Statistics On the Decline of Religion in England

This paper from the Equality and Human Rights Commission has some interesting statistics on the decline of religion in England. Table 7, for example, shows that 55.3% of respondents age 18-25 claim "no religion", while only 22.1% of respondents age 65+ claim "no religion" (a change of roughly 6% per decade of age). And, while someone might argue that people simply become more religious as they get older, the declining rates of religiousness and church attendance over the past few decades says that it's a real decline -- 34.4% of all respondents in 1985 claimed no religion, while 43.4% of all respondents in 2008 claimed no religion (a change of roughly 4% per decade). Table 11 also has some interesting numbers on the percentage of people in 1990 and 2008 who "believe and always have" (declining), "believe and didn't before" (a small percent), "don't believe and did before" (increasing), "don't believe and never have" (increasing). The numbers show that people are three times as likely to say that they "don't believe and did before" than they are to say that they "believe, but didn't before". --Hat Tip to Andrew Fakemam for this.