Yes, but I can’t remember if I put down no religion or Christian on my census, because I’m an atheist but I was Christened, grew up vaguely Christian and I celebrate Christmas, Easter, etc - I’m culturally Christian. I probably put no religion, but I’m not sure.
I know one particular friend who mentioned putting herself down as Christian for the same reasons as me, but she’s not even Christened, has never been to church except for other people’s weddings (her wedding was in a registry office), and doesn’t believe in God.
There wasn’t a tick-box for “atheist” so there would naturally be tiny numbers writing that in rather than ticking “no religion.” 25% in England Wales (actually 32% in Wales, but they’re a much smaller population so don’t affect the combined stats that much) put themselves down as no religion.
What I’m saying is those stats are probably less meaningful than the surveys about belief in God and church attendance. Those are all much lower in the UK - cf San Vito above.
Firstly, it is a voluntary question so cannot be considered fully representative. Secondly it cannot be taken as an indication whether a person is “religious” or not.
Because it is so vanishingly rare for people to go to church regularly, and secondly to volunteer the information. It just isn’t a topic that ever comes up, and the default assumption is that most people don’t go to church in any meaningful way.
Indeed I would go so far as to say it sounds like a deliberate way of signaling their religiosity, and fishing to see if you are similarly inclined. Precisely because they know that it’s a relatively uncommon thing in both the UK and Australia and not something to be assumed.
Anecdotally, the only time young people in the UK go to church is for a few months before they get married - thereby ‘earning’ a church wedding, which are still popular (if expensive). Apart from weddings, people only go to churches for funerals. A few people get baptised, but almost nobody attends on Sundays.
The church fills a social purpose (‘match and dispatch’), but attendees at these event are often as irreligious as I am.
Tonight is Census night in Australia. There has been a campaign here from the (I think) Rationalist Society asking people not to do this, pointing out that it results in more funding to religious institutions etc even though people aren’t actually religious.
It’s already happened in Australia and New Zealand - only half the population describe themselves as religious, and of the half that are religious, a significant number are only “Easter/Christmas/Weddings/Funerals” churchgoers, or think “Well Australia/NZ is a Christian country and I live here and support those values so therefore I’m Christian” or “Well Mum & Dad say we’re a good [religion] family and I’ll be in deep shit if I ever say I reject the tenets of the faith so I’ll pretend to go along with it in the interests of not getting disowned/shunned/worse”.
It’s also worth noting that “Christian” isn’t generally a huge part of people’s identities in this part of the world for the most part - someone might be Christian, they go to church, but they don’t go on about it (politicians, for example, rarely invoke spirituality and our PM gets some flak for being a Pentecostal). It’s not generally like parts of the US where being religious (and taking it seriously) can be a big part of people’s identities and shape how they view/interact with the world.
Everything that @Martini_Enfield posted above also applies to Germany. I’ve never heard an important politician make religious remarks in a speech or interview, not even from the CDU/CSU, which carry the term “Christian” in their name. If someone did, it would be considered tacky. When ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder omitted the standard formula “So wahr mir Gott helfe” (“so help me God”) when taking his office oath in 1998, it was duly noted, but caused no commotion whatsoever and hardly any comment. Angela Merkel, though a Lutheran pastor’s daughter and identifying as Christian, has never made any religious statement in her 16 years long term.
In the private sector, religion is seen as a private matter, and asking someone, especially someone you don’t know well, about their religious affiliation, is considered rude and an invasion of privacy. So be prepared to hear “Das geht Sie nichts an” (“This is none of your business”) when asking a German this question.
Interesting idea, and I think there is something to it. I have heard that Americans regularly change denomination, too, which I don’t think is at all common in Europe.
Looking at it on a world scale, I think insecurity has got to play a big role, but it’s not the only factor.
As many other people have pointed out, it really is. Maybe some parts of the US are as secular as Western Europe, but there is nothing like the Bible Belt in the UK, for example… actually, maybe Northern Ireland could qualify, but it has a small population and generally not much influence at a national level.
Lol, okay, I should have limited that a bit more. It’s possible for someone to be an atheist but still believe in ghosts, souls, auras, crystal healing etc. Would saying people who don’t believe in anything supernatural cover it?
Parts of? Even in the more liberal areas of the US religion is a big part of people’s identities. Our President, from blue Delaware (who I’d say is the most open religious President since Carter), and our Speaker of the House from “godless” San Francisco are quite open Catholics who speak often about their faith and how it informs their left of center views.
Mm, this just doesn’t happen in the UK. PM Theresa May was a regular church goer (daughter of an anglican vicar), and the most we got in the news about it was the press going ‘look! It’s Sunday and our PM has actually been to church!’ I think I only once read her mention her faith in an interview (as guiding her to do the right thing), but that was a real rarity.
The irony, of course, was that religious conservatives rallied around someone who really couldn’t be bothered to even half pretend he was Christian (especially after calling the previous President, a fairly standard liberal Protestant, a secret atheist or whathaveyou).
Well, voters are often blind to the people that are really on their side - or not. Explains why so many working class voters keep voting for elite-educated Boris.
It’s more difficult to decide how to vote when no party is clearly on your side:
Regardless of its causes, the consequences of this profound transformation are quite clear. As political systems have effectively come to represent two kinds of elites – the well-educated and the rich – they have left little space for the expression of the interests of the most disadvantaged citizens. Abstention, in Britain as in the majority of western democracies, has skyrocketed among low-income and lower-educated citizens in the past decades. In a remarkable book, Geoffrey Evans and James Tilley show how this “political exclusion of the British working class” was triggered by political parties and the mass media giving an ever-decreasing attention to questions of inequality. Class is not dead, as three political scientists emphatically stated 15 years ago: it has been buried alive.