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Religious Population

(Sources: Census, April 2001, Office for National Statistics Census, April 2001, General Register Office for Scotland)

 

  • The 2001 Census identified 8.6 million people in Great Britain who said they had no religion. Christianity is the main religion, with 41 million people. Muslims were the largest non-Christian religious group with 1.6 million people - and their profile shows a young, tightly clustered, but often disadvantaged, community.

 

  • Christianity is the main religion in Great Britain. There were 41 million Christians in 2001, making up almost three quarters of the population (72%). This group included the Church of England, Church of Scotland, Church in Wales, Catholic, Protestant and all other Christian denominations.

 

  • People with no religion formed the second largest group, comprising 15% of the population.

 

  • About 1/20 or 5% of the population belonged to a non-Christian religious denomination.

 

  • Muslims were the largest religious group after Christians. There were 1.6 million Muslims living in Britain in 2001. This group comprised 3% of the total population and over half (52%) of the non-Christian religious population.

 

  • Hindus were the second largest non-Christian religious group. There were over half a million Hindus (558,000), comprising 1% of the total population and 18% of the non-Christian religious population.

 

  • There were just over a third of a million Sikhs (336,000), making up 0.6% of the total population and 11% of the non-Christian religious population.

 

  • There were just over a quarter of a million Jewish people (267,000), constituting 0.5% of the total population and 9% of the non-Christian religious group.

 

  • Buddhists numbered 149,000 people in 2001, comprising 0.3% of the population of Great Britain.

 

  • The religion question was the only voluntary question in the 2001 Census and only 8% chose not to state a religion.

 

  • In England and Wales, 151,000 people belonged to religious groups which did not fall into any of the main religions. The largest of these were Spiritualists (32,000) and Pagans (31,000), followed by Jain (15,000), Wicca (7,000), Rastafarian (5,000), Bahá'ì (5,000) and Zoroastrian (4,000).