The difference a decade makes.
‘No religion’ in the Merthyr region
(The religious element in the 2001 and 2011 censuses)
In March this year (2021) there was a census. Its results will start appearing next year. Censuses tell us a lot about change during the decade between each of them but census statistics for religion are notoriously slippery. People are not obliged to answer the religion question, which will skew the figures and it tells you nothing about how seriously people identify with the religion they tick, or practise it (and that’s quite apart from the people who write ‘Jeddai’, ‘Ninja’ and such like). Some people may feel themselves to be Sikh or Jewish or whatever, ‘culturally’ or for family history reasons with no religious commitment at all. So those figures are useless if you want to know what percentage of a population attends a Gurdwara or a Synagogue.
Yet some things were clear from the 2011 census. In the previous ten years people who declared themselves Christians had decreased by 14% in Wales. That was despite the population having risen. They were the only religious group to register decline, moving from 72% of the Wales population in 2001 to 58% Christian in 2011. Also Wales as a whole registered an almost 14% rise in ‘no religion’ response since the 2001 census.
And what of the Merthyr region? The two tables below provide some answers.
2001
Year | Religion | Percentage |
2001 | Christian | 69.81 % |
2001 | No Religion | 21.00 % |
2001 | Religion Not Stated | 8.38 % |
2001 | Muslim | 0.25 % |
2001 | Other Religion | 0.21 % |
2001 | Hindu | 0.17 % |
2001 | Buddhist | 0.11 % |
2001 | Sikh | 0.04 % |
2001 | Jewish | 0.03 % |
*Office of National Statistics data
2011
Year | Religion | Percentage |
2011 | Christian | 56.03 % |
2011 | No Religion | 35.79 % |
2011 | Religion Not Stated | 7.02 % |
2011 | Other Religion | 0.38 % |
2011 | Muslim | 0.34 % |
2011 | Buddhist | 0.21 % |
2011 | Hindu | 0.14 % |
2011 | Sikh | 0.09 % |
2011 | Jewish | 0.01 % |
What will have happened in the last ten years? We have to wait until 2022 for the data and the analysis of it to start emerging.
Christine Trevett
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