“The decline of churches in the UK is long term, now it just happens to be approaching rock bottom. So 95 percent of people don’t attend church on an average Sunday. Christian worship is already the concern of a tiny minority of people,” Andrew Copson, chief executive of the British Humanist Association, said.
“I think over time even the weak cultural identity that still seems to be associated with Christianity will banish away, probably all over Europe, not just in the UK,” Copson added.
The British Muslim population has surged dramatically over the past 15 years, increasing by 75 percent. According to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics, Muslims have the youngest age profile of the religious groups, with 48 percent (1.3 million) aged under 25.
Muhammad Abdul Bari, Honorary Chairman of one of the largest mosques in the UK, the East London Mosque, believes that’s because Islam’s family values are “really bonded, and families really try to nurture young people in the folds of Islam.”
He added that the Mosque he goes to, founded in 1910 and accommodating 7,000 worshippers for congregational prayers, has a congregation over 50 percent young people, who feel “part of the Mosque establishment” these days.
Contrary to Islam, Christianity showed the oldest age profile among the leading religious groups in 2011. And while the main reason for Christians being economically inactive was retirement, for Muslims economic inactivity was mainly because they were students, or because they were looking after the home or family.
Some argue that unlike Islam, which gives security to people, Christianity isn’t helping young Brits to survive on the violent streets of England.
In fact, the UK had a greater number of murders in 2007 than any other EU country, making it the most violent place in Europe, according to Eurostat. By comparison, there were over 2,000 crimes recorded per 100,000 of population in the UK, and 466 violent crimes per 100,000 in America.
Latest figures from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) estimate that in the year ending March 2013 there were 8.6 million crimes in England and Wales.
“The passivity that Christianity promotes is perceived as alien and disconnected to black youths growing up in often violent and challenging urban environments in Britain today,” the former chairman of Brixton Mosque, Abdul Haqq Baker, wrote in the Guardian.
At some point in his life, Baker, raised as a Roman Catholic like his father, converted to Islam. Turning the other cheek has never been an option since then. The majority of young people he had interviewed converted from Christianity to Islam for similar reasons.
NTJ/NJF