Less than half of U.K. population now Christian, study says

The U.K. Office for National Statistics released a report Tuesday showing that the percentage of people in England and Wales claiming to be Christians dropped over the last decade. In 2021, only about 46 percent of people in England and Wales described themselves as Christian—that’s down from slightly less than 60 percent ten years ago. Scotland and Northern Ireland report their census data separately. Christianity is formally the state religion of Britain.

What happened with other religious beliefs? The percentage of people describing themselves as Muslim rose slightly to six and a half percent. More than one in every three people in England and Wales now describe themselves as not religious—up from one in every four people a decade ago.

Dig deeper: Listen to Mary Reichard’s conversation with Glenn Duerr on The World and Everything in It podcast about the U.K.’s new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.