THE UK is certainly one of only seven countries wherein no religious group makes up the vast majority of the population, a recent study has found.
The study by the US-based Pew Research Center’s Global Religious Futures project measured, in 201 countries and territories, how evenly seven religious categories — Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, other religions, and the unaffiliated — were represented.
Only European country is among the many ten most religiously diverse: France, whose population is basically Christian (46 per cent) and religiously unaffiliated (43 per cent), but with a sizeable (nine per cent) Muslim minority. France, in addition to the UK, is among the many seven wherein no religion holds a majority. The others are South Korea, Australia, Singapore, Mauritius and Ivory Coast, in addition to the UK.
The most religiously diverse countries are within the Asia-Pacific area, with Singapore at the highest, with probably the most even spread of religion groups, apart from Suriname, in South America, which comes second.
In UK census data from 2021, Christians account for lower than half the population of England and Wales — only 46 per cent said they were Christian, down from 72 per cent in 2001. Thirty-seven per cent said that they’d no religion, the second largest group within the UK. Other faith groups had very small populations. Overall, the UK ranks twelfth within the index of non secular diversity.
The report says that religious diversity levels around the globe didn’t substantially change between 2010 and 2020, because the religious composition of most countries remained fairly stable. While the info indicate that some countries have diverse populations of non secular groups, nations are way more often religiously homogeneous, and in 194 countries and territories, half or more of the population fall into one religious category. This includes 43 countries where at the least 95 per cent are in the identical religious group. These countries are predominantly Muslim or Christian.
Where there’s the best religious diversity, Christians are still often the most important group. In half of the world’s ten most religiously diverse countries — Togo, Benin, Suriname, France, and Australia — Christians are still the largest faith group.
Slightly fewer countries even have a reasonably even split between two faiths. For example, in Eritrea, almost equal numbers of Christians and Muslims live side by side (47 per cent and 52 per cent, respectively).
The Middle East-North Africa region was found to be the least diverse of the regions studied: 94 per cent Muslim. The region includes five of the world’s ten least religiously diverse countries and territories.
Eight of the ten have populations which are almost entirely Muslim: Tunisia, Iraq, Western Sahara, Morocco, Iran, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Yemen are all greater than 99 per cent Muslim.
Where populations had turn into more religiously diverse, it was found to be due to growing proportions disaffiliated from religion — normally from Christianity. In countries where very large Christian populations shrank in the last decade as much as 2020, and the small variety of the religiously disaffiliated increased, as in Ireland, then religious diversity increased. This was also true within the United States, where the big Christian majority shrank by 14 per cent to 64 per cent, and the number not identifying with any religion increased by 14 per cent.
Conversely, within the Netherlands, where the religiously unaffiliated grew further to 54 per cent and have become the bulk, religious diversity fell.
