Scotland’s religious collapse

00:00 04:49

Melanie McDonagh has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Last week, I had a drink with a Catholic priest friend who works with young people in custody. Inevitably, our talk turned to how radically unchurched they are – not badly disposed to Christianity, just unfamiliar with much of the doctrine and almost all the forms of worship, even though many had a Catholic granny or a non-practising parent. He mused over the startling speed of the secularisation of society. ‘Protestantism has collapsed,’ he said, and not in any triumphalist spirit.

And so it has turned out in Scotland. The latest census, published last month, shows that for the first time a majority of Scots identify as ‘no religion’ whatsoever. This makes Scotland that bit more secular than England and Wales, which are majority non-Christian but not majority non-religious. The Church of Scotland, which is Presbyterian, has lost a million members since 2000. Just a fifth of Scots identify with it; it’s down 35 per cent in a decade, which, in a population of about five and a half million, is quite something.

The Catholic numbers are also down in the same census by more than 117,000 in the past decade; they’re now 13.3 per cent of the population. But the trajectory of the present trend is interesting. Sara Parvis, a lecturer in Church history at the University of Edinburgh, who analysed the census, observed: ‘A couple of things to note, and one is really staggering, at least to me. First, it’s only Scottish men who are majority non-religious – a majority of Scottish women (albeit only 51 per cent) did say they have a religion, whether or not they practise it. But secondly, if you look at the detail of the census broken down by age, sex and religion – and this I find astonishing – the majority religion among under-45s of both sexes in Scotland is now Catholicism.’