Claud Cockburn claimed that the dullest Times headline ever written was: “Small earthquake in Chile. Not many dead.” For us, last week, the dullest headline might have been “Proportion of Christians in England unchanged.”
Not that we would have noticed it because the big headline from the same National Statistics survey told us that only one per cent of the UK population styled themselves as gay or lesbian. (You can see the survey, and its methodology, here).
But it’s the religious statistics which interest me. I know that it’s dangerous to compare two different surveys but both this one and the 2001 national census record Christians at around 70 per cent of our population. The second ranking denomination is Muslim, at around four per cent – an increase of 35 per cent since 2001). Taking “don’t knows” and “decline to answers” together, the non-religious remain at around 20 per cent.
