Post-Secularity and Religion in Britain: An Empirical Assessment

Abstract

In the almost half-century since Bryan Wilson published Religion in Secular Society, the secularisation paradigm has gone from take-for-granted orthodoxy to passé intellectual dead-end. It is now common to talk of post-secular Europe and de-secularisation. This article presents a very large body of data to demonstrate that despite the change in intellectual fashion, secularisation continues apace in Britain. Religion has become more contentious; it has not become more popular.

Notes

1. As a general mark of validation, it is worth noting that where Brierley extrapolated future church membership figures and we have now passed those dates and can thus test his predictions, his extrapolations proved to be very close: for 2005, they were +0.1% and for 2010, they were -0.1%.

2. Where data have no cited source, they are from Steve Bruce (Secularization).

3. I am grateful to David Voas for these figures.

4. These data were kindly supplied by Gordon Heald who worked for Gallup before founding Opinion Research Business.

5. The figures were supplied by the Registrar-General for Scotland. The totals may be artificially depressed by the fact that the census forms were completed on behalf of all members of a household by a single ‘household reference person’, often the oldest male, who may have chosen to overlook a young family member’s deviant religious identity. Even if we doubled the numbers, they would remain trivial.