Religion in Britain — страница 5

sexual mores. It is estimated that attendance will barely exceed 600,000 by the year 2005. The Catholic Church in England is composed of four main strands: immigrants from Ireland; working-class people in deprived areas among whom Catholic effort was concentrated in the nineteenth century; a few upper-class families; and finally middle-class converts, for example a bishop of London and two government ministers who all left the Anglican church and became Catholics over the Anglican ordination of women in 1992. The senior English cleric is the Archbishop of Westminster. All the formal churches are in numerical decline. Each time there is a census of church attendance and membership, the numbers in almost every church have fallen. In 1970 there were an estimated 8.6 million

practising Christians. By 1994 the figure had fallen to 6.5 million. At Christmas, the major festival, perhaps 5 million will attend church, but on a normal Sunday it is barely half this figure. One must conclude that numerical decline will probably continue in an age when people feel no apparent need for organized religion. But the decline may not be as dramatic as the figures suggest. Many church-goers have ceased to be regular simply because they often go away at weekends. Within the Church the debate is bound to continue between the modernists who wish to reinterpret religion according to the values of the age they live in, and conservatives who believe it is precisely the supernatural elements, which attract people in the age of science. On the national stage the Church has

made its greatest mark in recent years in the area of social justice. In 1985 the Church of England produced a report, Faith in the City: A Call for Action by Church and Nation, which examined inner-city deprivation and decline, and recommended measures both by church and state to reverse the trends. The Roman Catholic and Free Churches showed similar concern at increased social deprivation in the 1980s. Today the Church is no longer seen as an integral part of the establishment but as possibly its most formidable critic. Besides these 'orthodox' churches which accept the doctrine of the Trinity, there are others which have their own specific beliefs, and are consequently viewed as outside orthodoxy. The Mormon Church which is strong in the United States, has doubled its

membership to about 200,000 in the past 20 years. Other non-Trinitarian churches have also grown, part of an alternative form of spirituality which has been attractive to many people since the 1960s. Other religions Apart from Christianity, there are at least five other religions with a substantial number of adherents in Britain. These are usually composed of either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. The oldest is the Jewish community, which now numbers barely 300,000, of whom fewer than half ever attend synagogue and only 80,000 are actual synagogue members. Today the Jewish community in Britain is ageing and shrinking, on account of assimilation and a relatively low birth rate, and is in rapid decline. A survey in 1996 revealed that 44 per cent of Jewish men under the

age of 40 are married to or are living with a non-Jewish partner. Between 20 and 25 per cent of Jewish women in this age range also marry outside the community. Even so, it is the second largest Jewish community in Western Europe. Two-thirds of the community live in London, with another 9,000 or so in Manchester and Leeds respectively, and another 6,000 in Brighton. Jews returned to England in the seventeenth century, after their previous expulsion in the thirteenth century. At first those who returned, were Sephardic, that is, originally from Spain and Portugal, but during the last years of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century a more substantial number of Ashkenazi (Germanic and East European) Jews, fleeing persecution, arrived. Ashkenazis form 70 per

cent of British Jews. As a result of these two separate origins, and as a result of the growth of Progressive Judaism (the Reform and Liberal branches), the Jews are divided into different religious groups. The largest group, approximately 120,000, are Orthodox and belong to the United Synagogues. They look to the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain for spiritual leadership. A much smaller number of Sephardic Orthodox still recognize a different leader, the Haham. The two Progressive groups, the Reform and Liberal Jews, which roughly equate with the broad church and modernists of the Anglican Church, have no acknowledged single leader, but they do have a number of rabbis who command a following among those who admire their wisdom. The Progressives account for 17 per cent of the entire