59.6 million people, 89% of the UK population, live in England and Wales. According to the 2021 national census, 46.2% of these are nominal Christians. This is down from 59.3% just ten years ago. It comes as no surprise at all, as the various churches here have for decades been frequented almost only by old people and those churches are therefore quite unsurprisingly dying out. We would fully expect a drop of at least another 13% in ten years’ time, bringing the number of nominal Christians down to 33% and in thirty years’ time the figure for Christians could well reach 7% of the population.
The census also reveals that the second largest group in the country is those who have no religion, at 22.2 million people, or 37.2%. Their number was only 25% ten years ago. This will in ten years from now probably become the largest group.
The situation reflects that in other Western countries. Some are ahead of this (Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Czechia, Canada, Australia), others still some years behind (USA, Poland), though rapidly heading in the same direction. So this is the suicidal direction of the whole Western world, unlike in other civilisations, where traditional religious values, national identity and family life are important.
As regards the two most common languages in England and Wales apart from English and Welsh, these are Polish and Romanian. 612,000, 1.1% of the population, speak Polish, and 472,000, 0.8% of the population, speak Romanian. Ten years ago there were only 68,000 Romanian speakers in England and Wales. This means that over 400,000 Romanians and Moldovans have settled here in the last ten years, the vast majority of them Orthodox Christians. It would suggest that there are at least half a million Romanian-speaking Orthodox in the British Isles and Ireland, with perhaps 450,000 Romanians and 50,000 Moldovans.
Protestantism (which includes the so-called ‘Church of England’) is dying out, as it is a culture of the past, and Roman Catholicism has largely been destroyed by pedophilia and lack of normal priests. In the Orthodox world, Greek Orthodox churches are emptying, as the mainly Cypriot immigrants who came here largely in the 50s and 60s are dying out, their children assimilated into secularism, though they leave behind them an excellent infrastructure of churches and property which belongs to the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese. However, of its clergy that Archdiocese has 100 elderly clergy and only 3 candidates to ordain to replace them. Though far smaller, the Russian and Antiochian Orthodox are in the same situation, indeed there is no longer a single Russian bishop in the UK. Other Orthodox groups are far smaller still.
All this explains why there are so many Romanians in all Orthodox churches. Generally, where there are children, you know they are Romanian. For example, we usually do about 120 Romanian baptisms a year and about 40 of all other nationalities, Moldovan, Greek, Russian and English. However, in the Northampton Romanian parish they did 850 baptisms last year.