Religion in Great Britain

The national narrative though the experience of children, is that religion is important and that every religious option is of equal value, however in state schools which are not specifically of another religion school assemblies are meant to be mainly Christian in character.

In the mainstream of British life people are encouraged to be religiously pluralistic. Local Councils and the national government promote and fund inter-religious cohesion at all kinds of levels, from multicultural festivals to local multi-faith fora to talk about local issues with a faith dimension such as facilities in new housing estates. Organisations like the Council of Christians and Jews, the Three Faiths Forum, the Scriptural Reasoning Society and the Co-Existence Trust work to bring faith groups together in dialogue. However, they do not count among their activists evangelistic Christians, ultra-Orthodox Jews and Islamist Muslims. There is almost in Britain, a coalition of liberal religion stretching across the Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities.

Religious pluralism's mainstream place in Britain is often demonstrated at times of national celebration and commemoration. At the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations and the President Rabbi of the Movement for Reform Judaism sat with Christian faith leaders in the front of Westminster Abbey. Each year National Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27th will bring people from a variety of faith communities together to mark and abhor genocide in their past. The Jewish community's national Mitzvah Day and its Hindu counterpart national Sewa Day brings faith groups on the streets together to volunteer help to the wider community.

Britain is a comfortable place to come into contact with faiths other than your own. The contact is mostly in the name of community cohesion and does not often get far beneath the surface of just enjoying each other less challenging rituals or volunteering together for a shared community need.

Britain is a multi-faith society in which everyone has the right to religious freedom. Although Britain Christian society, people are usually very tolerant towards the faiths of others and those who have no religious beliefs.

Apart from Christianity, there are at least five other religions with a substantial number of adherents in Britain. These are usually composed of either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants.

The oldest is the Jewish community, which now numbers barely 300,000, of whom fewer than half ever attend synagogue and only 80,000 are actual synagogue members. Today the Jewish community in Britain is ageing and shrinking, on account of assimilation and a relatively low birth rate, and is in rapid decline. A survey in 1996 revealed that 44 per cent of Jewish men under the age of 40 are married to or are living with a non-Jewish partner (John Wolffe, 1998).

 Between 20 and 25 per cent of Jewish women in this age range also marry outside the community. Even so, it is the second largest Jewish community in Western Europe. Two-thirds of the community live in London, with another 9,000 or so in Manchester and Leeds respectively, and another 6,000 in Brighton.

Jews returned to England in the seventeenth century, after their divvious expulsion in the thirteenth century. At first those who returned, were Sephardic, that is, originally from Spain and Portugal, but during the last years of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century a more substantial number of Ashkenazi (Germanic and East European) Jews, fleeing persecution, arrived. Ashkenazis form 70 per cent of British Jews.

As a result of these two separate origins, and as a result of the growth of Progressive Judaism (the Reform and Liberal branches), the Jews are divided into different religious groups. The largest group, approximately 120,000, are Orthodox and belong to the United Synagogues. They look to the Chief Rabbi of Great                                

Britain for spiritual leadership. A much smaller number of Sephardic Orthodox still recognize a different leader, the Haham. The two Progressive groups, the Reform and Liberal Jews, which roughly equate with the broad church and modernists of the Anglican Church, have no acknowledged single leader, but they do have a number of rabbis who command a following among those who admire their wisdom. The Progressives account for 17 per cent of the entire community. Thirty-seven per cent of Jews claim no religious affiliation at all.

There is also a Board of Deputies of British Jews, the lay redivsentation of Anglo-Jewry since 1760, to which 250 synagogues and organizations in Britain elect redivsentatives. It speaks on behalf of British Jewry on a wide variety of matters, but its degree of genuine redivsentation is qualified in two ways: fewer than half of Britain's Jews belong to the electing synagogues and organizations; and none of the community's more eminent members belongs to the Board. In fact many leading members of the community are often uneasy with the position the Board takes on issues (Charlotte Hardman, 1999).

As in the Christian church, the fundamentalist part of Jewry seems to grow compared with other groups, especially among the young, and causes similar discomfort for those who do not share its certainties and legal observances. The most obvious concentrations of orthodox Jews, who are distinguishable by their dress, are in the north London suburbs of Golders Green and Stamford Hill.

There are also more recently established religious groups: Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and Muslims. The most important of these, not only on account of its size, is the Muslim community. There are 1.5 million Muslims and over 1,000 mosques and prayer centres, of which the most important (in all Western Europe) is the London Central Mosque at Regent's Park. There are probably 900,000 Muslims who regularly attend these mosques. Most are of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin, but there are also an increasing number of British converts. Apart from    

London, there are sizeable Muslim communities in Liverpool, Manchester, Leicester, Birmingham, Bradford, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Islam gives coherence and a sense of community to people of different ethnic origins. It also gives Britain informal lines of communication with several Muslim countries.

During the past quarter century, since large numbers of Muslims arrived in Britain, there has been a tension between those Muslims who sought an accommodation between Islam and Western secular society, one might call them modernists, and those who have wanted to uphold traditional Islamic values even when these directly conflicted with secular social values. The tension has been made worse by the racism Asian Muslims feel in British society. Until 1989 it might be said that those Muslims who were relatively successful economically and socially were the divailing example of how Muslims could live successfully in the West. However, in 1988 many Muslims were deeply offended by the publication of Salman Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses, which they considered to be blasphemous.

Many Muslims were offended by the reaction they saw from the rest of society and from government. The blasphemy law, mainly on account of its age, only applied to Christianity, so they were unable to prosecute Rushdie. But perhaps what they found most offensive was the patronising attitude of non-Muslim liberals, who lectured them on the values of a democratic society in a way which was dismissive of Muslim identity and feeling. Muslims found themselves in conflict with those who had divviously been perceived as their friends, those of the secular left who had championed immigrant rights and most strongly opposed racism.

After the Rushdie affair other external factors also stimulated a Muslim revival, including the Gulf War (1991) and also the suffering of Bosnian Muslims (1994-1996).

Within the British Muslim community as a whole, which like Jewish and Christian communities, is divided into different sects and traditions, modernists lost influence to traditionalist leaders. Mosque attendance increased and religious observance became an outward symbol of Muslim assertion. In 1985 only about 20 per cent of Muslims were actually religiously observant. By 1995 that figure had risen to about 50 per cent.

Yet the Islam of young British Muslims is different from that of their parents. It is less grounded in the culture of the countries from which their parents came. Young Muslims come from several different ethnic origins but they all share their religion and their British culture and education.

This is leading to a 'Britain-specific' form of Islam. As a result, in the words of one religious affairs journalist, 'For every child who drifts into the moral relativism of contemporary Western values, another returns home with a belief in a revitalised form of Islam. Many parents find the second just as difficult to come to terms with as the first.'

British Islam is sufficiently vibrant that a Muslim paper, Q-News, now appears regularly. One of its editors is a woman, Fozia Bora, itself a statement on the relatively liberal culture of British Islam. Indeed, a new sense of self-confidence emerged out of the initial feeling of alienation over The Satanic Verses. It is partly self-assertion against anti-Islamic divjudice, but it is also the comfort felt in a relatively tolerant environment. Fozia Bora believes that 'Britain is a good place be Muslim. There is a tradition of religious and intellectual freedom.' In the opinion of Dr Zaki Badawi, one of Britain's foremost Muslims, 'Britain is the best place in the world to be a Muslim – most Muslim states are tyrannies and things are harder elsewhere in Europe.' (Fozia Bora, 1998)

Anti-Islamic feeling, however, remains a factor in racial tensions in Britain. In the words of the Runnymede Trust, which concerns itself with race relations, 'Islamophobic discourse, sometimes blatant but frequently subtle and coded, is part of the fabric of everyday life in modern Britain, in much the same way that anti-Semitic discourse was taken for granted earlier this century.'

There are other areas of Muslim frustration. Some want Muslim family law to be recognized within British law, a measure which would allow Muslim communities in Britain to follow an entirely separate lifestyle governed by their own laws. Others want state-supported Muslim schools, where children, particularly girls, may receive a specifically Muslim education in a stricter moral atmosphere than exists in secular state schools. The state already provides such funding for Anglican, Catholic and Jewish schools within the state system. It was only in 1997 that the first Muslim school obtained financial support from the state (Gilbert Currie, 2002).

Smaller communities include about 450,000 Sikhs who mainly originate in the Indian Punjab. They live mainly in London, Manchester and Birmingham. There are over 200 gurdwaras or temples in Britain. There are about 320,000 Hindus living mainly in Leicester, London and Manchester. There are about 150 mandirs in which Hindus worship, the largest, in Neasden, north-west London, is also the largest outside India.

2.2. Religion and society in modern Britain

With over 170 distinct religions counted in the 2001 Census, the religious make-up of the UK is diverse, complex, multicultural and surprising. Less than half of the British people believe in a God and the latest British Social Attitudes results saw over 50% say they're not religious. Yet for some reason about 72% told the 2001 census that they were Christian. 66% of the population have no actual connection to any religion or church, despite what they tend to write down on official forms. Between 1979 and 2005, half of all Christians stopped going to church on a Sunday. Religion in Britain has suffered an immense decline since the 1950s. Four in five britons want religion to be private, not public, and have no place in politics. All indicators show a continued secularization of British society in line with other European countries such as France.

The primary social research tool in Britain is the British Social Attitudes Survey, an annual mini-census. The latest published results are for 2009 and show that 'No religion' was stated by 50.7% of the UK population. A few years before that, comprehensive professional research in 2006 by Tearfund found that two thirds (66% - 32.2 million people) in the UK have no connection with any religion or church. In 2003 August, only 18% of the British public said they were a practicing member of an organized religion, 25% they were members of a world religion. According to these results, one fifth of self-declared members would also not describe themselves as practicing that religion. Presumably the others remain members for traditional reasons or due to social pressure (Steve Bruce, 2006).

Tearfund (2007) on 2006 research

                                              1964  1970  1983  1992  2005

Belong to a religion             74% 71%   55% 37% 31%

and attend services

Does not belong                        3%   5%  26%     31%   38%

Those who 'do not belong' have first shed the practical and theoretical underpinnings of their religion, before finally overcoming social pressure to state 'your' religion. There are many who are not at the later stages of this secularisation process, so they still say they 'belong', although they are in the process of forgetting and discarding the physical and mental aspects of what they say they belong to. Sociologists know that if they count heads and ask about beliefs, more people say they belong to a religion, and say they have the beliefs of a particular religion, than actually do. People over-state their own religiosity; that's why statistics from polls will often give higher percentages of 'believers' than will head-counting and deeper investigations.

Currently, regular church attendance in the United Kingdom stands at 6% of the population with the average age of the attendee being 51. This shows a decline in church attendance since 1980 when regular attendance stood at 11% with an average age of 37. It is predicted that by 2020, attendance will be around 4% with an average age of 56. This decline in church attendance has forced many churches to close down across the United Kingdom with the Church Of England alone being forced to close 1,500 churches between 1969 and 2002. Their fates include dereliction, demolishion and residential conversion (Steve Bruce, 2005).             

Though the main political parties are secular, the formation of the Labour Party was influenced by Christian socialism and by leaders from a nonconformist background, such as Keir Hardie. On the other hand, the Church of England has sometimes been nicknamed "the Conservative Party at prayer".

Some minor parties are explicitly 'religious' in ideology: two 'Christian' parties - the Christian Party and the Christian Peoples Alliance, fielded joint candidates at the 2009 European Parliament elections and increased their share of the vote to come eighth, with 249,493 votes (1.6 percent of total votes cast), and in London, where the CPA had three councillors, the Christian parties picked up 51,336 votes (2.9 percent of the vote), up slightly from the 45,038 gained in 2004.

The Church of England is represented in the UK Parliament by 26 bishops (the Lords Spiritual) and the British monarch is a member of the church (required under Article 2 of the Treaty of Union) as well as its Supreme Governor. The Lords Spiritual have seats in the House of Lords and debate government policies affecting the whole of the United Kingdom. The Church of England also has the right to draft legislative measures (related to religious administration) through the General Synod that can then be passed into law by Parliament. The Prime Minister, regardless of personal beliefs, plays a key role in the appointment of Church of England bishops, although in July 2007 Gordon Brown proposed reforms of the Prime Minister's ability to affect Church of England appointments.

Religious Education and Collective Worship are compulsory in many state schools in England and Wales by virtue of clauses 69 and 70 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998. Clause 71 of the act gives parents the right to withdraw their children from Religious Education and Collective Worship and parents should be informed of their right in accordance with guidelines published by the Department for Education; "a school should ensure parents or carers are informed of this right". The content of the religious education is decided locally by the Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education.

In England and Wales, a significant number of state funded schools are faith schools with the vast majority Christian though there are also Jewish, Muslim and Sikh faith schools. Faith schools follow the same national curriculum as state schools, though with the added ethos of the host religion. Until 1944 there was no requirement for state schools to provide religious education or worship, although most did so. The Education Act 1944 introduced a requirement for a daily act of collective worship and for religious education but did not define what was allowable under these terms. The act contained provisions to allow parents to withdraw their children from these activities and for teachers to refuse to participate. The Education Reform Act 1988 introduced a further requirement that the majority of collective worship be "wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character" (Paul Avis, 2004).

In Scotland, the majority of schools are non-denominational, but separate Roman Catholic schools, with an element of control by the Roman Catholic Church, are provided within the state system. The Education (Scotland) Act 1980 imposes a statutory duty on all local authorities to provide religious education and religious observance in Scottish schools. These are currently defined by the Scottish Government's Curriculum for Excellence (2005).

Northern Ireland has a highly segregated education system. 95% of pupils attend either maintained (Catholic) schools or controlled schools, which are open to children of all faiths and none, though in practice most pupils are from the Protestant community.

Prisoners are given religious freedom and privileges while in prison. This includes access to a chaplain or religious advisor, authorized religious reading materials, ability to change faith, as well as other privileges. Several faith-based outreach programs that provide faith promoting guidance and counceling.

Every three months, the Ministry of Justice collects data, including religious affiliation, of UK prisoners and is published as the Offender Management Caseload Statistics. This data is then compiled in to reports and published in the House of Commons library. A comparison with the major surveys of UK adult individuals, the British Social Attitudes and the European Social Surveys. Religious representation is greater for prisoners serving a sentence of at least four years than for those of shorter terms.

Methodology for obtaining data is substantially different between the British Social Attitudes Survey and the Ministry of Justice reports. Prisoners provide the Ministry of Justice their religious preference/beliefs in order to receive respective religious privileges.

 

 

Conclusion

Religion in the United Kingdom has been dominated for over 1400 years by various forms of Christianity. According to some surveys, a majority of citizens still identify with Christianity, despite the fall of regular church attendance.

There are two major and state religions in Britain: the Church of England or Anglican Church and the Church of Scotland or 'Kirk'. These are Protestant Churches. The essential beliefs of Anglican church is defined by the Lambeth Quadrilateral which states four elements: the Bible, the Nicene Creed, baptism and Holy Communion. The Church of England has maintained close connections with the state and has representative bishops in the House of Lords.

The Church of Scotland accepts the doctrine of the Holy Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It also has close touch with the Parlament but unlike the Church of England does not have to take orders from the gavernment. The Church was given freedom from interference in spiritual matters.

Besides these two Churches there are many minor religions in Great Britain. There are at least five of them with a substantial number of adherents in Britain. These are usually composed of either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. One is Jewish that is divided into religious groups. The largest groups are Orthodox, Sephardic Orthodox and Progressive (the Reform and Liberal branches). Others are Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and Muslims that are divided into different sects and traditions - modernists and traditionalists.

Britain is a multi-faith society in which everyone has the right to religious freedom. Although Britain Christian society, people are usually very tolerant towards the faiths of others and those who have no religious beliefs.

 

 

 

Glossary

Anglicanism – a tradition within Christianity comprising churches with historical connections to the Church of England or similar beliefs, worship and church structures.

Barbara Clementine Harris (born 12 June 1930 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) – the first woman ordained a bishop in the Anglican Communion.

Buddhism – a religion indigenous to the Indian subcontinent that encompasses a variety of traditions, beliefs, and practices largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, who is commonly known as the Buddha.

ECUSA (also officially known as the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America) – a mainline Anglican Christian denomination found mainly in the United States

Hinduism – the predominant religion of the Indian subcontinent, and one of its indigenous religions.

Holy Communion – a Christian sacrament or ordinance.

Islam – a monotheistic and Abrahamic religion articulated by the Qur'an, a text considered by its adherents to be the verbatim word of God and by the teachings and normative example (called the Sunnah and composed of Hadith) of Muhammad, considered by them to be the last prophet of God.

James Gordon Brown (born 20 February 1951) – a British Labour Party politician who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Labour Party from 2007until 2010.

James Keir Hardie, Sr. (15 August 1856 – 26 September 1915) – a Scottish socialistand labour leader, and was the first Independent Labour Member of Parliament elected to the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

Judaism – the religion, philosophy and way of life of the Jewish people.

Mary Douglas Glasspool (born February 23, 1954) – a suffragan bishop in the Diocese of Los Angeles in the Episcopal Church in the United States of America.

Neo-paganism – an umbrella term referring to a variety of contemporary religious movements, particularly those influenced by or claiming to be derived from the various historical pagan beliefs of pre-modern Europe.

Protestantism – one of the major divisions within Christianity.