What is a Christian

Far be it from me as a devout atheist, to tell other people whether they are Christian or not, but I'm going to anyway.

A survey was done recently in the UK, sample size 2010. 51% of those surveyed claimed that they were Christian (3% Muslim,, 37% None).

Of the people who claimed to be Christian, 28% didn't believe in the resurrection of Jesus. I include "don't know" in that number, because if you don't know whether or not you believe something, then you don't believe.

I think that's a core belief of Christianity; if you don't believe that, then you don't believe the rest of it. And I'm not alone in this.


I think that a lot of people are Christian in the same sense that I claim to be gastronomically jewish. Tomorrow, I visit my sister for the Passover Seder, which (for me) is an opportunity to get together with that part of my family, talk about all sorts of things, eat chicken soup, chopped liver and Sephardi food (I'm more of an Ashkenazi, and my sister was too, but she married a Sephardi, and her cuisine is a mixture of both). I'm not frum about this - I'll eat Sephardi.

Strangely, 35% of non-christian religionists believe in the resurrection. That makes me wonder what religion they could be! And 9% of the "none"s believe in the resurrection, which makes me think that there might be some rather confused atheists out there.

17% of people believe that the Bible is gospel-true on the resurrection. A C of E spokesman said it showed many people held religious beliefs. Which is true; we still need to help those 17% towards enlightenment.