The fundamental winner from the lost boys of the UK, as described in a recent report into young male under-achievement by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), is sure to be Islam.
According to the CSJ’s Lost Boys report, published this week, “for the reason that pandemic alone, the variety of males aged 16 to 24 who usually are not in education, employment or training (NEET) has increased by a staggering 40 per cent in comparison with just seven per cent of females”.
“For those young men who’re in work, the much-vaunted gender pay gap has been reversed. Young men are actually out-earned by their female peers, including among the many university educated.”
The CSJ also found that “the growing divergence in boys’ and girls’ outcomes doesn’t only apply to education and employment. We are also seeing a growing divide within the social and political attitudes of the sexes.
“In Britain, as in countries across the developed world, young men are increasingly drawn to conservative, traditionalist or right-wing political movements, whilst young women turn into ever more liberal and left-progressive.”
The Lost Boys report declared: “As Britain grapples with an epidemic of family breakdown, tens of millions of boys are deprived of any positive model of manhood. For boys and young men in Britain – especially those that are poor – the image is an increasingly bleak one.”
Writing in The Daily Sceptic on Monday at first of Ramadan, Christian Concern’s head of public policy, Tim Dieppe, identified that Islam is the fastest growing religion within the UK:
“At the last census in 2021 there have been 3.9 million Muslims within the UK, or 6.5% of the population. This has risen quite rapidly from only 105,000 in 1960. The previous census in 2011 showed a Muslim population of two.7 million. Islam was subsequently the fastest growing religion within the UK over the 10-year period from 2011-2021, showing growth of some 44%.
“The average (median) age of Christians in England and Wales is 51 years-old. This compares to the typical age of Muslims at 27, and the typical age of the population as a complete at 40 years-old. Already in 2015 8.1% of all school age children were Muslim.”
The growth Dieppe is describing is driven by immigration and the relatively high Muslim birth rate within the UK. He identified that “the name Muhammad, when allowing for spelling variants, has been the highest boys name for babies in Britain every 12 months since 2011”.
But what the findings of the Lost Boys report signal is the true possibility of Islam achieving significant conversion growth amongst young males from non-Muslim backgrounds. Islam offers disenfranchised young males in post-Christian Britain three particular attractions:
· A purposeful peer group – a holy brotherhood – led by father figures who’re revered of their communities.
· An enemy to compete against and to hunt to subdue – the secular, permissive culture of the West.
· The opportunity to realize respect from their male peers and adulation from the females within the sub-culture by showing courage and resilience within the practice of Islam.
Dieppe concluded his piece with a strong call for Britain to vary spiritual course:
“As a Christian I lament the decline of the influence of Christianity in Britain. I can only blame the church for its failure to boldly and unashamedly proclaim the reality of the gospel…My view is that we are able to only really recuperate our belief in Christian values through belief in Christianity itself. We can follow the true religion, or a false one. At the moment we’re moving towards a false one. I hope, for the nice of the country, we alter course.”
But the UK is showing no signs of fixing course with the Labour government set to provide Islam special protections against criticism under an anti-Islamophobia law.
This would give Islam a big advantage in its public proclamation over against Christianity which its opponents would still be free to lambast to their heart’s content.
However, even without this political privileging, the sensible reality now’s that Islam has been given an open goal for conversion growth through the collapse of the standard family within the UK for the reason that Nineteen Sixties and specifically the pandemic of fatherlessness. How can it fail to attain with a big rise within the variety of young males from secular backgrounds becoming Muslims in the approaching years?
Julian Mann is a former Church of England vicar, now an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.
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