The main winner from the lost boys of the UK, as described in a new report into young male under-achievement by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), is bound to be Islam.
According to the CSJ’s Lost Boys report, published this week, “since the pandemic alone, the number of males aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) has increased by a staggering 40 per cent compared to just seven per cent of females".
“For those young men who are in work, the much-vaunted gender pay gap has been reversed. Young men are now out-earned by their female peers, including among the university educated.”
The CSJ also found that “the growing divergence in boys’ and girls’ outcomes does not only apply to education and employment. We are also seeing a growing divide in the social and political attitudes of the sexes.
“In Britain, as in countries across the developed world, young men are increasingly drawn to conservative, traditionalist or right-wing political movements, whilst young women become ever more liberal and left-progressive.”
The Lost Boys report declared: “As Britain grapples with an epidemic of family breakdown, millions of boys are deprived of any positive model of manhood. For boys and young men in Britain - especially those who are poor - the picture is an increasingly bleak one.”
Writing in The Daily Sceptic on Monday at the start of Ramadan, Christian Concern’s head of public policy, Tim Dieppe, pointed out that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the UK:
“At the last census in 2021 there were 3.9 million Muslims in the UK, or 6.5% of the population. This has risen quite rapidly from only 105,000 in 1960. The previous census in 2011 showed a Muslim population of 2.7 million. Islam was therefore the fastest growing religion in the UK over the 10-year period from 2011-2021, showing growth of some 44%.
“The average (median) age of Christians in England and Wales is 51 years-old. This compares to the average age of Muslims at 27, and the average age of the population as a whole at 40 years-old. Already in 2015 8.1% of all school age children were Muslim.”
The growth Dieppe is describing is driven by immigration and the relatively high Muslim birth rate in the UK. He pointed out that “the name Muhammad, when allowing for spelling variants, has been the top boys name for babies in Britain every year since 2011”.
But what the findings of the Lost Boys report signal is the real possibility of Islam achieving significant conversion growth among young males from non-Muslim backgrounds. Islam offers disenfranchised young males in post-Christian Britain three particular attractions:
· A purposeful peer group – a holy brotherhood – led by father figures who are revered in their communities.
· An enemy to compete against and to seek to subdue – the secular, permissive culture of the West.
· The opportunity to gain respect from their male peers and adulation from the females in the sub-culture by showing courage and resilience in the practice of Islam.
Dieppe concluded his piece with a powerful call for Britain to change spiritual course:
“As a Christian I lament the decline of the influence of Christianity in Britain. I can only blame the church for its failure to boldly and unashamedly proclaim the truth of the gospel…My view is that we can only really recover our belief in Christian values through belief in Christianity itself. We can follow the true religion, or a false one. At the moment we are moving towards a false one. I hope, for the good of the country, we change course.”
But the UK is showing no signs of changing course with the Labour government set to give Islam special protections against criticism under an anti-Islamophobia law.
This would give Islam a significant advantage in its public proclamation over against Christianity which its opponents would still be free to lambast to their heart's content.
However, even without this political privileging, the practical reality now is that Islam has been given an open goal for conversion growth through the collapse of the traditional family in the UK since the 1960s and in particular the pandemic of fatherlessness. How can it fail to score with a significant rise in the number of young males from secular backgrounds becoming Muslims in the coming years?
Julian Mann is a former Church of England vicar, now an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.
