For the first time since 1801, when the United Kingdom took its first census, less than half of the population identify as “Christian,” while the share of individuals who say they have no religion has swelled by millions, the latest data from their census show. The data published 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.
As in 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.” Responding to the results of the census, Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, said the U.K. had “left behind the era when many people almost automatically identified as Christian. It’s not a great surprise that the census shows fewer people in this country identifying as Christian than in the past.” Similar drops have occurred throughout much of Western Europe.
In contrast, according to a new survey in Central America, 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%).
This increase in evangelicalism has also led to an increase in beliefs on traditionally Christian values. The study says that 83.9% of Central American citizens do not agree with same-sex relationships. Regarding abortion, for 61.3% it is only acceptable if the woman’s life is at risk and for 54.6% in case of health reasons. For 46.8% both men and women should be virgins at marriage. These are all significantly higher than anything in Western Europe or the United States.
Biblical Connections: Daniel 7:7-8 states “After this I saw in the night visions, and behold, a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, exceedingly strong. It had huge iron teeth; it was devouring, breaking in pieces, and trampling the residue with its feet. It was different from all the beasts that were before it, and it had ten horns. I was considering the horns, and there was another horn, a little one, coming up among them, before whom three of the first horns were plucked out by the roots. And there, in this horn, were eyes like the eyes of a man, and a mouth speaking pompous words.”
Conservative scholars have generally agreed that the fourth beast in Daniel’s vision represents the Roman Empire and the little horn in this passage represents the future Antichrist, thus linking him to the Roman Empire, or more accurately a revived Roman Empire. Daniel 9:26 also links the Antichrist to the Roman Empire, as they are the people who destroyed the second temple. However, for centuries Western Europe was viewed as the bastion of Christianity, sending missionaries throughout the world. People wondered how such a Christian center could one day give rise to the Antichrist. This is no longer the case. Western Europe’s Christian influence has completely collapsed, to the point that even nominal Christianity is dying. The secularization of Western Europe could easily be setting the stage for the kingdom of the Antichrist to rise.
PRAY: Pray that Christianity will continue to grow in Central America and other place throughout the world and that Christianity may once again take hold in Western