Christians Now a Minority in UK, Top Clerics Say
Practicing Christians in the United Kingdom have now become a minority, just like the persecuted Roman Catholics after the reformation, according to two top clerics.
In a service conducted after a meeting at the Hampton Court Palace, Anglican Bishop of London Richard Chartres and Catholic Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Cardinal Nichols said Christians are now a "significant minority" in Britain. The two senior clerics also recognized the increasing secularization of society, according to Breitbart.
"We are all minorities now," said Bishop Chartres.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Cardinal Nichols compared the present situation of the Catholics in Britain to the severe persecution in the past centuries. He added that Christian values are not only being taken for granted but also being widely questioned nowadays, the report relays.
For the first time in history, the attendance during services at the Church of England had dropped to less than one million per week. This means only 1.4 percent of the population is coming to the big church to attend its services, the report details.
In addition, average church attendance every Sunday has dropped from 764,700 to just 22,000 in 2014. The church loses about one percent of its members every year, RT reports.
While the decrease in church attendance is partly attributed to aging and death of church members, there is also something else eating at the population of Christians in Britain. Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has warned that the UK is gravitating more and more to an anti-Christian culture and that the future of Christianity is becoming very bleak.
"In some parts of the [Anglican] Communion decline in numbers has been a pattern for many years," said Archbishop Welby. "In England our numbers have been falling at about one per cent every year since world war two … The culture [is] becoming anti-Christian … It is easy to paint a very gloomy picture."
In connection with this, the two senior clerics urged the two rival churches to not let their differences destroy their goals. They encouraged Christian churches to unite for their common objectives in order to survive.
