Here’s a very slightly boring chart, showing the number of people in Britain since the 1980s who say they don’t belong to any religion.
It’s not a marmalade dropper. It tells us exactly the story we expect. Gradually, very gradually, the proportion of British adults who don’t have a religion is increasing.
In 1983, in the first wave of British Social Attitudes, 31% said they didn’t have a religion. In 2021 it was 50%. Religions of all types are losing believers, at a rate of about 0.5% of the population a year.
This is an archetypal kind of Slow Futures – a glacial, seemingly inevitable change that will shape our society for decades (if not centuries) to come. It’s the kind that’s so slow moving it’s possible to overlook. It’s taken forty years for the proportion of believers in Britain to dwindle from a healthy two-thirds majority to just about half.
But the decline of religion is, I think, happening in a much more interesting way than these headline figures suggest. Recent increases in secularity aren’t being driven by the usual suspects of social and demographic change (young people). And our religiosity as a nation isn’t just receding, it’s also becoming both vaguer and more diverse at the same time.
Losing our religion
Secularity has increased across the generations, but not always at the same time, or at the same speed.
Between the 1980s and 1990s, the biggest increases in ‘no religion’ came from those aged under 35. In 1995 that meant the tail end of the Baby Boomer generation and most of the cohort that followed, Gen X.
These were big shifts, too. In 1991, 51% of 18-24s said they didn’t have a religion. By 1995 that was 68% - a rise of 17 percentage points in just a few years.
But, interestingly, as the young Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers moved through the years levels of secularity in the age bands they left behind stopped increasing.
In 2021, 72% of 18-24s (now the oldest Gen Z) didn’t have a religion, barely a hair above the level in the 1990s. For 25-34 year olds there’s been more change - at the turn of the century, 60% of 25-34s had no religion, in 2021 that was 66% - but the trend is definitely slowing. Have we reached peak secularity for the under 35s?
More recently, the biggest change in religious affiliation has come from the over 45s. The proportion of people without a religion between 1999 and 2019 increased by…
· … 10% for those aged 45-54
· … 13% for those aged 55-64
· … 15% for those aged 65+
In some ways this is just the same big generational change happening on repeat as the mould-breaking generations of the 1960s and 1970s age – and keep getting asked questions by social researchers about how religious they are. But, because young people aren’t much more secular than they were twenty years ago, it means the gap between the generations is narrowing. Not being religious used to be associated with youth. Nowadays (especially in 2019), not so much.
The final data in the chart is for 2021. In this wave, there’s an interesting, and significant, decline in the proportion of over 55s who say they have no religion. This is perhaps a response to the pandemic – a reminder to some that threats can come from anywhere, there are forces we can’t control and that the old institutions might still have some meaning. If that trend continues it means our drift towards secularity will be even slower than the first chart in this piece implies.
Rise of the non-denoms
The other significant change in religious observance in the UK is the nature of the religions that people do follow.
Among those who are religious, the overwhelming majority are Christian – 88% of those who are religious in 2021, down from 97% in 1983. We are getting more religiously diverse, but not very quickly. The religious bit of the population is still very heavily Christian. But that Christianity is somewhat vaguer than it was before.
In 1983, just 5% of the religious population said they were non-denominational Christian. In 2021, that had rocketed to 37%.
It’s important to note that less widely followed denominations like Methodism or Presbyterianism are captured within the ‘Other Christian’ category – which, like Church of England / Protestant, has shrunk significantly as a group (only Catholicism enjoys roughly the same share of the religious population now as it did forty years ago).
It’s also important to note that being non-denominational doesn’t automatically mean a more distant relationship with faith – indeed, in the US, the rise in non-denominationalism is associated with evangelism and the mega-Churches. But that doesn’t seem to be happening here.
Christian commentators lament how the faith is receding from public life. The rise in non-denoms tallies with long term (and Covid-accelerated) declines in church attendance. Increasing numbers of people have an association with Christianity that extends to Christmas, and the boxes they tick on school application forms, and maybe a hymn or two, but doesn’t extend to an organised set of beliefs. It’s a vaguer religion.
What does this mean?
Fear and anger – from some – about a decline in religion. Often, the trends we’ve discussed here are portrayed as a decline in Christianity. In reporting the latest census data, many news pieces led with this kind of analysis, like this one, from the Guardian. Culture warriors make hay with this kind of decline narrative, accusing the BBC of ‘abandoning Christianity’ over Easter a few weeks ago. A few years ago, this was led by the then Prime Minister, Theresa May, who criticised the National Trust for not making the word ‘Easter’ prominent enough in egg hunts they were arranging for children. This is largely all confected - neither the BBC nor the National Trust had relegated Easter in the way their accusers suggested. But it has been - and will remain - fertile ground for the culture wars, and our Political Brands trend.
Constitutional questions. The UK is the only democracy in Europe or North America to grant religious leaders automatic representation in our legislature. The Lords Spiritual account for 26 members of the House of Lords. As the UK becomes less Christian, and less religious overall, that will increase the volume of questions about the appropriateness of that arrangement. Any reform of the House of Lords is a big constitutional issue. Could the Lords Spiritual be the trigger for bigger reform?
The Rhythm of Life. This kind of rhythm probably wasn’t what David Cameron was referencing when he described his faith as ‘a bit like the reception for Magic FM in the Chilterns’. But the pattern of our daily and annual activities are hugely influenced by a faith that only a minority of us follow – a large number increasingly at a distance. Is it an anachronism for shops to only be open for six hours on a Sunday? Or for our bank holidays to be so clustered around key dates in the Christian calendar? Or for us to default to religious settings when we get married, or die? If it doesn’t feel like an anachronism now, it will soon. As our associations with Christianity become looser, the rhythms of life that the religion has left behind will fade.
Slow Shift. The religious population of the UK is declining by about 0.5% a year. This is an archetypal Slow Futures trend - a hugely significant shift in social values that is happening almost glacially. The slowness is a significant component of the change because it creates space for other manifestations - a drift into looser religiosity alongside secularism, arguments about constitutional change, challenges to the quietness of Sundays, endless Tim Stanley columns in the Telegraph, big institutions getting accused of turning their back on Christianity. If this was happening quickly, there’d be less space for any of that stuff to happen.
More than this
We talk about social trends like this all the time at Trajectory. We use external datasets, like British Social Attitudes, and our own proprietary ones to monitor trends in outlook, values and behaviour. We love tackling organisations’ big questions about change and the future too, so if you have such a question, get in touch with me at tom@trajectorypartnership.com.