Students at Oxford, Cambridge and Durham are twice as likely to worship on a Sunday as the general population, according to Church of England data.
Almost 5,000 people regularly attend services at the universities, whose colleges contain 56 chapels.
It is the first time that the church has published data for all three universities, finding that their chapels have at least 4,688 regular worshippers. In 2016, 2,981 people attended every Sunday, of whom 1,685 were students — equating to 2.6 per cent of the student bodies.
This is almost double the 1.4 per cent of the English population who attend Sunday services in Anglican churches. The real figure will be higher, as only 43 of the 56 chapels provided data.
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Holier than thou: students most likely to attend church https://t.co/2DedpgGIJ6 | Times (bhd p/w)
— HE News (@HEontap) March 28, 2018
This is actually encouraging for the UK, although one could wish the numbers were even larger.