Britain's Department for Communities and Local Government yesterday
released a report (
full text) (
Executive Summary) by Dame Louise Casey on integration and opportunity in isolated and deprived communities. It examines immigration and settlement patterns. As reported by
BBC News, the report gives attention to the rapid increase in Britain's Muslim population which stands at 2.8 million-- a 72% increase from 2001 to 2011. In its section on religion, the report says in part:
We remain an officially Christian country with our Head of State, Her Majesty the Queen, also Supreme Governor of the established Church in England, while at the 2011 Census, 59% of us described ourselves as Christian. But that figure had fallen significantly from 72% a decade earlier. And the Church of England has seen a steady decline in church attendance over the last half century, with the proportion of the population attending Sunday services now only one third of that in the 1960s.
At the same time there has been a shift away from mainstream Christian denominations and a growth in evangelical and Pentecostal churches, largely reflecting changes in ethnic diversity.
There has also been an increase in the variety of faiths being practiced. Fifty years ago, Judaism – at less than 1% of the population – was the largest non-Christian faith in the UK. Now it is the fourth largest non-Christian faith with 269,000 people identifying as Jewish in the 2011 Census behind Islam (2.8 million people), Hinduism (833,000), and Sikhism (432,000).
