Awkwardly plural

After the leaders’ debates in the 2010 general election, “experts” and strategists gathered in “spin alley” to brief journalists on how their guy had won the day. This week, religious sociology went through its own spin alley. The Office for National Statistics published the religion data from the 2011 census. This prompted much crowing from religion's critics, and for once the Church of England had a little nibble back, reminding everyone in a press statement that the National Secular Society has as many members as the British Sausage Appreciation Society (5000).

Christianity remains the largest religion in England and Wales, with 33.2m people (59.3 per cent of the population) ticking that box. Islam is next with 2.7m people (4.8 per cent of the population). Other religions total 4.7m people, or 8.4 per cent. And 14.1m people, or 25 per cent of the population, report they have no religion. Ten years ago, the Christian figure was 72 per cent, the non-religion figure was 15 per cent and the Muslim figure was 3 per cent.

The direction of travel seems pretty obvious, but it is often forgotten that the census measures loose affiliation. It doesn’t look at practice, knowledge or belief. The fact that 33m adults in England and Wales identify with Christianity doesn’t mean that the churches are full to bursting, or that this is a Christian country. In the same way, the upturn in the no religion category doesn’t mean that 14.1m people have learnt the virtues of scientific materialism, or will be celebrating hatchings, matchings and dispatchings with humanist ceremonies.

Indeed, a recent Theos/ComRes study into the non-religious, Post-religious Britain?: The faith of the faithless, shows how wrong it is to imagine that someone who calls themselves non-religious, or even atheist, has no spiritual beliefs. A quarter (23 per cent) of atheists believe in a human soul, 15 per cent in life after death and 7 per cent in angels. Similarly, a quarter (24 per cent) of the non-religious believe in heaven, while a fifth (20 per cent) believe in the supernatural powers of deceased ancestors.

Overall, only 9 per cent of the population are consistently non-religious—they don’t believe in God, never attend a place of worship, call themselves non-religious, and don’t believe in life after death, the soul, angels and so on. The non-religious category is as messy as the religious one, non-religious people believing in things and behaving in ways that are emphatically not non-religious. Britain is neither Christian nor secular, but awkwardly plural.