Peter Kaim-Caudle (1916-2010)

Posted on June 9, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Peter Robert Kaim-Caudle, the German Jewish refugee from Nazi persecution who became one of Britain’s leading sociologists (holding a chair at the University of Durham for many years), died on 18 May, aged 93.

Kaim-Caudle was best-known for his writings on social policy, in British, Irish and overseas contexts, including his influential book Comparative Social Policy and Social Security: A Ten-Country Study (1973).

However, through his two surveys of religion in the Billingham Urban District of County Durham in 1957-59 and 1964-66, he made an important contribution to the development of British religious statistics.

In particular, he undertook a systematic quantification of the three rites of passage (baptisms, weddings and burials – rarely studied in the round) in a community setting and carried out local censuses of church attendance, on both Easter Sunday and an ordinary Sunday in 1959 and 1966.

This research was partially written up in his three publications: ‘Marriages in Billingham’, Durham Research Review, Vol. 3, 1960-61, pp. 97-108; Religion in Billingham, 1957-59, Billingham-on-Tees: Billingham Community Association, 1962; and ‘Church & Social Change: A Study of Religion in Billingham, 1959-66’, New Christian, 9 March 1967.

Obituaries which have been noted to date are to be found at:

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/obituaries/2010/0605/1224271897549.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/7811800/Lives-Remembered.html

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Welsh Churchgoing

Posted on June 5, 2010 by Clive D. Field

The current issue (No. 9, June 2010) of FutureFirst, the bi-monthly magazine from Brierley Research, leads with an article on ‘Welsh Churchgoing’ by John Evans, Director for Strategic Oversight, Gweini (The Council of the Christian Voluntary Sector in Wales).

There has been no full church attendance census in Wales since 1995, with none planned. However, in 2007 Gweini undertook a major quantitative investigation of religion as social capital in Wales, which was published the following year as Faith in Wales. This report, together with a number of supplementary documents and files, is available online at http://www.gweini.org.uk

The 2007 survey was conducted by self-completion questionnaire, which achieved a response rate of 49%. Information was collected on congregational size, to help in the grossing-up of results, and from this it was possible to produce church attendance figures broadly comparable with those for 1995, after some reworking of denominational categories. These comparisons are now published for the first time.

The number of Christian congregations in Wales has declined by an average annual 1.1% between 1995 and 2007, from around 5,000 to 4,400. This is very close to the decrease reported between 1982 (when there had been another church census in Wales) and 1995.

In 2007 there was one congregation for every 670 Welsh inhabitants, compared to one per 1,430 in England. However, Welsh congregations are smaller, with a median attendance of just 25 over a given week in 2007, very little changed since 1995.

The proportion of the Welsh population attending church over a given week dropped from 8.7% in 1995 to 6.7% in 2007. The fall was principally related to the loss of young people from worship. Whereas 6.2% of Welsh under-30s were estimated to have attended in 1995, only 3.5% did so in 2007. In almost all the major denominations in Wales the over-65s represented more than one-half the congregations in 2007.

The group of 18 so-called ‘Newer Denominations’, relatively small and mainly evangelical, Pentecostal or charismatic, alone bucked these trends. Their attendance actually rose by 40% between 1995 and 2007, and their age distribution became more youthful. Indeed, it compared favourably with the Welsh population as a whole, with 42% against 39% being in the under-30 cohort in 2007.

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Pentecost Postponed? Prospects for Churchgoing

Posted on June 3, 2010 by Clive D. Field

A post on the Christian Today website reports on the talk given recently by Dr Peter Brierley of Brierley Research at the third annual Pentecost Festival in London. In it he painted a gloomy picture of the prospects for church attendance in Britain during the coming decade, based (it would seem), not on any new primary data, but largely on forward projections from the church censuses for which he was responsible when Director of Christian Research.

Brierley anticipates that all the main denominations, except Pentecostals, will decline in the next 10 years, with the Church of England set to experience the sharpest drop in attendance. Whereas in 2000 there were 3.5 million churchgoers, the number today is said to be 2.9 million. Brierley forecasts that, if present trends continue, church attendance in Britain will drop to 2.6 million by 2015 and 2.3 million by 2020.

A study of individual English counties in the last 12 years puts some flesh on these bare bones. While, in 1998, all but five counties had a churchgoing population (on an average Sunday) of at least 6 per cent, today there are only 12 English counties with that figure, and there are seven counties with a churchgoing population of less than 4.5 per cent. Brierley predicts that almost all counties will have a churchgoing population of less than 4.5 per cent by 2020.

He attributes the drop in attendance to various causes, including less evangelism. In 1990, Brierley claims, there were an estimated 120,000 conversions and 60,000 deaths of churchgoing Christians, but in the last year there were only 80,000 conversions and 120,000 deaths.

For Brierley, the most alarming statistics relate to the young. Whereas 60 per cent of British people overall do not attend church at all, the proportion is thought to be around 80 per cent among the under-15s and 75 per cent for 15 to 29-year-olds. 59 per cent of all churches in England have no members between the ages of 15 and 19. Brierley also voices concern about the number of 30 to 44-year-olds leaving the Church, as the presence of the over-65s in church continues to increase.

A major and related challenge for the mainline denominations is identified by Brierley as the ageing of the clergy, since previous research has found that ministers tend to attract congregations of a similar age. ‘The problem is that the ministerial age matches the congregation but not the people they need to reach.’

Black majority and other ethnic churches are the one part of the Christian scene not in decline, according to Brierley. By 2015, he anticipates that around one-quarter of churchgoers in England will be from non-white communities. Brierley explains their success because their members are inviting friends and neighbours of similar ethnic origin, and because they are friendly churches whose pastors offer good sermons.

Alongside the aggregate decrease in Christianity, other religions in Britain are set to grow, particularly Islam, with Brierley predicting the number of Muslims in Britain at 3 million by 2020. This seems a very conservative estimate, since there are probably some 2.5 million now, with Eric Kaufmann projecting almost 7 million by 2029 (in his new book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?).

With thanks to the original Christian Today post at:
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/researcher.anticipates.further.church.decline.in.2010s/25949.htm

Since Brierley gave his talk to the Pentecost Festival he has published a short article entitled ‘Decline Continues’ in FutureFirst, No. 9, June 2010, p. 2. This provides maps (for 1998, 2010 and 2020) showing the percentage of the population in each English county attending church on an average Sunday.

The article also contains new aggregate forecasts for English churchgoing, revised to take account of the latest Roman Catholic mass attendance figures. The 2010 average weekly Sunday attendance for England as a whole is given as 5.5% of the population, with projections of 4.8% in 2015 and 4.1% in 2020.

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Ongoing Public Relations Problems for the Vatican

Posted on May 30, 2010 by Clive D. Field

There are fewer than four months to go to the papal visit to Britain, yet there appears to be no let-up in the public relations problems faced by the Vatican and Pope Benedict XVI, which we have already flagged up in our posts of 26 February (‘What do we think of the Pope?’), 15 March (‘Cyber warfare breaks out over the papal visit to Britain’) and 20 April (‘Pope Benedict on the back foot’).

That at least is the implication of two recent Harris Interactive online polls undertaken among representative samples of adults aged 16-64 in France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Spain and the United States. Fieldwork for the first survey was carried out between 31 March and 12 April for France 24 and RFI, with 1,030 Britons interviewed. Fieldwork for the second study (n = 1,124 in Britain) took place between 27 April and 4 May on behalf of the Financial Times (although the relevant questions do not seem to have been reported in that newspaper, as yet). Full data tabulations for both polls will be found at:

http://www.harrisinteractive.com/NewsRoom/HarrisPolls/FinancialTimes/DataTables.aspx

In the first survey the proportion of Britons having a very or somewhat good opinion of Benedict XVI stood at just 28%, the lowest figure in all six countries investigated save France (22%) and barely half the level recorded in Italy (52%). This was also the lowest statistic in Britain across the six waves of the world leader rankings carried out by Harris since November 2008, 13 points below the peak rating of 41% and a drop of 8% in under six months. 41% of Britons had a very or somewhat poor opinion of the Pope, with men (48%) and upper-income earners (53%) among his harshest critics.

Somewhat more Britons (42%) considered the Pope to have a great deal or some influence on the international stage than viewed him positively, but this was 9% less than in November 2009. It was also the lowest figure for the six countries apart from France (34%) and fell well short of Italy’s 70%. 31% thought the Pope had no or limited influence (37% for men and 41% for those in the upper-income bracket).

Asked to select from a list of six attributes potentially applicable to the Pope, only a minority of Britons described him as dynamic (19%) or charismatic (26%). Pluralities found him reassuring (44%), close to the people (45%) or honest (47%). But 80% regarded him as serious (second only to the US on 87%); this was presumably often viewed as a negative characteristic. Those who doubted the Pope’s honesty were especially located among the young and northerners.

Doubtless, the fall in papal ratings between November 2009 and the present owes much to renewed revelations about child sex abuse at the hands of Roman Catholic priests, including the apparent failings of the Vatican and national hierarchies to address paedophilia at the heart of the Church. This is the clear inference of the second Harris poll, which focused on allegations about child sex abuse by priests.

In Britain 81% of respondents were aware of these allegations (the same as in Germany but less than in the other four countries). Of these, 45% of Britons agreed that the Pope should resign immediately over the Vatican’s failings in these cases (the highest figure in the six nations apart from Spain), with 25% disagreeing and 29% unsure. Moreover, three-quarters of Britons who were aware of the allegations considered that the Catholic Church had lost its moral credibility over the child-abuse crisis, more than in any other country apart from Germany (81%).

A final question asked how often interviewees attended a place of worship. In Britain, the number of self-reporting non-attenders was 65% (including 72% of northerners and 71% of low-income earners), followed by Germany on 61%, France on 54%, Spain on 50%, the United States on 37% and Italy on 33%. Of Britons who still attended worship, 22% said they did so less frequently than five years previously and 21% more often.

So, the Britain which Pope Benedict XVI will be visiting in September is a country where religious practice is no longer the norm and one where the moral authority of both the Catholic Church and Papacy is being seriously questioned. Perhaps these considerations will impact upon the size of the crowds attending the papal events in England and Scotland. These are already under pressure on account of health and safety and security constraints which will limit the maximum potential numbers well below those that were possible during Pope John Paul II’s visit in 1982. It also remains to be seen whether the recent disclosures about the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s planning for the visit will result in some kind of sympathy vote among the public in favour of the Pope.

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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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What Easter can tell us about churchgoing

Posted on April 19, 2010 by David Voas

by David Voas.

Some of the best statistics we have about churchgoing come from attendance counts.  Every year the Church of England, for example, publishes figures on Easter, Christmas and average weekly attendance based on data gathering a year or so earlier. 

http://www.cofe.anglican.org/info/statistics/

One challenge in interpreting the numbers is that they tell us about attendances, not attenders.  Users of the 1851 Census of Religious Worship have always faced the difficulty that many Victorians attended both morning and evening services, so attendance counts must somehow be scaled down in estimating the number of churchgoers.  Today the problem is the reverse: many ‘regular’ churchgoers do not attend every week. 

We can use self-reported attendance frequency from social surveys to estimate how many people attend how often.  Unfortunately we have a good deal of evidence that the answers people give to these questions are often inaccurate.  People who intend to go weekly may claim to do so, whatever their degree of success.

Any estimate of the number of churchgoers is sensitive to the assumptions we make about attendance frequency.  If everyone goes weekly or not at all, then one million attendances in a given week translates directly into one million attenders. If people attend just once a month, then a weekly attendance count of one million would suggest that there are four million churchgoers.

One solution is to maintain a register for several weeks in a sample of churches so that we can identify who has or hasn’t come previously. One of the best known studies of this sort was carried out in the diocese of Wakefield in 1997; see

http://www.ministrytoday.org.uk/article.php?id=181

The results of the survey are surprising.  Of all individuals attending at least one service during an eight week period, more than half came only once. (It is hard not to suspect data error; one wonders how many people were listed twice on the registers.)  If we say that someone should be regarded as a churchgoer if he or she attends at least monthly, then the Wakefield survey (if taken at face value) suggests that there are about 37 percent more Anglican churchgoers than there are C of E attendances in any given week.

Church leaders sometimes argue that even regular attenders now appear more sporadically than in the past.  To put it another way, the decline in average weekly attendance exaggerates the decline in the number of churchgoers, because fewer people are coming every week.  The conjecture is plausible and deserves investigation (using more than anecdotal evidence).

One possible test is to compare attendance at Easter with that in an ordinary week.  The theory would be that all churchgoers still make a serious effort to attend on the holiest day in the Christian calendar, even if the importance attached to regular weekly attendance has diminished. If the ratio of Easter to average weekly attendance has increased over time, it implies that the decline in the number of churchgoers has not been as rapid as the decline in weekly attendance counts.

We have Church of England statistics extending back several decades only for Easter communicants (i.e. participants in Holy Communion); all Easter attenders have only been counted since 2001.  In addition, the historical data on ordinary attendance is a count referred to as ‘usual Sunday attendance’; the Church now prefers ‘average weekly attendance’ on the grounds that some people come to midweek and not Sunday services. 

The evidence from these statistics is mixed.  From 1990 to 2008 there has been no change in the ratio of Easter communicants to usual Sunday attendance: the former is about 20 percent higher than the later, with relatively little variation from year to year.  During the 1980s the Easter communicant numbers were relatively higher (at around 28 percent more than ordinary attendance), which would undermine the theory that churchgoers are now attending less often than previously.  In 1970, however, the ratio was considerably lower (1.06).  If that value is representative of earlier years, then by implication the number of active Anglicans has held up better than the weekly attendance counts.  

As for Easter attendance itself, over the past several years it has been about 25 percent higher than average weekly attendance. Some of those in church at Easter will be visitors or infrequent attenders, but one might assume that they are balanced by churchgoers who are away on holiday.  Easter attendance is arguably a reasonable proxy for the total number of churchgoers (defined as people who go at least once a month).  In 2008 – the latest year for which figures are available –1,415,800 adults and children attended Church of England services on Easter. 

David Voas is a sociologist of religion at the University of Manchester.

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The Nationality of Numbers

Posted on April 16, 2010 by Ingrid Storm

by Ingrid Storm.

As interesting as studying religion in Britain is, we often want to know to what extent what we find here is similar or different to the results from other countries. However, a problem with cross-national comparative studies of religion (and other social opinions, attitudes and behaviours) is that national context can make a huge difference to the meaning of certain concepts.

In my research, I compare religiosity in Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark and Ireland, and find large differences that are only partly due to differences in what we would call “levels of religiosity” and just as much to do with differences in historical and political contexts. For example, more than eighty percent of the Danish population are members of the Church of Denmark, even though only a tiny proportion attend church regularly. Like in other Scandinavian countries, a large proportion of Danes seem to be members because they never bothered to opt out rather than as a result of a conscious decision.

DenmarkBritainRel

This is not to say that church affiliation is a meaningless variable. Perhaps this is not “religion” in the pure sense of the word, but as researchers we are often interested in how different expressions of religiosity have different connotations. Qualitative research has revealed that even as church membership is extremely common in Denmark despite otherwise widespread secularism, it is still important to many people in Denmark  as a way of expressing their identity or cultural heritage, supporting the maintenance of church buildings and last but not least because they want church services at important rites of passage such as weddings and funerals.

Nevertheless, the problem remains: how can such statistics be meaningfully compared to those of for example Britiain, where church membership is an expression of personal religiosity to a much larger extent? There is no easy answer to this. In studies involving a large number of countries one can control for national context through multilevel analysis. The problem here is that even when one does observe national differences it can be difficult to understand what these differences signify.

In smaller comparative studies such as my own, involving only a small number of countries, there is no statistical method available. Rather, the only option is to supply the quantitative analysis with rich historical and contextual analysis of each case country:  the relationship between state and church, the levels of religiosity, the changes in recent years and so on.

Knowledge of the national context informs us not only of why one can observe differences but also what variables it is most meaningful to compare in the first place. Sometimes context dependency makes like for like comparisons inadvisable. In the above example it would make more sense to compare Danish church membership with British self-stated “belonging to a religion” rather than British church-membership.   In other words, even for larger comparative studies, contextual knowledge is an important supplement to statistical analysis.

Ingrid Storm is a PhD student at the Institute for Social Change, University of Manchester


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Religious Easter

Posted on April 8, 2010 by Clive D. Field

It is a little after the event, but there does appear to have been one opinion poll this Easter which took the pulse of religiosity. It was conducted online on 1-2 April by YouGov among a representative sample of 1,503 adult Britons aged 18 and over.

The poll was commissioned by the Sunday Times which included three religion-related questions in what was essentially a political omnibus study. The newspaper never actually reported on these particular questions in its print or online editions, but the relevant data tabulations have been posted by YouGov on its own website at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-ST-tracker-02.04_0.pdf

Interviewees were first asked whether they had a religious faith or not. 43% replied that they did, 51% that they did not, with 6% uncertain. Men (40%) were somewhat less likely to believe than women (46%), and those aged 18-34 years significantly less (33%) than those aged 55 and over (51%).

Regionally, the lowest proportion of believers was in southern England outside London (40%), the capital itself returning 47% thanks to the greater concentration of immigrants there, who often incline to be religious. One of the most interesting breaks was by voting intention, 40% of Labour supporters having a faith as against 52% of Conservatives. Does this augur that religion will be a feature of the general election campaign?

People who declared that they had a faith were then asked a supplementary question about the religion to which they belonged. Of this 43% sub-sample, 54% stated that they were Church of England, 16% Roman Catholic, 17% some other Christian denomination and 11% of some other religion. The Anglican contingent was strongest among Conservative voters (67%) and residents of the Midlands and Wales (65%).

The full sample was finally asked whether they intended to go to any kind of religious service over the Easter weekend. 13% said that they did expect to go to a place of worship and 82% that they did not. These ‘churchgoers’ were disproportionately likely to be women, older persons and non-manual workers, albeit the demographic differences were not huge.

If 13% did actually attend a religious service, this would imply a total of more than 6,000,000 adults in the pews over the Easter weekend. This seems an implausibly high number, reinforcing past opinion poll experience that the path to salvation is paved with good intentions, with respondents consistently inflating their prospective or retrospective religious observance.

More objective data are hard to come by, the Church of England being one of the few Christian bodies to count its Easter worshippers. In 2008, the last reported year, all age Anglican attendance on Easter Eve and Easter Day was 1,415,800. This figure is actually lower than the highest attendance in an ‘ordinary’ week (1,667,000).

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New Church of England statistics

Posted on January 23, 2010 by Clive D. Field

The Church of England published two new sets of statistics on 22 January.

The first were its provisional statistics for mission in 2008, covering baptisms (infant, child and adult), thanksgivings (infant and child), confirmations, marriages and blessings, funerals, Easter and Christmas communicants and all age attendance, typical monthly church attendance (adult and children/young people) and electoral roll membership. Trend data are provided back to 2002. Weekly church attendance and electoral roll statistics are disaggregated by diocese. All these data may be found at:

http://www.cofe.anglican.org/info/statistics/2008provisionalattendance.pdf

An accompanying press release leads on the attendance figures, which show that 1,700,000 people attend Church of England services each month and 1,100,000 each week, either on Sunday or on a weekday. Total attendances in an average week were down 1 per cent on 2007, although there was a 3 per cent increase in the under-16s. Churchgoing grew in 14 of the 44 dioceses. Commenting on the results, Rev Lynda Barley (the Church’s Head of Research and Statistics) contextualized the data within declining participation in all organizations, noting especially the fall in membership of political parties. The press release is available at:

http://www.cofe.anglican.org/news/pr1310.html

The second set of statistics is contained in a report entitled Celebrating Diversity in the Church of England, which is on the agenda for next month’s meeting of the Church’s General Synod. This is based on a gender, age and ethnic diversity audit of a cross-section (one in eight parishes) of the Church’s adult congregations undertaken in September-December 2007, in response to the 2003 report, Called to Act Justly. It follows a comparable survey of clergy diversity in 2005. The proportion of ethnic minority worshippers was 5 per cent, with 65 per cent women and 69 per cent aged 55 and over. The full report is published at:

http://www.cofe.anglican.org/about/gensynod/agendas/feb2010/gsmisc/gsmisc938.doc

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