Theme : Birthplace & Religion

Themes are used in the Vision of Britain system to organise all our statistical data into a small number of broad categories, often identified by icons on the web site.

Identifier:

T_REL

Name:

Birthplace & Religion

Type:

Theme (T)

Text:

This is one of our more unusual themes, because only two censuses have ever gathered information on religion in England and Wales, and they were 150 years apart!

The 1851 Census of Religion was a separate census carried out at the same time as the main Census of Population. It assumed that everyone was Christian, and tried to find out what kind of Christians were most important in each district. It did this by counting how many people attended each church on the census Sunday. Our information has been considerably simplified from the original returns, which counted 35 different religious groups in England and Wales. One result is a large 'other' category.

In 2001, a question about religion was included among the questions in the main census for the first time ever. Except in Scotland, where there is separate information on the Church of Scotland, Catholics and 'Other Christian', the results lump all Christians together but also gathered information on Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims and Sikhs. People were allowed to write in other religions not included on the census form, but we have no data on the distribution of 'Jedi'.

Theme "Birthplace & Religion" is contained within:

The Database, which everything else is contained within:

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Theme "Birthplace & Religion" contains:

Rates, for mapping and for comparing areas :

Datasets or nCubes, containing the actual data :

Variables, defining what data was gathered for :