KINGSTON, Jamaica. In little more than a week, the letters page has carried the same quarrel in two different keys. The first letter welcomed the Ministry of Education’s revised October 2026 guidelines on devotions in public schools and asked for firmer protection of the Christian traditions on which Jamaica’s schools were built. The reply, from a children’s rights foundation, argued that our classrooms hold Christians, Rastafarians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims and the unbelieving, and that history alone cannot justify favouring one faith.
Both letters are about morning assembly. The question beneath them is much larger. What is Jamaica, and what does it intend to remain?
For an answer, look across the Atlantic to the country that gave us our Parliament, our common law and our Anglican parishes. Britain has travelled further down this road than any nation we know well. Its story shows what happens when a country keeps the furniture of its faith and lets the household quietly empty out.
Britain Did Not Abolish Its Faith. It Drifted.
Is “dangerous” the right word for what has happened in Britain? Perhaps not. Nobody stood up in Westminster and moved that the nation cease to be Christian. There was no revolution and no vote. The better word is drift: a slow, unplanned slide away from the thing that once held the country together, with the legal shell left standing.
That is the first surprise for anyone who assumes Britain has gone secular in law. On paper, England remains one of the most formally Christian states in the Western world.
| What the law says | What the people say |
|---|---|
| The Church of England is the established church, with the monarch as its Supreme Governor | Only 11% of adults say they belong to it |
| 26 bishops sit in the House of Lords as of right | Among 18 to 24 year olds, 1% belong to the Church of England and 64% to no religion |
| State schools must hold a daily act of collective worship that is wholly or mainly broadly Christian | Two in three adults never attend a religious service |
| At his 2023 coronation, King Charles swore to “maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England” | Christians became a minority at the 2021 census for the first time |
Britain kept the forms. What it lost was the life inside them.
Twenty Years, Nearly Ten Million Fewer Christians
The census tells the story plainly. In 2001, 71.7 per cent of people in England and Wales described themselves as Christian. By 2011 the figure was 59.3 per cent. By 2021 it was 46.2 per cent, or 27.5 million people, the first time in the history of the census that Christians made up less than half the population.
Over the same twenty years, the share saying they had no religion rose from 14.8 per cent to 37.2 per cent. That is 22.2 million people. In Wales, “no religion” has already overtaken Christianity, at 46.5 per cent against 43.6 per cent.
The British Social Attitudes survey, which has asked the same question every year since 1983, shows how deep the change runs. In 1983, 40 per cent of British adults said they belonged to the Church of England and 31 per cent to no religion. By 2024 the Church of England figure had fallen to 11 per cent and “no religion” had risen to 49 per cent.
Researchers who study these figures agree on the mechanism. Adults have not been abandoning the faith in great numbers. Rather, older Britons raised in the church are dying, and they are being replaced by children who were never raised in it at all. Among 18 to 24 year olds, 64 per cent now say they have no religion. Faith was not argued away. It simply stopped being handed down.
Hold on to that point. It is the whole argument of this column.
Is There a Quiet Revival?
Fairness requires one caveat. In April 2025 the Bible Society published a YouGov study reporting that monthly churchgoing in England and Wales rose from 8 per cent of adults in 2018 to 12 per cent in 2024, with the sharpest rise among young men. It also found that one in three churchgoers aged 18 to 54 now comes from an ethnic minority.
The finding is disputed. The British Social Attitudes survey, the British Election Study and the Church of England’s own attendance counts all show continued decline over the same period. Even the revival’s supporters accept that any growth has come in Catholic and Pentecostal congregations, not in the established church. The honest verdict: there may be green shoots, but the forest is still thinning.
Where the Law Came From
Many Jamaicans say our law is built on the Bible. The claim has real roots. Around the year 893, King Alfred of Wessex gathered three older Saxon law codes into a single book of judgments, the Domboc. He opened it not with his own decrees but with the Ten Commandments, long passages from Exodus and teachings from the New Testament, presenting the king’s law as flowing from God’s.
Historians still argue over how much of Alfred’s code survived into the English common law that took shape after the Norman Conquest. But the intent was unmistakable, and the common law that grew from that soil is the law Jamaica inherited and still practises. It is more accurate to say Scripture lies in the foundations of our legal tradition than that every statute follows from it. Foundations, however, are what hold a house up.
| Year | Britain | Jamaica |
|---|---|---|
| c.893 | Alfred’s law book opens with the Ten Commandments | |
| 1534 | Act of Supremacy makes the Crown head of the Church of England | |
| 1831 | Baptist deacon Sam Sharpe leads the Christmas Rebellion | |
| 1835 | Sligoville, the first Free Village, founded around a Baptist chapel | |
| 1838 | Full freedom; church built villages spread across the island | |
| 1870 | The Anglican church in Jamaica is disestablished | |
| 1962 | Independence: 28 of 41 high schools are church owned | |
| 1976 | Status of Children Act removes the legal stigma of birth outside marriage | |
| 1988 | Education Reform Act requires broadly Christian daily worship in state schools | |
| 2021 | Census: Christians fall below half for the first time | |
| 2026 | Ministry of Education revises its guidelines on school devotions |
The Nations That Held On
Britain’s path was not inevitable. Several modern democracies have welcomed people of every faith and none while still naming the faith that formed them. Every country below guarantees freedom of religion in the same constitution.
| Country | What the constitution says | Religious freedom guaranteed |
|---|---|---|
| Denmark | The Evangelical Lutheran Church is the established church and is supported by the state (Section 4) | Yes |
| Norway | Since 2012: “Our values will remain our Christian and humanist heritage” (Article 2). The King must profess the Lutheran faith | Yes |
| Greece | The Eastern Orthodox Church is the prevailing religion (Article 3) | Yes |
| Malta | The Roman Catholic Apostolic faith is the religion of Malta (Article 2) | Yes |
| Costa Rica | Catholicism is the religion of the state; public schools teach it, with an opt out for parents | Yes |
| Zambia | Declares the republic a Christian nation | Yes |
Norway is the lesson. When it loosened the formal tie between church and state in 2012, it did not erase its past. It wrote its Christian heritage into the second article of its constitution, a few lines from the top. Norway let go of the institution and held on to the inheritance. Britain did the reverse. It kept the institution and let the inheritance slip.
Jamaica Took the Other Road
Here is the twist. Jamaica has no state church. It disestablished the Anglican church in 1870, and today its constitution protects freedom of religion and names no official faith. By the British logic of law and establishment, Jamaica should be the less Christian of the two countries.
It is the opposite. At the 2011 census, 68.9 per cent of Jamaicans identified as Christian and 21.3 per cent said they had no religion. More striking still is how little that second number moved while Britain’s surged.
Put the two stories side by side and a pattern emerges that should shape this debate. Britain kept its church in the law and lost it in the home. Jamaica took the church out of the law and kept it in the home. Parliament does not keep a nation’s faith alive. Families, congregations and villages do.
One gap in the record needs closing. STATIN released the 2022 census population count of 2,774,538 in October 2025, but it has not yet published the religion tables. Jamaica is debating the place of faith in its schools without knowing what its own people told the census four years ago. Those figures should be released. You can follow our running summary of what is known on our Jamaica religion statistics page.
The Original Jamaica Home
Jamaica’s faith was not handed down from a throne. It was built from the ground up, by people who had just walked out of slavery.
In 1835, three years before full freedom, the Baptist missionary James Phillippo bought land in the hills of St Catherine and divided it into plots for the formerly enslaved. Henry Lunan, once an enslaved headman on Hampstead Estate, bought the very first lot. The settlement became Sligoville, Jamaica’s first Free Village. Sturge Town in St Ann followed in 1839, then Granville and Kettering in Trelawny, Bethel Town in Westmoreland, Mount Carey in St James and Islington in St Mary, with Methodists and Moravians founding villages of their own.
The design was always the same. A chapel stood at the centre and a school stood beside it. Around them, families who owned their own land for the first time raised their children. Those households became villages, the villages became districts, and the districts became the backbone of free Jamaica. The progression many of us were taught at home, from family to village to community to nation, is not a sermon illustration. It is literally how this country was settled.
The schools followed the chapels. At Independence in 1962, according to figures cited by the sociologist Peter Espeut, Jamaica had 41 high schools. Twenty eight were owned by churches, eight by trusts and only five by the government.
That legacy is not a museum piece. The churches of the Jamaica Council of Churches own 665 schools, and denominational institutions make up more than 35 per cent of schools across the island. The Prime Minister has said that, by whatever measure is used, church run institutions dominate Jamaica’s top 50 schools.
There is a detail here that the diversity argument often misses. Archbishop Emeritus Donald Reece, when he chaired the Ecumenical Education Committee, estimated that fewer than one in ten students at church schools belong to the denomination that runs them. Church schools are not closed clubs. They are already among the most mixed classrooms in the country, and parents of every background queue to get their children into them, precisely because of the ethos some now want diluted.
The Hard Truth About the Jamaican Family
A column that asks Jamaica to protect the home must be honest about the home. Our churches are fuller than Britain’s, but our marriages are far fewer.
About 85 per cent of Jamaican children are born to unmarried mothers, according to Registrar General’s Department figures cited by the Ministry of Health. In England and Wales, births outside marriage only overtook births within it in 2021, at 51.3 per cent, for the first time since records began in 1845. Jamaican sociologists point out that marriage has never been the majority family form here since emancipation.
So protecting the original Jamaica home cannot mean pretending it was always a married couple behind a picket fence. The original Jamaica home was the yard. It was the grandmother who raised three sets of grandchildren, the aunt who took in a nephew, the church sister who checked homework, the deacon who found a youth a job and the district that knew whose child you were. When Michael Manley’s government passed the Status of Children Act in 1976, removing the legal stigma from children born outside marriage, it recognised that reality with compassion. It was the right law.
But the yard itself is thinning. The Jamaica Survey of Living Conditions found that single person households rose from 29.0 per cent of all households in 2017 to 35.3 per cent in 2023, while households of four or more people fell from 33.6 per cent to 24.4 per cent.
Fewer children are arriving to fill those homes. Live births fell from 56,134 in 2000 to 31,276 in 2021, and the fertility rate has dropped from 4.5 children per woman in the early 1970s to 1.9, below the level needed to replace the population. The Planning Institute now describes Jamaica’s population as old.
This is where the real danger lies, and it is not diversity. Jamaica’s children have long been raised by two institutions above all: the extended family and the church, including the church school. If the extended family thins out at the same moment the church’s voice in school is trimmed to a short, carefully neutral devotion, both supports weaken together. That is exactly how Britain lost a generation. Nobody took their faith from them. Nobody gave it to them.
The Strongest Case Against This Column
The other side deserves a fair hearing, and much of what it says is right.
Section 17 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms guarantees every Jamaican freedom of conscience and religion. One in five Jamaicans reported no religion at the last published census. Rastafarian families have for years raised complaints about discrimination in schools, including over children’s locs. A child should never be pressured into worship against his conscience or his parents’ wishes, and an opt out that exists only on paper is no opt out at all.
Critics also point out that Christianity in Jamaica was not only the faith of the Free Villages. It was the faith of the plantation too. The established Anglican church stood with the planter class for most of the slavery era, while missionaries who preached to the enslaved were jailed and their chapels burned. Some argue that “protecting Christian tradition” can become a polite way of telling minorities they are guests in their own country. And researchers note that Britain’s decline in belief has many causes, from wealth to urbanisation to television, which no school policy could have stopped.
Those points are serious. But they argue for protecting the right to step aside, not for removing what others are stepping aside from. Freedom of conscience is itself part of the Christian inheritance; it was dissenting Christians who fought for it. And the faith worth protecting in Jamaica is precisely the dissenting, emancipating tradition of Sam Sharpe and the Free Villages, not the faith of the planters. Countries such as Costa Rica and, yes, Britain already combine a Christian ethos in schools with a lawful opt out. Jamaica can do the same.
What Jamaica Should Do
- Write the heritage down. Whenever Jamaica next revisits its constitution, it should follow Norway: acknowledge the Christian heritage that shaped the nation, in the same breath as a firm guarantee of freedom for every faith and none.
- Protect the ethos of church schools. The partnership between Church and State built our best schools. The devotion guidelines should safeguard each school’s tradition, from masses to chapel services, while making the opt out real, simple and free of stigma.
- Publish the numbers. STATIN should release the religion tables from the 2022 census so this debate rests on facts, not assumptions from 2011.
- Strengthen the home itself. Back marriage preparation, push to get every father’s name on every birth certificate, and support the grandparents who are quietly raising a large share of the nation’s children.
- Teach the story. Every Jamaican child should know how Sligoville was built. A people who know where they came from are harder to uproot.
Where We Go From Here
Britain is not a warning because it welcomed people of other faiths. Its welcome is to its credit. It is a warning because it stopped passing on what it had, and assumed that bishops in Parliament and a clause in an education act would do the work that only parents, grandparents and congregations can do.
We live in a changing world, and Jamaica should change with it where change is good. But a changing world is no reason to change everything. Respect the Rastafarian child, the Hindu child, the Muslim child and the child of no faith. Then keep the chapel, keep the devotion and keep the yard.
The free villages began with a family, a plot of land and a church. That was the original Jamaica home. Throw out the bathwater if you must, but do not throw out the baby.
Method: Figures come from the Office for National Statistics censuses of 2001, 2011 and 2021; the British Social Attitudes survey (National Centre for Social Research); the Bible Society’s Quiet Revival report and the British Election Study; the Statistical Institute of Jamaica censuses of 1991, 2001 and 2011 as summarised by the US State Department; the Planning Institute of Jamaica’s Survey of Living Conditions 2023 and Economic and Social Survey; the Registrar General’s Department; the Ministry of Education’s guidelines for devotions; the Jamaica National Heritage Trust; and the published constitutions of Denmark, Norway, Greece, Malta, Costa Rica and Zambia. Jamaican and British census years differ, so comparisons show each country’s own trend.
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