Census 2021: Religion, England and Wales

Census 2021, Religion, England and Wales, published by the UK's Office for National Statistics in 2022, is the government's own tabulation of self-reported religious affiliation from the 2021 census, including detailed write-in responses that recorded, among others, about 74,000 people identifying as Pagan, about 13,000 as Wicca and 2,489 as Druid. Its strength is that it is a national census, the most comprehensive and methodologically rigorous population survey conducted in England and Wales, with self-identification recorded rather than inferred. Its limit is that census religion questions measure self-reported affiliation, not belief, practice or theological orthodoxy, and the write-in categories bundle related but distinct traditions together, so a claim treating a census figure as a measure of active practice, rather than of stated identity, overstates what this source actually records.