British town votes to change a church to a mosque

Turning a church into a mosque in England.... See the rest of the article here. I have heard it is happening in other countries, also, for the same reasons.

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Today, Britain has fewer than 500,000 practicing Methodists, and only about 6 percent of Christians here attend church regularly, according to Peter Brierley, executive director of Christian Research.

The number of Britain's Muslims who regularly attend Friday prayers is not precisely known, but most agree that Muslims in Britain are far more devoted to their religion than Christians.

The symbolic encroachment of Islam at the pinnacles of British power is already clear. At Oxford University town residents recently, and unsuccessfully, fought the building of a Center for Islamic Studies, and in the House of Lords the number of Muslim members has gone from none to seven during the decade of Labor government.

In working class neighborhoods, the differences between the white British and the immigrant Muslim Asians, who began arriving in significant numbers from former British colonies in Pakistan and Bangladesh in the 1970s, are stark. Contemporary Britons are marrying less and bearing more children out of wedlock; many Muslims, who put stock in intact families, find those trends disturbing. The alarming rate of alcohol consumption among white Britons sets the two groups apart, too. In Blackburn and Preston, increasing numbers of neighborhoods have become exclusively Muslim.

Even as devotion among Christians wanes, the growing influence of the conservative Wahabi school of Islam is more and more visible among women who wear black robes and cover all but their eyes.

In Blackburn, the constituency of Jack Straw, the Labor leader of the House of Commons, there are 30,000 Muslims among a population of 80,000. But in a tell-tale sign for the future, the number of Blackburn children 10 years and younger is evenly divided between Christian and Muslim.