Religion
In 2001, 158,457 people in the local authority area (71 per cent) stated their religion as Christian, 44,286 (20 per cent) no religion, 16,800 (7.5 per cent) did not state a religion and 2,167 were Muslim. There are small communities of other religions, each making up less than 1 per cent of the total population.
Swansea is part of the Anglican Diocese of Swansea and Brecon and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Menevia. The Catholic see is based in Swansea at St. Joseph's Cathedral in the Greenhill area. The city is home to 10 per cent of the total Welsh Muslim population; Swansea's Muslim community is raising money to open a new central mosque and community centre in the former St Andrews United Reform Church. This would be replace the existing central Mosque on St Helens Road and in addition to the other three existing mosques (Swansea University Mosque, Hafod Mosque, Imam Khoei Mosque). Swansea is represented in Buddhism with the Dharmavajra Kadampa Buddhist Centre, Pulpung Changchub Dargyeling (Kagyu Tradition) and a branch of the international Dzogchen Community (Nyingma Tradition). Swansea Synagogue and Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Hall are both located in the Uplands area.
Swansea, like Wales in general, has seen many non-conformist religious revivals. In 1904, Evan Roberts, a miner from Loughor (Llwchwr), just outside Swansea, was the leader of what has been called one of the world's greatest Protestant religious revivals. Within a few months about 100,000 people were converted. This revival in particular had a profound effect on Welsh society.
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Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“I read ... an article by a highly educated man wherein he told with what conscientious pains he had brought up all his children to be skeptical of everything, never to believe anything in life or religion or their own feelings without submitting it to many rational doubts, to have a persistent, thoroughly skeptical, doubting attitude toward everything.... I think he might as well have taken them out in the backyard and killed them with an ax.”
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)
“We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“The only human beings I have thoroughly admired and respected in the world have been those who carried the load of the world with a smile, and who, in the face of anxieties that would have knocked me clean out, never showed a tremor. Such men and women end by owning us, soul and body, and our allegiance can never be shaken. We are only too glad to be owned. Religion is nothing but this.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)