Gulf between religious practise in NI and Scotland widens further according to latest census results

That figure of 51.1% is up significantly from the 2011 census when 36.7% of the population of Scotland said they had no religious affiliation.

According to the data released by National Records of Scotland (NRS), across Scotland as a whole, 20.4% responded Church of Scotland, down from 32.4% in 2011 while the next largest religious groups were Roman Catholic (13.3%), Other Christian (5.1%) and Muslim (2.2%).

Rev David Cameron, Convener of the Assembly Trustees of the Church of Scotland, said the decline in membership numbers is an area of “considerable concern” to the church and that radical reform is necessary to address this.

In Northern Ireland, the head of the Evangelical Alliance NI said there are several reasons why the gulf has widened.

"Scotland I think would be one of the most secular parts of these islands. In comparison, Northern Ireland is a very different landscape when it comes to religious identification and practise as well,” David Smyth said.

Evangelical Alliance NI recently carried out its own research, which found that one in every two people in NI would describe themselves as practising Christians.

Mr Smyth said: "You have three times as many people saying they have no religion in Scotland as in Northern Ireland, if you just use the government stats, and leave our research aside.

“Whenever we went into those government stats, and our own research which was carried out by a professional polling company as well, we found a few reasons why we have much higher rates of religious identification in Northern Ireland.

"One is obviously our history and our geography, and the political situation.

"We also have the highest proportion of Roman Catholics in the UK, and Catholics would be more likely to identify as practising Christians in our research than Protestants were. We also have higher proportions of evangelical Protestants than anywhere else in the UK”.

Dr Lois Lee, from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Kent, has described the Scottish census finding on religious practise as “very significant – though not a surprising one”.

The senior lecturer said: “It reflects the generational shifts we are seeing across the UK, with younger people much more likely than older people to identify as nonreligious. What it makes quite clear is that institutional religion is increasingly not what Scots are pinning their worldview identities to.

"This doesn't actually mean that institutional religion plays no role in their lives, but that role is changing – and, crucially, institutional religion is sharing space in people's lives with the non-institutional worldviews that our surveys fail to account for – humanism is a significant one, but also alternative spirituality, environmentalism, deep scepticism, not to mention the sources of meaning we have no names for”.

Dr Lee added: "Our public conversation and our public records do not at the moment reflect this changing landscape."