Religion in Britain

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This has been particularly true in the two areas of greatest controversy within the Church since the mid-1980s: the ordination of women and of homosexuals (and the acceptance of homosexuals already in the priesthood). In both cases the modernists are ranged against the conservatives. After a long and often contentious debate, the Church finally accepted the ordination of women in 1992, and the first were ordained in 1994, long after the practice had been adopted in other parts of the Anglican Communion. Some 200 clergy, fewer than expected, chose to leave the Church of England rather than accept women priests. They were almost all Anglo-Catholic. While great passion was aroused among some clergy and lay people on this issue, the large majority of church-goers did not feel strongly enough, either way, to force a decision. It is unlikely that any woman will become a bishop for some years. Having accepted women priests, a fresh controversy arose over the question of homosexuality with, if anything, even greater vehemence. This time the contest is primarily between modernists and evangelicals, but the essence of the debate is the same: biblical and traditional values versus contemporary social ones. The director general of the Evangelical Alliance claims that 'a vast number of churches stand by 2,000 years of biblical analysis which concludes that homosexual sex is outside the will and purpose of God'. The modernists argue that it is ludicrous to pick one out of many culturally specific prohibitions in the Old Testament, and that a judgmental posture excludes
Christians who quite sincerely have a different sexual orientation and perspective from heterosexuals. Modernists say the church should listen and learn from them. It is a controversy likely to persist well into the twenty- first century.

The Church of England was traditionally identified with the ruling establishment and with authority, but it has been distancing itself over the past 25 years or so, and may eventually disengage from the state.
'Disestablishment', as this is known, becomes a topic for discussion each time the Church and state clash over some issue. Since 1979 the Church has been ready to criticize aspects of official social policy.

Nevertheless, the Church of England remains overwhelmingly conventional and middle class in its social composition, having been mainly middle and upper class in character since the Industrial Revolution. Most working-class people in England and Wales who are religious belong to the nonconformist or 'Free' Churches, while others have joined the Catholic
Church in the past 140 years.

Because of its position, the Anglican Church has inherited a great legacy of ancient cathedrals and parish churches. It is caught between the value of these magnificent buildings as places of worship, and the enormous cost of their upkeep. The state provides about 10 per cent of the cost of maintaining the fabric of historic churches.

The other Christian churches

The Free or nonconformist churches are distinguished by having no bishops, or 'episcopacy', and they all admit both women and men to their ministry. The main ones today are: the Methodist Union (400,000 full adult members); the Baptists (150,000); the United Reformed Church (110,000) and the Salvation Army (50,000). These all tend towards strong evangelicalism.
In the case of the Methodists and Baptists, there are also smaller splinter groups. In addition there are a considerable number of smaller sects. Most of these churches are, like the Anglicans, in numerical decline.

In Scotland the Church, or Kirk, vehemently rejected the idea of bishops, following a more Calvinist Protestant tradition. Its churches are plain. There is no altar, only a table, and the emphasis is on the pulpit, where the Gospel is preached. The Kirk is more democratic than the Anglican
Church. Although each kirk is assigned a minister, it also elects its own
'elders'. The minister and one of these elders represent the kirk at the regional presbytery. Each of the 46 presbyteries of Scotland elects two commissioners to represent it at the principal governing body of the
Church, the General Assembly. Each year the commissioners meet in the
General Assembly, and elect a Moderator to chair the General Assembly for that year. Unlike the Church of England, the Church of Scotland is subject neither to the Crown nor to Parliament, and takes pride in its independence from state authority, for which it fought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In keeping with its democratic nature, it admits women as well as men to the ministry.

Among all these Protestant churches, but particularly among the larger
English ones, there has been a recent important development called the
'house church' movement. This began in the 1970s and has a membership of roughly 90,000, although attendance is far higher. This movement is a network of autonomous 'churches' of usually not more than 100 members in each. These churches meet, usually in groups of 15 or 20, in members’ homes for worship and prayer meetings. Most of those joining such groups are in the 20-40 year-old age range and belong to the professional middle classes
- solicitors, doctors and so forth - who have felt frustrated with the more ponderous style of the larger churches. They try to recapture what they imagine was the vitality of the early church. But it is doubtful how long these house churches will last. If they are anything like some of the revivalist sects of the nineteenth century, they in their turn will lose their vitality, and discontented members may return to the churches which their predecessors left, or drift away from the Christian church altogether.

The Protestant churches of Britain undoubtedly owe part of the revival taking place in some evangelical churches to the vitality of the West
Indian churches. West Indian immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s were not welcomed into Anglican churches, and many decided to form their own churches. Their music and informal joyfulness of worship spread quickly in evangelical circles. As Philip Mohabir, a West Indian, describes:

Congregations that would have been cold, dull and boring, would now sing to guitar music, clap their hands, and even play tambourines. Those were things that only West Indian churches did... . Now people would raise their hands in the air and clap and even dance. English, white, evangelical
Christians dancing and clapping their hands, praising God. That in itself is a miracle we West Indian Christians never thought would happen.

The Roman Catholic Church only returned to Britain in 1850. During the preceding 300 years the few Catholic families, which refused to accept the new Church, were popularly viewed as less than wholeheartedly English. The
English Protestant prejudice that to be Catholic is to be not quite wholly
English only really disappeared in the 1960s.

The Roman Catholic Church grew rapidly after 1850, particularly among the industrial working class. By the mid-1980s it had about 5.7 million members, of whom 1.4 million were regular attenders. By the mid-1990s this had fallen to 1.1 million attenders, a decline of over 17 per cent.
Alongside growing secularism in society, many have left the Catholic Church because of its authoritarian conservatism, particularly in the field of sexual mores. It is estimated that attendance will barely exceed 600,000 by the year 2005. The Catholic Church in England is composed of four main strands: immigrants from Ireland; working-class people in deprived areas among whom Catholic effort was concentrated in the nineteenth century; a few upper-class families; and finally middle-class converts, for example a bishop of London and two government ministers who all left the Anglican church and became Catholics over the Anglican ordination of women in 1992.
The senior English cleric is the Archbishop of Westminster.

All the formal churches are in numerical decline. Each time there is a census of church attendance and membership, the numbers in almost every church have fallen. In 1970 there were an estimated 8.6 million practising
Christians. By 1994 the figure had fallen to 6.5 million. At Christmas, the major festival, perhaps 5 million will attend church, but on a normal
Sunday it is barely half this figure. One must conclude that numerical decline will probably continue in an age when people feel no apparent need for organized religion. But the decline may not be as dramatic as the figures suggest. Many church-goers have ceased to be regular simply because they often go away at weekends. Within the Church the debate is bound to continue between the modernists who wish to reinterpret religion according to the values of the age they live in, and conservatives who believe it is precisely the supernatural elements, which attract people in the age of science.

On the national stage the Church has made its greatest mark in recent years in the area of social justice. In 1985 the Church of England produced a report, Faith in the City: A Call for Action by Church and Nation, which examined inner-city deprivation and decline, and recommended measures both by church and state to reverse the trends. The Roman Catholic and Free
Churches showed similar concern at increased social deprivation in the
1980s. Today the Church is no longer seen as an integral part of the establishment but as possibly its most formidable critic.

Besides these 'orthodox' churches which accept the doctrine of the
Trinity, there are others which have their own specific beliefs, and are consequently viewed as outside orthodoxy. The Mormon Church which is strong in the United States, has doubled its membership to about 200,000 in the past 20 years. Other non-Trinitarian churches have also grown, part of an alternative form of spirituality which has been attractive to many people since the 1960s.

Other religions

Apart from Christianity, there are at least five other religions with a substantial number of adherents in Britain. These are usually composed of either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants.

The oldest is the Jewish community, which now numbers barely 300,000, of whom fewer than half ever attend synagogue and only 80,000 are actual synagogue members. Today the Jewish community in Britain is ageing and shrinking, on account of assimilation and a relatively low birth rate, and is in rapid decline. A survey in 1996 revealed that 44 per cent of Jewish men under the age of 40 are married to or are living with a non-Jewish partner.

Between 20 and 25 per cent of Jewish women in this age range also marry outside the community. Even so, it is the second largest Jewish community in Western Europe. Two-thirds of the community live in London, with another 9,000 or so in Manchester and Leeds respectively, and another
6,000 in Brighton.

Jews returned to England in the seventeenth century, after their previous expulsion in the thirteenth century. At first those who returned, were Sephardic, that is, originally from Spain and Portugal, but during the last years of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century a more substantial number of Ashkenazi (Germanic and East European)
Jews, fleeing persecution, arrived. Ashkenazis form 70 per cent of British
Jews.

As a result of these two separate origins, and as a result of the growth of Progressive Judaism (the Reform and Liberal branches), the Jews are divided into different religious groups. The largest group, approximately 120,000, are Orthodox and belong to the United Synagogues.
They look to the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain for spiritual leadership. A much smaller number of Sephardic Orthodox still recognize a different leader, the Haham. The two Progressive groups, the Reform and Liberal Jews, which roughly equate with the broad church and modernists of the Anglican
Church, have no acknowledged single leader, but they do have a number of rabbis who command a following among those who admire their wisdom. The
Progressives account for 17 per cent of the entire community. Thirty-seven per cent of Jews claim no religious affiliation at all.

There is also a Board of Deputies of British Jews, the lay representation of Anglo-Jewry since 1760, to which 250 synagogues and organizations in Britain elect representatives. It speaks on behalf of
British Jewry on a wide variety of matters, but its degree of genuine representation is qualified in two ways: fewer than half of Britain's Jews belong to the electing synagogues and organizations; and none of the community's more eminent members belongs to the Board. In fact many leading members of the community are often uneasy with the position the Board takes on issues.

As in the Christian church, the fundamentalist part of Jewry seems to grow compared with other groups, especially among the young, and causes similar discomfort for those who do not share its certainties and legal observances. The most obvious concentrations of orthodox Jews, who are distinguishable by their dress, are in the north London suburbs of Golders
Green and Stamford Hill.

There are also more recently established religious groups: Hindus,
Sikhs, Buddhists and Muslims. The most important of these, not only on account of its size, is the Muslim community. There are 1.5 million Muslims and over 1,000 mosques and prayer centres, of which the most important (in all Western Europe) is the London Central Mosque at Regent's Park. There are probably 900,000 Muslims who regularly attend these mosques. Most are of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin, but there are also an increasing number of British converts. Apart from London, there are sizeable Muslim communities in Liverpool, Manchester, Leicester, Birmingham, Bradford,
Cardiff, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Islam gives coherence and a sense of community to people of different ethnic origins. It also gives Britain informal lines of communication with several Muslim countries.

During the past quarter century, since large numbers of Muslims arrived in Britain, there has been a tension between those Muslims who sought an accommodation between Islam and Western secular society, one might call them modernists, and those who have wanted to uphold traditional
Islamic values even when these directly conflicted with secular social values. The tension has been made worse by the racism Asian Muslims feel in
British society. Until 1989 it might be said that those Muslims who were relatively successful economically and socially were the prevailing example of how Muslims could live successfully in the West. However, in 1988 many
Muslims were deeply offended by the publication of Salman Rushdie's book
The Satanic Verses, which they considered to be blasphemous.