In the English speaking world, Christians are becoming fewer and fewer, and older and older. Certainly in the UK, census figures released last month showed that less than half the population identified themselves as Christian; for young people, the figure was barely one in three. The same phenomenon is evident in the US. As Stephen Bullivant reports, people who say they have “no religion” – the so-called “nones” – amount to about one in four of the population, almost 60 million adults.
About 70 per cent of this group used to have a religion. Prof Bullivant calls them “nonverts”, that is, the opposite of converts, those who go from having a religion to no religion. Of them, 16 million of them say they were once Catholic; 7.5 million are ex-Baptists; two million each of ex-Lutherans and ex-Methodists; and a million apiece of ex-Episcopalians and ex-Presbyterians. Another two million nones were brought up in non-Christian religions, just over half of whom were raised Jewish. So, there are 41 million nonverts: an extraordinary development.
