In the 2001 census 71.6% of respondents described themselves as white and Christian. That’s just over 42 million people. By contrast, a mere 15.5% (around nine million people) described themselves as having no religion (this figure includes those who described themselves as “Jedi Knight” in the mischievous hope of forcing the government to legally recognise a religion that didn’t exist). This group of non-believers nevertheless formed the second-largest grouping after Christians.
This means that around 80% of the population of the UK claims to have a religion. But how many of those who responded in this way actually believe in a supernatural deity and accept the important tenets of their particular religion? I suspect (though I cannot prove) that many of them have no particular belief in a god or gods, little interest in their religion’s articles of faith, and have not attended a place of worship since the most recent wedding or funeral. How many of those who ticked the box marked “Christian” really did so because for them the label functions as a sort of statement of their cultural identity, rather than a statement of faith?
Witness the grimly jocular response to people in Northern Ireland who claimed to be atheist during the troubles: “Yes, but are you a Protestant atheist or a Catholic one?” Here, there was no doubt that a religious label masked an important question of cultural identity.
The recent surprising popularity in the best-seller lists of a small number of books written with an explicitly atheistic and anti-religious agenda can perhaps be explained by the existence of a significant segment of the population who have long acted and thought in a manner that is implicitly atheist, but who have never troubled to say so because the UK is a society where religion is not overtly a part of everyday life, or perhaps through fear of giving offence and upset to those around them, or maybe because there was no vehicle for them to express their lack of belief coherently.
All this has changed with the publication of books such as Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion”. Suddenly, large numbers of those whose viewpoint is implicitly atheist are handed a text which not only affirms what they had always thought, but gives cogent reasons for believing religion to be harmful, as well as questioning the special privileges hitherto automatically accorded to religion in our schools, political institutions, and on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day.
Seeing the staying power of these books on the best-seller lists, I am tempted to wonder just how many people there are in the UK who see religion as at best an unnecessary hypothesis. If it turns out to be more than half the population we could probably come to an arrangement where we all agree what an occasionally glorious, sometimes vicious and ultimately stultifying waste of time it’s all been.
