Several years ago, Romani Prodi, then EU president, received some unsolicited advice about the UK's 2001 census. According to one of his senior advisors, a British anti-religious group wrote telling him to ignore the results of the religious question on the Census. Prodi and his advisor were baffled, not having considered the question until then. Fortunately, the anti-religious intervention had brought it to their attention and they subsequently studied the results with interest.

Religious statistics, like religion itself, has become something of a battleground in modern Britain. The nation is now officially post-Christian because "only" four million people attend church on an average Sunday. (Of what other weekly activity do we use the word "only" when talking about four million people?).

Britain remains thoroughly Christian because 37 million people put Christian in the national census (which begs the question where 90% of them are on a Sunday morning).

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