The United Kingdom's population is religiously diverse and increasingly unaffiliated, with the 2021 census recording just under half of respondents in England and Wales as Christian, a substantial religiously unaffiliated plurality of over a third, a Muslim population of around 6.5 percent, and smaller Hindu, Sikh, Jewish and Buddhist communities, figures broadly reflected in Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020.
The Church of England, established by Henry VIII's 1534 Act of Supremacy after his break with Rome over the pope's refusal to annul his marriage, remains the officially established church in England, with the reigning monarch as its Supreme Governor, while the Church of Scotland, Presbyterian in structure, holds a separately recognized national status without formal establishment in the same legal sense, and Wales and Northern Ireland have no established church at all. Britain's long and often violent religious history includes the Reformation-era persecution of both Catholics and Protestant dissenters depending on the reigning monarch's faith, the 1605 Gunpowder Plot by Catholic conspirators against a Protestant king, and centuries of legal disability for Catholics and non-Anglican Protestants only fully removed through nineteenth-century emancipation acts.