Politics and religion in The United Kingdom.

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Anybody from England here maybe can answer this. In the U.S. politics and religion go hand-in-hand, mainly Christians and Conservatives. Is this so in other nations? I'm especially curious about Great Britain.

No, in England pushing religion with politics would be a good way to lose an election. Religion and politics are much more separate in the UK than America. I'm English and now living in France - here in France religion is totally irrelevant to politics. Religion is for religious people and politics is for politicians. Different issues.

Edit: I'll just add that religion in general is much weaker in England anyway. If you did a random poll of British people many would say that they are Christian, but this is in name only and they never attend church except for weddings and funerals, they never pray or read the bible etc. In the workplace religion is irrelevant too. I've heard that in America admitting to be an atheist can cause exclusion and other problems. In England people basically don't give a damn about religion. The only person likely to be excluded in the workplace would be someone trying to push their religion (Christianity, Islam etc) onto other people.

I get the impression that America is one place in the world where politics and religion are intimately mixed together. In my personal opinion that is a very bad idea.

I thought the UK is secular enough to not have politics and religion intertwined together like in the US?

Tallyman, I like that. I think it's actually downright frightening that half the U.S. population considers their party the favorite of God. They think everything the other half does is diabolical. It's ****** up.

The thing about England's government is that there is no seperation of church and state and taxes go to christian faith schools, but at the same time the government pushes the idea of equality while funding their "master theology" . Like thought nazis.

I've only been hit by a teacher once and it was because I didn't sing a hymn because it made me uncomfortable because I didn't like the idea of zombies being real.

Teachers sometimes put you alone in a different area of the classroom if you say you don't believe in a god and let the other children bully you and tell you he's right there in the sky and you can see him.

To get through school in England recently you have to say you are a christian and then it carries on into later life where people will take your lunch if you aren't a christian, for example.

Gosh!

I didn't know the UK is a Christian based country. Sigh.

Anyway, the Queen is already the head of a major church... what else the English can believe in?

OK. Having lived in the UK all my life, this is what I can tell you.

We are, nominally, a Christian country with the Queen as the head of the Church of England, bishops in the House of Lords, and all that. However, it's something the vast majority of British people don't give a blind thought to. For my folks, it meant you were white, middle-class and normal. They never went to church, they couldn't have told you the Ten Commandments if you'd put a gun to their head, yet they were angry and disgusted when I started to explore other religions in my teens. Go figure.

In the country in general, today, the C of E has far less influence than it used to. We had a blasphemy law up until not long ago, which only applied to Christianity; that's now been ditched, although there's been debates recently about whether a similar law applying to all faiths might be a good idea. There are discrepancies in the marriage laws that make it hard for anyone of certain minority faiths to get married legally; a number of groups (the Pagan Federation, among others, as we're one of the faiths affected) are working towards changing this. Otherwise, we're getting a lot more equitable towards all religions. We now, for example, have a law against religious discrimination in the workplace, which applies to any faith or belief system - that's real progress from a few years back.

People used to use C of E churches by default for baptisms, weddings and funerals. Now, the only people who 'dunk' their kids are the ones trying to get little Tarquin into a good church-run school; if you want a pretty wedding, you can have a civil one at a stately home; and church funerals are just embarrassing because so few people know any of the hymns. And, basically, a lot of people who still tick the 'Christian' box on forms do it because there isn't a box for 'Well, I think there must be a God but I'm not sure about all that praying stuff...' Most people I know don't give a monkey's about religion, and have ideas about morals, how to treat other people decently and so on, that they wouldn't identify as derived from religion at all.

I think maybe this is a good thing for the Church of England; at least now they know the people who attend church do it because they really do believe. While the C of E dwindles, the fastest growing type of Christians in this country are the evangelical churches, and anyone from the US knows what those are like. People like this formed a sizeable minority in my (non-faith) school and basically assumed that, being 'Christian', they had a legally sanctioned right to ride roughshod over everyone else's beliefs. As a pagan, the few times I've revealed my beliefs to genuine C of E believers, I've generally been treated with respect, interest and curiosity. Evangelicals either push tracts at me or back away with a faintly contaminated look. I'm tempted to agree with Yeats: 'The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity...'

Evangelical? I heard in my anthropology of religion class that they mostly think about converting you, 'tis true?