Christianity Facing 'Catastrophic Collapse' in Britain

By  Charles C. W. Cooke

The Telegraph reports:

Christianity could be facing a catastrophic collapse in Britain according to official figures suggesting it is declining 50 per cent faster than previously thought.

A new analysis of the 2011 census shows that a decade of mass immigration helped mask the scale of decline in Christian affiliation among the British-born population – while driving a dramatic increase in Islam, particularly among the young.

It suggests that only a minority of people will describe themselves as Christians within the next decade, for first time.

Meanwhile almost one in 10 under 25s in Britain is now a Muslim.

Many historians hold that, along with many of the Protestant areas of Western Europe, the British “lost their religion” after the First World War. After 1918, Church attendance dropped consistently (except for during the Second World War) and Durkheim’s notion that Christianity was “superior” was shattered, not only by the horrors of total war but by the sight of those “superior” Christians killing each other on an industrial scale.

Nevertheless, the country still remained nominally “Christian.” Whether or not the majority of the British people actually believed in God or not after 1918, they remained more than likely to regard themselves as being “Christian,” internalizing the values taught by the established church. This, it appears, is changing – and quickly:

Initial results from the 2011 census published last year showed that the total number of people in England and Wales who described themselves as Christian fell by 4.1 million – a decline of 10 per cent.

But new analysis from the Office for National Statistics shows that that figure was bolstered by 1.2 million foreign-born Christians, including Polish Catholics and evangelicals from countries such as Nigeria.

They disclosed that there were in fact 5.3 million fewer British-born people describing themselves as Christians, a decline of 15 per cent in just a decade.

At the same time the number of Muslims in England and Wales surged by 75 per cent – boosted by almost 600,000 more foreign born followers of the Islamic faith.

Any Brit who dared suggest that the importation of so many immigrants into a tiny, crowded island — into a country whose constitution and stability are ultimately reposed in the liberal traditions of the parent culture — would inexorably change things was, during the Blair years at least, dismissed as a “racist.” Any Brit who argued that a multi-ethnic society is all fine and dandy but that a multi-cultural society is a recipe for segregation and collapse was flatly ignored. Anybody who suggested that immigration from areas of the world spectacularly different to Britain should be limited was accused of intolerance. Indeed at times, merely mentioning the word “immigration” was enough to invite a stern look and the attendant suggestion that it was somehow beyond the pale for the people of a nation to assert that they might control who joins their society. To suggest that they might as a matter of general policy privilege those areas of the world full of people who are more like the natives was “profiling.”

Now, as the deleterious consequences of uncontrolled immigration in Britain become apparent to the British, those who willfully allowed it to spin out of control have been forced to apologize and their critics have been allowed to speak again. Even Left-leaning Think Tank “Demos,” which was closely involved with the Blair government’s disastrous immigration policy, told Russia Today last week that,

“We do have an integration problem. The“changing ethnic composition” of the British capital is causing a large exodus of ethnic white out of the city, he added. Goodhart went on to say that the problem of integration was not confined to Great Britain and is prevalent all around the EU despite attempts to eradicate segregation.

This, as anybody paying attention could have told him, was utterly predictable. Of course there is a material difference between a country’s importing people with the same religious, political, cultural, and legal assumptions as the native population and a country’s importing people who lack those shared assumptions — especially when the government of that country dismisses calls for assimilation (and warnings that it is not happening) as cultural imperialism.

Back on the Telegraph:

Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society, said the long-term reduction of Christianity, particularly among young people, was now “unstoppable”.

“In another 20 years there are going to be more active Muslims than there are churchgoers,” he said.

There’ll always be an England. Right?

The rest here.