David Cameron Was Right When He Called the U.K. a ‘Christian Country’

British Prime Minister David
Cameron has caused a minor controversy in the U.K. by writing in
the
Church Times that “I believe we should be more
confident about our status as a Christian country.” After the
article was published, 50 public figures signed a letter to

The Daily Telegraph objecting to Cameron’s article,
saying:

Apart from in the narrow constitutional sense that we continue
to have an established Church, Britain is not a “Christian
country”. Repeated surveys, polls and studies show that most of us
as individuals are not Christian in our beliefs or our religious
identities.

Unlike the American president, the British head of state (Queen
Elizabeth II) is the head an established church (the Church of
England). However, as the signatories of the letter to The
Telegraph rightly point out, most Britons “are not Christian
in our beliefs or our religious identities.”

As the chart below from
The Washington Post—based on 2011 British census
data—shows, almost 60 percent of Britons identify as Christian, and
a little over 25 percent are not part of a religion.

The Washington Post goes on to mention that according
to the results of the 2013 British Social Attitudes Survey, 48
percent of Britons did not belong to a religion. In 2013, the
Church of England
said that church attendance rates were “stabilising” after years of
decline, with 1.1 million attending weekly services in 2011. The
U.K. has a population of almost
64 million. The
British Humanist Association claims that many Britons identify
as religious for cultural reasons, not because they believe in
religious metaphysical claims.

While it might be the case that the British are not very
religious, it is hard to deny that the U.K. and its institutions
are drenched in religious history and culture, as Harry Cole
explained in The Spectator:

Leaving aside the fact that 59% of the UK population
self-defines as Christians, we need only look at our institutions
and state structure to see how bizarre this row has been. England
has an established church. English bishops sit in our Parliament. A
glance around the rim of our £1 coin will show you that our Head of
State has another far more interesting title – Defender of the
Faith. The Left weren’t so snooty about the Archbishop of
Canterbury, our state-declared spiritual leader, when he was
defending foodbanks.

We have a constitutional framework, legal system and legislature
that is built around Judeo-Christian values. Almost every single
bank holiday we have in this country is to mark some sort of
Christian festival. Tens of thousands of children are educated
every day in church-supported schools, and what is the first word
of the national anthem again?

The British may not be a particularly religious bunch,
especially compared
with Americans, but they undoubtedly live in a Christian
nation.