Religion in the United Kingdom
religion in the country

Christianity is the largest religion in the United Kingdom, though it no longer represents a majority of the population. The United Kingdom was historically a Christian-majority country, but Christianity lost its majority status between 2010 and 2020.
In the most recent 2021–2022 censuses, Christianity was the largest religion in the United Kingdom (at 46.5% of the population), followed by no religion (37.8%), Islam (6.0%), Hinduism (1.6%), Sikhism (0.8%), Buddhism (0.4%), Judaism (0.4%), Other (0.6%) and a further 5.9% who did not state a religion. Among Christians, Anglicanism is the most common denomination, with 53% of Christian believers in the UK identifying with it as of 2023, followed by Catholicism, Presbyterianism, Methodism, Unitarianism, and Baptists.
The Anglican Church of England is the state church of England, whilst the Presbyterian Church of Scotland is the national church of Scotland. The Monarch of the United Kingdom is the supreme governor of the Church of England. Both Northern Ireland and Wales have no state religion since the Irish Church Act 1869 and the Welsh Church Act 1914, respectively.
A large number of individuals have no religious affiliation, and many others are only nominally "affiliated", defined as persons claimed by a faith (e.g. through baptism for Christians), and neither believe nor practice.
History
Prehistory–11th century: Paganism and Christianisation
Before the Roman conquest of Britain, various types of British paganism were practised which included ancestor worship.
“Religion in the United Kingdom” enters the record as religion in the country. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Religion, United and Kingdom can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Religion in the United Kingdom” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Religion, United and Kingdom provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q892159. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2010, 2020, 2021 and 2022.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Religion in the United Kingdom” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.