Christianity is for all practical purposes dead in the UK. According to a recent report, only 55% of British people consider themselves Christians. However, upon further examination, that number is actually greatly exaggerated, as only 6% of people are considered “active,” meaning they attend mass or services at least once a week, pray, and read something of their Bibles according to a recent report:
Only 6 percent of British adults are practicing Christians, a new survey commissioned by the Church of England has found, defining the term as those who read the Bible, pray, and attend church on a regular basis.
The ComRes survey found that the reported decline of Christian believers in the U.K. might be even steeper than suggested, as 55 percent of the faithful admitted they never read the Bible. Another 33 percent said they never attend church, while 29 percent said they never pray.
The poll interviewed 8,150 adults in the U.K. between March 17 and March 31, and summarized in its findings that close to half, or 51 percent of adults, identified as Christians.
Rachel Jordan, the Church of England’s National Mission and Evangelism adviser, said in an article for The Telegraph on Thursday that the results convey “a real sense of the scale of the task ahead.”
“There are lots of surveys out there which measure how many people nominally identify as Christians,” Jordan added.
“But we, as a group of leaders across denominations committed to evangelism, wanted to devise a measure which shows us who the most committed people are — those who themselves might be willing to take on the task of spreading the Good News of Jesus in His country.”
She said there is “no point being woolly” when it comes to defining a practicing Christian, adding that it wouldn’t help with evangelism.
“We are really happy when people in this country chose to affiliate with us, identifying as both Christian and Church of England even if in practice they don’t always choose to join in our churches,” Jordan continued.
“But this does show that we need to do more to connect with those people and explore ways to draw them into the wider church community.”
Survey data from NatCen’s British Social Attitudes earlier in September put the non-religious population in the U.K. even higher, at 53 percent.
The data noted that only 15 percent of respondents would describe themselves as Anglicans. What is more, 71 percent of young people aged 18–24 said they follow no religion.
The Bishop of Liverpool, the Rt. Rev. Paul Bayes, said in a statement sent to The Christian Post at the time that “God remains relevant,” however.
“The Church remains relevant. We in the Church, and all who love the Church, need to keep finding ways to show and tell those who say they have ‘no religion’ that faith — faith in the God who loves them still — can make that life-transforming difference for them and for the world,” Bayes said. (source)
As noted by the study, even the 6% figure is exaggerated because a staggering 71% of people under the age of 24 openly admit they follow no religion. This means that a majority of the 6% of people who are considered “practicing” are likely older people who are past their prime years for having families and are approaching death. In short, as the Baby Boomers continue to die off, that 6% figure will drastically decrease. Likewise, while there has been made much to do about foreign immigrants with Christian backgrounds, such as from Poland or Brazil, the fact is that there is a great chance they will secularize too in the same way that many people from Central and South America who come to the USA go from being religious to complete pagans within the span of three generations.
The greatest irony of this entire study I find is how the Church of England says they do not care if people even join their church, but simply any church at all because the extent of the crisis is so deep. I say this because while the events of history’s past are the past, the fact is that the state of England today was a direct creation of centuries of rabid anti-Catholicism leading to a nationalized ‘church’ which is nothing more than the equivocation of morality with the social ethos of the current time and place. As we have warned, any attempt to link social ethics absolutely to divinely revealed truth will always result in the replacement of the divine with man because due to original sin, man will always attempted to make himself the standard of divine truth. This always results in the reduction of the Church to being a merely social institution that one may or may not choose to associate with, which in turn naturally generates secularism and if taken far enough, a return to an individual moral standard created, justified, and maintained by man himself according to what he wills at the current time. Instead of “the law is do what God wills,” morality becomes the infamous Crowlean mantra of “do what thou wilt is the whole of the law,” which is the defining mantra of satanism.
The danger is in the philosophical consequences and conclusions that Protestantism naturally leads to. It is also not a process that happens immediately, but usually takes time and grows due to the failure of people to address and uproot false teachings as they arise. Indeed, it is only natural that errors occur among Christians because we live in a sin-fallen world. Sometimes these errors may even be hard to detect until they have had time to grow in. To use the analogy of a gardener, sometimes weeds look just like planted seeds and one cannot distinguish between weed or seed until the plants have been given a short time to grow. However, once the weed is identified, it is for the gardener to uproot the weed and destroy it because if it is not uprooted, it will facilitate the spread of more weeds that could destroy the garden itself.
Jesus clearly states to St. Peter that “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I shall build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Truer words could never have been spoken, as evidenced by the fact that many times the Catholic Church has been overrun with heresy and apostasy so badly that it would seem to be on the edge of collapse. Yet it is at that point, when all hope seems to have faded, that a miraculous event or series of events happens and the Church is restored stronger than before. This has happened many times and is a constant theme because Jesus Himself promised this in Sacred Scripture. When those entrusted to weed the garden fail to do their job, then Christ Himself does the job.
The same is not promised for heresy.
While there are many good people in many different churches, the fact is that the Church is still the Church. When problems happen in the Church, while they may be terrible, they are eventually worked out by miraculous means because there is no way that the Church could survive other than by the hand of God. If God’s hand were not there, the Church would simply be either annihilated or split into thousands of warring sects all claiming truth but never being able to unite with each other, resulting eventually in their submission to the ethos of the times and eventually submersion into the abyss of history.
In other words, they would become what Protestantism is today.
England is in a sad state, and Christianity is dying. She has had many chances to return to the ancestral Faith, and has refused for centuries. She is now at just before the final stage of heresy, which is a return to paganism. I say “just before” final because, as we have noted before, merely echoing the voices of great Catholic writers of old, that the final stage of all Christian heresy and the vacuum which fills formerly Christian societies is Islam.
Just saying.