Talking Jesus Research Results
A consortium of Christian ministries joined together to commission a poll amongst people in the UK about their understanding on various topics related to the Christian faith. The ministries involved were; Alpha, the Evangelical Alliance, HOPE Together, Luis Palau Association, and Kingsgate Community Church. The consortium hired Savanta ComRes to conduct the polling.
Polling took place between 28 January and 13 February. There were about 4,000 adults polled. The margin of error is estimated to be 1.54%.
48% of the UK’s adult population self-identified as Christians. The next largest categories were, None of the Above at 26%, and Atheists at 12%. 4% self-identified as Agnostics with an identical percentage identifying as Muslims. 2% were in the Prefer Not to Say category.
The report stated: “The first question that we asked was about the religious affiliation of the population. We discovered that 48% of the population choose to describe themselves as Christians. This is down “from 58% in 2015.1 The Christian faith is chosen by many more people in the older age brackets – 60% of those aged 55-64, going up to 63% of those 65+, whereas it is 29% of those aged 18-24.
“This is a significant drop in the number of people choosing to affiliate themselves with the Christian faith.”
Whilst 48% of the population describe themselves as Christian. However, only 6% identified as practising the Christian faith. Practising Christians were those that went to worship at least once per month and were praying and reading the Bible at least weekly.
This means that 94% of those ascribing to the Christian faith were non-practising.
The polling showed that 20% of the UK population thinks that Jesus is God in human form and a real historical person. 25% understand Jesus to be a normal human. 33% see Jesus as a prophet or spiritual leader but not as God. 18% don’t know.
Interestingly, 16% believe in the resurrection as told in the Bible. 29% believe in the resurrection but that the Bible has some content that, “should not be taken literally.”
