According to a new study, the Church of England is heading for the dustbin of history, while British Islam is on the upswing.
The Church of England has suffered a dramatic slump in its followers, shocking new figures show.
Between 2012 and 2014, the proportion of Britons identifying themselves as C of E or Anglican dropped from 21 per cent to 17 per cent – a fall of about 1.7 million people.
Over the same period, the number of Muslims in Britain grew by nearly one million, according to a survey by the respected NatCen Social Research Institute.
Former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey warned last night that unless urgent action was taken, the Church was just ‘one generation away from extinction’.
The number of Anglicans in Britain has dropped from about 10.3 million to 8.6 million, and will raise fresh fears over the future of the Church of England, which has been in decline since the 1960s.
Of course, those numbers of Anglicans is boosted by imports from the old empire. Africans and Arabs are surely boosting those figures. How many natives attend services even occasionally is unknown to me. The overall weekly attendance rate of Christians in England is 12%. My bet it the number of self-identified Christians who bother attending services is less than 20%.
Alarmingly for Church leaders, the worst losses have come over the past decade, with about 4.5 million fewer people affiliating themselves to the C of E or Anglicanism between 2004 and 2014. In contrast, those who describe themselves as Muslim have jumped from 3.2 per cent of the population – equivalent to 1.5 million – in 2012 to 4.7 per cent or 2.4 million in 2014. The only Christian denomination that has remained relatively stable between the 1980s and today is Catholicism – numbers have dipped slightly from ten per cent to eight per cent.
Mr Brierley said the Roman Catholic Church had benefited from the influx of immigrants in recent years, particularly those from Eastern Europe. He added: ‘It is not just Poles. Many others are joining the Church when they come here, from Filipinos to Portuguese. There are seven different Catholic churches just for Croatians in London.’
A category called ‘Other Christian’ has also remained steady, boosted by the rise of largely black congregations attending Pentecostal ‘mega-churches’.
Naomi Jones, of NatCen, said one explanation for the Anglican decline is that fewer people see Christianity as being an important part of their British identity.
I have an old friend who is an Episcopal minister. The Episcopal Church is suffering from the same problems as the Anglican Church. Women, homosexuals and Progressives have worked hard to turn the church into an anti-Christian and anti-Western romper room. They had a Bishop a few years back who was a proud sodomite and all-around public nuisance.
Christianity only works when it calls the faithful to live in opposition to the fallen world. In Europe, nationalism was mixed into the faith so that each people could make their own claims to be God’s chosen. Even so, the faithful, including secular leaders, were required to live according to the tenets of the faith, which demanded the foregoing of earthly pleasures in order to spend eternity in heaven.
Mainstream Protestant faiths, like the C of E, have thrown in the towel on all that sacrifice and self-denial stuff. As a result, people stopped going to services, What would be the point? The Church was supposed to offer guidance and support in navigating around temptation. If the guy saying mass cannot control himself and preaches that you follow his lead, why not stay home and watch TV instead?
That’s all water under the bridge now as Christianity is dead on the Continent and nearly dead in the Anglosphere. The big news is that Islam is maybe a decade away from being the biggest religion in England. With about ten percent of the population being Muslim now, ongoing conversion and immigration suggest Muslims will be pushing 25% of the population in a generation.
It’s tempting to think that the rest of the country will rise up in opposition, but everyone thought something similar when Æthelberht converted to Christianity in the 6th century. As Osama bin Laden put it, people see a strong horse and a weak horse. They will choose the strong horse. Just as Christianity was the strong horse 1500 years ago, Islam is now the strong horse in Britain.
As-salamu alaykum Chaps!