Email Michael
EmailBritain’s Most Serious Religious Problem
The horrific Manchester terror attack raises uncomfortable questions about the imperfect integration of Britain’s Muslim minority.
A series of such brutal incidents in the United Kingdom involved native-born British subjects, not recent refugees. And despite some fears of Islam’s surging influence, the most recent numbers show that self-identified Muslims still comprise only 5 percent of the UK population. The far more worrisome numbers involve the declining percentage who say they are Christian–down from 72 percent to 59 percent today.
By far the fastest growing religious group in Britain, as in the United States, are those who say they have “no religion”–now 25 percent of Brits, but only 15 percent in 2001.
Those who hope that America and the United Kingdom will maintain their distinctive cultural identities are right to worry about Christianity’s declining numbers. But we should remember that those losses reflect disenchantment and disaffiliation far more than the growth of Islam or any other rival faith.
Comments (8)
Leave a commentMy suggestion to the Brits is to tune into Joel Osteen's programs. He come across less fundamentalist and more common sense while still tying it all into the Bible. He helped me to solve a 2500 year old problem that was proven to be impossible.
And what 2500 year old problem was that? Curious???
Faith is often based on true experiences that are often not able to be replicated from one individual to another. One has to seek and find answers for themselves. Most people would choose an easier way to just follow a religious group by birth or community, or simply give up the seeking and claiming that they don't know or in another word having no religion.
"Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?
"By far the fastest growing religious group in Britain, as in the United States, are those who say they have “no religion”–now 25 percent of Brits, but only 15 percent in 2001."
Hopefully one day those numbers will drop even lower to the levels we see in Finland, Estonia, Singapore, HK, Korea where we find then best performing students and the highest IQs.
A high number of people claiming "no religion" is not the reason that those countries have good students or high IQs, assuming that what you are saying is true. I'm sensing anti-religious bigotry in your comment. Bigotry is not a virtue.
We hear over and over again that the ones committing violence are not the current generation of immigrants from Islamic countries, but the ones born in the west (2nd generation). Why is that any less of an argument for restricting and strictly vetting immigrants from those countries. Clearly the 2nd generation is unhappy with our system and their value system does not discourage violence in that circumstance. Probably the first generation is thankful to be out of the hell hole they came from and the 2nd generation is only disaffected by the promise of our system not living up to its hype. In fact I argue that that the 2nd generation trend in violence is a stronger argument for restricting immigration based on the value system that creates the violence.
Pat Allen
You make a thoughtful, logical, and fact-based arguement for the restriction of immigration. However, Liberals/leftists demand that you abandon this "hate-filled" approach, in favor of their "love, hope, change, and irrational desires for a world with no borders".
It's really kind of pathetic, but this is what we have to deal with.