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Jewish and Muslim Press and Other News

Posted on April 6, 2014 by Clive D. Field

Jewish press

The Jewish Chronicle (The JC) is Britain’s longest established Jewish weekly newspaper, being founded as far back as 1841 (with its entire archive available online), and its headquarters are in London. Its current edition (4 April 2014, p. 2) highlights the findings of its latest readership research, conducted by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. This suggests that the paper is read on a regular basis by 156,000 people, equivalent to 67% of UK Jews, a figure far in excess of its circulation. The latest Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) certificate for The JC (covering July-December 2013) shows an average print circulation of 21,370 copies, of which 99% were in the UK and Republic of Ireland. The overwhelming majority (71%) were retail and single copy sales, with 18% single copy subscription sales, 1% multiple copy sales, and 9% free distribution. Earlier audited data are only available to ABC subscribers but circulation is evidently falling since an undated readership survey on The JC’s website (which can be no later than c. 2010 from internal evidence) cites sales of 35,000 copies and a readership of 180,000, reaching 80% of Jewish households in the UK. The survey, which contains a range of other interesting facts and figures about The JC’s readership, can be found at:

http://www.thejc.com/files/pdfs/JCH%20004%20readershipsurvey%20bk.pdf

Other Jewish newspapers may also be mentioned. The London-based Jewish News was established in 1997. It is a free weekly newspaper and claims to be the only title exclusively serving the Jewish communities of Middlesex, Hertfordshire, and Essex. It is distributed via 257 distribution points in Greater London. Its latest ABC certificate, again for July-December 2013, reveals an average circulation of 31,930 copies. In 2000 it launched www.totallyjewish.com, which is described as ‘the leading web portal for British Jews’.

The weekly Jewish Telegraph was founded in 1950 and incorporated the Jewish Gazette from 1995. It is based in Manchester and regards itself as ‘Britain’s only regional Jewish newspaper’, with four separate editions for the Jewish communities of Manchester and the Midlands, Liverpool and Merseyside, Leeds and Yorkshire, and Glasgow and Scotland. No circulation data are quoted on its website, but the Liverpool edition is said to reach ‘virtually every Jewish home in that city and surrounding areas’. No subscription is mentioned, so, presumably, advertising is the main source of revenue.

The Jewish Tribune (not to be confused with the Canadian title of the same name) is a weekly newspaper for the strictly orthodox (haredi) Jewish community. Founded in 1962, it is published by Agudath Israel of Great Britain and is based in Stamford Hill, London. It has a circulation of just 2,500 copies. It is said to be the only UK newspaper to include a section in Yiddish.

Hamodia (the Hebrew word for communicator) is a subscription-based weekly English-language newspaper. It is also specifically designed for haredi communities but aimed at an international market (in America, Israel, and Europe), although its main offices are in London. It commenced in 1998 and its international readership is said to be 250,000.

Muslim press

Two English-language Muslim newspapers in the UK have recently celebrated significant anniversaries. Harrow-based Muslim News, a monthly with an annual subscription of just £12, has had its 25th birthday, having begun in February 1989, about the same time as Muslims were emerging as a distinct faith community in British public life. Its circulation was last verified by ABC in July-December 2002, when bulk distribution averaged 21,400, but copies are also distributed via other channels. Readership is currently claimed as over 150,000 with 1,500,000 hits on its website each month. In 2012, according to an advertiser pack for that year still on the newspaper’s website, there were 145,000 readers, of whom 37.6% were in London, 11.5% in Lancashire, 9.1% in the Midlands, 7.4% in West Yorkshire, 28.5% elsewhere in England, 2.5% in Scotland, 1.1% in Wales, 0.5% in Ireland or Northern Ireland, and 1.7% abroad. The gender division of readers was 55% male and 45% female, and the ethnic breakdown 65% Asian, 10% African or Afro-Caribbean, 10% Turkish, 10% Middle Eastern, and 5% other. Also in 2012, 18,000 email addresses were held by the Muslim News and available for mail shots.

The East London-based Muslim Weekly (£50 per annum and with a mean page extent of 32 A4 pages) has now completed ten years of publication, having commenced in October 2003. It claims a circulation of 50,000 copies per edition and a readership of 275,000, with each copy being read by an average of five and a half people. It is also not registered with ABC. Copies are distributed via the wholesale trade, subscriptions, and at over 200 mosques in the UK. Its readership profile is summarized on its website as: 60% male and 40% female; 68% aged 20-45; 70% married; and primarily belonging to ‘the ABC1 and C2 socio-economic groups, possessing a sizeable disposable income, and who are frequent purchasers of staples, quality and luxury items’.

Other English-language newspapers and magazines for Muslims in the UK have come and gone over the years, of which perhaps the most influential was Q News, which was published between April 1992 and October 2006, to judge from records in the national serials union catalogue. The Muslim Post weekly newspaper seems to have lasted only between 2009 and 2012.

Methodist statistics

The most recent quarterly meeting of the Methodist Council took place in Leamington Spa on 5-7 April 2014. One of the papers under consideration was MC1457, ‘Statistics for Mission Report, 2014’. Although this is not the detailed triennial statistical report for the Methodist Church for 2010-13, which will be presented to the Methodist Conference over the summer following completion of ‘verification and reasonableness checks’, it does include headline findings on the general direction of travel, as well as noting new measures and enhanced dissemination of data. The four-page report can be read at:

http://www.methodist.org.uk/downloads/coun-MC14-57-statistics-for-mission-april-2014.pdf

Membership and attendance figures are said to ‘show year-on-year decreases across the connexion and suggest a narrative of general decline’. The number of Methodist members in Britain at 31 October 2013 was 208,679, 10.0% down on 231,708 in 2010, while average weekly church attendances fell from 208,962 to 193,210 (or by 7.5%) over the triennium, albeit the annual rate of decrease in churchgoing was slower in 2010-13 than it had been in 2004-07 (2.6% compared with 4.5%). Potentially even more significant than a ten-year decline of 32% in weekly attendance is the 47% drop in the community roll, Methodism’s most inclusive performance indicator, of all those in pastoral contact with the Church. The latter figure is tentatively attributed to a change in the recording and reporting of the community roll, but this explanation is not unpacked.

The report to Methodist Council was glossed in an editorial in the Methodist Recorder for 4 April 2014 (p. 6). It is said to ‘make for pretty grim reading’, the decreases being ascribed to ‘a combination of the deaths of large numbers of members, alongside very low “recruitment rates” in most churches’. Of particular concern is ‘the well-documented catastrophic decline in the involvement of young people in our churches’, which is ‘inextricably linked with the widespread absence of families in our congregations’. While the scenario of ‘oblivion in around a generation’ is dismissed, the editor’s most optimistic reading of the situation is that, if current trends persist, the Methodist Church will shrink by half in the next thirty years.

Religion and social grade

In the past, social status was often thought to be a major determinant of religious allegiance, but is this still the case today? To provide an up-to-date answer to this question, BRIN has aggregated the weighted results from online political polling by Populus for January-March 2014, conducted for Lord Ashcroft (January) and the Financial Times (February-March). The combined sample of 50,685 adult Britons aged 18 and over was asked ‘which of the following religious groups do you consider yourself to be a member of?’ Percentages are shown below, first for religious affiliation within social grade (downwards) and then for the social grade of each religious group (across).

% down	All	AB	C1	C2	DE
Christian	53.3	54.8	51.4	54.7	52.7
Muslim	2.1	2.1	2.2	2.0	2.1
Hindu	1.0	1.2	0.9	1.2	0.6
Jew	0.7	0.8	0.7	0.3	0.7
Sikh	0.3	0.3	0.1	0.6	0.2
Buddhist	0.5	0.4	0.7	0.5	0.5
Other	2.0	1.5	1.8	1.8	3.1
None	37.9	36.4	39.6	37.3	38.1
No answer	2.2	2.4	2.6	1.6	2.0

% across	AB	C1	C2	DE
All	26.8	28.2	21.5	23.5
Christian	27.6	27.2	22.0	23.2
Muslim	27.0	29.3	20.5	23.1
Hindu	33.8	24.9	26.1	15.6
Jew	32.8	31.1	11.0	25.0
Sikh	28.4	13.5	44.0	14.2
Buddhist	22.2	37.1	20.0	20.7
Other	20.2	25.6	18.7	35.6
None	25.8	29.5	21.1	23.6
No answer	29.5	33.1	15.7	21.5

It will be seen from the across table that, overall, social grade in isolation now appears to make only a modest difference to the pattern of religious affiliation. The social grade profile of the three largest religious groups – Christians, nones, and Muslims in that order – is fairly close to the national average. Among more minority religions, the most important deviations from the norm are the disproportionately large number of Hindus and Jews in the top (AB) social grade, of Jews and Buddhists in the lower middle class (C1), and of Sikhs in skilled manual occupations (C2). There are also fewer than expected Sikhs in C1, of Jews in C2, and of Hindus and Sikhs in the lowest grade (DE). The downward picture teases out some nuances, with Christianity faring best among the AB and C2 grades, and no religion peaking among the C1s.

Since we often feature polls with breaks by social grade, a classification system which originated with the National Readership Survey and is based on the occupation of the chief income earner in the household, some BRIN readers may find the following tabular summary of the system helpful:

Grade	Status	Occupation
A	Upper middle class	Higher managerial, administrative, or professional
B	Middle class	Intermediate managerial, administrative, or professional
C1	Lower middle class	Supervisory or clerical, junior managerial, administrative, or professional
C2	Skilled working class	Skilled manual workers
D	Working class	Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers
E	Lowest level of subsistence	State pensioners or widows (no other earner), casual or lowest grade workers

The March 2014 Populus/Financial Times data tables can be found at the following URL, with a range of demographic breaks for the religion question on pp. 149-56:

http://www.populus.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/140401-Populus_FT-March-2014.pdf

Religious slaughter

The highly emotive debate about religious slaughter for Jews and Muslims, whereby animals are not pre-stunned before having their throats cut, has flared up again in Britain, spearheaded by the British Veterinary Association (BVA). John Blackwell, BVA’s President-Elect, has just called for Britain to follow Denmark’s lead in banning slaughter without pre-stunning, although Prime Minister David Cameron promised Israel, on his recent visit to the country, that he would defend Jewish shechita. Advocates of religious slaughter methods have often argued that they are as, if not more, humane as conventional techniques, which involve pre-stunning, because of a high incidence of failures in stunning.

Now, in a written response to Parliamentary Questions 192079 and 192080 on 24 March 2014, the Government has published details of incidents of mis-stunning which occurred during slaughtering in approved meat establishments between 27 March 2008 and 28 February 2014. The numbers were very small indeed, from which the BVA (in a press release issued on 5 April) has calculated the mis-stunning rate to be very much less than 1%, far below the level (anything up to 31%) sometimes claimed by defenders of religious slaughter. According to The Times for 5 April religious leaders (such as the spokesperson for Shechita UK) have reacted angrily to the Government statistics, which they consider to be inaccurate, reflecting vets failing to record properly mis-stuns in abattoirs. In its response Government also stated that the Food Standards Agency collects no data on mis-cuts in relation to religious slaughter.

Posted in church attendance, News from religious organisations, Official data, Religion and Politics, Religion in public debate, Religion in the Press, Survey news | Tagged Audit Bureau of Circulation, British Veterinary Association, church attendance, church membership, Hamodia, Jewish Chronicle, Jewish News, Jewish Telegraph, Jewish Tribune, Methodist Church, Methodist Recorder, Muslim News, Muslim Weekly, newspapers, Populus, press, Religious Affiliation, religious slaughter, shechita, social grade, stunning | Leave a comment

Supernatural, Superstition, and Other News

Posted on March 30, 2014 by Clive D. Field

Supernatural and superstition

UK adults are now more likely to believe in supernatural phenomena than in a God, according to a survey published on 27 March 2014. It was conducted by OnePoll among an online sample of 2,000 adults aged 18 and over and commissioned by UKTV’s Watch Channel to coincide with the British launch of the US drama series Believe. The story is about a young orphan girl in possession of mysterious powers who is placed under the protection of an escaped death row inmate.

Belief in the supernatural and superstition ran at 55% against 49% believers in a God. The most widespread supernatural beliefs were in ghosts (33%), a sixth sense (32%), UFOs (22%), past lives (19%), telepathy (18%), the ability to predict the future (18%), psychic healing (16%), astrology (10%), the Bermuda Triangle (9%), and demons (8%).

One-quarter of respondents said that their beliefs in the supernatural arose from witnessing something spooky themselves, while 19% had been convinced by somebody they trusted, and 16% influenced by television or film. Some were prepared to fork out money in pursuit of the supernatural, 4% admitting they spent more than £100 a year on it, but others did not need to. For 10% (and 14% in North-West England) claimed to possess at least one supernatural power themselves (mostly seeing into the future, regressing to past lives, or telepathy), which was more than attended religious services on a weekly basis (8%).

One-third (32%) of adults considered themselves superstitious, rising to 37% in the South-East. The most common superstitions about good or bad luck were associated with walking under a ladder (25%), breaking a mirror (21%), touching wood (18%), opening an umbrella indoors (18%), putting new shoes on the table (17%), finding a penny on the floor (17%), experiencing burning ears when somebody was talking about them (15%), spilling salt (15%), Friday the 13th (14%), and forbidding the groom to see the bride in her dress before the wedding (14%).

Online coverage of this poll is currently rather limited, and OnePoll does not tend to publish its data tables, but there is a press release about the survey on one of the UKTV websites at:

http://watch.uktv.co.uk/believe/article/do-you-believe/

There have also been some news stories in the print and online editions of the Daily Mail at:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2590349/God-Were-likely-believe-supernatural-Number-people-think-sixth-sense-higher-regularly-attend-church.html

and of The Times, with the online article (heavily abridged for the print edition) being accessible to subscribers only at:

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/faith/article4046215.ece

In the absence of any further information about question-wording and results, it is hard to compare these headline findings with those from previous polls. This is certainly not the first time since the Millennium that only a minority report belief in a God, but the exact proportion does tend to vary quite a bit, depending on how the question is framed and what response codes are on offer.

Scottish independence

Scots will be voting in the independence referendum in September. Religion has not featured strongly in the debate thus far, but The Universe for 23 March 2014 (p. 11) contained a report entitled ‘Scots Catholics “more likely to vote for independence”’. It reflected recent coverage in The Herald newspaper regarding the attitudes of Catholics in Scotland to Scottish independence. Professor Tom Devine is quoted as saying that Catholics are the biggest supporters of independence, having abandoned their previous apprehensions about it following ‘the death of structural sectarianism and labour market discrimination’. He cited data from the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey (SSAS) in defence of his claim. Professor John Curtice agreed that Catholics had once been unlikely to vote for the Scottish Nationalist Party and (implicitly) for Scottish independence and that this was no longer the case. However, he argued that Scottish Catholics were still more likely to vote Labour than non-Catholics. The Scottish Labour Party is campaigning for the union with the United Kingdom.

SSAS certainly appears to be the main source of information about the subject, since it gathers data on religious affiliation, whereas most opinion polls and sample surveys touching on Scottish independence do not. The 2013 SSAS, which interviewed 1,497 adults, is the latest available, and the independence debate has obviously moved on since then, so we cannot be sure that the picture it reveals is still current. One of the many questions asked was ‘should Scotland be an independent country?’ This is identical to the wording to be used in the forthcoming referendum. The religious break of the combined responses of those who had and had not definitely made up their mind at the time of interview are as follows:

% across	Yes	No	DK/not vote
Church of Scotland	22	66	13
Roman Catholic	37	41	22
Other Christian	13	68	18
Non-Christian	37	54	10
No religion	34	50	17
All	30	54	17

So, at that stage, Scottish Catholics were more likely to support independence than any other religious group, apart from non-Christians, albeit the plurality of Catholics still favoured the union. These figures have been calculated from the extremely valuable What Scotland Thinks website, which brings together all the relevant opinion data and enables online analysis of SSAS results. Besides data, it also has a comment and analysis section, including an interesting blog by Michael Rosie from last August on ‘Religion and Scottish Independence’, explaining that, once age and gender are factored in, the modest differences in attitudes to independence between religious groups fade away. See:

http://blog.whatscotlandthinks.org/2013/08/tall-tales-religion-and-scottish-independence/

2021 census

As widely reported in national media on 28 March 2014, there will be a decennial population census in England and Wales in 2021 if recommendations by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) are approved by Government. Following comprehensive evaluation of options, and a public consultation exercise, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority submitted proposals to the Cabinet Office on 27 March under which the census would continue, but on the basis of being completed online in the main. Such a change in methodology is expected substantially to reduce the estimated £1 billion cost of taking a conventional paper-based census in 2021, and builds upon the relative success of the 2011 census in which 16% of household reference persons in England and Wales took up the option of filing their returns online. Additionally, ONS is arguing for a change in the law to allow personal administrative data routinely collected by Government departments (examples might be from the tax, benefit, and NHS systems) to be made available to ONS so as to improve the currency and accuracy of its data sources. It is intended that greater use would also be made of sample surveys between censuses. All in all, quite an ambitious ONS shopping list.

The detailed recommendations from the National Statistician and Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority in respect of England and Wales (Scotland and Northern Ireland are carrying out separate reviews of options for another census) can be read at:

www.ons.gov.uk/ons/about-ons/who-ons-are/programmes-and-projects/beyond-2011/beyond-2011-report-on-autumn-2013-consultation–and-recommendations/national-statisticians-recommendation.pdf

It is naturally far too early to say what the content of any 2021 census (if it happens) would be, and, in particular, whether the voluntary question on religious affiliation asked in 2001 and 2011 will be retained.

2011 census

Meanwhile, new analysis of the results of the 2011 census continues to be published, and a couple of recent releases are worthy of note.

On 27 March 2014 the Office for National Statistics published various outputs on living arrangements and marital status for adults in England and Wales in 2011, demonstrating a marked increase since 2001 in the proportion cohabiting or living alone (including the never married). The highest levels of cohabitation seemed to be associated with local authorities with the greatest incidence of religious nones, and vice versa. The pattern was exemplified by Norwich, which topped the league tables for both indicators, with 16% of adults cohabiting and 43% of the population professing no religion. See table 4 in the report at:

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171776_356002.pdf

On 19 March 2014 the Registrar General for Scotland published Release 3B of the 2011 Scottish census, including table DC2207SC, containing details of country of birth by religion by sex for all geographies. The full data can be manipulated via the data explorer tool on the Scotland’s Census 2011 website, but a summary of country of birth for each religious group in Scotland appears below (the abroad category including the Republic of Ireland, an important consideration in the case of Catholics):

%	Scotland	Rest of UK	Abroad
All	83.3	9.7	7.0
Church of Scotland	94.1	4.4	1.5
Roman Catholic	82.1	5.7	12.2
Other Christian	48.6	36.0	15.4
Buddhist	33.2	13.3	53.5
Hindu	13.2	5.2	81.6
Jew	63.1	17.4	19.5
Muslim	37.3	7.4	55.4
Sikh	43.9	14.2	41.9
Other religion	63.3	23.0	13.6
No religion	83.4	11.4	5.2
Religion not stated	79.5	13.5	7.0

Church of England health check

In our posts of 31 January and 14 February 2014 we noted three of the four instalments in the health check of the Church of England which recently appeared in the Church Times, and written by a team of 35 contributors under the leadership of Professor Linda Woodhead. These articles have now been gathered together into a single volume, which will be published by Canterbury Press on 25 April 2014: How Healthy is the CofE? The Church Times Health Check (ISBN 9781848257016, £12.99 paperback). Copies can be pre-ordered on the Canterbury Press website but not yet on Amazon. Orders are also being taken by the Church Times bookshop with a reduced price for six copies or more.

Attitudes to Israel

British Jewry is always sensitive about perceptions of Israel by the British public. It may, therefore, be disappointed to see the outcome of what is arguably the largest-scale test of opinion ever conducted in this country. Ironically, it was published (on 22 March 2014) soon after Prime Minister David Cameron had visited Israel. In the latest Populus poll for Lord Ashcroft, conducted online among a huge sample of 20,058 Britons aged 18 and over between 7 and 20 January 2014, respondents were asked to say how positively or negatively they felt about 21 countries, using a scale running from 0 (very negative) to 10 (very positive). In a league table of mean scores, below, Israel languished in 18th position, just behind Russia (noting that fieldwork predated the Crimean crisis) but ahead of Iran and North Korea, traditionally the least favoured states.

Canada	7.23	China	4.77
Sweden	6.77	Poland	4.74
Switzerland	6.63	Greece	4.63
Norway	6.52	South Africa	4.60
Japan	5.98	India	4.55
Germany	5.74	Russia	4.07
USA	5.73	Israel	3.97
Italy	5.70	Saudi Arabia	3.46
Spain	5.69	Iran	2.69
France	5.08	North Korea	2.40
Brazil	4.90

Only 7% of Britons gave Israel the most positive scores of 8-10, whereas 53% were fairly neutral (4-7) and 40% very negative (0-3), the last figure peaking at 45% among the 45-54s and the lowest (DE) social group and at 46% for those with no formal educational qualifications. These findings are in line with other evidence, Israel’s reputation in Britain having taken a tumble during recent decades because of its policies and actions on the Palestinian question. The complete favourability of nations ratings can be found on pp. 250-501 (with Israel on pp. 286-97) of the data tables at:

http://lordashcroftpolls.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Europe-on-Trial-poll-Full-tables.pdf

Posted in News from religious organisations, Official data, Religion and Politics, Religious Census, Survey news | Tagged Believe, census of population, Church of England, Church Times, cohabitation, country of birth, health check, Israel, Linda Woodhead, Lord Ashcroft, Office for National Statistics, OnePoll, Populus, Religious Affiliation, Roman Catholics, Scotland, Scottish independence, Scottish Social Attitudes Survey, supernatural, superstition, UKTV, WATCH | Leave a comment

Papal Track-Record and Nones

Posted on March 12, 2014 by Clive D. Field

In case anybody is counting, this is BRIN’s 650th blog post since 2010.

Pope Francis one year on

Pope Francis has been Bishop of Rome for a year now, and the media have been busying themselves with seeing what difference he has made, as perceived by the Catholic faithful and adults as a whole. For example, the Catholic weekly The Tablet ran a global survey on its website between 19 February and 4 March 2014, to which a self-selecting sample of over 1,400 responded, mostly weekly Massgoers (the survey is briefly noted in the edition of The Tablet for 8 March, with the full data to be released soon). The Pew Research Center’s latest study has focused on the opinions of United States Catholics about the Pope, published on 6 March. Meanwhile, Angus Reid Global polled the general publics of the United States, Canada, and Great Britain online on 4 March 2014, including 2,013 Britons, issuing a press release containing topline results only on 7 March at:

http://www.angusreidglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ARG-Pope-First-Year.pdf

Much has been written about the ‘Francis effect’, but the Angus Reid Global study reveals that it is rather less prevalent in Britain than in the United States or Canada. Whereas three-fifths of Americans and Canadians had a positive overall view of Pope Francis, the number fell to 36% in Britain, the majority (56%) being neutral and 9% negative. Practising Catholics were most positive in Britain (92%), three times the level among non-Catholics (31%). Only a plurality of Britons (48%) assessed that Pope Francis had made a positive impact on the Catholic Church, 19% less than in Canada and 15% fewer than in America, with 44% taking a neutral position.

Although two-thirds welcomed his simple lifestyle and commitment to the poor, 70% of Britons said that Pope Francis had not succeeded in changing their own views of the Catholic Church, one-quarter acknowledging he had improved them (against 37% in Canada and 44% in America). Even 77% of lapsed or non-practising British Catholics claimed that Pope Francis’s record had failed to persuade them to strengthen their relationship with the Church, and for 6% it had made it less likely. Two-fifths of all Britons criticized the Pope for failing to do enough to tackle the scandal of sexual abuse by priests.

The poll is interesting in segmenting popular Catholicism in contemporary society and highlighting just how nominal much of it is. Asked to describe their relationship with Roman Catholicism or the Catholic Church, respondents self-identified as follows:

% down	Canada	United States	Britain
No real relationship	49	57	73
Practising Catholic	7	11	4
Non-practising Catholic	19	13	6
Lapsed Catholic	4	3	3
Raised Catholic	15	10	6
Another relationship	7	6	8

Religious profession

Populus, formerly pollster to The Times, recommenced regular (twice weekly) voting intention surveys in July 2013, and it has just announced a new partnership with the Financial Times, whereby the aggregate political data for each month will be analysed in detail in the newspaper, as part of its pre-general election coverage. The first month’s results have now been released, based on online interviews with 14,203 adult Britons between 5 and 27 February 2014. The full data tables can be viewed at:

http://www.populus.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/OmOnline_Vote_February_2014.pdf

The classification section of the tables (pp. 146-53) includes responses to the standard Populus question on religious affiliation (‘which of the following religious groups do you consider yourself to be a member of?’), broken down by gender, age, social grade, region, employment sector, past and current voting, educational attainment, working status, and various permutations of these attributes. The following table pulls out some key findings for the principal faith groupings, Christians, non-Christians, and people of no religion (or ‘nones’):

% across	Christians	Non- Christians	Nones
All	53	7	38
Gender
Men	52	7	39
Women	54	6	37
Age
18-24	27	11	59
25-34	35	13	48
35-44	46	7	45
45-54	57	5	37
55-64	67	2	29
65+	74	3	21
Social grade
AB	53	7	38
C1	52	7	40
C2	55	6	37
DE	54	6	38
Region
London	48	17	30
Other South-East	54	4	40
Midlands	55	7	37
North	55	5	38
South-West	48	4	47
Wales	58	2	39
Scotland	50	4	45
Employment sector
Public sector	53	9	35
Private sector	47	7	43
Current politics
Conservative	66	5	28
Labour	48	10	39
Liberal Democrat	51	6	41
UKIP	67	3	30
Education
Secondary education	59	4	36
First degree	50	7	41
Higher degree	44	16	36
Working status
Full-time worker	48	7	43
Part-time worker	51	8	38
Retired	73	3	22
Not working	41	9	48

These data broadly confirm all the other contemporary evidence, not least in terms of the effect of age. No religion is now the ‘creed’ of the majority with the 18-24s and the plurality among the 25-34s, and the over-65s are almost three times as likely to profess Christianity as the youngest cohort of adults. Gender and social grade make remarkably little difference, whereas for long periods in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they decisively shaped levels of religiosity. Region is significant, with the highest proportion of ‘nones’ to be found in South-West England (once the bastion of Methodism) and Scotland (once the stronghold of Presbyterianism). In political terms, Conservatives and ‘Kippers’ are disproportionately Christian, while Labourites and Liberal Democrats display a greater tendency to renounce religion. The better educated you are, the less likely you are to embrace Christianity.

Fuzzy nones

Speaking of ‘nones’, Professor Linda Woodhead has been undertaking further analysis of her two YouGov surveys from January and June 2013 for the Westminster Faith Debates, in which 8,455 Britons were interviewed online. This is presented in her blog on the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network website, posted on 7 March 2014, which reaffirms that, in matters of people’s religion, there are no rigid blacks and whites. Whereas David Voas has illuminated the ‘fuzziness’ of the nominally faithful, Woodhead suggests that such ‘fuzziness’ also characterizes the nones and that the majority do not conform to a Richard Dawkins style of secularism. Only 43% of the ‘nones’ in her samples described themselves as atheists, with 40% agnostics and 16% believers in God. A handful even engaged in religious or spiritual practices. They were more likely to be indifferent to religion than antagonistic to it. The blog can be read at:

http://blog.nsrn.net/2014/03/07/launch-series-the-fuzzy-nones/

Atheism

And still speaking of ‘nones’, a recent addition to the Oxford Handbook series is The Oxford Handbook of Atheism, edited by Stephen Bullivant and Michael Ruse (Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-964465-0, xvi + 763p., hardback, £95.00). Although only published in late November, it is already reprinting, a testimony to the increasing academic interest in the subject of no religion. The book is multidisciplinary and global in its approach, comprising 46 chapters written by 53 contributors. Unfortunately, relatively little consideration is given to the quantitative aspects of the subject, the principal exception being chapter 36 (pp. 553-86), by Ariela Keysar and Juhem Navarro-Rivera on ‘A World of Atheism: Global Demographics’. This mainly focuses on an analysis of data about atheists and agnostics from the 2008 International Social Survey Program, including breaks by gender, age, education, and marital status.

Callum Brown also briefly touches on the statistics for people of no religion in chapter 15 (pp. 229-44) on ‘The Twentieth Century’. However, a more comprehensive source of numbers for the English-speaking world is his 2012 book Religion and the Demographic Revolution (Boydell Press), especially on pp. 105-23, and his earlier article in Archiv für Soxialgeschichte (Vol. 51, 2011, pp. 37-61). Another recent essay by Brown, albeit more qualitative, will also be of interest: ‘Men Losing Faith: The Making of Modern No Religionism in the UK, 1939-2010’, Men, Masculinities, and Religious Change in Twentieth-Century Britain, edited by Lucy Delap and Sue Morgan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 301-25).

Dr Robert Currie (1940-2012)

On 3 November 2012, shortly after his death, BRIN carried a short appreciation of the life and work of Dr Robert Currie, who had a long association with Wadham College, Oxford as Fellow (from 1967) and Emeritus Fellow (from 2000). A much fuller obituary has now appeared in the 2013 edition (pp. 120-34) of the Wadham College Gazette, which has literally just been distributed to old members. Rather it comprises a quartet of obituaries, by Currie’s friend Professor Sir Brian Harrison, former colleague Professor Qassim Cassam, former student Ciara Fairley, and son Daniel. The ground covered includes Currie’s pioneering contributions to the study of religious statistics in the British Isles, initially those of Methodism (in his Methodism Divided, 1968) and then of all denominations (in his Churches and Churchgoers, 1977, written with Alan Gilbert and Lee Horsley).

Posted in People news, Religion and Politics, Survey news | Tagged Angus Reid Global, atheism, Callum Brown, Financial Times, International Social Survey Program, Linda Woodhead, Michael Ruse, nones, Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network, Pope Francis I, Populus, Religious Affiliation, Robert Currie, Roman Catholic Church, Stephen Bullivant | 1 Comment

More Scottish Census Data and Other News

Posted on March 1, 2014 by Clive D. Field

More Scottish census data

Release 3A of the 2011 census results for Scotland was made available on 27 February 2014. It comprised the first of a series of rolling releases of cross-tabulations, providing (in this case) detailed characteristics on ethnicity, identity, language, and religion, from the national to the local levels. The Scottish Census Data Explorer tool is the entry-point for a range of configurable standard outputs and can be found at:

http://www.scotlandscensus.gov.uk/ods-web/standard-outputs.html

Three standard outputs are relevant to BRIN from release 3A: Table DC2107SC (religion by sex by five-year age bands; Table DC2201SC (religion by ethnic group); and Table DC2204SC (religion by national identity). The national identity data are obviously rather topical in view of the referendum on Scottish independence later this year, especially so since the extensive referendum polling has largely (if not entirely) ignored any possible religious influences on prospective voting. A simplified version of Table DC2204SC is therefore given below (the other category subsumes: Scottish and any other identity; English identity; any other combination of UK identities; other identity with or without a UK identity):

%	Scottish	British	Scottish and British	Other
Total	62.4	8.4	18.3	10.9
Church of Scotland	65.8	6.8	24.8	2.7
Roman Catholic	65.6	5.3	13.9	15.2
Other Christian	32.5	17.2	14.3	36.0
Buddhist	26.6	16.6	7.4	49.3
Hindu	8.6	16.6	3.8	71.0
Jew	36.8	18.2	19.4	25.6
Muslim	24.3	29.2	9.9	36.6
Sikh	30.5	29.4	9.0	31.2
Other religion	51.2	12.8	11.9	24.2
No religion	65.9	8.4	15.7	10.0
Religion not stated	58.3	10.0	18.0	13.8

This analysis demonstrates that Scottishness is disproportionately concentrated among adherents of the Church of Scotland and the Roman Catholic Church and among those professing no faith at all, with two-thirds in each of these three groups describing themselves as Scottish only. The Scottish versus British debate seems much less relevant to other Protestants and non-Christians in Scotland, the majority (other Christians, Buddhists, and Hindus) or plurality of whom (Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and other religion) decline to choose between these two competing identities or select another identity combination.

From Table DC2107SC we can calculate the religious profile of Scotland in 2011 separately for children and adolescents and for adults aged 16 and over, as follows:

%	0-15	16+	All
Church of Scotland	21.3	34.8	32.4
Roman Catholic	15.3	16.0	15.9
Other Christian	4.2	5.8	5.5
Buddhist	0.1	0.3	0.2
Hindu	0.3	0.3	0.3
Jew	0.1	0.1	0.1
Muslim	2.5	1.2	1.4
Sikh	0.2	0.2	0.2
Any other	0.1	0.3	0.3
No religion	47.9	34.3	36.7
Not stated	8.1	6.7	7.0

Of particular interest is that the majority (56%) of Scottish under-16s were returned as without a faith or religion not stated. It is hard to know whether respondents completing the census schedules were admitting that children in their households were being brought up without a religion or implicitly stating that this was a matter for them to make up their own minds about when old enough to do so. This phenomenon particularly impacts the Church of Scotland, the Roman Catholic Church having a similar proportion of adherents among children as among adults. Also notable is the much stronger showing of Muslims among children than adults, laying the foundation for future growth of Islam in Scotland (albeit from a small base, relative to England).

The combination of Table DC2107SC and the previously available DC2107EW now enables us to present final figures for the religious profile of the adult population (aged 16 and over) of Great Britain in 2011, as follows:

	England and Wales	Scotland	Great Britain
Whole population	45,496,780	4,379,072	49,875,852
Christian	27,926,262	2,477,436	30,403,698
Buddhist	218,935	11,685	230,620
Hindu	665,429	13,701	679,130
Jew	210,426	5,294	215,720
Muslim	1,810,929	54,193	1,865,122
Sikh	336,352	7,005	343,357
Any other	220,291	14,155	234,446
No religion	10,909,996	1,501,972	12,411,968
Not stated	3,198,160	293,631	3,491,791

Anglican ordinands

A Church of England press release on 25 February 2014 celebrated the fact that in 2013 young people (under 30) comprised almost one-quarter of those accepted for training in the Church’s ministry. The absolute number of young ordinands was, at 113, the same in 2013 as in 2012 and about 30 higher than the average throughout the noughties, albeit the figure had been 112 in 1998. There were slight increases between the two years in ordinands in their thirties and forties with those in their fifties flat. Ordinands who were 60 years and over reduced from 45 in 2012 to 19 in 2013. The percentage below the age of 30 during the past two decades (calculated from various editions of Church Statistics) is as follows:

1994	25.5	2004	12.6
1995	22.6	2005	14.9
1996	19.6	2006	15.2
1997	21.5	2007	14.8
1998	22.9	2008	16.7
1999	18.1	2009	15.1
2000	19.7	2010	21.0
2001	15.0	2011	16.6
2002	14.9	2012	22.2
2003	15.4	2013	22.6

Spotlight on Seventh-Day Adventists

This week’s jailing of two self-styled Seventh-Day Adventists for the manslaughter of their five-month-old son, who died of rickets in 2012, has brought some unwelcome media publicity for the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. The couple had refused medical treatment for their son on religious grounds, apparently regarding the death as ‘God’s will’. The Church has just issued a press release distancing itself from the couple’s ‘misguided understanding in their belief system’, and pointing out that they had drifted away from the Church since 2009.

The sectarian movement which became the Seventh-Day Adventist Church originated in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century but what is now its British Union Conference has always been relatively small. Its membership was first reported in 1903, at 1,160, rising steadily for the next 60 years, when it reached five figures (10,084 in 1963). It has more than trebled in the past half-century, standing at 34,048 in December 2012 (when last reported), almost certainly on the back of immigration. British membership flows for 2006-12, summarized below, are tabulated in full on the Church’s website at:

http://adventist.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0018/11574/BUC-Quarterly-Membership-Reports-2006-to-2012.pdf

	January	Gains	Losses	December
2006	25,520	2,432	1,057	26,895
2007	26,895	1,992	777	28,110
2008	28,110	1,541	601	29,050
2009	29,050	2,244	760	30,534
2010	30,534	1,647	519	31,662
2011	31,662	1,813	460	33,015
2012	33,015	1,548	515	34,048

Schools and creationism

Fearful that some faith-based academies and free schools, released from the strictures of the national curriculum, may seek to replace the teaching of evolution with creationism, the Government has clarified that all state-funded schools must teach evolution and not present creationism as a scientifically valid theory.

However, new research from the University of York’s Institute for Effective Education, among more than 200 14- to 16-year-olds in four English secondaries, demonstrated that student views on the origins of human life, and willingness to engage with the inter-relationship of science and religion, vary considerably according to their religious beliefs (Christian, Muslim, or none). Therefore, the researchers warn, the insensitive teaching of evolution in schools, devoid of any religious reference, could risk alienating pupils with a strong faith and turning them off science.

The full research can be found in the pay-per-view/subscription-based article by Pam Hanley, Judith Bennett, and Mary Ratcliffe, ‘The Inter-Relationship of Science and Religion: A Typology of Engagement’, which was recently published in the online edition of International Journal of Science Education. A freely available summary appeared on 12 February 2014 in the higher education e-journal The Conversation, which, in turn, formed the basis of news coverage in the Times Educational Supplement for 21 February 2014 and The Times for 22 February 2014. See:

http://theconversation.com/can-schools-find-way-through-creationism-meets-science-minefield-in-the-classroom-22807

A sixtieth anniversary

Sixty years ago today (on 1 March 1954) Billy Graham commenced his Greater London crusade in the Harringay Arena. By the time the crusade had finished, at Wembley Stadium on 22 May, he had reached an audience of over two million. Graham was already no stranger to Britain, having visited it for evangelistic purposes several times since 1946, as part of a wider (but uncoordinated) movement of revivalism in the years immediately after the Second World War, and in which all the major Protestant Churches, and even the Catholic Church, participated. After his 1954 crusade, Graham came back to run more crusades: in Glasgow and London in 1955; Manchester, Glasgow, and Belfast in 1961; London in 1966 and 1967; Oxford and Cambridge in 1980; Blackpool in 1982; Bristol, Sunderland, Norwich, Birmingham, Liverpool, and Ipswich in 1984; Sheffield in 1985; London in 1989; and Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and Glasgow in 1991.

How was Graham regarded by the British at the time of the 1954 crusade? According to two Gallup polls, he was certainly well known in the country, 83% of Britons having heard of him in March and 88% in May. A minority perceived him as a good and religious man doing very good work, 18% and 34% respectively, a big increase over the two months, reflecting the huge media coverage of the crusade. A further 15% and 13% suggested he was not likely to do much good in Britain, and another 12% and 11% said he was more needed in America. In March 13% and in May 7% thought he was just a curiosity or performer, while 17% and 22% had no interest in him.

The proportion of attenders at the crusades who ‘came forward’ as enquirers was small, around 2% in London in 1954 and Glasgow in 1955. They were disproportionately women and young people, and the majority already had a church association. A detailed assessment of the effects of mass evangelism in the 1950s, made by John Highet in his The Scottish Churches (1960), was fairly downbeat about its value. Certainly, the Graham crusades of 1954-55 coincided with the beginning of a renewed down-turn in Protestant church membership after a momentary reversal of decline (for some denominations, at least) in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Posted in Historical studies, News from religious organisations, Official data, People news, Religion and Ethnicity, Religious Census, Survey news | Tagged Billy Graham, census of population, church membership, Church of England, Creationism, crusades, evangelism, evolution, International Journal of Science Education, Judith Bennett, Mary Ratcliffe, ordinands, Pam Hanley, Religious Affiliation, science, Scotland, Seventh-Day Adventist Church | Leave a comment

Church of England Health Check and Other News

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Clive D. Field

Church of England health check

Further to our post of 31 January 2014, we now note the appearance of the second and third instalments of the ‘Church Health Check’ series being run in the Church Times. In the issue for 7 February 2014 (pp. 21-8) there were various essays by academics and insiders focusing on the leadership and structure of the Church of England. Those which had a particularly quantitative dimension were by:

Professor Linda Woodhead who examined (pp. 21-2) the Church’s statistics of ministry for 2012, concluding that ‘there are no longer enough troupers left to keep the show on the road, and the show will have to change’ – see further the BRIN post of 24 October 2013 at http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/2013/from-st-george-to-prince-george/
Professor Leslie Francis who summarized (pp. 26-7) his research into psychological type profiling of Anglican bishops, to determine whether the Church has the right sort of episcopate – see the BRIN post of 30 November 2013 at http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/2013/st-andrews-day-and-other-news/
Professor David Voas who reported (pp. 26-7) on the importance of clergy leadership qualities to church growth, noting ‘there are strong associations between growth and personality type, but none between growth and attendance on leadership courses’ – see the BRIN post of 18 January 2014 at http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/2014/anglican-church-growth-and-other-news/

The same issue of the Church Times also contained (p. 2) two shorter reports quoting further findings from the newspaper’s 2013 readership survey, which attracted 4,620 self-selecting respondents. They revealed that 73% expressed confidence in the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury (7% disagreeing), but just 23% had confidence in the General Synod (37% disagreeing and 41% undecided), and 37% in the Archbishops’ Council. Sub-nationally, 69% (71% among laity) had confidence in their local clergy and 63% in their diocesan bishop. On matters of sexual morality, Anglo-Catholics and Broad Anglicans were shown to be more liberally disposed than Evangelicals, suggesting that the Church of England’s internal strife over homosexuality is far from over. Among Evangelicals, 63% disapproved of ordaining practising homosexuals as priests and 65% as bishops, while 75% were opposed to same-sex marriage in church and 51% to the blessing of such relationships. There was more sign of consensus on another historically contested issue (but now with just one final hurdle to clear in July’s General Synod following this week’s debate), that of women bishops, with support running at 76% for Anglo-Catholics, 77% for Evangelicals, and 93% for Broad Anglicans. These two reports are freely available online at:

http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2014/7-february/news/uk/poll-lack-of-trust-in-synod

The third instalment of the ‘Church Health Check’ can be found in the current issue of the Church Times (14 February 2014, pp. 21-7) and is devoted to the social impact of the Church of England. This has a rather limited quantitative element. However, the lead article by Professor Linda Woodhead (pp. 21-2) draws upon her 2013 Westminster Faith Debates surveys to illustrate how people still connect to the Church in ways apart from regular attendance at public worship, while also noting that take-up of all three church-based rites of passage has diminished. Some of the Opinion Research Business polling for the Church of England over the last decade or so is also relevant in this context, a couple of examples of which can be viewed through the Research and Statistics link webpage (which, incidentally, is in desperate need of an overhaul and update to consolidate the archival material) at:

http://www.churchofengland.org/about-us/facts-stats/research-statistics.aspx

The same issue of the Church Times (p. 3) carries further results from the 2013 readership survey, revealing that 67% of this sub-set of Anglicans are currently involved in some form of unpaid community work (volunteering), with 35% active in two or more fields. Education (19%), local community action (18%), cultural activities (18%), children’s work (12%), and social welfare services (10%) were most frequently mentioned by the self-selecting sample. Volunteering by these clergy and lay churchgoer respondents is said to be at least twice as great as by the population at large, as recorded in Government surveys. See further:

http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2014/14-february/news/uk/if-you-need-help,-turn-to-a-churchgoer

Finally, the issue of 14 February 2014 contains a full page (p. 17) printing nine letters from readers in response to the first two instalments of ‘Church Health Check’.

Catholics polled on family life – the sequel

On 8 November 2013 BRIN reported on the Roman Catholic Church’s global consultation of the views of the faithful on family life, including vexed issues such as contraception and same-sex relationships, in preparation for the Extraordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family, to be held in the Vatican on 5-19 October 2014. The consultation, by means of a 40-question survey instrument, attracted significant attention, not to say controversy, inside and outside the Catholic Church. It was criticized in some quarters for its inadequate methodology and theologically opaque content, although the Vatican was at pains to point out that it was not an opinion poll and that the Church’s teaching is not determined by majority popular vote.

Notwithstanding, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales took the lead in putting the questionnaire online and received a healthy response (albeit small in relation to the size of the Catholic population). According to the Catholic Herald (7 February 2014, p. 2) and The Tablet (8 February 2014, p. 28), the Conference received some 16,500 completed questionnaires. The bulk of these (12,266) were filled in online, mainly by laity (80%), with 69% being married and 38% parents. One-fifth of respondents were in ‘positions of responsibility within the Church’, including priests, teachers, and pastoral assistants, while 24% were aged under 45 years and 30% 65 and over. The figures exclude 1,163 responses from 57 other countries, which were forwarded to the relevant Church authorities.

In deference to the Vatican, the Conference has declined to publish its report on the results of the English and Welsh consultation in advance of the Extraordinary Synod (as have the bishops in the United States, Canada, and Australia), despite the fact that both the German and the Swiss Bishops’ Conferences have already published their respective national reports, containing a strong message on the need for ‘reform’. It would be surprising if any different message emerged from England and Wales, given that polling of Catholics in Britain during recent years has demonstrated a wide gulf between opinions in the pews and the Magisterium of the Church. Newly-released polling of 12,000 Catholics worldwide (excluding Britain) by Univision (the television network serving Hispanic America) has revealed similar disaffection, with the partial exception of Africa, as have national surveys by Catholic media and institutions in France, Belgium, and The Netherlands. There is a helpful summary of some of this international research in The Tablet for 15 February 2014 (p. 30).

2011 census: Church of Scotland parish profiles

Overseen by Revd Fiona Tweedie, the Statistics for Mission Group of the Church of Scotland has now completed the task of preparing parish profiles of selected data from the 2011 census of population for Scotland. The profiles, which take the form of attractive 12-page PDF documents comprising charts and tables, include details of religious affiliation. They are available to download through the ChurchFinder on the Church of Scotland website (using the ‘Parish statistics’ link from the table of search results) at:

http://cos.churchofscotland.org.uk/church_finder/

Invisible church

Speaking of the Church of Scotland, Steve Aisthorpe (the Kirk’s Mission Development Worker, North) has recently written an interesting 26-page preliminary report on Investigating the Invisible Church: A Survey of Christians who Do Not Attend Church. It is based on a survey of a random sample of 5,523 people in the Highlands and Islands contacted by telephone in the autumn of 2013, 2,698 of whom gave a short interview. Of these 934 identified themselves as Christians who do not attend church and agreed to take part in a more detailed study, and 430 (46%) eventually completed and returned the online and postal questionnaire, comprising almost 80 items. Critical Research oversaw the recruitment of participants, data entry, and statistical analysis, while funding came from the Church of Scotland’s Mission and Discipleship Council and three other partners. The report is at:

https://www.resourcingmission.org.uk/sites/default/files/downloads/Investigating%20the%20invisible%20church.pdf

The headline finding from the study was that 44% of the population of the Highlands and Islands, representing some 133,000 individuals, are professing Christians who are not currently engaged with a local congregation, although only 15% had never attended church regularly in the past and 23% had attended for more than 20 years (with a further 27% for more than 10 years). Inevitably, a good proportion of these are ‘cultural Christians’, but a surprisingly large number (50%) scored highly (more than 30 out of 50) on the Hoge Intrinsic Religiosity Scale, which aims to measure the extent to which faith underpins everyday life. Disillusioned respondents may have been with the Church, and their reasons for church-leaving were explored in detail, but 72% were not disappointed with God, with 50% regarding themselves as part of a worldwide Christian community and 41% as on a spiritual quest beyond religious institutions. There was no simplistic partition into ‘sheep’ and ‘goats’ here.

The areas explored in the quantitative phase emerged from a previous qualitative phase in 2012-13, in which 30 Christians not attending a local church were interviewed in depth. The report on this qualitative phase (dated July 2013) is also available at:

https://www.resourcingmission.org.uk/sites/default/files/downloads/Faith_journeys_beyond_the_congregations.pdf

Anti-Semitic incidents

The Community Security Trust (CST)’s 32-page Antisemitic Incidents Report, 2013 was published on 6 February 2014. It revealed that the number of such incidents recorded in the United Kingdom in 2013 was, at 529, 18% lower than in 2012 and only just over half the post-1984 high of 931 incidents in 2009. CST believes the fall in anti-Semitism since 2012 to be genuine and to reflect the lack of anti-Jewish ‘trigger events’ in 2013, such as had caused two temporary spikes in 2012. However, CST still reckons there is ‘significant underreporting’ of anti-Semitic incidents both to itself and the police, and that the true figure is considerably higher. Of the 529 recorded incidents in 2013, over three-quarters took place in Greater London and Greater Manchester, with 69 categorized as violent assaults, although none constituted ‘extreme violence’ (amounting to grievous bodily harm or a threat to life). The most common category, with 368 incidents, was of abusive behaviour, including verbal abuse, albeit these were 23% down on 2012. One-quarter of all incidents were assessed as having far right, anti-Israel, or Islamist motivations. In the minority of cases where a physical description of the perpetrator could be obtained, 62% were white and 25% South Asian. The report, including a profile of incidents by category and month for each year from 2003 to 2013, can be read at:

http://www.thecst.org.uk/docs/Incidents%20Report%202013.pdf

Values profile of Britain

The January 2014 issue of Modern Believing (Vol. 55, No. 1) is a special theme issue, devoted to ‘What British People Really Think’, and guest-edited by Professor Linda Woodhead. Using data from a variety of sources, but especially from her January and June 2013 YouGov polls for the Westminster Faith Debates, it depicts what the British think about abortion (pp. 7-14); women bishops (pp. 15-26); same-sex marriage (pp. 27-38); euthanasia (pp. 39-48); God, religion, and authority (pp. 49-58); and society, politics, and religious institutions (pp. 59-67). There is also an introduction (pp. 1-5) and conclusion (‘A Values Profile of Britain’, pp. 69-74) by Woodhead. Non-subscribers to the journal, and non-members of subscribing institutions, may struggle to access these articles. The new publisher (Liverpool University Press) does not appear to be offering the option to buy a print copy of this special issue only, while downloads cost an eye-watering £25 per (shortish) article via the following link:

http://liverpool.metapress.com/content/n37414k210jp/?p=a25311fb53864bfe817f0c15f25adc56&pi=0

POSTSCRIPT [18 February 2014] BRIN has now ascertained that single copies of this entire issue can be purchased for £15.00, more cost-effective than the article download option. To order a copy, contact Liverpool@turpin-distribution.com

Faith under fire

Do soldiers turn to God when they are on the front line? Some provisional answers to this question are apparently contained in a postgraduate thesis submitted to the Cardiff Centre for Chaplaincy Studies by Revd Peter King, who was chaplain to the Queen’s Royal Hussars during a bloody tour to Helmand province between October 2011 and April 2012, during which 23 British soldiers were killed and dozens more severely wounded. The research was featured in The Sunday Times, 9 February 2014, Main Section, p. 20 in an article by the newspaper’s defence correspondent, Mark Hookham. King surveyed more than 200 men in his 400-strong battle group, finding that 80% professed some religion and 63% reported that they were more likely to frequent religious services while on operations than when in barracks. An Easter service held by King in a cookhouse in Afghanistan had been attended by about 100 men, of whom one-quarter received Holy Communion. Almost half (46%) of the soldiers interviewed by King said they had prayed in Afghanistan, and the same proportion carried or wore a symbol of faith. An awareness of the presence of God had been felt by 17%, and a few even described a religious experience at the front.

POSTSCRIPT [7 April 2014]: The research has now been published as Peter King, ‘Faith in a Foxhole? Researching Combatant Religiosity amongst British Soldiers on Contemporary Operations’, Defence Academy Yearbook, 2013, pp. 2-10, freely available online at:

http://www.da.mod.uk/publications/library/miscellaneous/58520%20DA%20Yearbook%202013.pdf/view

Posted in church attendance, News from religious organisations, Religion and Politics, Religion and Social Capital, Religion in the Press, Religious Census, Survey news | Tagged abortion, Afghanistan, Andrew Village, anti-Semitic incidents, Anti-Semitism, Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, census of population, Church of England, Church of Scotland, Church Times, Community Security Trust, Critical Research, David Voas, euthanasia, family, Fiona Tweedie, health check, Highlands and Islands, Hoge Intrinsic Religiosity Scale, homosexuality, Jews, leadership, Leslie Francis, Linda Woodhead, Mark Hookham, ministry, Mission and Discipleship Council, Modern Believing, non-churchgoers, parishes, Peter King, Queen’s Royal Hussars, Religious Affiliation, Roman Catholic Church, same-sex marriage, social impact, soldiers, Statistics for Mission Group, Steve Aisthorpe, Sunday Times, values, Vatican, volunteering, Westminster Faith Debates, women bishops, YouGov | Leave a comment

Bible Literacy and Other News

Posted on February 7, 2014 by Clive D. Field

Bible literacy

Bible literacy in Britain is falling through the generations, according to research just released by the Bible Society, which has launched a ‘pass it on’ campaign to encourage parents and other family members to ‘pass on’ a Bible story to their children (including via a Bible Bedtime App), with an overarching warning of ‘use it or lose it’. The research was conducted by YouGov and involved online interviews with 1,091 parents of children and adolescents aged 3-16 on 10-14 January 2014 and 804 children aged 8-15 on 10-13 January 2014. The Bible Society has published a report on the survey, together with tabulations of raw (unpercentaged) data with breaks by demographics for each of the samples. They can be found at:

http://www.biblesociety.org.uk/uploads/content/projects/Bible-Society-Report_030214_final_.pdf

http://www.biblesociety.org.uk/uploads/content/Pass_It_On/Results-for-Portland-Communications–(Bible-Society—Parents-Omnibus)-02-14-Parents-Omni—Counts.pdf

http://www.biblesociety.org.uk/uploads/content/Pass_It_On/Pass-It-On-data-tables—children’s-survey.pdf

Children were asked to select stories that appear in the Bible from a list of popular children’s books, Greek myths, and fairy tales, and only 14% answered all correctly. Moreover, significant numbers of children indicated that they had not read, seen or heard anything about some of the most celebrated stories in the Bible, 93% saying so about Job, with 89% for the Tower of Babel, 87% for Saul on the road to Damascus, 85% for Solomon, 72% for Daniel in the lion’s den, 63% for the Creation, 61% for the Good Samaritan, 61% for the feeding of the 5,000, 57% for David and Goliath, 56% for the parting of the Red Sea, 54% for Joseph and his coat of many colours, 43% for the Crucifixion, 38% for Adam and Eve, 25% for the Nativity, and 23% for Noah’s Ark.

In like fashion, many parents found it hard to distinguish the plot-lines of Bible stories from Hollywood blockbusters, 54% thinking that the storyline in Hunger Games might have originated in the Bible, with 46% saying the same about the Da Vinci Code, 34% about Harry Potter, and 27% about Superman. On the other hand, 46% did not recognize the plot-line of Noah’s Ark as a Bible story, with 31% ignorant of the derivation of David and Goliath, 30% of Adam and Eve, and 27% of the Good Samaritan. Older parents (the over-55s) were found to be appreciably better than those aged 25-34 at differentiating between Bible stories and Hollywood films, reflecting the fact that they were more likely (79% versus 56%) to have engaged with Bible stories when at school. Parents in Wales were also more knowledgeable than those elsewhere in Britain.

Notwithstanding their own relative ignorance, many parents whose children had been exposed to Bible stories continued to recognize their importance. This was especially so for professing Christians, 59% of whom viewed Bible stories as providing values for a good life, 52% as important to our history and culture, and 41% as classic stories that stand the test of time. Even one-third of non-Christians agreed with each of these propositions, not far below the average of 43%, 40%, and 36% respectively. Among all parents, only 11% deemed it inappropriate for children to learn Bible stories, 62% believing such learning should take place at school, 58% at church or Sunday school, and 45% at home. Three-fifths of parents considered it the role of parents or guardians to read Bible stories to a child, yet only 31% of parents of children aged 3-8 claimed to read Bible stories to their child once a month or more.

These findings are in line with other research. Indeed, a systematic review of some 160 sample surveys of Bible ownership, readership, knowledge, literalism, beliefs, and attitudes since the Second World War demonstrates a progressive decrease in ‘Bible-centricism’ during the past 60 years. It could thus be said to lend support to the theory which sees secularization as declining religious authority, in this case the authority of the Bible as the foundation document of Christianity. This research, by the present author, will be published in Journal of Contemporary Religion later this year.

European Quality of Life Survey

The dataset for the third (2011-12) European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) has recently been released to the UK Data Service’s Nesstar catalogue. The Survey, previously conducted in 2003 and 2007, is commissioned by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions. UK fieldwork was undertaken by GfK NOP between 30 September 2011 and 12 February 2012 among 2,252 adults aged 18 and over. Interviews also took place in 33 other European countries, mostly in the European Union (EU).

EQLS has been light on religion-related questions. However, in the 2007 and 2011 rounds a question was included on perceived tensions between different religious groups in each survey country, with the following results for the UK and EU as a whole (EU27), having applied the cross-national weight, and omitting don’t knows and refusals:

%	UK	UK	EU27	EU27
	2007	2011	2007	2011
A lot of tension	32.5	33.7	28.8	28.0
Some tension	53.3	50.0	46.3	48.3
No tension	11.5	16.3	19.0	23.7

A question on claimed frequency of attendance at religious services was included in the 2002, 2007, and 2011 EQLS. The question and reply options differed on each occasion but the weighted results can be collapsed into the threefold categorization shown below:

%	UK	UK	UK	EU25	EU27	EU27
	2003	2007	2011	2003	2007	2011
Once a week or more	12.6	13.5	12.6	17.0	17.4	15.3
Less often	29.3	30.9	27.7	43.5	45.1	39.3
Never	58.0	54.9	59.7	39.5	36.6	45.4

It will be seen that the majority of UK citizens (59.7% in 2011) claim never to attend religious services, 14.3% more than the EU average, with weekly attenders 2.7% less. At the same time, perceptions of tensions between different religious groups are greater in the UK than the EU, and more in the UK reported a lot of tension in 2011 relative to 2007, whereas in the EU somewhat fewer did.

Scottish Health Survey

The results of the 2012 Scottish Health Survey, undertaken by the Scottish Centre for Social Research on behalf of the Scottish Government Health Directorates and NHS Health Scotland, have likewise just been released to the UK Data Service’s Nesstar catalogue. A large sample (4,815 adults aged 16 and over in Scotland) was interviewed face-to-face and by self-completion questionnaire on a wide range of health topics.

A background question on religious affiliation was included on the schedule: ‘What religion, religious denomination or body do you belong to?’ Weighted figures are shown below, in percentages (excluding refusals and don’t knows), together with those for 2003, the first year for which the Scottish Health Survey appears in Nesstar (the first survey was actually conducted in 1995). Unfortunately, the question asked on that occasion was different: ‘Do you regard yourself as belonging to any particular religion?’ There were also methodological variations between the two surveys. Therefore, the two sets of data are not strictly comparable, which may explain why – counterintuitively – there has been no overall decline in religiosity between the two dates (although the ‘other Christian’ group has lost ground). Additionally, it should be remembered that the ‘belonging’ form of question tends to maximize the number of religious ‘nones’. Statistics refer to adults only, not the entire Scottish population (as in the 2011 census).

%	2003	2012
None	39.5	38.7
Church of Scotland	33.2	35.2
Roman Catholic	14.4	15.6
Other Christian	11.3	7.2
Other religion	1.6	3.1

BRIN has disaggregated the 2012 data by age cohort. The results, presented below, show some striking trends: a) no religion is the religious choice of the under-45s; b) Church of Scotland support is concentrated among the over-65s, and there has been an Anglican-style collapse with younger people, undermining the Kirk’s position as a national Church; c) Catholic self-identity reduces with age, being strongest among the under-45s, and offering some hope for the Church; and d) other Protestants appear to be dying out.

%	16-44	45-64	65+
None	52.5	33.5	15.9
Church of Scotland	20.6	40.6	59.5
Roman Catholic	17.9	14.0	13.0
Other Christian	4.8	8.7	10.2
Other religion	4.1	3.0	1.2

Justin Welby as hero

Asked to rate 84 famous Britons as heroes or role models, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby was placed 51st by a representative sample of 4,031 adults aged 18 and over interviewed online by Vision Critical in November 2013. Welby was the only past or present religious leader to be included on the list. Top spot in the heroes index went to Falklands War veteran Simon Weston, with physicist Stephen Hawking in second position. Sportspeople did especially well, assisted by their individual prominence in the 2012 Olympics, and politicians scored consistently poorly, ranked between 55th (Boris Johnson) and 84th (Michael Gove). Under the circumstances, given that he has not been in the job that long and has less media exposure than many of the other celebrities asked about, Welby can perhaps be reasonably content with his public standing as ‘hero’. The survey was commissioned by PR agency freuds, and a headline report was published by them on 1 February 2014 at:

http://heroes.freuds.com/assets/files/FREUDS_BREWERY_JOURNAL_2014_PDF.pdf

Religion and voting, 1940s/50s-style

I am currently working on a review of statistical indicators of religious belonging in Great Britain during the ‘long’ 1950s (between 1945 and 1963), and this has led me to re-examine source material in the Mass-Observation (MO) Archive at the University of Sussex, which I first investigated back in the 1980s. Fortunately, huge quantities of the Archive are now available in a commercial digital edition from Adam Matthew Publications, Mass Observation Online, in partnership with the trustees of the Archive (who naturally retain the copyright).

MO is best known for its qualitative and participant observation techniques, but it also diversified into more conventional opinion polling after the Second World War, ultimately leading to the establishment of a market research company of the same name. Two of its largest-scale surveys, each involving interviews with representative quota samples of over 6,000 adult Britons, were undertaken for the Daily Telegraph in April-May 1948 and December 1955-January 1956, to gauge public opinion on the subject of capital punishment.

Both surveys included background questions about religion and political partisanship, and they enable us to move further back in time with the analysis of religious influences on voting which have been so well explored by Ben Clements and Nick Spencer for the era from the 1960s to the present in their recent Theos report on Voting and Values in Britain: Does Religion Count? This is a book which we covered in our post of 26 January 2014.

Unfortunately, MO’s questions were worded somewhat differently to those in the surveys used by Clements and Spencer, so we should be mindful that we are not entirely comparing like with like. MO’s religion question in both 1948 and 1955 was: ‘What Church, if any, do you usually attend?’ On this definition, 74% in 1948 and 81% in 1955 claimed a religion, so, in effect, respondents really interpreted the question as one about religious affiliation, since church attendance nationally was well below these levels at both dates. MO’s political question was: ‘Which political party, if any, do you support?’

The results for both years are presented below, omitting Jews (too few of whom were interviewed) and refusals, abstracted from the tabulation sheets in MO Archive TC 47-10-E and TC 72-2-E respectively, which are reproduced in Mass Observation Online:

1948 % across	None	Lab	Con	Lib	Other	Undecided	Uninterested
Not attend church	18	38	30	3	3	5	3
Church of England	12	23	52	4	1	5	3
Roman Catholic	17	41	25	3	1	5	3
Nonconformist	11	35	25	18	1	5	4
Church of Scotland	19	28	40	5	1	3	4
Other	23	34	27	8	1	4	3
All	15	30	40	6	1	5	3

1955 % across	None	Lab	Con	Lib	Other	Undecided	Uninterested
Not attend church	18	45	24	3	2	4	3
Church of England	11	30	46	5	1	4	3
Roman Catholic	19	47	24	3	1	3	3
Nonconformist	12	33	32	10	1	5	6
Church of Scotland	9	35	35	4	2	6	6
Other	17	32	29	8	2	3	7
All	13	35	37	5	1	4	4

The tables broadly confirm the findings of Clements and Spencer for subsequent periods, not least in showing that Anglicans were disproportionately Conservative and Roman Catholics disproportionately Labour.

Posted in church attendance, Historical studies, News from religious organisations, Official data, People news, Religion and Politics, Survey news | Tagged Archbishop of Canterbury, Bible, Bible literacy, Bible Society, Bible stories, children, church attendance, Daily Telegraph, European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, European Quality of Life Survey, freuds, GfK NOP, heroes, Justin Welby, Mass-Observation, parents, politics, Religious Affiliation, Scottish Centre for Social Research, Scottish Health Survey, tensions between religious groups, Vision Critical, YouGov | 3 Comments

Religious Vote and Other News

Posted on January 26, 2014 by Clive D. Field

Is there a religious vote?

A religious vote continues to exist in Britain, particularly as regards disproportionate Anglican and Jewish preferences for the Conservative Party and Catholic and Muslim preferences for the Labour Party. However, the association between religion and politics is by no means straightforward nor consistently strong (and probably weaker than yesteryear). It is also shaped by other socio-economic factors (notably class), and it is not necessarily driven by the saliency of religious or moral issues. Theo-political alignments certainly seem to be less powerful in Britain than the well-researched religious vote in the United States, albeit the latter can sometimes be exaggerated. These are some of the impressions left from a reading of the latest Theos report, published on 24 January 2014, by Ben Clements (University of Leicester) and Nick Spencer (Theos) on Voting and Values in Britain: Does Religion Count? It can be downloaded from:

http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/publications/2014/01/24/voting-and-values-in-britain-does-religion-count

This 123-page book, which packs in no fewer than 66 figures and 22 tables, is underpinned by secondary analysis of the British Election Studies from 1964 (including the special surveys of ethnic minorities in 1997 and 2010) and the British Social Attitudes Surveys since 2000. Its first two chapters map religious affiliation and attendance to voting yesterday (at 14 general elections between 1959 and 2010) and today (2010 and beyond, albeit omitting the recent large-scale polls by Lord Ashcroft, doubtless because he does not differentiate between Christian denominations). The third to fifth chapters map the same factors to three scales of political values (left versus right; libertarian versus authoritarian; and welfarist versus individualist), while an appendix presents the results of multivariate analysis of vote choice at the 2010 general election (drawing on the special internet panel of voters).

The findings and arguments of this work are (commendably) too nuanced and granular to restate here. Nobody could accuse the authors of over-simplification or of unevidenced assertions, such is the care with which the analysis and interpretation have been undertaken. They even resist a speculation about the likely effects on political behaviour and values of the progressive collapse of Anglican nominalism and rise of people of no religion. Consideration of the latter would have been especially interesting as they document a shift from libertarianism to authoritarianism among the ‘nones’ during the past decade. The book contains no overarching conclusion, although chapters 1 and 2 have separate summaries and conclusions, and the executive summary extends to 11 pages, reflecting the wide range of statistics.

Given all this complexity, by way of an appetizer, we confine ourselves to reproducing below a reformulated table 1.1 (p. 35) which shows average party vote share (in percentages) by religious group for all general elections between 1959 and 2010, calculated from the British Election Studies:

	Conservative	Labour	Liberal/ Liberal Democrat
Anglicans	47.8	35.5	15.4
Catholics	31.1	54.3	12.8
Nonconformists	41.5	36.9	19.3
Church of Scotland/Presbyterian	37.9	37.3	13.3
No religion	32.6	43.2	19.9

A Theos press release about the report, also issued on 24 January, offers a more bite-size overview under the heading ‘Anglicans are still “Tory Party at Prayer” but Muslims are Labour’s to Lose’. In it Spencer is quoted as saying that the report demonstrates that ‘religious block votes do not exist in Britain as many claim they do in America.’ On the other hand, he adds, ‘there are clear and significant alignments between various religious and political camps, of which politicians should be aware. At a time when mass party membership, political ideology and party tribalism are at a low ebb, we should pay attention to the big political values that shape our voting behaviour.’ The press release is at:

http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2014/01/24/anglicans-are-still-aotory-party-at-prayerao-but-muslims-are-labouraos-to-lose

Disestablishment of the Church of England

Clements and Spencer have also taken a fresh look at ‘Public Opinion in Britain towards the Disestablishment of the Church of England’ in the FirstView edition of their article for the Journal of Anglican Studies, published online on 17 January 2014, and available for non-subscribers to rent or purchase. The paper derives from responses to the question about the Church of England’s continuing establishment asked in the Alternative Vote Referendum Study in Spring 2011, the importance of which Clements has already flagged up in his BRIN post of 21 May 2012. The sample is a very large one (n = 22,124 for Britain and 18,556 for England), thereby permitting a very detailed analysis.

Overall, 56% in England agreed that the Church of England should keep its status as the official established Church, with 15% disagreeing, and 29% neutral or undecided. The figures for Britain were 54%, 16%, and 31% respectively. Respondents most supportive of disestablishment were found to be men, residents of Scotland, those with degree-level education, Liberal Democrat identifiers and others with left-wing and liberal policy preferences, and readers of The Guardian. No significant differences by age group were discovered, despite generational variations in religious belonging, beliefs, and practice evident in other surveys. A limitation of the data source is that no information was gathered about religious affiliation, so religion is the one variable which cannot be controlled for. The article can be accessed at:

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9151959&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S1740355313000399

Attitudes to the burka

Last summer and autumn we reported on a series of new polls of public attitudes to the wearing of the burka and full face-veil (niqab) by Muslim women in Britain. The issue is also live in several other Western countries, and the ethical, political, and legal dimensions of the matter are explored in a collection of French-language essays published on 16 January 2014: Quand la burqa passe à l’ouest: enjeux éthiques, politiques et juridiques, edited by David Koussens and Olivier Roy (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, ISBN 978-2-7535-2844-4, 280pp., €20). The chapters are a mixture of generic discussion and individual case studies, of France (particularly), Belgium, The Netherlands, Italy, and Quebec. The former include a digest of multinational polling about the burka and attitudes to Muslims in general by Ben Clements: ‘La burqa dans l’opinion publique des sociétés occidentales’ (pp. 39-52). It comprises 11 tables, with commentary, drawn from: Pew Global Attitudes Surveys in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011; European Values Surveys in 1990, 1999, and 2008; and Harris Interactive polls in 2006 and 2010. The discussion mostly centres on Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and the United States. A brief conclusion highlights some distinctive characteristics of French and American public opinion.

Counting blessings

The Church of England appears to be in research overdrive at the moment. Following the release on 16 January 2014 of key findings from its 18-month Church Growth Research Programme, two more studies were published last week. First, on 20 January, to coincide with ‘Blue Monday’ (often considered as the most depressing day of the entire year), the Church issued a press release encouraging people to ‘count your blessings’, informed by new YouGov online polling which the Church had commissioned among 2,084 Britons on 10-13 January. The survey revealed that only one in ten adults never ‘count their blessings’, in the sense of feeling grateful or lucky when reviewing their life situation, while a majority (51%) count them at least once a week, including 59% of women and the over-55s and 60% of the retired. Family and/or partner (53%) is deemed to be the single most important factor when counting blessings, followed by health (15%). No option was given to mention faith or religion as a blessing in its own right, nor to acknowledge that ‘blessings’ might have a supernatural origin, along the lines of Johnson Oatman’s famous hymn of 1897, which invited its hearers and singers to acknowledge ‘what the Lord hath done’. The Church’s press release, including a link to YouGov’s full data table, is at:

http://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2014/01/count-your-blessings-on-blue-monday,-says-cofe.aspx

Credit unions

Then, on 22 January 2014 the Church Urban Fund (CUF) published a preliminary research report on credit unions: Money Speaks Louder than Words: Credit Unions and the Role of the Church in Tackling Financial Exclusion. The Church has been advocating a greater role for credit unions to combat the social evils which are seen to stem from the rapid growth of the payday lending sector and is encouraging churchgoers to invest some of their savings in such unions. To test churchgoers’ experience of and attitudes to credit unions, the Church commissioned two pieces of research: a quantitative study of 385 churchgoers of all denominations aged 16-75 who worshipped at least once a year (among them 200 attending at least once a month), interviewed online by Ipsos MORI in December 2013; and six focus groups involving 54 regular Anglican churchgoers.

Among the Ipsos MORI panel past or present membership of credit unions by all churchgoers was found to be very low (5%), with only 22% feeling they knew a great deal or fair amount about such unions, and less than one-quarter willing to consider joining a credit union in future, even after they had been given a brief explanation of how the unions function. At the same time, 83% of churchgoers agreed that payday loans exploit those who cannot access other forms of credit, and around one-half that the Churches should engage with credit unions in some way. Overall conclusions drawn by CUF from the quantitative and qualitative research were that churchgoers: think there is a need to develop a more ethical financial system; are positive about credit unions in principle but have some concerns; and believe the Churches should help the credit union sector to grow. The report can be read at:

http://www.cuf.org.uk/money-speaks

Religious gypsies

On 21 January 2014 the Office for National Statistics published a report on What does the 2011 Census Tell Us about the Characteristics of Gypsy or Irish Travellers in England and Wales? The 2011 census represented the first time that the ethnic group question had included a dedicated tick box for the white ethnic sub-group of gypsy or Irish traveller (which is recognized under the Equality Act 2010), and, in the event, 58,000 people identified themselves as such in the census (albeit this figure is lower than previous estimates). The report itself makes only a couple of brief references to the religious affiliation of the gypsy or Irish traveller community, but fortunately the detail can be calculated from Table DC2201EW, showing ethnic group by religion, which has been available for some time.

Summary data (in percentages) are presented in the table below, from which it will be seen that the proportion of Christians among gypsies and Irish travellers was much the same as in the white population overall, but that 4.6% less professed no religion and 2.4% more declined to answer the question. The lower figure for ‘nones’ is especially interesting in that the median age of gypsies and Irish travellers in 2011 was 13 years less than in England and Wales (26 versus 39), and that ‘nones’ generally tend to be concentrated among younger cohorts. The predominance of Christians is unsurprising. Historically, there were quite close links between gypsies and Christian evangelism in Britain, explored in a 2003 book by David Lazell, with Gypsy Smith one of the most famous revivalists of the early twentieth century.

	Gypsy or Irish Traveller	All white people	All persons
Christian	64.1	63.9	59.3
Buddhist	0.7	0.2	0.4
Hindu	0.2	0.0	1.5
Jewish	0.4	0.5	0.5
Muslim	0.7	0.4	4.8
Sikh	0.2	0.0	0.8
Other religion	1.4	0.4	0.4
No religion	22.7	27.3	25.1
Not stated	9.6	7.2	7.2

Posted in Historical studies, News from religious organisations, Official data, Religion and Politics, Religion in public debate, Religious Census, Survey news | Tagged Alternative Vote Referendum Study, Ben Clements, British Election Studies, British Social Attitudes Surveys, Burka, census of population, Church of England, Church Urban Fund, counting blessings, credit unions, disestablishment. European Values Surveys, gypsies, Ipsos-MORI, Irish travellers, Islamophobia, Journal of Anglican Studies, Muslims, Nick Spencer, Olivier Roy, Pew Global Attitudes Surveys, political values, politics, Religious Affiliation, religious dress, Theos, voting, YouGov | Leave a comment

Anglican Church Growth and Other News

Posted on January 18, 2014 by Clive D. Field

Anglican church growth

The Church of England’s ambitious 18-month research programme into numerical church growth, sponsored by the Spending Plans Task Group accountable to the Archbishops’ Council and Church Commissioners, is nearing its end, and findings are beginning to be released. The programme comprises three strands involving research teams at the University of Essex (headed up by Professor David Voas, also of BRIN); St John’s College, Durham; and Ripon College, Cuddesdon. The strands relate to: the analysis of existing data collected annually by the Church; church profiling (a special survey of a representative sample of churches, to which 1,700 or 46% responded); and structures (with sub-strands on cathedrals, fresh expressions of church and church plants, and amalgamations and team ministries). The research has employed a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods and has also taken account of existing literature on church growth.

The first primary published output from the programme, issued on 16 January 2014, is the report From Anecdote to Evidence: Findings from the Church Growth Research Programme, 2011-2013. It identifies factors associated with church growth (pp. 7-11); describes where growth is to be found (pp. 12-22), including four case studies; and pinpoints factors associated with church decline (pp. 23-9). Rather than attempt to rehash the report here, it is probably easiest to let BRIN readers explore it for themselves (if you are pressed for time, there is an executive summary on pp. 5-6). It can be read at:

http://www.churchgrowthresearch.org.uk/report

There is also an infographic of key findings at:

http://www.churchgrowthresearch.org.uk/infographic

and a Church of England press release at:

http://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2014/01/signs-of-growth.aspx

Coinciding with the report, a Church Growth Faith in Research Conference took place in London on 16 January 2014, attended by some 200 delegates, mostly from within the Church of England, but including some academics, journalists, and members of other denominations. Overviews were provided of all the strands of the research programme, typically via parallel breakout sessions. There was also the bonus of a presentation by Dr Mike Clinton of King’s College London about his complementary Experience of Ministry Project, which is surveying cross-sections of clergy in 2011, 2013, and 2015 and has a longitudinal component.

The morning plenary session by David Voas on national, local, and individual factors affecting numerical change in church attendance was undoubtedly the most general and the most interesting slot on the conference programme (at least for me). Voas has been responsible for the data analysis and church profiling strands. His key message was that, in order to grow again, the Church of England needs to improve retention of its children and young people, and to invest in provision for teenagers and young adults (churches with youth workers, for instance, are more likely to grow than those without). Evangelism of adults has limited potential, Voas continued, since, according to British Social Attitudes Surveys, people do not tend to change their religious identity much during adulthood.

Theoretically, such retention should be possible, since the ratio between children and adults in the Church of England is not much different from in the whole population. However, European Values Surveys indicate that Anglicans do not attach great parenting priority to the transmission of faith to their children, just 11% among nominal Anglicans and no more than 36% of the religiously active ones, the latter statistic being highlighted by Andreas Whittam-Smith, First Church Estates Commissioner and chair of the conference. A further recommendation from Voas, noting the Church’s attendance high during Advent and at Christmas, was to look again at the other festivals to ‘make Christmas come more than once a year’. He also thought that the parochial model of the Church should be examined afresh, since the research suggested it was breaking down.

Notwithstanding such key messages, both Voas and Dr Bev Botting, the Church of England’s Head of Research and Statistics, stressed that there was no single and simple recipe for growth in the Church of England. They also emphasized that, while the research programme had been able to isolate some of the factors affecting church growth and decline, it had not necessarily been able to establish causation. Voas pointed out that certain factors, such as churchmanship, which seemed significant at bivariate analysis stage faded away in importance when it came to multivariate analysis.

Voas and, particularly, Botting highlighted continuing issues surrounding the completeness and quality of the Church’s annual statistics-gathering from parishes. In his breakout session on methodology, Voas drew attention to the weak correlation (0.29) between the incidence of church growth self-reported in the survey of churches in summer 2013 and objective measures of growth in those churches derived from the Church’s own central data. Various explanations for the discrepancy can be advanced, but one reading is obviously that survey respondents were too optimistic in recalling the degree of growth experienced by their churches. Moreover, the model proposed by Voas could only explain one-quarter of self-reported church growth (even less of objective growth).

Presentations and recordings from the conference will be made available on the church growth programme’s website in due course, as will the final reports from each research strand or sub-strand. The website also contains much other useful contextual information. It can be found at:

http://www.churchgrowthresearch.org.uk/

Rating the Pope

The current Pope may be enjoying a higher and more positive public profile than his predecessor, but there is little evidence yet of a decisive ‘Francis effect’ in terms of British opinion. This is suggested by a multinational YouGov poll on ‘the most admired people in the world’ conducted for The Times and published on 11 January 2014. Fieldwork was conducted, through a mixture of online and mobile phone interviews, with 13,895 adults in 13 countries (representing in aggregate over half of the global population). It took place after the death of Nelson Mandela and after Time magazine had chosen Pope Francis as its ‘person of the year’. Participants were asked two open-ended questions, seeking write-in answers about a) the most famous person in the world and b) the living person most admired by them.

Across all 13 countries combined Pope Francis was ranked fourth, with a score of 3.43%. However, in six nations (China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Russia) he did not make the top ten. In the remaining seven his score and ranking are shown in the table below, the Pope’s vote in Britain being only one-sixth of the level recorded in the United States and equivalent to just one-third of professing British Catholics:

	% score	national ranking
United States	21.07	1
Brazil	16.82	1
Germany	16.13	1
France	12.79	2
Australia	5.47	3
Great Britain	3.66	3
Nigeria	1.48	9

The British list was headed by Her Majesty the Queen (18.74%) followed by Barack Obama (8.57%). The Dalai Lama came in fifth place, with 3.09%, just behind Sir Richard Branson (3.43%) and immediately ahead of Archbishop Desmond Tutu (2.63%). Unless one counts Richard Dawkins (the arch-atheist) as such in 25th place (with 0.69%), no other religious figure made the British top thirty, which is bad news for the Archbishop of Canterbury. Evangelist Billy Graham scored well in the United States (6.10%) but to a much lesser extent globally (0.49%).

Stephan Shakespeare (YouGov’s CEO) had a full-page article about the results of the survey in The Times for 11 January (main section, p. 26). There is also a detailed blog by William Jordan on the YouGov website at:

http://yougov.co.uk/news/2014/01/11/infographic-bill-gates-most-admired-world/

Decline in the Archdiocese of Glasgow

The Archdiocese of Glasgow, which is widely regarded as the heartland of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, has embarked upon a strategic review of pastoral provision in response to a sustained and long-term decline, which is far in excess of the contraction in the city’s population (down just over 10% between the 1991 and 2011 censuses, although it has started to rise again recently). Some key statistics are contained in the December 2013 issue of Flourish, the Archdiocese’s journal, from which the following table has been compiled:

	1991	2012	% change
Parishes	109	94	-14
Diocesan priests	196	85	-57
Catholic population	252,676	189,576	-25
Mass attendance	75,790	43,579	-43
Baptisms	4,050	2,245	-45
First communions	3,692	1,970	-47
Marriages	1,229	775	-37
Funerals	2,962	2,282	-23

Integrated Household Survey

Data for the Government’s January-December 2012 Integrated Household Survey, the largest pool of official social data apart from the census of population, have just been released for online analysis in the Nesstar catalogue (UK Data Service, SN 7419). The questions put to the sample of 338,174 UK citizens included one on ‘what is your religion?’ and the percentage distribution of replies for Great Britain and its constituent home nations are shown below (all data are weighted):

	England	Wales	Scotland	Britain
No religion	29.0	36.1	37.8	30.1
Christian	61.3	60.3	58.6	61.1
Buddhist	0.5	0.2	0.3	0.4
Hindu	1.6	0.3	0.4	1.4
Jew	0.5	0.1	0.1	0.5
Muslim	5.2	1.7	1.5	4.7
Sikh	0.7	0.1	0.2	0.6
Any other	1.2	1.3	1.2	1.2

Worship and criminality

‘People who regularly visit a place of worship are less likely to be involved in low level crime and delinquency’, according to a (statistics-free) press release by the University of Manchester on 15 January 2014. The research, funded by the Bill Hill Charitable Trust and to be published in full later in the year, was undertaken by PhD student Mark Littler on the basis of a survey of 1,214 UK young people aged 18-34 in July 2013 and in-depth qualitative interviews. Information was gathered on eight measures of delinquency: littering, skipping school/work, using illegal drugs, fare dodging, shoplifting, music piracy, property damage, and violence against the person. The most significant correlations were found for shoplifting, illegal drugs, and music piracy. The press release, including comments by Littler, is available at:

http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/display/?id=11380

Religious hostilities

Social hostilities involving religion in the UK declined somewhat between December 2011 and December 2012 but remained at a high level relative to 197 other countries, according to research published by the Pew Research Center on 16 January 2014. The Center’s social hostilities involving religion score, an index calculated from 13 different measures of religion-related tensions and crime available from public domain information sources, dropped for the UK from 6.3 in 2011 to 6.0 in 2012, although it was substantially greater than when first calculated in 2007 (when it stood at 1.6). By contrast, the government restrictions on religion index, based on 20 measures, was unchanged for the UK between 2011 and 2012, registering 3.0 in both years, a score which was judged moderate in relation to other nations. For full details about the methodology and results of this research, consult the full report at:

http://www.pewforum.org/files/2014/01/RestrictionsV-full-report.pdf

Army chaplaincy in the First World War

With the centenary of the First World War fast approaching, BRIN will naturally be keeping a look-out for new publications which explore the religious aspects of the conflict, especially including the statistical perspective. A recent book by Peter Howson fits the bill in not neglecting the quantitative dimension of the subject of army chaplaincy: Muddling Through: The Organisation of British Army Chaplaincy in World War One (Solihull: Helion, 237pp., ISBN 978-1-909384-20-0). A total of 185 army chaplains died during the war, 52% as a direct consequence of enemy action. Three-fifths of the deceased were Anglicans, who accounted for 57% of all chaplains serving in the Army on 11 November 1918, when hostilities stopped. Below we reproduce a simplified (and arithmetically corrected) version of table 2 in the volume, showing the denominational breakdown by theatre of war of all Army chaplains at the time of the Armistice:

	UK	Western Front	Other theatres	Total
Anglican	709	878	398	1,985
Presbyterian	75	161	66	302
Wesleyan	60	127	69	256
United Board	60	126	64	250
Welsh Calvinist	4	5	1	10
Salvation Army	0	4	1	5
Catholic	78	389	184	651
Jew	4	8	4	16
Total	990	1,698	787	3,475

Posted in church attendance, Historical studies, News from religious organisations, Official data, Religion and Social Capital, Religion in the Press, Rites of Passage, Survey news | Tagged Archdiocese of Glasgow, army chaplains, church growth, Church of England, crime, David Voas, First World War, Integrated Household Survey, Mark Littler, Peter Howson, Pew Research Center, Pope Francis I, Religious Affiliation, religious hostilities, Roman Catholic Church, The Times, YouGov | 1 Comment

Roman Catholic and Other Statistics

Posted on January 11, 2014 by Clive D. Field

A belated Happy New Year to all readers of BRIN! It has been a slowish start to 2014 in terms of new religious statistical sources, but here is a selection of seven stories to replenish your stock of data.

Roman Catholic statistics

In our post of 1 February 2013 we reported that the editor of the Catholic Directory of England and Wales had decided to discontinue publication therein of the annual statistical supplement, which had appeared for a century, as a result of her lack of confidence in the quality of the data, especially regarding their consistency. The Tablet for 21/28 December 2013 reported that, ‘thanks to the efforts of a former banker’, the statistics would be reinstated in the 2014 edition of the Catholic Directory. This has yet to appear (it will be published later this month), but, in the meantime, Tony Spencer of the Pastoral Research Centre Trust (PRCT) has just released a preliminary table of pastoral and population statistics of the Catholic community in England and Wales for 2011 and 2012, based on a careful (but still not quite complete) editing and reconciliation of data for each of the 22 dioceses. Figures for all years between 2001 and 2012 will be available in due course. The 2011-12 picture is one of continuing decline on several performance measures, of 2.2% in the estimated Catholic population, 1.8% in Mass attendance in October (with only one-fifth of Catholics now at Mass), 3.7% in baptisms, and 18.5% in receptions of converts. There was a modest (0.5%) rise in marriages, but the figure includes mixed marriages and those celebrated in Anglican churches which were authorized by the Catholic parish priest. Deaths were 0.9% less in 2012 than 2011, with the Catholic death rate being 9.7 per 1,000. The PRCT table will be found at:

http://www.prct.org.uk/

The data were covered by two broadsheet newspapers in their editions of 4 January 2014, The Times suggesting that the pattern of long-term decline (associated with child abuse scandals) might be reversed by the ‘Francis effect’, The Daily Telegraph concentrating on the increase in late baptisms of children (after their first birthday), which it attributed to ‘a scramble for places at the most popular Roman Catholic schools’. The Roman Catholic weekly, The Tablet, also noted the possible ‘Francis effect’ from 2013 when it ran the story a week later (11 January 2014), headlining ‘Mass Attendance Down but London Bucks the Trend’.

BRIN was contacted by the Catholic Herald for an assessment of the statistics, and we are quoted in that newspaper’s report in its edition of 10 January 2014 (p. 3 – there is also an editorial on p. 13). In more detail, the points we made were:

There are long-standing concerns about the quality of many Roman Catholic statistics (especially estimated Catholic population), arising from the absence of a national infrastructure for data collection and quality control, such as exists, for example, in the Church of England.
In many senses the decline in the Roman Catholic Church mirrors what is happening in mainstream Christian denominations in this country. However, the underlying fall would almost certainly have been much greater but for the boost given to the Church by immigration from Eastern Europe in recent years.
In both the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England alienation is linked to the growing gulf between official Church teaching and the views of active and nominal members. This has been demonstrated by Professor Linda Woodhead’s recent research. For her study of Catholics, see: http://faithdebates.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/WFD-Catholics-press-release.pdf
Optimists in the Roman Catholic Church suggest that decline may be reversed by the ‘Francis effect’. We are more sceptical about this since a similar argument was put forward for the ‘Benedict bounce’ following the 2010 papal visit. It did not materialize, as the Opinion Research Business polls commissioned by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference in 2010 and 2011 demonstrated, and as confirmed by the Church’s statistics for 2009 and 2010 summarized at: http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/2012/catholic-directory-2012/

Religion and politics

Lord Ashcroft’s latest political poll, published on 4 January 2014 and conducted online by Populus on 4-10 November 2013, included the standard background question about membership of religious groups, asked of a very large sample (n = 8,053). The proportion identifying as of no religion was, at 38%, identical to that reported in the two YouGov polls for the Westminster Faith Debates, which we covered in our last post of 30 December 2013. These ‘nones’ constituted a majority (51%) of the 18-24s in Ashcroft’s survey and a plurality (44%) of the 25-34s, with Christianity being the leading faith for other demographic sub-groups, averaging 53% and peaking at 71% of over-65s. In political terms, ‘nones’ were most likely to be found among people who had voted Liberal Democrat at the 2010 general election (44%) or the smaller number intending to vote Liberal Democrat now (41%). They were least likely to be encountered among Conservative supporters (27% in both 2010 and 2013), who were disproportionately Christian (66% in 2013). Of those who had voted Conservative in 2010 and intended to do so again, 68% were Christian, falling to 65% for voters who had defected from the Conservatives since 2010, 57% for adults who had switched to the Conservatives since 2010, and 52% for those who had not been Conservative in the past but indicated they might be in the future. UKIP supporters were 10% more likely to identify as Christian than the norm and Labour supporters 4% less. Non-Christians favoured Labour, and this was especially true of Muslims. Superficially (other factors are at work, of course), the historic connection between religion and voting is by no means extinguished. For more data, see table 69 at:

http://lordashcroftpolls.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Blueprint-4-Full-tables.pdf

Also, watch out for the forthcoming Theos report by Ben Clements and Nick Spencer on Voting and Values in Britain: Does Religion Count? BRIN will cover this as soon after publication as possible.

Religion and age

The lead story on the front page of The Times for 10 January 2014 (subscription access online) was a curiously headlined article by Dominic Kennedy, the newspaper’s investigations editor, on ‘Rise in Muslim Birthrate as Families “Feel British”: Census Figures Reveal “Startling” Shift in Demographic Trend’. Its key underlying fact, taken from the 2011 census, was that ‘almost a tenth of babies and toddlers in England and Wales are Muslim … almost twice as high as in the general population’; in stark contrast, ‘fewer than one in 200 over-85s are Muslim’. Expert comments on the findings were sought and quoted from two of the country’s leading demographers, Professors David Coleman of the University of Oxford and David Voas of the University of Essex (and BRIN). Voas apparently said that he saw no prospect of Muslims becoming a majority in Britain, although he did foresee that Muslims who worshipped might outnumber practising Christians one day (which several other pundits have also been predicting for a decade or more). The story in The Times, which has been widely reported in other print and online media in Britain and worldwide, was not actually based on any new analysis of census data by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) but on a hitherto little noticed ad hoc ONS table (CT0116, created on 18 October 2013), giving a detailed breakdown of religion in England and Wales by sex by age in 2011. This was pointed out by Ami Sedghi in her post on The Guardian’s Datablog on 10 January 2014, which helpfully includes a link to the table, rather implying that The Times was raking over ‘old news’, and additionally observing that the census actually recorded more children aged 0-4 as having no religion as those who were Muslim. The blog can be read at:

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/jan/10/rise-british-muslim-birthrate-the-times-census

Gift aid and the Church of England

Gift aid (introduced in 1990) has been an important factor in helping the Church of England to grow its real income consistently over the past two decades, according to a post on the Civil Society blog on 17 December 2013. The Church collects over £80 million of gift aid and tax refunds each year, and it accounts for 8% of all gift aid by value and 15% by volume. Although the number of adults in usual Sunday congregations of the Church of England declined by 27% between 1980 and 2010, tax-effective subscribers (using covenants and gift aid) rose by 38% over the same period, with tax-effective subscribers equivalent to 72% of usual Sunday congregations by 2010 (almost double the 38% of 1980). More information at:

http://www.civilsociety.co.uk/fundraising/blogs/content/16600/gift_aid_does_make_a_difference_to_giving_ask_the_church_of_england

Violence against the clergy

The Sunday Telegraph of 5 January and The Times of 6 January 2014 both included reports about ‘hundreds of violent attacks on the clergy’, the story subsequently being run by the Church Times on 10 January. The articles drew upon data obtained by right-of-centre think-tank Parliament Street through Freedom of Information requests submitted to police forces in England, of which 25 responded. The replies suggested that there had been more than 200 violent attacks on clergy over the past five years, a number thought to be just ‘the tip of the iceberg’ because of the inadequate and inconsistent recording of such offences. Parliament Street, which has not posted its data online, is calling upon Government to recognize attacks on clergy as constituting a religiously motivated hate crime, which would thereby attract severer penalties. The organization National Churchwatch has also been active since 2000 in documenting anti-Christian hate crime. However, so far as BRIN is aware, the best source of empirical evidence on the subject of the clergy remains the ESRC-funded research into violence against three groups of professionals (including clergy) undertaken by Royal Holloway, University of London in 1998-2001, details of which appear in the final project report at:

http://www.esrc.ac.uk/my-esrc/grants/L133251036/read

State-sanctioned surveillance

In an online Resonate poll conducted by Christian Research since the leaks emanating from former American security contractor Edward Snowden, the majority (77%) of 1,134 UK practising Christians sensed that mass intelligence-gathering by the state in the UK is increasing, but 82% agreed that it is justified in order to prevent acts of terrorism and 69% considered that the level of CCTV in operation in their area was about right. The results were disclosed by the Church Times in its issue of 3 January 2014 (p. 6). Characteristically, no further information is available on Christian Research’s website. However, the website does record that membership of the Resonate Christian omnibus panel has now reached 14,000 and that surveys will be run monthly from January 2014.

Jewish emigration to Israel

Jewish immigration to Israel in 2013 was modestly (1%) up on 2012, according to data collected by the Jewish Agency for Israel and the Israel Ministry of Immigration and Absorption. However, the number of Jews leaving the UK for Israel (making aliyah) in 2013 was, at 510, 27% down on the previous year, albeit close to the average since the beginning of the Millennium (the range being from 300 in 2002 to 800 in 2009). This decline compared with a rise of 35% in Western Europe (and 63% in France); in the United States there was a reduction of 13%. Emigrants to Israel from the UK constituted 12% of the Western European total and 3% of the world figure. The fall in UK emigrants is attributed by some to the improving economic situation and lessened anti-Semitism in the UK, and by others to a weaker focus on aliyah following a radical restructuring of the Jewish Agency two years ago. This note derives from a press release issued by the Israeli embassy in London on 30 December 2013 and from coverage in the Jewish Chronicle for 3 January 2014. The full data do not yet appear on the Jewish Agency’s website.

Posted in church attendance, News from religious organisations, Official data, Religion and Politics, Religion in the Press, Religious Census, Survey news | Tagged Aliyah, Ami Sedghi, Catholic Herald, census of population, Christian Research, Church of England, clergy, David Voas, emigration, finance, gift aid, hate crime, Israel, Jews, Lord Ashcroft, Office for National Statistics, Parliament Street, Pastoral Research Centre Trust, politics, Populus, Religious Affiliation, religious census. Roman Catholic Church, surveillance, The Times, Tony Spencer, violence, voting | 2 Comments

End-of-Year Round-Up

Posted on December 30, 2013 by Clive D. Field

This will be the final news post on BRIN for 2013. It features 11 sources which have come to hand over the Christmas period. This year we have been able to bring you 63 general posts containing 310 different news stories. We hope that they have been of interest and value. We will be back in 2014. Meanwhile, we wish you all a Happy New Year.

Christmas religion (1)

Britons appear less likely than Americans to uphold the religious dimension of Christmas, according to a poll by Angus Reid Global published on 23 December 2013, in which 998 Britons were interviewed online between 9 and 11 December. The proportion of Britons saying the religious aspect of Christmas was meaningful to them personally was not much more than half that of Americans (39% against 70%), with a similar transatlantic disparity between those planning to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ on Christmas Day (40% versus 72%). One-quarter of Britons claimed they would attend a special Christmas service during December and one-fifth a regular religious service in the month, whereas two-fifths of Americans had the same plans in each case. Some 16% of Britons stated that they normally attended church monthly or more (compared with 18% of Canadians and 37% of Americans). Fewer Britons (48%) than Canadians (64%) or Americans (66%) reported they had been raised in a Christian household that attended church. In all three nations preferences for Christmas carols against Christmas songs were almost evenly balanced, albeit more Britons (39%) than Americans (35%) intended to sing carols. Overwhelmingly, Christmas was said to have become too commercialized (by 84% in Britain), but 14% of Britons also regarded it as too religious. Whatever the good intentions of respondents, it seems improbable that the anticipated levels of religious observance of Christmas were achieved in practice, certainly in Britain. Topline data from the poll can be found at:

http://www.angusreidglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Angus-Reid-Poll-Christmas-Religion.pdf

Christmas religion (2)

Britons may have been taught a lot (30%) or a little (55%) about the Bible when at school, but their knowledge of the biblical accounts of the Christmas story is often shaky, according to a ComRes survey for the Christian Institute published on 21 December 2013, 2,055 adults aged 18 and over being interviewed online on 18-19 December. Some of their false assumptions about the biblical version of the nativity are perhaps understandable, such as the 84% who thought that three kings visited Jesus (the Gospels only referring to wise men from the East), or the 34% who recalled the Bible specifying He was born on 25 December (whereas the Gospels do not cite a specific date). However, other errors were more of the ‘exam howler’ variety, including 7% who were convinced that a Christmas tree is mentioned in the Bible and 4% that Father Christmas appears there. The biblical knowledge of the older age cohorts tended to be sounder than that of the younger, reflecting the fact that they were more likely to have been taught a lot about the Bible during their schooldays. The ComRes data tables are at:

http://www.comres.co.uk/polls/Christian_Institute_Christmas_Knowledge_Survey_December_2013.pdf

and a Christian Institute press release at:

http://www.christian.org.uk/news/brits-believe-santa-present-at-jesus-birth-new-poll-reveals/

Christmas Day shopping

Christmas Day is fast becoming a retail extravaganza. Not only were record numbers of independent shops (16,000) open on Christmas Day this year, but online shopping also hit a new peak. Before the event, Barclaycard estimated that 31% of adults would shop online on Christmas Day, with anticipated purchases of £350 million, according to the Interactive Media in Retail Group. Afterwards, Experian reported that there had been 114 million visits to online shopping sites in the UK on Christmas Day, 6% more than in 2012, with over 1% of all online searches on Christmas Day including the words ‘sale’ or ‘sales’. Christmas Day shoppers almost certainly outnumbered Christmas churchgoers several times over. However, when the Mail on Sunday contacted 42 senior Church of England bishops for their reactions to this exponential rise in Christmas Day trading, and its compatibility with the spiritual values of Christmastide, only a handful felt able to comment. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York and the Bishop of London were among those keeping their heads down on the subject. The Mail on Sunday article can be read at:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2527696/Church-silent-record-number-stores-set-stay-open-Christmas-Day.html

Westminster Faith Debates: new analyses of data

Professor Linda Woodhead continues to draw upon the January and June 2013 YouGov polls conducted for the Westminster Faith Debates to provide fresh insights into religion in Britain. On 28 November 2013 she took advantage of the publication by the Church of England of the Pilling Report on Human Sexuality to highlight ‘a revolution in Anglican attitudes to homosexuality and same-sex marriage not reflected in official teaching’, based upon the opinions of 2,381 self-identifying Anglicans in the YouGov surveys. Her press release can be found at:

http://faithdebates.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/WFD-Pilling-press-release.pdf

On 22 December 2013 Woodhead issued another press release headed ‘“No Religion” is the New Religion’, with 38% of adult Britons in the two YouGov polls professing no religion. The number varied greatly by age cohort, rising to 48% of the under-30s (among whom only 26% were Christians), but falling to 27% of over-60s (58% of whom were Christians). Indeed, the majority (55%) of those aged 18 or 19 had no religion, and no religion was the biggest single faith category for everybody under 50 years. Although a plurality (43%) of ‘nones’ were atheists, 40% were agnostics, and 16% believers in God. Only 13% of ‘nones’ were found to be hostile to religion in the Richard Dawkins sense, in that they had no religion, admitted to being atheist, and regarded the Church of England and Roman Catholic Churches as negative forces. These hostile ‘nones’ were disproportionately (62%) male. ‘Nones’ were more liberal than the rest of the population in their attitudes to personal morality, and this was enhanced by the age effect (young people also being more liberal). This press release is not yet available on the Westminster Faith Debates website but doubtless will be in the New Year. In the meantime, Woodhead has a blog on the same subject (dated 20 December 2013) at:

http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/blogs/linda-woodhead/why-no-religion-is-the-new-religion/

Westminster Faith Debates: the book

The book of the 2013 series of Westminster Faith Debates has been published by Darton, Longman and Todd recently: Religion and Personal Life, edited by Linda Woodhead with Norman Winter (ISBN 978-0-232-53018-6, £8.99 paperback, also available as an e-book). The debates are presented in condensed form (based on recordings and transcripts), together with additional research findings (from the special YouGov poll on ethical opinion in Britain commissioned in January 2013), media reactions, and teaching materials. New commentary and reflection is offered in each of the six debate chapters, which deal with: abortion and stem cell research; sexualization of society; religion and gender; the traditional family; same-sex marriage; and assisted dying. A seventh chapter is devoted to ‘why do God?’ with Delia Smith and Alastair Campbell in conversation.

Recent Eurobarometers

The European Commission’s Eurobarometer surveys continue to include occasional questions touching on religion, and a couple of recent reports exemplify this. Interviews are conducted face-to-face with representative samples of the adult population aged 15 and over in each member state of the European Union (EU). United Kingdom fieldwork is carried out by TNS UK.

Special Eurobarometer 401, published in November 2013, was on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), Science and Technology and included interviews with 1,306 UK citizens (between 27 April and 14 May 2013) as part of Eurobarometer 79.2. Inter alia, the report revealed that adults in the UK were fairly evenly split about whether ‘we depend too much on science and not enough on faith’, 36% agreeing (EU average 39%), 34% disagreeing (32%), and 30% undecided (29%). The pattern of results was broadly similar to Eurobarometer 73.1 in Spring 2010, albeit the dissentients in the UK were 5% fewer in 2013. Hardly anybody (2% in the UK, 1% in the EU) viewed representatives of the various religions as being best qualified to explain the impact of scientific and technological developments on society, by far the lowest score for the 12 groups investigated. Topline findings are presented on pp. T11-T13 and T23 at:

http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_401_en.pdf

Standard Eurobarometer 80.1, undertaken in the UK on 2-17 November 2013 among 1,326 adults, enquired into which of 12 factors most created a feeling of community among EU citizens (a maximum of three responses being permitted). Relatively few (10% in the UK, 11% in the EU) singled out religion, which – in the UK’s case – was just one-third the level of the top-scoring unifying factors of sport and culture. Only citizens of Cyprus (27%) and Romania (24%) considered religion to be especially important in creating a sense of EU-wide identity. The question had previously been asked in Eurobarometer 79.3 six months before, when 8% in the UK had mentioned religion. Topline data are on pp. T176-T177 at:

http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/eb/eb80/eb80_anx_en.pdf

Spatially concentrated Jews

The fourth report in the Institute for Jewish Policy Research’s series on the 2011 UK population census was published on 19 December 2013. Written by David Graham, and entitled Thinning and Thickening: Geographical Change in the UK’s Jewish Population, 2001-2011, it demonstrates how that population is becoming increasingly concentrated in a small number of core geographical areas. The ten local authorities which experienced the largest absolute increases in Jews between 2001 and 2011 accounted for 36% of UK’s Jews in 2001 but 44% in 2011, whereas the ten places which registered the biggest absolute decreases over the decade saw their aggregate share of the UK Jewish population fall from 23% in 2001 to 18% in 2011. The former list comprised: Barnet, Hackney, Hertsmere, Salford, Haringey, Gateshead, Bury, St Albans, Nottingham, and Epping Forest. UK Jews overwhelmingly (97%) lived in England in 2011, with Scottish numbers contracting by 8% between the two censuses. Areas of ‘thickening’ population are said to be growing as a result of migration from areas of ‘thinning’ population and as a consequence of differing age profiles, resulting in high birth rates in the thickening cores and high death rates in places which are thinning. The report is available at:

http://www.jpr.org.uk/documents/Thinning_and_Thickening.Final1.pdf

Religious hate crimes

BRIN readers may have noticed media coverage in recent days of a partial survey of religious hate crimes undertaken by the Press Association on the basis of Freedom of Information requests sent to police authorities in England and Wales. However, the media seem to have overlooked an important interdepartmental Government report on the subject, prepared by the Home Office, Office for National Statistics, and Ministry of Justice, which was published on 17 December 2013: An Overview of Hate Crime in England and Wales. This brings together, for the first time, data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW, a continuous survey of adults aged 16 and over), police statistics of recorded crime, and certain other sources. According to the CSEW for 2011/12 and 2012/13, there are on average 70,000 incidents of religiously motivated hate crime each year, evenly divided between personal and household crimes. This represents a sharp increase on the 39,000 incidents for the previous four years, back to 2007/08. Overall, in 2011/12 and 2012/13, 0.1% of English and Welsh citizens were victims of a religiously motivated hate crime during the 12 months prior to interview, but the proportion increased sharply (to 1.5%) for Muslims. The CSEW reporting period spanned March 2010 to February 2013 so excluded the spike in Islamophobic incidents which followed the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in May 2013. Non-whites generally were more susceptible (0.7%) than whites to be victims of religious hate crimes. Religious hate crimes comprised 25% of all hate crimes estimated from the CSEW (55% for race) but only 4% of hate crimes recorded by the police (against 85% for race). In 2012/13 the police registered just 1,573 religious hate crimes (24% entailing violence against the person), suggesting, by comparison with the CSEW, that the vast majority go unreported. For extensive commentary and tables, go to:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/an-overview-of-hate-crime-in-england-and-wales

Murder of Lee Rigby

The brutal murder of Drummer Lee Rigby by two Islamist terrorists on 22 May 2013 was the equal top news story of 2013, according to a YouGov poll for The Sun on 17-18 December, for which 1,937 adult Britons were interviewed online. It was the choice of 17% of respondents, the same proportion as selected the death of Nelson Mandela and the investigations into sexual abuse by Jimmy Savile as being the biggest news story, with the birth of Prince George and the conflict in Syria being in fourth and fifth positions (13% and 10% respectively). The fact that the trial of Rigby’s murderers was in its final stages at the time of fieldwork, culminating in a guilty verdict from the jury on 19 December, may partly explain the overall salience of the story. The case was seen as especially important by UKIP supporters (28%) and the over-60s (22%). The data table is at:

http://cdn.yougov.com/cumulus_uploads/document/kfslu2z1sg/Sun_Results_131218_SunAwards.pdf

Secularisation and Humanist History blog

Callum Brown, Professor of Late Modern European History at the University of Glasgow and an authority on secularization in British and international contexts, launched his Secularisation and Humanist History website on 16 December 2013. It ‘hosts discussion on the social and cultural history of humanism and allied secular positions’ and features blogs based on the author’s own research and on current news. It can be accessed at:

http://humanisthistory.academicblogs.co.uk/

Faith in Research conference

The Church of England’s annual Faith in Research conference will take place in Birmingham on 4 June 2014. Preliminary information about the event has been published recently, together with a call for abstracts for papers (with abstracts to be submitted by 24 January). If you are interested, go to:

http://www.churchofengland.org/about-us/facts-stats/research-statistics/faith-in-research-conferences/faith-in-research-june-2014.aspx

Posted in church attendance, News from religious organisations, Official data, People news, Religion and Politics, Religion in public debate, Religion in the Press, Religious Census, Survey news | Tagged Angus Reid Global, Bible, Callum Brown, census of population, Christian Institute, Christmas, Christmas carols, Christmas Day, church attendance, Church of England, community feeling, ComRes, Crime Survey for England and Wales, David Graham, Eurobarometer, European Union, Faith in Research conference, hate crimes, Home Office, humanism, Institute for Jewish Policy Research, Islamophobia, Jews, Lee Rigby, Linda Woodhead, Mail on Sunday, Ministry of Justice, Muslims, no religion, nones, Norman Winter, Office for Natrional Statistics, personal life, police, Religious Affiliation, religious festivals, religious knowledge, science, secularization, shopping, The Sun, TNS UK, Westminster Faith Debates, YouGov | 1 Comment

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