What Are the Scots?

Last night at a New Years party my gf asked me "What religion are the Scots? Anglican?" I said the largest group and the national church are (yes, groups are plural) the Church of Scotland, so the Scots "are" Presbyterian.

A summary of the religious identity of the Scottish people can be found here - again, at Wikipedia. At the 2001 census 65% of the Scottish population were some kind of Christian. The groups with the greatest number of people claiming some kind of allegiance to them were the Church of Scotland, with about 42% of the Scottish population, and the Roman Catholic Church, with about 16%. Since no denomination claims a majority of the Scottish people, I think it's unfair to say that "the Scots" as a single people "are" anything. (This seems even more true when we consider that the numbers we're talking about are nominal religious identities - what people merely claim to be - and not how they practice or whether or not their churches officially recognize them as practicing members of the church.)

Of course, by the same reasoning I can say that the English are not Anglican, since only 22.2% of the English people claim to be in the Church of England (the Church of England recognizes only 1.7 million as practicing members of the church).