THE proportion of weddings held in a religious setting in 2020 — the year that the pandemic began — dropped by 3.7 per cent compared with the previous year, figures released by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) on Thursday show.
The percentage of opposite-sex weddings in England and Wales which were held in a religious setting fell from 18.7 per cent in 2019 to 15 per cent in 2020, the year for which statistics have just been released.
The sample size was greatly reduced from previous years, however, owing to the pandemic: only 85,770 weddings were held in 2020, down from 219,850 the previous year.
The declining rate of religious wedding ceremonies follows an established trend in the statistics: in 2016, 24 per cent of weddings were held in a church or other place of worship, and, in 2005, religious weddings accounted for 35 per cent of the total.
Of the 12,441 religious weddings that were held in 2020, two-thirds were solemnised in Church of England or Church in Wales services. This represents a drop on recent years, in which the Anglican share of religious weddings remained steady at about 73 per cent; but it mirrors the balance seen in the statistics at the turn of the millennium.
Overall, the number of marriages of opposite-sex couples has been falling since 1970, a year in which 415,487 couples got married, despite the population having grown 20 per cent in the past 50 years.
In 1970, 40 per cent of all weddings were conducted by priests in the Church of England or the Church in Wales: a slightly larger proportion than those who were married in civil ceremonies.
Despite the stark statistics, in more recent years, the marriage rate, defined by the ONS as the change in the adult population in a legal partnership, has been declining only since 2016.
As with opposite-sex marriages, the number of same-sex marriages in the UK fell significantly between 2019 and 2020, when many weddings were cancelled because of the pandemic. There were 2811 in total, split four to three between female and male couples.
Only 17 of the 2811 same-sex weddings that were held were recorded as being conducted in religious ceremonies. Neither the Church of England nor the Church in Wales currently conduct same-sex weddings.