Posted on 09/28/2013 4:32:01 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o
The UK’s official religion is dwindling at a record speed, with the decline of the Church “approaching rock bottom,” experts warn. While Christian congregations age, most British mosques are bringing more and more young people on board.
Public mosque services attract thousands of British Muslims, but when you check out a church, there are hardly a dozen participants at Sunday morning worship, RT’s Polly Boiko reports from London.
“The decline of churches in the UK is long term, now it just happens to be approaching rock bottom. So 95 percent of people don’t attend church on an average Sunday. Christian worship is already the concern of a tiny minority of people,” Andrew Copson, chief executive of the British Humanist Association, told RT.
“I think over time even the weak cultural identity that still seems to be associated with Christianity will banish away, probably all over Europe, not just in the UK,” Copson added.
The British Muslim population has surged dramatically over the past 15 years, increasing by 75 percent. According to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics, Muslims have the youngest age profile of the religious groups, with 48 percent (1.3 million) aged under 25.
Dr. Muhammad Abdul Bari, Honorary Chairman of one of the largest mosques in the UK, the East London Mosque, believes that’s because Islam’s family values are “really bonded, and families really try to nurture young people in the folds of Islam.”
He told RT that the Mosque he goes to, founded in 1910 and accommodating 7,000 worshippers for congregational prayers, has a congregation over 50 percent young people, who feel “part of the Mosque establishment” these days.
Contrary to Islam, Christianity showed the oldest age profile among the leading religious groups in 2011. And while the main reason for Christians being economically inactive was retirement, for Muslims economic inactivity was mainly because they were students, or because they were looking after the home or family.
Some argue that unlike Islam, which gives security to people, Christianity isn’t helping young Brits to survive on the violent streets of England.
In fact, the UK had a greater number of murders in 2007 than any other EU country, making it the most violent place in Europe, according to Eurostat. By comparison, there were over 2,000 crimes recorded per 100,000 of population in the UK, and 466 violent crimes per 100,000 in America.
Latest figures from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) estimate that in the year ending March 2013 there were 8.6 million crimes in England and Wales.
“The passivity that Christianity promotes is perceived as alien and disconnected to Black youths growing up in often violent and challenging urban environments in Britain today,” the former chairman of Brixton Mosque, Abdul Haqq Baker, wrote in the Guardian. “ ‘Turning the other cheek’ invites potential ridicule and abuse, whereas resilience, strength and self-dignity evokes respect and, in some cases, fear from unwanted attention,” he said.
At some point in his life, Baker, raised as a Roman Catholic like his father, converted to Islam. Turning the other cheek has never been an option since then. The majority of young people he had interviewed converted from Christianity to Islam for similar reasons, he says.
“With my newfound faith, there existed religious guidelines that provided spiritual and behavioral codes of conduct. Role models such as Malcolm X only helped to reinforce the perception that Islam enabled the empowerment of one’s masculinity coupled with righteous and virtuous conduct as a strength, not a weakness,” the founder of Street UK, Strategy to Reach Empower and Educate Teenagers program, explained.
According to academics, the total obedience that Islam demands from its followers has made it more appealing to worshippers and converts from other religions. Islam says no to drinking, smoking, gambling, pornography, helping those who truly follow its laws and values become complete and firm in their decisions.
“Islam says NO – this is no and full stop. And people find a sense of direction in it, because their religion of origin has lost that, and not because it never had it in the first instance,” Dr. Sara Silvestri, Senior Lecturer at City University, told RT.
Demographers say that if current trends continue, Islam could eclipse Christianity as the dominant religion in the UK, in as little as a decade.
The 2011 census puts the Muslim population of the UK at around 5 percent, a total that has been boosted by around 600,000 Muslim immigrants who have arrived in the UK over the past decade. Nearly half of all Muslims were born in the UK.
US-based religious think tank the Pew Forum estimates that if the current trend continues, the Muslim population of the UK would swell to almost double within the next 20 years, totaling 5.5 million. So, by 2030 Britain may have more Muslims than Kuwait. (RT.com)
Thank you. Home, indeed. :)
I think they are playing fast and loose with the word Christian...’Real’ Christians do not move away from Jesus Christ, they move closer...
Church attendance or membership does not make one a Christian...Born into a religious family does not make one a Christian...
As I see it, joining Izlam is like joining a club, or a gang membership...
Ping to why Islam is winning converts in Britain.
Amen!
Very well said.
’Real’ Christians do not move away from Jesus Christ, they move closer...
1 Pet 1:3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, 5 who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. 6 In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, 7 so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. 8 Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, 9 obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
The attraction for native Brits is belonging to a group that gives them pride, a sense of entitlement and doesn’t bash them for being white, native and thus inherently evil.
For girls who want to be wives and mothers at an early age, they gravitate to the “be a wife and mother and valued for it”, not realizing that spousal abuse is also his right. Native British culture, especially for the working classes, has so destroyed the family structure and man’s obligation to his woman and children, that their are girls willing to go under the veil to have a husband and children and support for being a stay at home mother.
Too bad they don't realize they will night find the meaning of life in Islam- only a culture of death and destruction.
Three entirely different figures.
No entirely satisfactory, but what're you gonna do?
Church membership does have some validity as a marker. Christ founded the Church, and talked as if it would be something you'd be able to locate: that is, with a definite, visible, even MapQuest find-ability.
And Paul certainly seconds that, in that he lays down rules for them, and knows who and where they are.
Israel means to “struggle” with God. islam means to “submit”.
I’ll struggle, thanks.
Maybe it’s a form of God’s judgment that those who reject Christianity(which they find so “restricting” when it in fact provides the only true emancipation for mankind) would turn to Islam(with more restrictions and enslavement than they could ever imagine).
Maybe if real and unafraid Christianity was allowed into Londonistan, they could compete
Being a Christian has to be more then being exactly like the world except you had a bit of water thrown on you and you might spend an hour twice a year singing songs and dozing through the sermon.
I know conventional wisdom is that we have to make things "easy for the kids" or else they will leave but I find that the kids want the Commandments, they want rules, they want to have something demanded of them. They want to feel that what they are doing MATTERS.
Mohammedanism demands that you dress in a certain way, you eat certain foods, that you pray five times a day, you study your koran, you attend services at the mosque, you are no longer just like every one around you.
It taps into the part of humanity that is sorely neglected by social or cultural Christianity.
Thank you for the link.
It is easy to see why, the implied idea of “Christ is a wimp” and the secularization of the CoE and all Protestant denominations in rapidly increasing “formerly Great Britain.”
The CoE and American Protestant churches need to look at the example of Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis in returning to a strong Christianity based upon the Bible and not the last 20 years “rush to secularization and meaninglessness.”
See my post # 55
Likely because Muslims BELIEVE in their faith, and preach it without apology, unlike the most recent generation of Anglican leaders, or Catholic leaders, for that matter. The Christian ministers have been so worried about offending anyone, what they've been preaching is pablum, which is insufficient to the faith needs of younger folks, and older ones.
At this point, Islam is just surging into the vacuum.
Also the left has been on a PR campaign against Christianity for the better part of a century. Islam appears hip and cool to the younger fools.
Bein Protestant, I won’t rely on the Pope, but the point stands. A return to faithand biblical principals is much needed.
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