[4] A third of Anglicans polled in a 2013 survey doubted the existence of God, while 15% of those with no religion believed in some higher power, and deemed themselves "spiritual" or even "religious".

Holyoake took to publishing The Movement (1842–1845) following his six-month sentence, which later became The Reasoner (1845–1860) and shifted to a larger focus on social issues facing the British working class, increasing the publication's readership.

It was during this time that Holyoake developed his idea for the replacement of Christianity with an ethical system based upon science and reason, terming his proposal "secularism".

[7] George Holyoake's coining of the word secularism in 1851 offered the English-speaking world the clarification of the nascent movement for separation of religion and state.

When Bradlaugh was ultimately admitted in 1886, he took up the issue and saw the Oaths Act 1888 passed, which confirmed the right to optionally affirm declarations for inaugurations to office and offering testimony to government bodies.

[citation needed] Meanwhile, the South Place Religious Society became further aligned with organised secularist advocacy during the tenure of Moncure D. Conway as minister of the congregation; Conway, an American Unitarian minister who served from 1864 to 1885 and 1892–1897, moved the congregation further away from doctrinal Unitarianism, and spent the break in his tenure (during which Stanton Coit served in his stead) writing a biography of American revolutionary ideologue Thomas Paine.

[11] John William Gott, a working man of Bradford, West Yorkshire, attacked religion, especially Christianity, seeing it as reducing the opportunity for a socialist revolution.

Liberal Prime Minister H. H. Asquith was one of a group of Members of Parliament who proposed an ultimately unsuccessful piece of legislation to abolish blasphemy offences.

Gott was jailed again ten years later for a pamphlet showing Jesus as a clown, and died in 1922 soon after his nine-month sentence which included hard labour despite his worsening physical condition.

[12] Gott was the last Briton jailed for blasphemy, but the offence remained a technical crime through common law until being abolished in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008.

[18] In 2015, over 110 Parliamentarians in the UK are members of the All-Party Parliamentary Humanist Group, which means the non-religious have substantial representation among MPs and Lords.

[40] The five local authorities with the largest proportion of those who identified as holding no religious beliefs were all located in Scotland: Shetland Islands (62.75%), Fife (60.55%), Midlothian (60.54%), Aberdeenshire (58.96%) and Clackmannanshire (58.33%).