Church Weddings a Rarity in England

As The Organization in England continues its debate on same-sex marriages, it might be good to look at some wedding statistics from that island.

From The Telegraph,

 A record 204,982 marriages were sealed in civil ceremonies in 2022, crossing the 200,000 threshold for the first time, new data released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show.

Almost 250,000 couples tied the knot that year in total, marking a 12.3 per cent increase on 2019 levels.

But religious marriages – those held on Church of England grounds or in other places of worship – are continuing their pattern of steady decline since they reached a peak of more than 400,000-a-year in the early 1970s.

Just 41,915 took place in 2022. Civil ceremony services, meanwhile, have proved much more resilient.

On the one hand, the soaring cost of church weddings is likely to be having an impact. 

With couples now spending  £20,775 for the big day on average, according to wedding planning app Bridebook, a scaled-back ceremony at the register office is a more financially palatable option.

On the other, the collapse in religious weddings is observed alongside the waning of religious affiliation more broadly.

In the 2021 census, less than half of the population (46.2 per cent) described themselves as “Christian” for the first time.

Religious ceremonies made up just 17 per cent of the total in 2022 – a record low outside of the pandemic, when the number of weddings plummeted due to successive lockdowns.

The legalisation of same-sex marriages in 2014 has also had an effect, just 1.2 per cent of which were held in religious premises in the latest year of data.

It remains against the law for Anglican clergy to wed same-sex couples in church, but many now offer “prayers of dedication” for those who want to “give thanks for their love in faith before God”.

It is, however, possible for homosexual couples to hold a civil partnership ceremony in a religious building that has been licensed by the council.

A record 7,800 same-sex marriages were held in 2022, of which only 91 were on religious premises of any kind.

The data also show opposite-sex couples electing to cohabit before taking their vows more than ever before, up from 59.6 per cent in 1994 to 90 per cent in 2022.

The wait before a first marriage is also growing longer, with the median age across men and women up by almost a decade from 23.3 years in 1970 to 32 in 2022.

The unchurched are not interested in a church wedding, and the homosexuals generally are not so inclined either. 

I wonder what the funeral statistics show.