More than half of UK population is non-religious

bemused

The British Humanist Association web-site has reported on the results of the British Social Attitudes Survey, which is a major annual survey, the latest report covering the year 2013:

https://humanism.org.uk/campaigns/religion-and-belief-some-surveys-and-statistics/the-british-social-attitudes-survey/

For the first time, those people saying they are not members of any religious group are in the majority in the UK, up by three percentage points from 47.7% to 50.6% in just one year. Furthermore the survey indicates that 62.4% of people never attend religious services, so some of those claiming to be members of a religion must be completely inactive.

I was never a JW and I'm not sure what this means for the WT. However it seems to me that a lot of WT teaching criticises other christian groups, saying they have got it wrong on the trinity, dates etc. - this would seem to become increasingly irrelevant given the decline in those faiths. WT may have to shift focus to attacking the non-religious, but that's a less easy target as, by definition, they have no one set of beliefs..

WT may benefit possibly in the short-term from catholics and anglicans looking for other homes as their churches empty, but ultimately it's hard to see how a decline in religiosity in the UK can be anything but bad news for the JW faith.

stan livedeath

the largest christian religion in the UK is church of england. most members who say they are have never set foot in a church---its just a cop out phrase--easier than writing "none" on a form.

i would imagine the largest religious group in the UK--that do regularly attend their place of worship--are muslims. closely followed by football supporters.

Simon

I suspect many of those saying they are members of a religious group are really on the fringe and just identify out of habit and family.

Yay for the UK, leading the secular charge ! :)

cofty

Still working on the other 49.4%

steve2

It is on a par with New Zealand where surveys consistently show that the "nonreligious" group is the fastest growing from census to census, with the overall proportion of Christians dropping. Even the JWs, who once bucked trends, now have fewer people identifying as JWs in 2013 (17,931) than in 1996 (19,527).