{"id":14603,"date":"2015-12-08T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-08T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2015\/12\/08\/britain-is-no-longer-a-christian-country\/"},"modified":"2015-12-08T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-12-08T12:00:00","slug":"britain-is-no-longer-a-christian-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2015\/12\/08\/britain-is-no-longer-a-christian-country\/","title":{"rendered":"Britain Is No Longer a Christian Country"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/education\/12036287\/Britain-is-no-longer-a-Christian-country-and-should-stop-acting-as-if-it-is-says-judge.html\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n<p>UNITED KINGDOM, December 7, 2015 (The Telegraph): Britain is no longer a Christian country and should stop acting as if it is, a major inquiry into the place of religion in modern society has concluded, provoking a furious backlash from ministers and the Church of England. A two-year commission, chaired by the former senior judge Baroness Butler-Sloss and involving leading religious leaders from all faiths, calls for public life in Britain to be systematically de-Christianized. It says that the decline of churchgoing and the rise of Islam and other faiths mean a &#8220;new settlement&#8221; is needed for religion in the UK, giving more official influence to non-religious voices and those of non-Christian faiths.<\/p>\n<p>The report provoked a furious row as it was condemned by cabinet ministers as &#8220;seriously misguided&#8221; and the Church of England said it appeared to have been &#8220;hijacked&#8221; by humanists.<\/p>\n<p>The report, by the Commission on Religion and Belief in Public Life, claims that faith schools are &#8220;socially divisive&#8221; and says that the selection of children on the basis of their beliefs should be phased out. It also accuses those who devise some RE syllabuses of &#8220;sanitizing&#8221; negative aspects of religion in lessons and suggests that the compulsory daily act of worship in school assemblies should be abolished and replaced with a &#8220;time for reflection.&#8221; The report backs moves to cut the number of Church of England bishops in the Lords and give places to imams, rabbis and other non-other non-Christian clerics as well as evangelical pastors.<\/p>\n<p>The report highlights figures showing the decline in people who say they are Anglicans from 40 per cent in 1983 to less than a fifth in 2013. It says: &#8220;Three striking trends in recent decades have revolutionized the landscape on which religion and belief in Britain meet and interact. &#8220;The first is the increase in the number of people with non-religious beliefs and identities. The second is the decline in Christian affiliation, belief and practice and within this decline a shift in Christian affiliation that has meant that Anglicans no longer comprise a majority of Christians. &#8220;The third is the increase in the number of people who have a religious affiliation but who are not Christian.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Much more at &#8220;source&#8221; above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source UNITED KINGDOM, December 7, 2015 (The Telegraph): Britain is no longer a Christian country and should stop acting as,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14603\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}