Defender of All Faiths? Coronation Puts Focus on King Charles’s Beliefs

THE GUARDIAN: The crowning ceremony will be a deeply Christian affair. Will it be at odds with king’s desire to reflect UK’s religious diversity?

King Charles III with the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who said the coronation was ‘first and foremost an act of Christian worship’. Photograph: Aaron Chown/PA
In 1953, the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, the UK was predominantly Christian, with Sunday church attendance the norm, children taught to say their prayers at bedtime and vicars regarded with unquestioning deference.

Opinion polls in the 1950s and 1960s asking people to name their religion found that between 86% and 91% gave a Christian denomination.

Seventy years on, as King Charles III prepares for his coronation on 6 May, the picture is rather different. The 2021 census found that for the first time, a minority of people in England and Wales described themselves as Christian, with those saying they had no religion gaining ground. Attendance at Sunday services at Anglican churches in England hit an all-time low (bar the pandemic year of 2020) in 2021, at 509,000 people, or less than 1% of the population. » | Harriet Sherwood | Thursday, May 4, 2023

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