Evangelicals Now Majority In Central America,Christianity Greatly Declines In UK
By Evangelical Focus November 30, 2022
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The research company M&R Consultants has carried out the "First Central American survey on religious affiliation, beliefs and practices".
According to the survey, evangelicals are the majority with 37% of the population; while Roman Catholicism experienced a big decrease, reaching only 32.6%. 29.1% said they were unaffiliated believers and 1.3% non-believers.
Among the 32.6% of Catholics, 19.3% attend their church more than once a week and generally participate in church activities. Evangelicals participate almost three times more than Catholics in church activities (58.4%).
The survey was conducted from 7 October to 15 November 2022, with a sample of four thousand people in Guatemala; Honduras; Costa Rica; Nicaragua and El Salvador. .
Decline of Roman Catholicism
The survey shows that in Central America 61.5% of citizens were raised Catholic since childhood, but 29.9% have stopped believing in Catholicism.
"Protestants are gradually taking the lead and are growing more and more in Central America", explained Raúl Obregón, president of M&R Consultants.
He pointed out that "we must bear in mind that Roman Catholicism comes from practically 100% of the population and is in a process of decline that has been growing since the 1990s in the entire Central American region".
For Obregón, "the population states that Catholicism is becoming very ritualistic, and this tends to tire believers, on the other hand, pastors have been closer to their congregations in recent years and visited them more personally".
"There is a significant migration of Catholics to other faiths, where while preserving their precepts they have an opportunity to have a more active life in the search for souls, which is the gospel of Christ", added analyst Xavier Díaz Lacayo.
Decline Of Christianity In The UK
Meanwhile the United Kingdom has seen the opposite effect with less than half the population now identifying as "Christian", the first time this has happened since it started taking a census in 1801.
The data published Tuesday by the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics show that only 46.2% or 27.5 million of the country’s more than 67 million people say they are Christian. In 2011, when the last census was done, 59.3% of the population or 33.3 million, people described themselves as Christian.
Similar to the United States, the number of people with no faith in the U.K. has been growing with the decline of Christianity. Some 22.2 million people or 37.2% of the population reported that they had "no religion." Ten years earlier, only 14.1 million people or 25.2% of the population, said they had "no religion."
The census data also showed that the population of Muslims and Hindus in the U.K. also grew. Muslims increased their population in the U.K. from 2.7 million in 2011 to 3.9 million in 2021. Hindus increased from 818,000 to 1 million.
Andrew Copson, chief executive of the charity Humanists U.K., said "the dramatic growth of the non-religious" had made the U.K. "almost certainly one of the least religious countries on Earth."
Originally published at Evangelical Focus - reposted with permission.
