As an atheist, declining religion worries me

For the first time since modern censuses started the proportion of people describing themselves as Christian in England and Wales has fallen below 50 per cent. Picture: Getty Images

Now, it came to pass that Caesar Augustus ordered a census and as a result Jesus was born in Bethlehem. And it also came to pass that in the days of Boris Johnson there was another census and it discovered that a majority of Britons probably no longer believed the Jesus in a manger story. And not a few people were sore troubled.

It’s understandable. Any decent therapist will tell their patients that all change is loss, even where the change may be for the best. What was there before has gone, and we can somehow regret it even if we didn’t always like it.

This week’s release by the Office for National Statistics of analysis from the 2021 census concentrated on two things: ethnicity and religiosity. On the former, it was pretty much what you would have expected. The country has continued to become more ethnically diverse, with those identifying as white still in a large majority, but having declined by half a million over a decade. In some cities such as Leicester no one ethnicity now makes up more than half the population. In my own native city of London, 37 per cent identified as white British – still, at 82 per cent, by far the biggest single group in the country.

In the decade from 2011 to 2021 self-described Christians have gone down by nearly 13 percentage points in Britain. Picture: Getty Images

But not big enough for some. That former UKIP leader with the implausible grin took to social media to bemoan this “massive, massive demographic change”, noting that cities such as London and Manchester were “minority white”. And, naturally, getting it wrong, because the group that has grown most (up 1.2 million) was “Other White”, meaning that London is actually 54 per cent white. Not far behind are those of mixed ethnicity. But then some people have trouble getting their heads round the idea that born Britons can be brown and white people can be Romanian. There is a word for such people.

More interestingly a deeper dive into the figures showed the major story wasn’t increased concentration of ethnicities in cities but the spreading of diversity beyond them. My own inner-city borough of Camden has seen its proportion of citizens born abroad grow more slowly than, say, Surrey Heath in the stockbroker belt.

I was struck though by one reaction. The Board of Deputies of British Jews (probably the most misleadingly evocative organisation title around) seemed to have changed its position on whether Jews should be counted as an ethnicity – previously and understandably they had been opposed – as well as a religion. They may have done this because more Britons these days would identify as ethnically Jewish than as religiously Jewish. I, for one, might do that. These days, everyone is ethnic.

But that also tells you something about the demographics of religion. To remind ourselves of the headlines here, for the first time since modern censuses started (and possibly for the first time since the Saxon heptarchy) the proportion of people describing themselves as Christian in England and Wales has fallen below 50 per cent. In the decade from 2011 to 2021 self-described Christians have gone down by nearly 13 percentage points. It’s a genuinely dramatic fall.

And this has not happened because of the Great Replacement plot to substitute Muslims for white Christians. As with Hindus, the number of those identifying as Muslim has gone up a bit and now stands at a distinctly un-civilisation threatening 6.5 per cent. Whereas the proportion of those saying they have no religion at all has risen by 12 percentage points to just over 37 per cent. None of the above: that’s where the Christians are going.

The Sikh community cooking free meals for Lismore residents during the city’s floods. Picture: Jaswinder Singh

This too provoked a fit of the vapours from those who, while never having exhibited any obvious Christian traits themselves, are prepared to don cheap but shiny armour in defence of “Christian tradition”. Though the ethics established by Christianity in Britain seem as robust as ever, the outward is everything for some people. All change, remember, involves loss.

What seems apparent to me is that this is a generational change. My guess is that many people in the past who weren’t at all religious identified as Christian because of the ideological furniture of their early lives. I attended a state primary school in north London in the 1960s. Every morning at assembly we said the Lord’s Prayer and Miss Collinson, who was tall and had very red curly hair, would bash out a couple of hymns on the upright next to the stage. I can still recite from “Our Father” to “for ever and ever” and recall all the words to Fight the Good Fight. I was from a family of atheists but I was nevertheless a junior conscript into Christ’s army.

It seems entirely likely that the tens of millions who went through the same mild indoctrination would often put down “Christian” when asked by census-takers. But that institutional hypocrisy is long gone. My children, attending state primary schools in the same area, were never taught Our Father, and the only hymns they know are carols. Why would these generations not now say they had “no religion"?

Ethics, however, they have in almost creepy abundance. So in one way this change is to be expected and can hardly be lamented. Nor is there a likely reversal, despite chimerical notions of how a super-charismatic Archbishop of Canterbury might turn things round for Anglicanism.

And yet I was struck by something the Archbishop of York said in response to the census findings. The church had existed for two millennia in order to “share the good news of Jesus Christ, serve our neighbour and bring hope to a troubled world”. And the need for all that, he added, had not gone away.

Fewer people might believe in that kind of good news, but the serving our neighbour bit is a different matter and it’s why, despite being an atheist, I meet this latest news with mixed feelings. If I look out of my house I see an Anglican church and beyond it a Quaker meeting hall. Just below, out of sight, is a small synagogue. At various times people congregate in these buildings. They greet each other, chant, sing, collect for good causes. I simply don’t believe life around here would be better if they stopped. In fact, I believe the opposite.

It may be coincidental but the census showed that the South Wales valleys, the old mining towns and villages that were once all union and chapel, were among the least religious parts of Britain. They are also some of the most depressed, with high rates of addiction and suicide. Is there a possible correlation here? Should we be thinking harder about what we do to replace the communal function of declining religion? To mitigate the loss from this change?

– The Times