It can now be argued that England is no longer a Christian nation. Watch out, USA...the "no religion" "other" and various choices are gaining traction. ...the Archbishop of York said the country has "left behind the era when many people almost automatically identified as Christian".

"Dramatic growth of the non-religious":

https://news.sky.com/story/census-2021-data-shows-number-of-christians-in-uk-fall-below-half-for-first-time-12757819

"Dramatic growth..." So non-religion has become tumescent?

Jesus could fix this if he wanted to, right? Hmmmmnnn Seems to be MIA though. No way to treat your planet.

All the pearl-clutching because "we are below 50%, therefore we are not in charge anymore, some nameless 'they' are in charge" is nonsense.

A cohesive voting block doesn't need 51% to be in charge. Often 5 or 10% is more than enough to sway an election or apply pressure to get a law passed if the rest of the people are more or less evenly split, which is often the case.

Specifically, Utah is below 50% active Mormon, but the Mormons are still most definitely in charge in the state. Over 90% of the legislature is LDS, because it is nearly impossible to get nominated/elected in Utah if you are not LDS.


But yeah, growth in the non-religious gets a thumbs-up from me.

Exactly, BoJ, Christians are still by far the largest group and I noticed, in case anyone was wondering, that only 5.5% said they were muslim, so the "great replacement" has a long way to go.

Non-believers were the fastest-growing group ;-)

Some years ago right here on RFM, the question was raised about whether Spain was still "a Catholic country" because of the Muslim influx.

While I didn't respond at the time, I did look up the percentage of Islamic residents and as I recall it was just under 5%, part of which was Muslims who had been in Spain for generations.

We get the same nonsense in the US. "Illegal aliens" are estimated at between 3 and 4% of the population, much of it in the part of the US that was part of Mexico for far longer than it has been part of the US. [We stole it fair and square from Mexico, but they stole it from the First Nations, so what goes around comes around] In any case, the other 96% of us are probably going to survive the "great replacement". Sheesh.

The Monarch (King Charles) is Head of the Church of England. However, he seems to have a very loosey-goosey approach to religion that was definitely not his mother, the Queen,'s approach. She was truly religious in thought, word and deeds.

Charles, not so much. If at all - except for the optics, such as Christmas Day.

Actually when he was Prince of Wales Charles expressed his desire to be known as Defender of the FaithS (capitalization mine) instead of Defender of the Faith (Anglican). At that time the Palace advisors told him that was too radical and wouldn't fly.
He has long been interested in religions of the world. (He was the first Prince of Wales allowed to attend college - look what comes of educating royals!) He has said his coronation next spring will be much shorter than his mother's. It will be interested to see what's deleted in the name of inclusivity.

With far less than 5% attending church (the last figure I saw) I would say the number is far below 49%. Identifying as a Christian and giving even a minimal amount of attention to it are different things I believe. Britain, especially the English part of it,
if has been a post Christian society for a very long time. It is a slide that began heavily after the horrors of WW1.

We've agreed on this before. WWI changed Europe and, in a real sense, it mortally wounded God as traditional imagined by the West.

World War One truly was the Great War.

I kind of wondered about that. I would have thought actual participation in Christian churches in the UK would be well below 50% for decades. I didn't think the ratio of self-identified Christian, and participating Christian would be anywhere near ten to one.

That's pretty grim.

I have a friend in Sweden, who switched from practicing Catholic in the US to practicing Lutheran in Sweden. He said most Swedes claim to be Christian, and generally get baptized, married and buried in a church, and that's about it.


Canada is also post-Christian now. I'm not sure when the WASP portion of Canada changed. I assume in the period after WWII.

I grew up "back east" which for Utahns is anywhere east of Rock Springs or Vernal, but I was really back east, and my hometown was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. In the 1950s and before, Catholics, at least in the US, took Catholicism every bit as seriously as Mormons took Mormonism.

Mormons have a strong tendency to think they are the only people who really, truly think their church is true, for the obvious reason that it is the only church that is really true. Impeccable circular logic, that.

Basically all my HS friends were Catholic. Over half of the crowd I hung out with went to Catholic universities. All but one couple that I grew up with have left the Catholic faith. That one couple sent all their kids to Notre Dame, and they and their kids are the most decent people imaginable.

Anyway, what killed Catholicism for the others was foremost, the church teaching on birth control. Opposition to abortion probably lost a few more, and church sex abuse lost a few more. It probably would have lost more, but most of them were already gone.

My friends kept cultural tabs on Quebec, which was not all that far from where we grew up, and was even more conservatively Catholic than NE PA. The collapse of Catholicism in Quebec was rapid and spectacular. That happened within my living memory, and birth control was the main driver there too.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/02/2022 11:37PM by Brother Of Jerry.

As fate would have it, Jana Reiss's column yesterday was about the rapid acceleration of US people leaving religion starting in 1990. Her article reports on a paper that documents the change, which has been pretty dramatic and consistent since 1990, and what changed in society that triggered the exodus.

What probably caught Reiss's eye was that a primary case study in the paper was the Mormons, even though they are a relatively small US religion. It was sort of "if even the Mormons are ditching religion, the rest of y'all are really and truly screwed."

Anyway, interesting article, and not too long - quick read.

https://religionnews.com/2022/12/01/why-americans-are-leaving-their-churches/

The interesting thing is that the number of nonreligious people started to rise sharply around 1991. It does make you wonder what was going on at the time that spurred such an enormous shift. The author of that study, Steven Bullivant, cites a number of factors including the end of the cold war, the rise of the hard-line evangelicals, and the rise of the internet (although that, IMO, didn't become a huge factor until the end of the 1990s.)

I have to wonder if churches were just not keeping up with larger societal changes -- i.e. women gaining rights and entering the workforce, and minorities and LGBTQ gaining ground as well. It also could have been a part of a generational shift, as the Great Depression/WWII generation started to die off.

I think what you wonder might be right, summer.

As women and LGBTQs began to expect their place at the table be expanded and equal, religion pushed back. Religion COULD have been champions for them to be included and equal, but no, they (most religions in general) stuck to being regressive once again.

I know one role of religion is to preserve tradition and prevent rapid change to keep the society glue in place and all, but in these times they needed to be more adaptable to be relevant.

I wonder if this is what it looked like as belief in the Greek and Roman religions faded away.

> I wonder if this is what it looked like as belief
> in the Greek and Roman religions faded away.

I don't think so. What happened then was more of Nietzsche's "God is dead" phenomenon. The old gods had simply lost their hold over the popular imagination.

But that didn't mean the people were irreligious: they simply gravitated towards the mystery cults, including eventually Christianity. That's why Constantine adopted the new faith: it was a religion that could bolster state power unlike the moribund Greek and Roman traditions.

Now when Nietzsche made his observation about 19th century Christianity, he knew that Europeans would eventually embrace new faiths and he predicted they would arise in Germany and Russia. As I've harped on many times before, he would not have been surprised to see the new religions appear in the form of political ideologies since he did not think God was a necessary element in a functioning religion. What mattered in his scheme was that there was an overarching ideology that gave people a purpose and an identity--a shepherd's song to keep the sheep happy.

An interesting question is whether the current decline in Western religiosity will result in the adoption of a new faith in coming decades; or, asked differently, whether it already has and we just haven't perceived the change in those terms.

Thanks.
Your last sentence is sobering.

Bolstering state power then, often seems to be linked to this thing humans need: faith in something.

We lived in London in the early 80’a. It wasn’t very religious even back then. Most our neighbors didn’t go to church. Most my friends at school didn’t.

I think the figures more fit a question like " If you were to be religious what would you be?" A answer for the majority? "Christian." It is a tradition thing more than a reality.

I think that is exactly it. For decades "Christian" was the socially acceptable answer. In recent decades two things changed - there was a rise in people who were a religion other than Christian, and it was OK to say you were Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu (all present as significant minorities in the UK),

The other change was that enough people were admitting to be a "none", that the stigma associated with being a None has diminished significantly, which made even more people willing to say they were a None. Positive feedback loop.

So, now there is much less risk of negative social consequences if you answer something other than "Christian" or some Christian sect to the question "what religion are you?"

On 2021's list of 100 top names:

#5: Muhammad
#35:Mohammed
#84 Mohammad
#94 Yusuf

96 other names weren't any version of the above.



https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/a26971152/most-popular-baby-names/

On 2022's list:

"Muhammad was the most popular boys’ name in four out of nine English regions, while Olivia was the top girls’ name for every English region and Wales, except for the East Midlands where Amelia was the most popular girl’s name."

I don't think "four out of nine English regions" makes the name the most popular in the entire UK (although I'm terrible at math, as I've said, but I think you need a bigger sample than this to get a true indicator of the entire UK).

And why would it matter?

I had lunch today with a Latino friend named Osman, the legacy of the Moorish presence in Spain; and our very own Jesus owes his name to an ancient religion of some note. So two Joseph, Hannah, Adam, Eve, Joshua, Elizabeth, Sarah, Zach, Jed, and many other Jewish names.

Such choices only become political if one insists on making everything political.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
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> And why would it matter?

A most excellent question.

My friends in the neighbourhood named their youngest son Mohammed and so far, so good.

The local Christian churches are still as full on Sunday as ever they were. :)



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/03/2022 05:21PM by Nightingale.

It's possible that #5 + #35 + #84 added together would move Mohammed variations up from #5 to #4 or possibly even #3. Any more than that strikes me as very unlikely. We of course can't tell for sure without the actual counts for each name.

Also, it is possible that some of the top 4 names also have close matches down on the list, so those names should have the variants added to their total as well, e.g. Sarah, Sara

It would appear that nationally, Mohammed is pretty high on the popularity list at the moment, but it is not #1. And as LW points out, the totality of Hebrew-derived names in the English speaking world, and probably the entire Christian and Jewish world, totally swamps the number of Islamic-derived names, and even many Islamic names are Hebrew-derived - Ibrahim for example.

Side-bar: I've always found it odd that Islam forbids art that represents living creatures, including people, because it constitutes graven images in violation of one of the Ten Commandments, yet they have no trouble naming children after their prime prophet, and they throw the name Allah around with wild abandon, while Mormons won't even say God, preferring the "Heavenly Father" euphemism. Mormons also were somewhat reluctant to say Jesus Christ a lot except at the end of prayers, until they decided that people must call them "The Church of Jesus Christ", dammit, because they've had a gut full of people saying they weren't Christian, so take that, world.

Note also caffiend's final entry: Yusuf, who was of course the man with the coat of many colors.

And also the fact that the "Al" in "Allah" is the "El" in Elohim, Abraham's God, both stemming from a semitic or proto-semitic word for deity.

Onomastics indicate clearly the continuity between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which is inconvenient for those who pretend the religions are fundamentally different.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
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> Note also caffiend's final entry: Yusuf

Slight correction: that was my list. Can't blame caffiend unless he's worthy of it. :)


> Onomastics

Thank you so much for providing me with a delicious new word I don't recall ever having seen before.

My dad loved words. He had a book of big words he would rustle through often and share with us kids. We always admired his vocabulary. It's a precious legacy I appreciate very much.

Words. Are. Fun. And instructive. As you indicate, they reveal actual living history.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/03/2022 06:47PM by Nightingale.

Apologies to caffiend.

One of my teachers, a Shakespeare nut, received as a little girl a birthday present from her uncle. It was a nicely bound dictionary and was inscribed:

"To Janet, who loves words,

From Albert, who also loves words"

That she still had that dictionary in her sixties shows how deeply the gift touched her.

I'm glad we can just google words now. Onomastic sounds like an extra-strength denture adhesive. No more "Oh no". Buy onomastic...

Some of my favorite names are Flin Flon, Manitoba, named after a Li'l Abner character Flintabbity Flonatin. Truth or Consequences, NM is good for a giggle.

But my fave is Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway. Svalbard is an island up in the Arctic Ocean. When I saw the name of the city, I assumed it was named in exasperation for how it felt being stranded there through the entire winter when the harbor was frozen solid.

Turns out "byen" means town, and the town was named after John Munro Longyear, who opened a coal mine there.

I like my derivation better.

If you don't know your onomastics, you'll never get your Scandinavian history straightened out.

In fact, you might find yourself Uppsala without a paddle.

IMV the English language spoken at its finest and with beautiful words is like music. I was flattered last year when my grandson, an English major with an emphasis on poetry, asked me to recite a poem by Shelley at his wedding. Reminded me how far I need to go to reach the level of really good speakers. One of my all time favorite people was Peter Ustinov. Loved his command of English. Funny, too.

When numbers go down its a testimony that we're in the Last Days and it strengthens my testimony.

When numbers go up its also a testimony-strengthener.

Oh the joys of the beloved Correlation program.

I googled, "is mohammed the most popular baby name in Britain?" and came up with different articles. Some said yes, some otherwise. This showed up at the top of the list, and gave the ranking of several other Islamic-related boys' names:

https://www.globalvillagespace.com/muhammad-remains-the-most-popular-baby-name-in-the-uk/#:~:text=Muhammad%20remains%20the%20most%20popular%20name%20for%20baby%20boys%20in,for%20both%20males%20and%20females.

Different counts according to different sources. The fact remains, Islam has grown substantially. Some Islamists have openly called for "conquoring" Europe, not with the sword, but with immigration and a high birthrate. Meanwhile, native Euro birthrates decline to below replacement level.

Note how caffiend's two paragraphs are logically unrelated.

The first tells us what names are popular in the UK. It is based on a source called "babycenter" whose credibility as a source of data analysis is not especially clear. But it's definitely about babies' names.

The second paragraph, by contrast, says nothing at all about names, arguing instead that Muslims represent a threat to "Europe." If one were a stickler for logic, the non sequitur would stand out like a sore thumb.

But of course there is a connection, just an implicit one and an unsavory one. The intermediary through which the baby names come to caffiend's and our attention is globalvillagespace.com. That word "space" is as pregnant as caffiend's use of the word "Europe."

What is "Europe" if it is threatened by people from Africa and the Middle East? The answer seems obvious.

And what are we to make of the word "space?" It sounds vaguely territorial, vaguely anti-immigrant, does it not? In fact it recalls Hitler's "lebensraum," literally "living space," that was to be acquired by Germany through the extermination of lesser races like Jews and Slavs.

It would have been nice if we could stop with the non sequitur, perhaps concluding that caffiend needed a nap. But the truth is less benign. The nonsense about baby names is not important. It was just the pretext through which he sought to feed us racist tropes.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 12/03/2022 10:53PM by Lot's Wife.

Ah yes, I heard a term on the radio today and it explained exactly what caffiend is expressing: "the Great Replacement," meaning the replacement of white people by dark and loathsome ones.

One wonders if caffiend has any thoughts that do not come from his Lord and Savior and right-wing pundits.

I did get the undercurrent re the names.

I admit to a sinking feeling when my friends called their new little boy Mohammed because it wouldn't help them, I thought, to fit in easily in the neighbourhood that they had come to as refugees.

But they've found their way and they're thrilled with their new life and that little baby has grown into a decent young fine-looking Canadian citizen.

I wasn't born in Canada myself, although my parents and their two toddler daughters had an easier time fitting into North American society, being from the UK. And {{cough}} the white skin.

Circumstances of birth shouldn't be the measure of a person.

And does it even need saying that a person shouldn't be judged by their name.

> I wasn't born in Canada myself, although my
> parents and their two toddler daughters had an
> easier time fitting into North American society,
> being from the UK. And {{cough}} the white skin.

NG, there's no need to feel anxiety on that score. Canadians are famously open-minded and hence unlikely to hold your lowly origins against you.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
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> NG, there's no need to feel anxiety on that score.
> Canadians are famously open-minded and hence
> unlikely to hold your lowly origins against you.

Yeah, so far, so good. Nice people.

Generally.

Hopefully.

But nothing, I have learned, can be taken for granted. There is no magical centre place where we all agree, as I had previously always thought. Because some things are so obvious, like equality and justice, ya know?

Just call me Pollyanna.

Polly for short.