British Social Attitudes Survey.

Survey: Half of Britons Atheist, Only 38% Christian, Islam on the Rise.

Carl Court/Getty

VICTORIA FRIEDMAN

 11 Jul 2019

3:54

The British Social Attitudes survey has revealed that those professing a Christian faith have fallen to a record low, while more than half of Britons profess no faith and the number of those professing adherence to Islam is on the rise. The BSA also revealed that acceptance of gay sex has fallen for the first time since the height of the 1980s AIDS crisis.

Conducted by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), the survey of 2,884 people in 2018 found that there has been a “dramatic decline” in the number of people identifying as a Christian in the past 35 years.

In 1983, two-thirds (66 per cent) of people said they were Christian, that number hitting half the population in 2008, and just over a third, 38 per cent, in 2018. Only one per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds identify as belonging to the Church of England.

The survey also found that the only faiths which are notably growing in the UK are Christian Pentecostalism — likely due to immigration from West Africa — and Islam, which grew from one per cent in 1983, to three per cent in 2008, to six per cent in 2018.

NatCen’s 2016 saw that for the first time, half (50 per cent) of the population claimed to have no religion, with that figure rising to 52 per cent in 2018.

The survey’s authors would not commit to stating that the UK had become a ‘secular’ nation, but did say that while religion may be declining, “it is also diversifying and deepening, as some believers, like non-believers, become more committed to their worldviews. This means a world in which there may be significant tension between the political and social attitudes of the religious and non-religious, meaning faith is likely to remain an important part of our national conversation.” Breitbart.