeds among the non-Muslim/Hindu male population ..... However amongst the female equivalent in the study, almost two thirds of women still profess a belief in the existence of heaven or an afterlife of some sort. The 1970 British Cohort study, which has been tracking religious beliefs in 9,000 people, now approaching 50, for nearly 34 years since they were age 16 (although given the low numbers of Muslims back in 1970, I have to assume that they have been added since).

It found that 54 per cent of men could be classed either as atheist, or agnostic, compared with only 34 per cent of women ... the reasons for this disparity amongst the sexes, may be partly in women's emotional wish to believe that loved ones, haven't gone forever when they die. However that question remains the subject of debate

But the findings also point to major confusion among the population about what their beliefs were and what even constituted as religion – with a quarter of those involved in the study changing their minds over time on the basic question of whether they would say they had a “religious” upbringing. Spirituality and other new age beliefs have impacted the ideas of what's a religion in some cases.

Consequently, more than a quarter of those sampled, actually fell into a middle category of so-called “fuzzy believers” who either said they believe in a vague “higher power” but not a specific deity, or even that they believed in God or a god “some of the time” .... presumably when they found themselves calling upon a higher being for some sort of assistance.

The study also found that over the time of the study, the idea of what was a 'religious upbringing' had altered and many were confused about what constitutes that form of upbringing.  Now I was born more than a decade before them and attended junior school in the 1960's, so they would have done the same in the late 1970's.

I went to church occasionally as a young school child (not with my parents, but with the school - harvest festival and Easter spring to mind), but we had 'school assembly,' which included a prayer to God everyday, and I was taught bible stories (this was not a Catholic school, where that was also standard ... I had been to one of those as well). By today's standards that would probably be classed as a religious upbringing, but it was shared by everyone else in the same age group, and tied us in to our heritage ... my parents, their parents, and all my antecedents, all had this same background, and the same stories as bedrocks to their moral compass.

I am not advocating religion per se, but the Judeo Christian beliefs have under pinned our society for over 1,200 years .... but we have now abandoned that, and replaced it with 'multiculturalism' and 'gender equality'....  etc.

I'll bet that we one day live to regret this decision, made under the auspices of Political Correctness ... What is the moral compass for teens now, and where do they get it? Its certainly not from religious teaching of stories with morality at school anymore.