According to the British Humanists, who give the sources for their statistics on their new post, weekly attendance at the 16,000 Church of England’s parishes has dropped to less than 1,000,000 for the first time in at least sixty years. First, here’s a graph from the Church’s own document showing the heartening decline of attendance over the last 54 years, showing that people go to church more often on religious holidays than for regular Sunday service. The “population” on the Y-axis is the total population within all dioceses. Only 1.8% of Brits went to an Anglican Sunday service each week in October of 2014.

Here’s the decline over the last decade, visible even for Christmas attendance!:

The sick part of all this is that “church attendance” in Anglican schools, which are supported by the British government, now exceeds voluntary worship, as kids going to Anglican schools are forced to go to services. (I assume that there’s an opt-out provision, but I’m not sure.) And if you go to the Church’s report linked to above, you’ll see that, faced with these declining stats, Anglicans are weighing lumping children’s school attendance together with “regular” churchgoers to hide the decline in noncompulsory attendance.

Graph showing the fall in weekly church attendance as compared to the rise

in pupils enrolled at Church of England schools

I’m still appalled that children in a country as secular as England—far more secular than the U.S.—can go to government-funded faith schools. Can’t you Brits stop that? And because these faith schools exist, parents must pretend to be Anglicans to get their kids into good local schools. As the British Humanists note:

The figures [on church attendance] also call into question the appropriateness of a system in which so many schools are able to prioritise children on the basis of church attendance in their admission arrangements. 16% of all school places in England are subject to religious admission criteria, and both Church of England research andindependent polling have revealed that a huge number of parents are forced to attend church simply to get their children into their local school – a practice variously known as ‘pew-jumping’, ‘prayers for places’, and ‘on your knees or pay the fees’. Indeed, in 2014, various research published as part of the Church of England’s Church Growth Research Programme found that church growth is strongest in areas that have an oversubscribed, religiously selective school, and even suggested that proximity to an oversubscribed school was something that churches should seek to ‘engineer’. BHA Campaigns Manager, Richy Thompson, commented, ‘Setting aside what these latest attendance figures say about the claim that England is still a “Christian country”, it’s incredibly alarming that the church has been able to increase its grip on the education system despite representing fewer and fewer people year on year. It’s well-known that a great many parents are forced to attend church each week in order to enjoy the simple right of having their children educated at a local school, and more than anything, these statistics demonstrate that this problem will only get worse.

As Britain becomes less and less religious, the rationale for having church schools becomes shakier and shakier. And of course there’s no good rationale to have the government supporting any such schools. The good news in all this is that the secularization of the UK, at least with respect to Christians, is increasing, probably irreversibly.