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| Screengrab from RT.com report Christianity Decline in Britain |
Christianity is supposed to be
Britain’s national religion. However, as RT’s Polly Boiko finds, recent census
data and polls suggest the faith is in decline.
The last UK census showed a dramatic
decline in the number of Britons who classed themselves as Christian. In the
2001 census, 72 percent said they were adherents to the faith. That figure
dropped to 59 percent by 2011.
“I wouldn’t say
I’m religious, but I have my beliefs,” one Londoner
told RT. “I have been brought up in a Christian family.”
You can find a Bible in almost every
hotel room around the globe. However, in August the Travelodge chain, one of
Britain’s biggest accommodation chains, removed the book from all its 500
hotels for “diversity reasons… in order not to discriminate against any
religion.”
The hotel chain said if customers
want to read the Bible, they can pick up a copy from the reception desk.
The Church of England condemned the
move as “tragic and bizarre,” saying that Bibles in hotel rooms are
important to provide hope, comfort and inspiration to travellers.
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Westminster Abbey is seen in central
London
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Several recent cases indicate that
Christianity is not practiced as freely as was previously the case. In 2006, a
British Airways employee was banned from wearing a cross at work.
The European Court of Human Rights
ruled in 2013 that Nadia Eweida should not have been prevented from wearing a
cross at work. She was awarded £1,600 in damages.
The Guardian claims that in 2013 there were 5.4
million churchgoers in the UK, representing some 10 percent of the adult
population (people aged 15 and over). That is 300,000 fewer than five years
previously, when 12 percent of UK’s population attended churches.
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