Counting Religion in Britain, March 2017

Posted on April 1, 2017 by Clive D. Field

Counting Religion in Britain, No. 18, March 2017 features 25 new sources. It can be read in full below. Alternatively, you can download the PDF version: No 18 March 2017

OPINION POLLS

Belief at work

‘British employers struggle to manage expressions of religion and belief in the workplace’, according to the first major piece of thought leadership from the newly-established ComRes Faith Research Centre – ‘Belief at Work: Faith in the Workplace Study, 2017’ by Katie Harrison and Oscar Watkins. It is based upon online interviews in February 2017 with 251 HR managers, managers, and senior HR decision-makers at British companies with more than 50 employees and with 984 paid British workers at lower than director equivalent level, as well as upon more informal evidence-gathering. The research tested levels of awareness and access to provision relating to seven of the protected characteristics in the Equality Act 2010 (including religion or belief). Bullying, harassment, or discrimination in the workplace on the grounds of religion or belief had been observed by 3% of the workers, with the identical number having experienced it themselves or been the recipient of an inappropriate comment about their religion or belief. Religious clothing or iconography was regularly (monthly or more) worn at work by 6% but just 3% often talked about their faith with work colleagues. About one worker in five thought their employer made provision for prayer during working hours or for planning working hours around holy days or religious festivals. The report and two sets of data tables are available at:

http://www.comresglobal.com/polls/belief-at-work-faith-in-the-workplace-study-2017/

Religious symbols in the workplace

Determining a Belgian case involving a receptionist wearing a headscarf to work, the European Court of Justice recently ruled that employers are entitled to ban their employees from ‘visible wearing of any political, philosophical, or religious sign’ in the workplace. A plurality (42%) of the 5,036 Britons questioned by YouGov by means of its mobile app on 14 March 2017 agreed that employers should indeed have the right to be allowed to ban visible religious symbols such as headscarves, reaching a majority among the over-40s and UKIP voters (66% in the latter case). Just over one-third (36%) thought employers should not be allowed to act in this way, including 50% of 18-24s, while 22% were undecided. Results (by standard demographics) are at:

https://yougov.co.uk/opi/surveys/results#/survey/199d5070-089c-11e7-80fa-d2249ae0b02d

The subject was further explored in another YouGov mobile app poll published on 15 March. This revealed that 16% of adults had worn religious symbols at work, evenly split between those who judged they should be allowed and those who understood why they should not. Asked whether the ban on wearing religious symbols should also apply to children in nurseries and schools, 58% agreed that it should, with 33% opposed and 9% unsure. Topline figures only in this instance are available at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/03/15/eu-courts-workplace-headscarf-ban-ruling-tolerance/

Religion as conversation topic

A surprisingly large minority (34%) of Britons claim to have had a conversation about religion in the last few weeks, according to a YouGov Daily app-based poll published on 27 March 2017. However, religion was the least talked about of the ten topics on the list, apart from celebrities (18%). The principal subjects of conversation were politics and the weather (82% each). Topline figures are available at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/03/27/topics-interest-displays-patriotism/

Islamic terrorism

One-quarter of Britons interviewed by YouGov via mobile app assessed Islamic terrorism as the biggest current threat to the UK. This was the same proportion as were anxious about Brexit negotiations going wrong but less than the 34% who feared the consequences of going through with Brexit. Immigration (19%), a second referendum on Scottish independence (16%), the rise of nationalism across Europe and the West (15%), and Russian meddling in Western politics (12%) were also matters of concern. Topline results only were published on 16 March 2017 at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/03/16/nic-u-turn-and-what-biggest-threat-uk-moment/

Ken Livingstone

On 30 March 2017 the Jewish News published the headline findings of a ComRes poll it had commissioned among an online sample of 2,034 British adults on 24-26 March. The release was timed to coincide with the commencement of a disciplinary hearing against Ken Livingstone, Labour politician and ex-Mayor of London, being conducted by the Labour Party’s National Constitutional Committee. Livingstone’s current difficulties arise from his defence of a Labour MP who had shared a social media post widely perceived as anti-Semitic and from his own subsequent comments which were construed as linking Hitler and Zionism. One-fifth (22%) of respondents thought those comments were anti-Semitic while 28% judged the Labour Party to have a ‘particular problem’ with anti-Semitism, to the extent that 34% said they would think twice before voting for Labour. Just under one-third (29%) favoured Livingstone’s expulsion from the Labour Party. Although fewer (23%) of Labour voters did so, 37% accepted that the party needed to work harder to repair its relationships with the Jewish community. At the time of writing, the full data tables from this poll have not been posted to the ComRes website but the report in the Jewish News is freely available at:

http://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/ken-livingstone/

FAITH ORGANIZATION STUDIES

Visitor attractions

Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral in London were the most visited ecclesiastical buildings in Britain during 2016, according to the latest survey of members of the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions. They recorded, respectively, 1,819,945 and 1,519,018 visits, ranking them fourteenth and nineteenth in the list of 241 attractions. Outside London, Canterbury Cathedral was the most visited ecclesiastical building, in thirty-eighth position with 903,319 visits. The most visited institutions of any type were the British Museum (6,420,395) and the National Gallery (6,262,839). For the full list, and comparative annual statistics back to 2004, go to:

http://www.alva.org.uk/details.cfm?p=607

Christian conferences

Women accounted for 36% of the speakers at 22 national Christian conferences in the UK in 2016, the same proportion as in 2015, according to a report from Project 3:28. Only two (The Pursuit and Ichthus Revive) had gender-balanced platforms, with the Keswick Convention having the lowest number of female speakers (13%, seven points less than in 2015). The report, which includes data for all years since 2013 (when the gender audit began), is available at:

https://media.wix.com/ugd/7c3a0c_9b87b27b3dc64c8190acbd4271d6feb8.pdf

Jewish school places

In the Institute for Jewish Policy Research’s latest report, Daniel Staetsky and Jonathan Boyd highlight the widening gap between applications and admissions to the six mainstream Jewish secondary schools in the capital and project future demand for places, based on three alternative scenarios: Will My Child Get a Place? An Assessment of Supply and Demand of Jewish Secondary School Places in London and Surrounding Areas. The report is available at:

http://www.jpr.org.uk/documents/Will_my_child_get_a_place._March_2017.pdf

OFFICIAL AND QUASI-OFFICIAL STATISTICS

Marriages in England and Wales, 2014

The proportion of marriages between opposite-sex couples in England and Wales solemnized in religious ceremonies has fallen again, to 27.5% in 2014 compared with 28.5% in 2013. The figure was lower in England (27.3%) than Wales (31.9%). Hardly any (just 23) same-sex couples married in religious ceremonies in 2014, a mere 0.5% of all same-sex weddings. For further information, including access to a configurable dataset, go to:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/marriages-in-england-and-wales-2014

ACADEMIC STUDIES

Religious nones

The January 2016 edition of Counting Religion in Britain noted Linda Woodhead’s lecture to the British Academy on ‘Why No Religion is the New Religion’, which drew upon the results of YouGov polls she had commissioned revealing that most ‘nones’ are not straightforwardly secular. The text has now been published in print in British Academy Lectures, 2015-16, edited by Janet Carsten and Simon Frith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, ISBN: 978-0-19-726604-5, £40, paperback) and online in Journal of the British Academy, Vol. 4, 2016, pp. 245-61. An eprint of the article, which has been retitled ‘The Rise of “No Religion” in Britain: The Emergence of a New Cultural Majority’, is available at:

http://www.britac.ac.uk/sites/default/files/11%20Woodhead%201825.pdf

Losing religion

At a quick glance, Callum Brown’s Becoming Atheist: Humanism and the Secular West (London: Bloomsbury, 2017, x + 231 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4742-2452-9, £21.99, paperback) might easily be dismissed by BRIN users, being neither exclusively about Britain nor particularly statistical, based as it is on qualitative interviews with 85 people of the 1960s generation born in 18 countries. However, it needs to be read as the third and final volume of a trilogy which has taken us on a journey through secularization, starting with a cultural analysis of The Death of Christian Britain in 2001 followed by a quantitative and international account of Religion and the Demographic Revolution in 2012. Becoming Atheist draws on these predecessor volumes and other sources for a certain amount of statistical context as well as providing fascinating insights, by means of the oral testimonies, into the loss of faith in relation to childhood, gender, and ethnicity. The book’s webpage is at:

http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/becoming-atheist-9781474224529/

Losing Anglican activists

Another new book which, in certain respects at least, is complementary to Brown’s is Abby Day’s The Religious Lives of Older Laywomen: The Last Active Anglican Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, xi + 257 pp., ISBN: 978-0-19-873958-6, £50, hardback). It is an ethnographic study of Anglican laywomen from what Day calls Generation A (born in the 1920s and early 1930s), based on interviews and participant observation in the UK and North America (generally written up in the first person), contextualized within discussions of religious gender and generation differences and sociological theory. There are some fascinating insights into the practical and intellectual contributions made to the Church by Generation A, including as ‘pew power’ (contrasting with leading from the front), but perhaps Day has a tendency to exaggerate its uniqueness since there are no directly comparable studies of previous generations, long since dead. Almost by definition, the sub-title’s prediction that this will be ‘the last active Anglican generation’ (indeed, we are told, potentially the final one in mainstream Christianity) was going to be hard to evidence, and Day’s attempts to do so, throughout and in the rather bullish conclusion (where it is anticipated that churches will be increasingly populated by gay men – the new old ladies), are not fully persuasive. Statistically-based actuarial projections, founded in church or sample survey data, might have been equally advantageous. The book’s webpage is at:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-religious-lives-of-older-laywomen-9780198739586?q=religious%20lives%20of%20older%20laywomen&lang=en&cc=gb

Rowan Williams and Sharia law

The row over his speech supposedly acknowledging the inevitability of an accommodation with Sharia law in Britain must have been one of the low points during Rowan Williams’s time as Archbishop of Canterbury. In a methodologically and historically fascinating essay, Peter Webster has used the JISC UK Web Domain Dataset (an extraction from the Internet Archive) to study online reactions to the speech: ‘Religious Discourse in the Archived Web: Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Sharia Law Controversy of 2008’, in The Web as History: Using Web Archives to Understand the Past and the Present, edited by Niels Brügger and Ralph Schroeder (London: UCL Press, 2017, ISBN: 978-1-911307-56-3), pp. 190-203. Webster’s methodology was to analyse the pattern of unique hosts linking to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s official website, the number being 49% higher in 2008 (when the speech was delivered on 7 February) than in 2007 and 42% higher than the mean for 2005-07. Of the hosts linking to the site in 2008, 44% were doing so for the first time, the most significant component of which were blogs. The Web as History is published on an open access basis at:

http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1542998/1/The-Web-as-History.pdf

United Reformed Church

In a revision of his doctoral thesis, Martin Camroux offers an ecumenically-framed account of the formation (in 1972) and subsequent ‘catastrophic implosion’ of the United Reformed Church, of which he is an ordained minister: Ecumenism in Retreat: How the United Reformed Church Failed to Break the Mould (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2016, xi + 238 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4982-3400-9, $30, paperback). He has utilized a wide range of printed primary and secondary sources, including membership and other statistical indicators, and also conducted an impressive number of oral history interviews. The book’s webpage is at:

http://wipfandstock.com/ecumenism-in-retreat.html

Prayer

As an additional – and less familiar – key performance indicator of secularization, Clive Field offers a meta-analysis of over-time quantitative data about private prayer in modern Britain, mostly derived from national cross-sectional sample surveys among adults. Despite the fragmentary nature of the evidence, and its methodological challenges, with consequent variability in results, the direction of travel is clear. Self-reported regular (weekly or more) private prayer has declined from one-half to one-quarter of the population over the past half-century, while the proportion never praying has risen from one-fifth to one-half. There have been parallel falls in belief in prayer and its efficacy. Gender, age, and ethnicity are the main secular attributes impacting prayer behaviour, relatively higher levels of which also correlate with above-average religiosity, belief in God, and churchgoing and with being Roman Catholic or non-Christian. Prayer statistics thus corroborate other indicators which suggest that secularization in Britain has been a progressive, rather than sudden, process. ‘Britain on its Knees: Prayer and the Public since the Second World War’ is published in Social Compass, Vol. 64, No. 1, March 2017, pp. 92-112, and access options are outlined at:

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0037768616685014

Death and religion

Jonathan Jong, Robert Ross, Tristan Philip, Si-Hua Chang, Naomi Simons, and Jamin Halberstadt have examined ‘The Religious Correlates of Death Anxiety: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis’ for the 2017 online edition of Religion, Brain, and Behaviour. Their sample of 125 international English-language research articles revealed little consensus about the relationship between death anxiety and religiosity with, in general, weak negative correlations between the two. Their paper is freely available at:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53578960e4b0cc61351ba675/t/58caaf73d1758e9193b019b0/1489678207142/Jong+et+al+2017+-+Metaanalysis.pdf

Covering similar ground, but in more depth, and reaching similar conclusions is Jonathan Jong and Jamin Halberstadt, Death Anxiety and Religious Belief: An Existential Psychology of Religion (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, xiv + 233 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4725-7-162-5, £85, hardback). The book’s webpage is at:

http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/death-anxiety-and-religious-belief-9781472571625/

Faith schools

Understanding School Segregation in England, 2011 to 2016, prepared by The Challenge, SchoolDash, and the iCoCo Foundation, applies an innovative methodology to the analysis of the latest Department for Education statistics. It finds that, in terms of the ethnicity and socio-economic background of their students, faith schools continue to be more segregated than non-faith schools in the same area, at both primary and secondary levels. Segregation is most pronounced in Roman Catholic and non-Christian faith schools. The report is available at:

http://the-challenge.org/uploads/documents/TCN-Understanding-School-Segregation-in-England-2011-to-2016.pdf

Religious education

The Empirical Science of Religious Education, edited by Mandy Robbins and Leslie Francis (London: Routledge, 2016, xxxii + 290 pp., ISBN: 978-1-138-92985-2, £95, hardback) reprints 20 articles originally published in the British Journal of Religious Education between 1996 and 2010 (when Robert Jackson was editor) alongside a new introduction by Robbins and Francis (pp. xviii-xxxii) which briefly traces the history of the discipline in Britain since the 1960s and the contribution of the journal to it, as well as explaining the principles informing the selection of the chapters. A majority of them relate to Britain, including several of quantitative interest, notably the overview by Robbins and Francis (pp. 260-72) of the Teenage Religion and Values Survey in England and Wales, undertaken among 34,000 adolescents in the 1990s. The book’s webpage is at:

https://www.routledge.com/The-Empirical-Science-of-Religious-Education/Robbins-Francis/p/book/9781138929852

Sixth-form values

Longitudinal research among 150 students pursuing a course in Religious Studies (RS) at A Level is reported in Leslie Francis, Andrew Village, and Stephen Parker, ‘Exploring the Trajectory of Personal, Moral, and Spiritual Values of 16- to 18-Year-Old Students Taking Religious Studies at A Level in the UK’, Journal of Beliefs & Values, Vol. 38, No. 1, 2017, pp. 18-31. Although some values were unchanged over the two-year period, attitudes towards sex and relationships had become more liberal, while students had become less convinced that knowledge of more than one religious tradition enhanced their own spirituality, less certain about life after death, and less open to mystical orientation. There were also significant reductions in their frequency of attendance at worship and in their affirmation of having undergone a religious experience. The authors acknowledge the methodological limitations of the research and are cautious about asserting causality between these changes and pursuing a course in RS. Access options to the article are outlined at:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13617672.2016.1232567

Religiosity and educational attainment

‘Students in Countries with Higher Levels of Religiosity Perform Lower in Science and Mathematics’, according to an article in press by Gijsbert Stoet and David Geary published online in the journal Intelligence. The authors compared educational performance scores for adolescents in mathematics and science (from the Programme for International Student Assessment and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) with self-assessed religiosity scores for adults from the World Values Survey and European Social Survey. Data are reported for 76 countries (including the United Kingdom, ranked thirteenth in terms of non-religiosity) for three time periods: 2000-04, 2005-09, and 2010-15. Possible causes of the negative correlation between religiosity and educational attainment are discussed, although gender does not appear to be a significant factor. Access options to the article are outlined at:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289617300247

Leeds Beckett University, where Stoet works, has issued a press release about the findings at:

http://www.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/news/0317-research-reveals-students-in-more-religious-countries-perform-worse-in-science-and-mathematics/

Islamist terrorism

Hannah Stuart’s Islamist Terrorism: Analysis of Offences and Attacks in the UK (1998-2015) (London: Henry Jackson Society, 2017, xxv + 1013 pp., ISBN: 978-1-909035-27-0, £83) is a comprehensive quantitative and descriptive survey of 269 individual Islamist-related offences across 135 distinct terrorism cases. One-third of the offences occurred in 2005-07 and a further 38% in 2011-14. The overwhelming majority (93%) of offences were committed by men while the mean age of offenders was 27 years with a range between 14 and 52. Offences were mostly perpetrated by UK nationals (72%) including 47% born in the UK; 16% were converts to Islam. An extended preview edition of the report, incorporating a full executive summary (pp. viii-xiv) and the statistical section (pp. 918-1010), but omitting the profiles (pp. 1-916), is freely available at:

http://henryjacksonsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Islamist-Terrorism-preview-1.pdf

Historical demography

The historical demography of religion in Britain is a relatively under-researched area, and it is unusual to have a new monograph in this field: Albion Urdank, Birth, Death, and Religious Faith in an English Dissenting Community: A Microhistory of Nailsworth and Hinterland, 1695-1837 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016, xvi + 133 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4985-2352-3, £49-95, hardback). The book is described as ‘an outgrowth’ of the author’s previous volume Religion and Society in a Cotswold Vale (1990), which examined the same Gloucestershire community. The new work offers a comparative study of the life events and experiences, notably fertility and mortality, of Anglicans and Particular Baptists based on a family reconstitution exercise, and by means of both qualitative and quantitative (notably path analysis) techniques. The author’s special interest is the extent to which ‘religious values informed procreative activity’. The principal conclusion appears to be that the likelihood of another birth increased following a religious conversion experience. Church historians will not find the book an easy read, and two-fifths of the short main text comprises endnotes and other ancillary matter. The book’s webpage is at:

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498523523/Birth-Death-and-Religious-Faith-in-an-English-Dissenting-Community-A-Microhistory-of-Nailsworth-and-Hinterland-1695%E2%80%931837

NEW DATASETS AT UK DATA SERVICE

SN 8139: Smith Commission Survey – Devolution Preferences in Scotland, England, and Wales, 2014

The Smith Commission was established, following the ‘no’ vote in the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence from the UK, to make proposals for further devolution of powers to the Scottish Parliament. Against this background, the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh secured funding from the Economic and Social Research Council to investigate attitudes to devolution and broader political issues among samples of electors in Scotland, England, and Wales. Fieldwork was conducted online by ICM between 4 and 18 November 2014, and interviews were achieved with 1,500 adults in Scotland and 1,000 each in England and Wales. The questionnaires were, to a certain extent, customized for each home nation, but all respondents were asked to give their religious affiliation (using a ‘belonging’ form of question) and to state how often they attended ‘religious ceremonies’, useful background variables for analysing the answers for the political topics. A catalogue description for the dataset is available at:

https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=8139&type=Data%20catalogue

SN 8141: Scottish Crime and Justice Survey, 2014-2015

The Scottish Crime and Justice Survey was established in 1993 and is now commissioned by the Scottish Government. For the 2014-15 study, face-to-face interviews were conducted by TNS BMRB Scotland with 11,472 adults aged 16 and over living in private households in Scotland. A question on religious affiliation was included as part of a module on identity, and this can be used to analyse responses to the other modules on experiences of crime and the criminal justice system, attitudes to the police, harassment, drug use, and partner abuse. A catalogue description for the dataset is available at:

https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=8141&type=Data%20catalogue

SN 8160: Annual Population Survey, January-December 2016

The Annual Population Survey is compiled from variables present in the Labour Force Survey. It is undertaken by the Office for National Statistics Social Survey Division through a combination of face-to-face and telephone interviews. The 2016 sample comprised a cross-section of 289,176 persons resident in the UK and living in private households or young people living away from the parental home during term-time. This is a sufficiently large total to yield analyses which are robust at unitary or local authority level. Respondents in Britain were asked ‘what is your religion?’ A catalogue description for the dataset is available at:

https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=8160&type=Data%20catalogue

 

Please note: Counting Religion in Britain is © Clive D. Field, 2017

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Faith Schools and Other News

Posted on September 22, 2013 by Clive D. Field

Seven religious statistical stories feature in today’s post, including five newly-released YouGov polls, four touching on aspects of religious prejudice, and leading with a major study of attitudes to faith schools.

Faith schools

In our post of 2 September 2013, we referred to new research into faith schools commissioned by Professor Linda Woodhead in connection with the Westminster Faith Debates. It was undertaken on her behalf by YouGov, 4,018 Britons aged 18 and over being interviewed online between 5 and 13 June 2013. That research was published on 19 September, in the form of a press release on the Religion and Society website and the data tables on the YouGov website. Some fascinating results emerged, which, as the press release indicated, will offer ‘little comfort for either those who defend or those who oppose faith schools’. Findings include the following:

  • Only 32% believe the Government should fund faith schools generally, 18-24s being most supportive (43%), with 45% opposed, peaking at 57% in Scotland (where the existence of Catholic schools has often been a matter of controversy), and 23% undecided
  • Government funding of any type of faith school fails to find majority support, but opposition is notably lowest for Anglican schools (38%) and greatest for Islamic schools (60%) – hostility to Hindu and Jewish schools (59% and 55% respectively) is also high, but falls to 43% for Christian schools other than Anglican
  • Only 24% would choose a faith school for their own child, the proportion not exceeding 30% in any demographic sub-group, with 59% being unlikely to do so (peaking at 77% in Scotland)
  • Academic standards (77%), location (58%), and discipline record (41%) are the major factors in choice of school – just 5% attach importance to grounding of a pupil in a faith tradition and 3% to transmission of belief about God, and no more than 23% cite ethical values
  • A plurality (49%) finds it acceptable that faith schools should have admission policies which give preference to children and families who profess or practice the religion with which the school is associated (with 38% deeming it unacceptable, ranging from 31% of women to 51% of Scots)
  • Just 23% (never exceeding 28% in any demographic sub-group) agree that all faith schools should have to admit a proportion of pupils from a different religion or none at all, while 11% think it better for faith schools to admit pupils only of the same faith and 30% that schools should determine their own admissions policies

Analysing the factors which determine favourability to faith schools, Woodhead found strength of belief in God to be the most significant. When it came to attitudes to non-Christian faith schools, an insular (as opposed to a cosmopolitan) outlook was a key influence. In general, while there was some age effect, gender, social grade, and voting intentions appeared to make little difference to opinion.

The press release can be found at:

http://www.religionandsociety.org.uk/news/show/new_poll_reveals_what_people_really_think_about_faith_schools

and the data tables (with breaks confined to gender, age, social grade, region and voting intention) at:

http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/4n6d3tnayp/YG-Archive-University-of-Lancaster-Faith-Matters-Debate-results-180613-faith-schools.pdf

Y-word in football

Yid is slang for a Jew, deriving from Yiddish. On 9 September 2013 the Football Association (FA), which is ‘cracking down’ on undesirable behaviour in football, issued a governance statement about what it described as the ‘y-word’, concluding that ‘the use of the term “Yid” is likely to be considered offensive by the reasonable observer’ and encouraging football fans ‘to avoid using it in any situation’. The statement was clearly directed at Tottenham Hotspur Football Club (the ‘Spurs’) which historically had many Jewish supporters. In consequence, its fans often still describe themselves as ‘Yids’ or as belonging to ‘the Yid Army’, and the team’s opponents, in turn, call Spurs supporters ‘Yids’. The FA’s statement has led to controversy and debate, in which even the Prime Minister has become involved.

To test public opinion on the topic, YouGov questioned 1,878 British adults aged 18 and over online on 18 and 19 September 2013. Although three-fifths of those interested in football felt that it was acceptable for Tottenham fans to use the y-word in describing themselves, fewer (46%) of the sample as a whole agreed (with 26% disagreeing and 28% undecided). One-quarter contended that such self-description encouraged anti-Jewish abuse, albeit one-fifth argued the contrary, suggesting that anti-Jewish abuse was actually discouraged by reclaiming the y-word as a positive. A plurality (41%) deemed it unacceptable for Spurs’ opponents to call Tottenham fans ‘Yids’, but people interested in football were more inclined to tolerate use of the word in this context (47%) than Britons overall (34%). Roughly half of both the public and those interested in football seemed to approve of the FA’s intervention in the matter, but 34% thought there were other (implicitly more important) issues for the FA to focus on, UKIP voters (56%) particularly subscribing to this view. Data tables were published on 20 September at:

http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/ms6ofjga9s/YG-Archive-‘Yid-Army’-results-190913.pdf

By way of footnote, some BRIN readers may be interested to know that a forthcoming exhibition tells the story of Jews and football in Britain. Entitled Four Four Jew: Football, Fans, and Faith, it runs at the Jewish Museum in London from 10 October 2013 to 23 February 2014.

Banning the burka (1)

Recent high-profile cases, involving courts and a college, have reignited the controversy surrounding Islamic women’s dress, the debate having now spilled over into other arenas such as hospitals. The specific point at issue has been the desirability of permitting the wearing of the full face veil or niqab in public, but The Sun commissioned YouGov to run a poll about the burka (a whole-body garment) more generally, 1,792 Britons aged 18 and over being interviewed online on 16 and 17 September 2013. Three-fifths (61%) supported a total ban on the burka in Britain, 5% less than in April 2011, while 32% were opposed to such a prohibition and 8% undecided. The strongest backing for a ban came from UKIP voters (93%), the over-60s (76%), and Conservatives (71%), with the 18-24s (55%), Liberal Democrats (46%), and Scots (42%) most hostile. Opposition to a ban effectively increased when the question was asked in a more roundabout way, 38% agreeing with the proposition that people should be allowed to wear whatever clothing they want in public, including the burka, 54% being in disagreement. At the same time, many respondents wanted officials and employers to have discretion to ban the burka in specific locations: 86% at security checkpoints, 83% in courtrooms (for defendants), 79% in courtrooms (for witnesses), 68% in schools and colleges, and 63% in universities and the workplace. Full data tables were published on 18 September 2013 at:

http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/7kfoc0tfiq/YG-Archive-Pol-Sun-results-170913-the-Burhka.pdf

Banning the burka (2)

YouGov’s polling for The Sunday Times, conducted online on 19-20 September 2013 and published on 22 September, was more nuanced, differentiating between the burka, the niqab, and the hijab (a headscarf which does not cover the face). Whereas two-thirds of the 1,956 respondents supported a ban in Britain on both the burka and the niqab, with fewer than one-quarter disagreeing, only 25% opposed the wearing of the hijab (with 65% against its prohibition). Rather more (76%) wanted schools to be allowed to ban their students from wearing burkas or niqabs, and 81% wanted hospitals to be permitted to ban their staff from wearing the garments. Referring to the recent court case involving a female defendant with a veil, just 6% thought she should be allowed to wear it throughout the entire trial; 54% favoured removal of the veil in court at all times and a further 35% while the woman was giving evidence. The usual demographic variations can be seen in the answers to all these questions, with UKIP and Conservative voters and the over-60s least sympathetic to Islamic dress, and the under-40s (especially), Londoners, and Scots disproportionately more tolerant. The data tables are at:

http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/4ua4utkfr8/YG-Archive-Pol-Sunday-Times-results-200913.pdf

Churchgoers and evolution

A non-random and disproportionately northern ‘convenience sample’ of 1,100 attenders at 132 Protestant churches, who completed questionnaires in 2009, is used by Andrew Village and Sylvia Baker to examine ‘Rejection of Darwinian Evolution among Churchgoers in England: The Effects of Psychological Type’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 52, No. 3, September 2013, pp. 557-72. The principal conclusions are set out in the abstract: ‘The main predictors of rejecting evolution were denominational affiliation and attendance. Individuals from Pentecostal or evangelical denominations were twice as likely to reject evolution compared with those from Anglican or Methodist churches. In all denominations, higher attendance was associated with greater rejection of evolution. Education in general, and theological education in particular, had some effect on reducing rejection, but this was not dependent on having specifically scientific or biological educational qualifications. Psychological type preferences for sensing over intuition and for thinking over feeling also predicted greater rejection, after allowing for the association of type preferences and general religiosity.’ For options to access the article, go to:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jssr.12049/abstract

Ecumenism in Scotland

A report on ecumenical activity at congregational level has been prepared by the Church of Scotland’s Committee on Ecumenical Relations and the Ministries Council, based on research carried out in February-March 2013. A questionnaire was sent to all the Kirk’s parishes of which 823 (over half) replied online or by post, a significant minority of which recorded the absence of any other denomination in the parish. Where there was a presence, Roman Catholic, Scottish Episcopal and Baptist churches and independent fellowships were thickest on the ground. However, in practice working relationships were closest (in terms of frequent ecumenical contacts) with the United Reformed Church, followed by the Scottish Episcopal Church, Congregational Federation, and Salvation Army. The commonest inter-denominational activities involving Church of Scotland parishes were the World Day of Prayer, Holy Week services, Christian Aid Week, and Week of Prayer for Christian Unity services. Only a minority of parishes belonged to a local Churches Together Group/Council of Churches (43%) or to an ecumenical ministers’ meeting (48%), but it could have been that none existed locally in some cases. The ‘deepest’ forms of collaboration were inevitably limited, just 6% of congregations sharing their building with another denomination, 3% being in a covenanted partnership with a congregation from another denomination, and 1% having involved an ecumenical partner in the appointment of a minister. More Church of Scotland parishes (70%) detailed hindrances to ecumenical working than identified benefits (60%). Further information about the research can be obtained from Very Rev Dr Sheilagh Kesting at SKESTING@COFSCOTLAND.ORG.UK

Ghosts and UFOs

A majority of Britons (52%) believe that some people have experienced ghosts but fewer (38%) think that some individuals have witnessed UFOs with an extra-terrestrial origin. This is according to a YouGov poll conducted online among a sample of 2,286 adult Britons aged 18 and over between 28 and 30 August 2013, on behalf of the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP) and published by ASSAP on 17 September 2013 (following a preview in the Sunday Telegraph for 15 September, p. 3). Disregarding inevitable variations in question-wording, belief in ghosts appears to have risen over time (see the tabulation of previous data at http://www.brin.ac.uk/figures/#ChangingBelief), and it is especially prevalent among women (62% in the ASSAP survey), the separated/divorced (64%), and residents of the East Midlands (66%). Belief in UFOs is highest in the North-East (50%). Disbelievers in ghosts number 34% and in UFOs 45%, peaking among full-time students at 50% and 61% respectively, with 14% and 17% of adults unsure. The data tables are at:

http://assap.ac.uk/newsite/Docs/Ghost%20UFO%20Survey%202013.pdf

 

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21st Century Evangelicals

Posted on January 12, 2011 by Clive D. Field

According to a large-scale survey of churchgoing published by Tearfund in 2007, there are approximately two million evangelical Christians in the UK. Hitherto, we have had only limited insights into their profile and attitudes.

We now know a great deal more about them, thanks to a study undertaken by Christian Research for the Evangelical Alliance in 2010, and published on 11 January under the title 21st Century Evangelicals: A Snapshot of the Beliefs and Habits of Evangelical Christians in the UK.

17,298 Christians aged 16 and over completed the Christian Research questionnaire. These mostly divided between two samples: 14,511 attenders at seven Christian festivals in the UK and known to be popular with evangelicals, and 1,159 attenders at 35 churches randomly selected from the 3,222 in membership of the Evangelical Alliance.

Interestingly, 6% of both samples could not say for certain that they were Christians, while fully one-quarter of the professing Christians failed to designate themselves as evangelicals.

A third sample was also drawn, of black majority churches and conferences. Only a few agreed to participate. Although 1,239 questionnaires were completed by attenders at these churches, Christian Research clearly has reservations about the typicality of this sample, and limited use has been made of the findings from it.

Two reports on the research have been issued at present, although more are promised. The first (described as the ‘initial report’) is a ‘popular’ 24-page summary. This is fully-illustrated, selective in its use of statistics, and has an emphasis on headlines and brief commentaries. Such data as are quoted in it mainly relate to the festival sample. It can be found at:

http://eauk.org/snapshot/upload/21st-Century-Evangelicals-PDF.pdf

The second 47-page report (the so-called ‘data report’) is likely to be of special interest to BRIN users. This contains detailed information about the research methodology and the all-important weighting procedures, which require careful review (see the discussion and weighting factors on pp. 6-7).

The second document mainly comprises tables of results (pp. 8-45), routinely disaggregated for the festival and church samples and, more occasionally, for non-evangelical festival-goers. There are some minor inconsistencies between some of the tables when replies to certain questions are duplicated. This report can be accessed at:

http://www.eauk.org/snapshot/upload/21st-Century-Evangelicals-Data-Report.pdf

There were fewer differences in the profiles, beliefs and behaviours of the festival and church samples than might have been expected. However, for simplicity, and because they instinctively feel more ‘representative’ of grass-roots evangelicals, all the figures quoted below derive from the church sample only.

DEMOGRAPHICS: 60% of evangelical churchgoers are women and 38% men. 36% are under 45 years of age, 39% 45-64, and 21% 65 and over (an age profile far less skewed than for churchgoers in general). 24% are single, 1% cohabiting, 61% married, 6% separated or divorced, and 7% widowed.

BELIEFS: 98% agree that their faith is the most important thing in life and 96% that it is the key factor in their decision-making. 96% believe that Jesus is the only way to God. 96% consider the Bible to be the inspired word of God and 82% say that, in its original manuscript, it is without error. 92% believe in miraculous gifts of the Spirit. 59% believe in a physical hell, but 27% are unsure and 14% disbelieve. 39% think evolution and Christianity are incompatible, 43% that they are not.

PRACTICES: 95% claim to attend church once a week or more. 76% attend a small group meeting at least once a fortnight. 55% read the Bible daily and a further 36% during the course of a week. 78% pray daily and a further 20% during the course of a week.

EVANGELISM VERSUS SOCIAL ACTION: 91% deem it the Christian’s duty to be actively engaged in evangelism, and 58% talk about their faith with a non-Christian once a month or more. 82% regard evangelism and social action as equally important and 80% as complementary, but 39% think many churches place too much emphasis on social action. 88% consider it a Christian’s duty to volunteer in the service of the local community. 78% volunteer at least once a month. 98% voted in the 2010 general election.

MORALITY: 82% agree that sexual intercourse outside marriage is always wrong. 62% say that assisted suicide is always wrong (and 15% not). 49% agree and 33% disagree that abortion can never be justified. 36% feel it is wrong to have homosexual feelings, with 22% unsure and 42% not seeing it as problematical. However, 80% condemn homosexual actions. 84% oppose the blessing of civil partnerships in churches.

GIVING: 97% have given money to their church in the past year, 77% to Christian charities, 48% to other charities, 47% to individual missionaries, and 22% to individual homeless people. 62% claim to have given at least one-tenth of their household income during the past month to their church and charities. 73% agree that it is a Christian’s duty to give 10% of their income to their church, but only 40% tithed to their church during the past month.

ECUMENICAL AND INTER-FAITH WORK: 95% consider it important for Christians to be united in truth and 93% in mission. 88% say that their church works with other places of worship. 63% want Christians to collaborate with people of other faiths on community projects.

Also worth a glance is the Evangelical Alliance’s press release about both strands of the research, issued on 10 January. This focused on the themes of distinctiveness and diversity in the evangelical constituency, and highlighted the vital role of evangelicals in volunteering in the community. See:

http://eauk.org/media/uk-evangelical-christians-distinct-yet-diverse.cfm

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Reflections on Surveying Religion Online: Perils and Promise?

Posted on May 11, 2010 by Gladys Ganiel

by Gladys Ganiel, Trinity College Dublin at Belfast.

I presented the results of my surveys of religion on the island of Ireland this weekend at the annual conference of the Sociological Association of Ireland (May 7-9, 2010 at Queen’s University in Belfast). All three of the papers presented were about religion, and all three utilized quantitative data of some sort.

Prof. Tom Inglis of University College Dublin, one of the leading sociologists of religion in Ireland, commented that he is increasingly frustrated with the perils of survey questions when it comes to asking people about their faith.

Survey questions about religion often ask people if they believe in God, heaven, hell, sin, etc.; or to quantify the frequency of their religious practice. These measures have been important for helping sociologists to chart the ‘decline’ of religion in the West. But as Inglis pointed out, such questions do little to give us in-depth understanding of how people think about ‘meaning of life’ questions.

Supplemental qualitative interviewing is often a good method for complementing religious survey results with more nuanced perspectives.

But is it possible to include a built-in qualitative component in quantitative surveys of religion? I have experimented with this in my current research on religion in Ireland. This involved developing online surveys for faith leaders and laypeople, which included a range of conventional multiple choice/tick box questions, coupled with open ended questions where people had the opportunity to ‘write in’ responses to amplify their responses or make entirely new points.

The online data-gathering method provided people with the time and space, if they were inclined, to type thoughtful and sometimes lengthy responses. Commenting on these surveys, Prof. John Brewer of the University of Aberdeen highlighted the importance of these ‘free text spaces’:

“…the resulting fervour to write comments in free text spaces gives us a wealth of qualitative data that surveys of any kind do not normally disclose. Let me suggest that the free text will end up as important as the statistics for this survey.” (Click here to read further.)

For example, the survey questions focused on religious approaches to diversity/immigration, reconciliation and ecumenism. These are topics about which there are few agreed definitions. So the open ended questions provided people with the opportunity to define reconciliation and ecumenism for themselves – or to tell us that they thought that these issues weren’t all that important!

The blending of the quantitative and the qualitative within the survey format may not be possible in all large-scale surveys of religion. But I think that it is a promising way forward, especially when used in small-scale, online surveys on religious topics. For example, my surveys of religion in Ireland received responses from more than 700 faith leaders and 900 laypeople – far more than I would have had time or opportunity to interview.

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