Believing without belonging' has become the catchphrase of much European work on religion in the past decade. The thesis that religious belief is fairly robust even if churchgoing is declining is examined using data from the British Household Panel Survey and the British Social Attitudes surveys. The evidence suggests that belief has in fact eroded in Britain at the same rate as two key aspects of belonging: religious affiliation and attendance. Levels of belief are lower than those of nominal belonging.The roles of period, cohort and age effects on religious change are considered; the conclusion is that decline is generational. In relation to the rates at which religion is transmitted from parents to children, the results suggest that only about half of parental religiosity is successfully transmitted, while absence of religion is almost always passed on. Transmission is just as weak for believing as for belonging. KEY WORDSbelief / cohort effect / intergenerational transmission / religion / secularization 11 Sociology

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This article analyzes the best available evidence from the major British social surveys to describe and explain the continuous decline of religion throughout the 20th century. This decline is overwhelmingly generational in nature rather than a product of particular periods such as World War II or the 1960s. Measures of religious affiliation, regular attendance at worship, and religious belief show nearly identical rates of intergenerational decline. Decline has not been offset by any positive age effects in an aging society: Britons do not get more religious as they get older. The intergenerational decline follows clear patterns of transmission of parental religious characteristics to children. Two potential modulators of decline are identified and investigated: immigration of people who are more religious than the existing population and higher fertility rates among the religiously active population. Of these only the former appears of importance. The nonwhite ethnic minority immigrant population is far more religious than the white population; however, the rates of intergenerational decline (between immigrant parents and nativeborn children) are almost as high as for the white population, leading to an intergenerational convergence of levels of religiosity. Although ethnic minority populations tend to be more religious and have higher fertility rates, there is no differential fertility by religiosity among the population as a whole.

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