The Archbishop of York said the country had “left behind the era when many people almost automatically identified as Christian” after Census data showed the proportion of the population of England and Wales describing themselves as such had fallen below a half for the first time.
Some 46.2% of the population of England and Wales described themselves as Christian on the day of the 2021 census, down from 59.3% a decade earlier, the ONS said. This is the first time the proportion has dropped below a half.
The percentage of people saying they had no religion jumped from around a quarter in 2011 (25.2%) to over a third in 2021 (37.2%). There were increases in the proportion of people describing themselves as Muslim (up from 4.9% to 6.5%) and as Hindu (from 1.5% to 1.7%).
