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.
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.
Many Muslims were offended by the reaction they saw from the rest of society and from government. The blasphemy law, mainly on account of its age, only applied to Christianity, so they were unable to prosecute Rushdie. But perhaps what they found most offensive was the patronising attitude of non-Muslim liberals, who lectured them on the values of a democratic society in a way which was dismissive of Muslim identity and feeling. Muslims found themselves in conflict with those who had previously been perceived as their friends, those of the secular left who had championed immigrant rights and most strongly opposed racism.
After the Rushdie affair other external factors also stimulated a Muslim revival, including the Gulf War (1991) and also the suffering of Bosnian Muslims (1994-6).
Within the British Muslim community as a whole, which like Jewish and Christian communities, is divided into different sects and traditions, modernists lost influence to traditionalist leaders. Mosque attendance increased and religious observance became an outward symbol of Muslim assertion. In 1985 only about 20 per cent of Muslims were actually religiously observant. By 1995 that figure had risen to about 50 per cent.
Yet the Islam of young British Muslims is different from that of their parents. It is less grounded in the culture of the countries from which their parents came. Young Muslims come from several different ethnic origins but they all share their religion and their British culture and education.
This is leading to a 'Britain-specific' form of Islam. As a result, in the words of one religious affairs journalist, 'For every child who drifts into the moral relativism of contemporary Western values, another returns home with a belief in a revitalised form of Islam. Many parents find the second just as difficult to come to terms with as the first.'
British Islam is sufficiently vibrant that a Muslim paper, Q-News, now appears regularly. One of its editors is a woman, Fozia Bora, itself a statement on the relatively liberal culture of British Islam. Indeed, a new sense of self-confidence emerged out of the initial feeling of alienation over The Satanic Verses. It is partly self-assertion against anti-Islamic prejudice, but it is also the comfort felt in a relatively tolerant environment. Fozia Bora believes that 'Britain is a good place be Muslim. There is a tradition of religious and intellectual freedom.' In the opinion of Dr Zaki Badawi, one of Britain's foremost Muslims, 'Britain is the best place in the world to be a Muslim – most Muslim states are tyrannies and things are harder elsewhere in Europe.'
Anti-Islamic feeling, however, remains a factor in racial tensions in Britain. In the words of the Runnymede Trust, which concerns itself with race relations, 'Islamophobic discourse, sometimes blatant but frequently subtle and coded, is part of the fabric of everyday life in modern Britain, in much the same way that anti-Semitic discourse was taken for granted earlier this century.'
There are other areas of Muslim frustration. Some want Muslim family law to be recognised within British law, a measure which would allow Muslim communities in Britain to follow an entirely separate lifestyle governed by their own laws. Others want state-supported Muslim schools, where children, particularly girls, may receive a specifically Muslim education in a stricter moral atmosphere than exists in secular state schools. The state already provides such funding for Anglican, Catholic and Jewish schools within the state system. It was only in 1997 that the first Muslim school obtained financial support from the state.
Smaller communities include about 450,000 Sikhs who mainly originate in the Indian Punjab. They live mainly in London, Manchester and Birmingham. There are over 200 gurdwaras or temples in Britain. There are about 320,000 Hindus living mainly in Leicester, London and Manchester. There are about 150 mandirs in which Hindus worship, the largest, in Neasden, north-west London, is also the largest outside India.
From this report we can see that there are two established or state churches in Britain: the Church of England, or Anglican Church as it is also called, and the Church of Scotland, or 'Kirk'.
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.
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.
Outsiders sometimes see possible tensions between one religion and another. They are less aware of the often greater tensions within each religion or sect between conservatives and liberals. In many religious groups there is a conservative wing which has little time for, or interest in, other religions and which disapproves of its own liberal co-religionists. By contrast, these liberals usually welcome dialogue and warm relations between religions, and enjoy the rich pluralism of a multi-faith society. But regardless of viewpoint, most people in Britain whether religious or not, consider the matter of faith to be a private and personal matter.
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