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Counting Religion in Britain, November 2017

Posted on December 1, 2017 by Clive D. Field

Counting Religion in Britain, No. 26, November 2017 features 23 new sources. It can be read in full below. Alternatively, you can download the PDF version: No 26 November 2017

OPINION POLLS

Good life

What makes for a good life in the eyes of the public? GfK set out to find the answer to this question in a global poll conducted during summer 2017, for which 23,000 adults from 17 countries were interviewed online, including 2,175 in the UK. Respondents were given a list of 15 factors which might make for ‘the good life’ (specified as the life they would like to have) and asked to choose those which were most significant for them. The UK’s selection was headed by good health (82%), financial security (75%), and leisure time (68%), with spiritual enrichment in eleventh place, on 26%, compared with the multinational mean of 39% (the national peak being in Brazil at 47%). The importance attached to spiritual enrichment did not differ between the sexes in the UK, but it was surprisingly low for the over-60s (21%) and high among under-20s (30%). GfK’s press release, including a link from which to download a free copy of the full report on the survey, is at:

http://www.gfk.com/en-gb/insights/press-release/health-financial-security-and-free-time-are-top-factors-for-the-good-life-say-uk-consumers/

Royal family

The recent announcement that Prince Harry is to marry American actress Meghan Markle in 2018 prompted The Times to commission YouGov to repeat some of its standard questions about attitudes to the royal family, in an online poll of 1,575 Britons on 27-28 November 2017. The topics covered included reactions to a member of the royal family marrying a person from various backgrounds. Just over two-thirds (68%) deemed it acceptable for a member of the royal family to wed somebody of a different religion, which was three points less than in November 2016, with 16% opposed (among them 22% of Conservatives) and a further 16% unsure. This was a similar proportion as in favour of a member of the royal family marrying someone of a different ethnicity (69%). A blog about the survey, containing a link to the full data tables, is at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/11/29/5-charts-british-reaction-prince-harrys-engagement/

Protection of churches

Notwithstanding low and declining church attendance, cathedrals and churches rank second only to castles in a list of ten categories of UK historic buildings which the public considers should be protected for future generations. Asked to identify the first, second, and third most important category, 69% in aggregate opted for castles, 60% for cathedrals and churches, and 49% for royal palaces. Support for cathedrals and churches varied by age, rising from 49% among under-35s to 74% for over-65s. Findings derive from a ComRes survey commissioned by the National Churches Trust, for which 2,062 adults were interviewed online on 21-22 June 2017. The data tables are at:

http://www.comresglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/National-Churches-Trust-Historic-Buildings-Survey.pdf

Trust in clergy

The latest annual Ipsos MORI Veracity Index, compiled from face-to-face interviews with 998 adults on 20-26 October 2017, has revealed clergy and priests to be the tenth most trusted of the 24 professions included on the list. Two-thirds (65%) of the public trusted them to tell the truth (four points less than in 2016 and twenty points lower than in 1983, when the index began), against 30% who did not trust them and 4% who were unsure. The net veracity score of +35% for clergy and priests was way behind that of nurses (+89%), doctors (+84%), and teachers and professors (+76% each). The most negative scores were for government ministers (-59%) and politicians generally (-63%). At present, topline results only are available at:

https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/politicians-remain-least-trusted-profession-britain

Thought for the Day

Thought for the Day is a regular faith-based slot in BBC Radio 4’s flagship Today programme, broadcast continuously (under different titles) since 1939. Its appropriateness in a news and current affairs programme is periodically challenged, and it has recently come under attack from some of Today’s own presenters. This prompted YouGov to include a question in an app-based poll reported on 1 November 2017, the British public being divided between those who wanted Thought for the Day removed from the schedules (44%) and those wishing to retain it (47%), 9% being undecided. Topline results only are available at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/11/01/are-modern-women-fragile-thought-day-facebook-list/

Religious education

YouGov ran an app-based poll on the back of news that schools in Staffordshire are to offer virtual tours of mosques after some parents refused to allow their children to visit them during school religious education trips. Three-fifths of respondents thought that parents should have the right to withdraw their children from school visits to certain places of worship while a third suggested they should not be allowed to do so. Topline results were posted on 16 November 2017 at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/11/16/information-war-between-west-and-russia-religious-/

Christmas

The vast majority of Britons (83%) still prefer to describe the period around 25 December as Christmas, according to an online poll of 3,372 adults taken by YouGov on 17 November 2017. The proportion was lowest among under-25s (76%), Scots (78%), and Scottish National Party supporters (72%). It peaked (at 95%) with UKIP voters. Another 5% of the whole sample opted for Xmas while 9% gave other answers. Results, with breaks by demographics, are at:

https://yougov.co.uk/opi/surveys/results#/survey/42e1403b-cb80-11e7-bdbe-dfebc9b5b055

Gender fluidity

In recent guidance issued to its own schools, the Church of England has stated that children should be free to try out ‘the many cloaks of identity’ without being labelled or bullied. This statement was approved of by 71% of respondents to an app-based poll by YouGov reported on 14 November 2017, with 21% disapproving and 7% unsure. Topline results only are at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/11/14/coes-statement-regarding-gender-traffic-lights-mot/

Sexual orientation and identity

The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association (ILGA) has released the results from the ILGA-RIWI Global Attitudes Survey on Sexual, Gender, and Sex Minorities, 2017, conducted in partnership with Viacom, Logo, and SAGE. Data were gathered, by means of opt-in online interviews, from 116,000 adults aged 18 and over in 75 countries plus Hong Kong and Taiwan. By virtue of the patented Random Domain Intercept Technology employed by RIWI, which targets web users bypassing search engines (see pp. 13-14 of the global report for a description of methodology), these do not comprise nationally representative samples. There were 6,483 respondents from the UK, although not everybody answered all the questions (partly because of the use of a combination of fixed and rotating modules).

Two statements with Likert-style answers specifically addressed religion. The first related to sexual orientation: ‘it is possible to respect my religion and be accepting of people who are romantically or sexually attracted to people of the same sex’, with which 58% in the UK agreed and 15% disagreed, 27% being neutral. The second statement concerned gender identity: ‘it is possible to respect my religion and be accepting of people who dress, act, or identify as one sex although they were born as another’, with which 59% in the UK agreed and 12% disagreed, 29% being neutral. The global report and country-specific data (in Word and Excel formats) can be downloaded from:

http://ilga.org/what-we-do/ilga-riwi-global-attitudes-survey/

Schoolchildren and the hijab

Ofsted, the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills in England, has recently recommended its inspectors to question Muslim primary school girls if they are found to be wearing a hijab, in order to ascertain whether they have been forced to do so. In response to a YouGov app-based poll whose results were posted on 21 November 2017, a plurality (47%) of Britons thought the school inspectors should not be interviewing hijab-wearing Muslim primary school girls in this way. Two-fifths considered they should be interviewed while 14% were uncertain. The topline findings only are available at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/11/21/hijabs-schools-counter-terrorism-classes-poetry/

Islamic State

When they met in Vietnam recently, US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin resolved to defeat Islamic State in Syria. However, a plurality of Britons (43%) thinks they will fail in this goal, with 42% having confidence they will succeed and 15% unsure. The poll was conducted by Yougov’s app and reported on 13 November 2017 at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/11/13/trump-and-putin-vs-isis-next-conservative-leader-f/

FAITH ORGANIZATION STUDIES

Voting of churchgoers

Christian Research has posted a summary of its online poll of 1,512 UK practising Christians (church leaders and churchgoers) conducted, during week-commencing 29 May 2017, in the immediate run-up to the 2017 general election. Respondents were drawn from the Resonate panel, which is self-selecting, and were disproportionately male, Anglican, Baptist, and Methodist. The overwhelming majority (96%) of practising Christians said they intended to vote in the election. Just 10% stated they always voted for the same political party. With only days to go, 24% had still not decided how to cast their vote. Of those who had already made up their minds, 37% opted for the Conservatives, 32% for Labour, and 22% for the Liberal Democrats (the last figure significantly above the national average, reflecting the legacy of Free Church electoral habits). Managing the National Health Service was the most important policy factor in determining voter preference, followed by Brexit and ensuring the benefits of economic growth were felt by all. The post is available at:

http://www.christian-research.org/reports/election-2012/

Church of England cathedral statistics

The 44–page Cathedral Statistics, 2016 reports on attendance at services (Sunday, midweek, and festival), rites of passage, visitors (9,030,000 plus 1,100,000 at Westminster Abbey), educational outreach, events, volunteers, choristers, and musicians. Ten years of trend data are included. The report is available on the recently revamped Church of England website at:

https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2017-11/2016cathedralstatistics_0.pdf

In accordance with current fashion, the new Church website is mobile-friendly and shifts the emphasis in content away from words to images and sounds. To that end, a lot of documentation on the old website appears to have been dropped. Fortunately, the Research and Statistics pages have not been too adversely affected, but it would seem logical to complete the online back-file of Church Statistics and perhaps even to add digitized editions of the forerunner Statistical Supplement to the Church of England Yearbook. The Research and Statistics pages do serve an important archival function. They can be found at:

https://www.churchofengland.org/more/policy-and-thinking/research-and-statistics

Muslim marriages

A survey commissioned in connection with Channel 4’s The Truth about Muslim Marriage programme, broadcast on 21 November 2017, has revealed that 60% of Muslim women married in Britain (and 80% of those under 25) are not in legally recognized marriages. This is because they have not had a civil marriage ceremony alongside their traditional Islamic (Nikah) religious wedding. Many (28%) of these women who were just married religiously were unaware of the fact that, as a consequence, they did not have the same rights and protections afforded to couples marrying in the eyes of the law. Of the 66% who understood their marriage had no legal standing, half had no plans to enter into a civil wedding. The situation arises in part because only one in ten mosques in England and Wales is licensed for the solemnization of marriages and just 31% of Muslim women married in the UK had done so in a mosque.

The study also explored attitudes to polygamy, finding that 89% of the women did not wish to be in a polygamous relationship and that 37% of the 11% who were in such a relationship had not agreed to it.

The interviews, with 923 Muslim women married in Britain, were conducted, face-to-face or over the telephone, by female Muslim community researchers in 14 British cities in two waves between December 2016 and July 2017. Respondents were recruited by snowballing techniques and thus do not necessarily constitute a representative sample. Channel 4’s press release is at:

http://www.channel4.com/info/press/news/new-channel-4-survey-reveals-the-truth-about-muslim-marriage

Additional survey documentation, including the questionnaire for the second wave and a fuller description of methodology, is available on the website of True Vision Aire, the production company which made the programme, at:

http://truevisiontv.com/films/details/295/the-truth-about-muslim-marriage

OFFICIAL AND QUASI-OFFICIAL STATISTICS

Armed forces diversity statistics

The Government has published the UK armed forces biannual diversity statistics as at 1 October 2017. In respect of religion, they reveal that 72% of the Regular Forces and 74% of the so-called Future Reserves 2020 self-identified as Christian on that date with, respectively, 25% and 24% professing no religion, together with relatively small numbers of non-Christians. The proportion of religious nones in the Regular Forces continues to be highest in the Royal Navy (31%) and lowest in the Army (22%). The report and tables are at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-armed-forces-biannual-diversity-statistics-2017

ACADEMIC STUDIES

European Social Survey

The first set of data from Round 8 of the European Social Survey has been released, including those for the UK, where 1,959 adults were interviewed face-to-face by NatCen Social Research between 1 September 2016 and 20 March 2017. This academically-led study, which has been conducted every two years since 2002, always includes a short module on religion, asking about religious affiliation, self-assessed religiosity (on a scale running from 0 = not at all religious to 10 = very religious), attendance at religious services other than rites of passage, and private prayer. The weighted results for Great Britain (excluding Northern Ireland) in 2002 and 2016 are shown in compressed form below, the biggest change being the 11-point increase in those self-identifying as non-religious. The figures have been calculated from the Centre for Comparative European Survey Data website at:

http://www.ccesd.ac.uk

%	2002	2016
Regard self as belonging to a particular religion
Yes	48.0	44.5
No	52.0	55.5
Self-assessed religiosity
Not religious (0-4)	48.0	58.8
Neutral (5)	17.8	11.4
Religious (6-10)	34.2	29.8
Attendance at religious services apart from rites of passage
Monthly or more	17.8	18.0
Less often	31.6	30.5
Never	50.7	51.5
Private prayer
Daily	18.5	17.0
Monthly	18.0	15.4
Less often	19.0	16.2
Never	44.4	51.3

Material security and religious practice

In a recent article in Journal of Religion in Europe (Vol. 10, No. 3, 2017, pp. 328-49), Ingrid Storm tests three hypotheses linking material security (as measured by household income) with attendance at religious services at least monthly. Using the British Household Panel Survey and UK Household Longitudinal Study datasets for 1991-2012, she found that increased income was weakly associated with declining religious attendance but that reductions in income did not significantly impact attendance. However, the data did suggest that religious attendance improved and maintained life satisfaction in the face of economic loss. Access options to the article, ‘Does Security Increase Secularity? Evidence from the British Household Panel Survey on the Relationship between Income and Religious Service Attendance’, are outlined at:

http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/18748929-01003004

Church schools and religious diversity

Further findings from the Young People’s Attitudes to Religious Diversity Project in 2011-12 are presented by Leslie Francis, Andrew Village, Ursula McKenna, and Gemma Penny in ‘Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Religious Clothing and Symbols in School: Exploring the Impact of Church Schools in a Religiously Diverse Society’, in Religion and Civil Human Rights in Empirical Perspective, edited by Hans-Georg Ziebertz and Carl Sterkens (Cham: Springer, 2018), pp. 157-75. A sub-sample of 2,385 students aged 13-15 from schools in England, Wales, and London who identified as Christian or of no religion was used. The authors conclude that, after controlling for gender and individual differences in personality and religiosity, ‘schools with a religious character are a source neither for good nor for ill in terms of shaping student attitudes either toward freedom of religious clothing and symbols in school or toward religious diversity more generally assessed’. The chapter can be purchased from:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-59285-5_7

Muslim identity

Data from the Young People’s Attitudes to Religious Diversity Project also form the basis of Leslie Francis and Ursula McKenna, ‘The Religious and Social Correlates of Muslim Identity: An Empirical Enquiry into Religification among Male Adolescents in the UK’, Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 43, No. 5, 2017, pp. 550-65. The authors compared the responses of 158 male students aged 13-15 who identified as Muslim with those of 1,932 male students with no religious affiliation, finding (not unexpectedly) that the former had a distinctive profile in terms of both religiosity (measured across eight themes) and social values (six themes concerning wellbeing and attitudes to cultural and religious diversity). The correlations are presented in 14 tables with commentary. Opportunities for further research into Muslim identity are identified in the form of improved sampling and an elaborated survey instrument. Access options to the article are outlined at:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03054985.2017.1352351

Muslim population

The number of Muslims in the UK is projected to grow from an estimated 4,130,000 in 2016 to between 6,560,000 and 13,480,000 in 2050, or from 6.3% to between 9.7% and 17.2% of the population. So suggests the Pew Research Center in its latest report, entitled Europe’s Growing Muslim Population. To arrive at these projections, Pew modelled three scenarios for net Muslim migration (the biggest single factor affecting the size of the Muslim community), depending upon whether it was zero, medium, or high. The UK is currently the top destination in Europe for regular (non-refugee) Muslim migrants. Natural increase was also factored into the calculations, reflecting the fact that Muslims are disproportionately young and still have a higher fertility rate than non-Muslims in the UK (one more child on average). The report is available at:

http://www.pewforum.org/2017/11/29/europes-growing-muslim-population/

Islamophobia

Although racial boundaries between whites, blacks, and Asians have blurred in recent years, Muslims are widely singled out for negative attention by both white people and non-Muslim ethnic minorities in Britain, including a large number who do not express hostility to other ethnic groups. This is according to Ingrid Storm, Maria Sobolewska, and Robert Ford, ‘Is Ethnic Prejudice Declining in Britain? Change in Social Distance Attitudes among Ethnic Majority and Minority Britons’, British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 69, No. 3, September 2017, pp. 410-34. Their evidence concerning attitudes to Muslims derives from a measure of interpersonal social distance, specifically acceptance of an in-law from Muslim versus other ethnic backgrounds, contained in the 2013 British Social Attitudes Survey (for whites) and the 2010 Ethnic Minority British Election Survey. Access options to the article are outlined at:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-4446.12250/full

NEW DATASETS AT UK DATA SERVICE

SN 8280: Health Survey for England, 2015

The Health Survey for England, 2015 is the twenty-fifth in a series of annual studies designed to monitor trends in the nation’s health. It is commissioned by NHS Digital and conducted by NatCen Social Research and the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London. It is undertaken through a combination of face-to-face interview, self-completion questionnaire, and clinical and other measurements. A number of core health-related topics are explored each year with additional topics investigated on a more occasional basis (including several in 2015). A question ‘what is your religion or belief?’ was one of the background variables included in the self-completion booklets given to the 13,748 adults and children interviewed in 2015, with reply options of no religion, Roman Catholic, other Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, and any other religion. This permits analysis of the religious correlates of particular health conditions and attitudes. For a full description of the dataset and background documentation, see the catalogue entry at:

https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=8280&type=Data%20catalogue

SN 8290: Scottish Health Survey, 2016

The Scottish Health Survey, 2016 is the twelfth in a series initiated in 1995. It was conducted by ScotCen Social Research on behalf of the Scottish Government, 4,323 adults aged 16 and over living in private households throughout Scotland being interviewed face-to-face between January 2016 and January 2017. A belonging form of question about religious affiliation was asked of all respondents, which can be used as a variable for analysing answers to all other questions, whether health-related or not. A catalogue description of the dataset, with links to documentation, is available at:

https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=8290&type=Data%20catalogue

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

Posted in church attendance, News from religious organisations, Official data, Religion and Ethnicity, Religion and Politics, Religious prejudice, Survey news | Tagged Andrew Village, armed forces, attendance at religious services, BBC, British Household Panel Survey, British Journal of Sociology, British Social Attitudes Survey, cathedrals and churches, Channel 4, Christian Research, Christmas, Church of England, clergy, ComRes, ethnic minorities, Ethnic Minority British Election Survey, European Social Survey, Gemma Penny, gender fluidity, general election, GfK, good life, Health Survey for England, hijab, historic buildings, household income, Ingrid Storm, International Lesbian Gay Bisexual Trans and Intersex Association, interreligious marriage, Ipsos-MORI, Islamic State, Islamophobia, Journal of Religion in Europe, Leslie Francis, Maria Sobolewska, marriage, migration, mosques, Muslims, NatCen Social Research, National Churches Trust, NHS Digital, Nikah, Ofsted, Oxford Review of Education, Pew Research Center, politics, polygamy, prayer, prejudice, primary schools, Religious Affiliation, religious broadcasting, Religious diversity, religious dress, religious education, Religious Identity, RIWI, Robert Ford, royal family, schools, ScotCen Social Research, Scotland, Scottish Health Survey, self-assessed religiosity, sexual identity, sexual orientation, Social Distance, spiritual enrichment, Syria, The Times, Thought for the Day, Today, True Vision Aire, trust, Understanding Society, University College London, Ursula McKenna, veracity, voting, YouGov, Young People’s Attitudes to Religious Diversity Project | Leave a comment

Counting Religion in Britain, September 2017

Posted on October 1, 2017 by Clive D. Field

Counting Religion in Britain, No. 24, September 2017 features 26 new sources. It can be read in full below. Alternatively, you can download the PDF version: No 24 September 2017

OPINION POLLS

Harmfulness of religion

More than twice as many Britons (68%) feel the world has been damaged by religion as say it has benefited from it (30%), according to a Populus poll for the Legatum Institute think-tank, for which 2,004 adults were interviewed online on 4-6 August 2017. Respondents were shown a list of eight social, cultural, and economic trends and asked to rate their impact on a scale running from minus 100 (denoting severe damage) to plus 100 (great benefit), religion receiving the lowest mean score of all (even worse than immigration). The proportion with a negative view of religion peaked at 79% among UKIP voters. Full data tables are available at:

http://www.populus.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/OmLeft_Wing_Populism.pdf

Saliency of religion

Asked to choose three of twenty facets of life which were of greatest importance to them ‘right now’, only 5% of a sample of 1,003 UK young adults aged 16-22 (Generation Z) selected religion, their top priorities being family (44%), education (32%), money (29%), and friends or boyfriend/girlfriend/partner (25% each). Religion was of most significance to Londoners (10%) and black and minority ethnic young persons (19%, six times the figure for white people). The survey was conducted online by Ipsos MORI for BBC’s Newsbeat programme between 24 August and 4 September 2017. For comparative purposes, a sample of adults aged 23-65 (Generation Y, Generation X, and Baby Boomers) was invited to speculate what they thought the immediate concerns of Generation Z were. Data tables are available at:

https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2017-09/bbc-newsbeat-survey-tables-2017_2.pdf

Airbrushing religious symbols

German supermarket chain Lidl has incurred some negative publicity recently with the discovery that, throughout Europe, it has airbrushed out the Christian cross at the top of the blue dome of the Anastasi Church on the island of Santorini, images of which feature on its Greek food range, in order to remain ‘religiously neutral’. Three-quarters of Britons interviewed by YouGov in an app-based poll released on 7 September 2017 disapproved of Lidl’s action, with only 13% endorsing it and 12% undecided. Topline results are available at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/09/07/cutting-unskilled-eu-labour-airbrushing-religious-/

Funerals

The eleventh (2017) edition of SunLife’s Cost of Dying Report contains a range of information about funerals, mostly based upon two UK-wide surveys undertaken by Critical Research in May 2017 among (a) 1,524 adults who were responsible for planning a funeral and administering an estate during the past four years (online interviews) and (b) 100 funeral directors (by telephone). One-quarter of funerals now involve burials and three-quarters cremations, with an increasing number of the latter (10% according to the funeral directors) being direct cremations, generally involving no funeral service whatsoever (albeit a small minority have some sort of post-cremation service). Two-thirds of the funeral directors returned a decrease in religious funerals, one-half of funerals also featuring modern songs, music, or anthems. Just 11% of those who had organized a funeral for a loved-one described the tone of the service as ‘religious’ and no more than 36% even knew whether the deceased would have preferred a religious or non-religious service. The report is at:

https://www.sunlife.co.uk/blogs-and-features/how-much-does-a-funeral-cost-in-the-uk-today_/

Online radicalization

Attitudes to extremist content online and the regulation of the internet more generally have been thoroughly investigated in an online poll by ICM Unlimited among 2,051 adult Britons on 14-18 July 2017, on behalf of Policy Exchange. Results for all questions were disaggregated by religious affiliation, albeit only the sub-samples of professing Christians and religious nones were large enough to yield statistically robust breaks. On many issues, the latter tended to adopt more liberal positions than the former, although this was probably largely a function of their different age profiles. Additionally, a couple of questions were posed which specifically focused on religion. The first asked whether extremist or hate speech at places of worship influenced people to commit terrorist acts; 63% thought it did so a lot, 25% a little, and only 3% not at all. The second question enquired whether it was acceptable in certain situations to publish online content that encourages violence against religious groups; just 13% agreed overall (but including 31% of under-25s and 45% of the 50 Muslims interviewed) while 72% disagreed and 12% were neutral. Data tables can be found at:

https://www.icmunlimited.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/2017_PX_online_radicalisation_survey.pdf

Workplace discrimination

The experience during the past five years of specific types of work-related discrimination or disadvantage by 1,003 black and minority ethnic (BME) workers in Britain was measured in an online poll by ICM Unlimited for the Trades Union Congress in January 2017. Breaks for several questions were given by religious affiliation, including for statistically viable sub-samples of Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and religious nones. Race/ethnicity or gender were more likely than religion/belief to be cited as the perceived cause of cases of harassment, verbal abuse, physical violence, or unfair treatment. Prejudice against wearing visible markers of religious identity was reported as having increased since the vote in 2016 on the UK’s membership of the European Union, 23% of BME respondents having experienced or witnessed it post-Brexit. Data tables are available at:

https://www.icmunlimited.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/TUC-Workplace-Discrimination-Short-Updated.pdf

Trust in professions

Three-fifths of 2,612 secondary school pupils aged 11-16 in England and Wales trust clergy and priests to tell the truth, and just 14% distrust them, according to the 2017 Ipsos MORI Young People Omnibus, undertaken by self-completion questionnaire between 6 February and 17 May. With a net trust figure of +46%, clergy and priests were ranked fifth of eighteen professional groups for trustworthiness, after doctors (+83%), the police (+71%), judges (+64%), and scientists (+53%). This was about the same net trust figure for clergy and priests as in the 2016 Ipsos MORI Veracity Index for British adults (+43%), albeit the latter expressed both higher levels of trust (69%) and distrust (26%) for clergy and priests to tell the truth, mainly because there were fewer don’t knows than in the school pupil sample. Data tables for the Young People Omnibus are available at:

https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/doctors-are-most-trusted-profession-among-school-children

Viewing the Arab world

The Arab News has published a series of articles on British attitudes to the Arab world, derived from a YouGov poll which it commissioned in partnership with the Council for Arab-British Understanding, for which 2,142 adults were interviewed online on 16-17 August 2017. The full report and data tables have yet to be released, but the articles reveal a few findings which will be of interest to BRIN readers. Although 72% of respondents acknowledged that anti-Muslim hatred is a growing problem in the UK, 55% supported racial profiling of Arabs/Muslims for security reasons (with 24% disapproving). The majority (53%) endorsed the UK’s continued military operations against Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria, with 29% opposed and 19% neutral. On the Israel-Palestine question, 53% agreed that the UK should recognize Palestine as a state, and only 32% regarded the Balfour Declaration of 1917 (in favour of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine) as something to be proud of (albeit a plurality of 41% was undecided). At the same time, most (55%) did not feel the UK should take responsibility for sorting out the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Arab News coverage can be found at:

http://www.arabnews.com/tags/how-brits-view-arab-world

FAITH ORGANIZATION STUDIES

Mapping Christians

ComRes has completed a so-called ‘mapping’ study for the Church of England’s Evangelism Task Force, interviewing 8,150 adult Britons online between 17 and 31 March 2017, and identifying that 50% professed to be Christians, 7% non-Christians, and 42% religious nones (peaking at 57% of 18-24s). Christians (n = 4,190, 56% of them Anglican) and former Christians (n = 84) were then asked a series of questions to measure their commitment to the faith. Among Christians, just 28% regarded themselves as ‘an active Christian who follows Jesus’, 63% not, with 9% unsure. More specifically, 40% of Christians claimed to pray at least monthly and 29% never; 19% to attend church at least monthly and 33% never; and 18% to read or listen to the Bible at least monthly and 55% never. Across the whole sample, 6% of adults were categorized by ComRes as ‘practising Christians’, defined as people who satisfied the triple test of reading the Bible and praying at least weekly and attending church at least monthly. Almost certainly, these claims to religious practice were overstated by respondents. Full data tables, extending to 155 pages, can be found at:

http://www.comresglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Church-of-England-Church-Mapping-Survey-Data-Tables.pdf

Food poverty

The Church Urban Fund has recently released the results of an online poll about food poverty, which it commissioned ComRes to undertake among a sample of 2,048 adult Britons on 4-5 January 2017. The survey covered the incidence of particular financial and food anxieties and deprivations during the previous twelve months, which were generally found to be higher among non-Christians than for Christians or religious nones. Data tables are available at:

http://www.comresglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Church-Urban-Fund-Food-Poverty-Survey-Data-Tables.pdf

Church of England ministry statistics

The Church of England has released the latest annual reports on the number of its clergy and ordinands. The 25-page Ministry Statistics, 2016 shows a total of 19,550 active ordained ministers, 2% fewer than in 2015, 29% of whom are women and 40% stipendiary. The single-slide report on ordinands records 544 entering training in 2017, the highest figure for ten years; this represents an overall increase of 14% on 2015 but 19% more women and 39% more young ordinands. The documents can be accessed via links in the press release at:

https://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2017/09/number-of-women-in-ordained-ministry-at-record-high.aspx

Living Ministry

The Church of England’s Ministry Division has published the first results from its Living Ministry project: Liz Graveling and Olga Cara, Mapping the Wellbeing of Church of England Clergy and Ordinands: Panel Survey Wave 1 Report. The project is a longitudinal panel study involving a large-scale quantitative online survey every two years among four cohorts of clergy (those ordained deacon in 2006, 2011, and 2015 and those who commenced training in 2016) together with smaller-scale qualitative research. It will run from 2016 to 2026. There were 761 respondents to wave 1, equivalent to 38% of the cohort population. Overall, levels of wellbeing were found to be positive for each domain (financial and material; physical and mental; relationships; and ministerial). Gender was a less significant factor than age in explaining differences. The report is available at:

http://www.ministrydevelopment.org.uk/UserFiles/File/Research_Consult/Living_Ministry_Panel_Survey_Wave_1_Report.pdf

Coincidentally, King’s Business School at King’s College London has published a summative report on the Experiences of Ministry project, the forerunner of Living Ministry: Mike Clinton and Tim Ling, Effective Ministerial Presence and What It Looks Like in Practice: Insights from the Experiences of Ministry Project, 2011-17. This earlier project captured the views of 6,000 Church of England clergy through a series of national surveys, as well as conducting in-depth interviews and collecting week-long daily diaries. Like Living Ministry, it also addressed clergy wellbeing, revealing that it compared favourably with other occupational groups. A full-length book on the findings of Experiences of Ministry is promised for 2018. Meanwhile, the summative report is available at:

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/business/assets/PDF/Effective-Ministerial-Presence-Brochure-final.pdf

Church in Wales statistics

At its meeting in Lampeter on 14 September 2017, the Church in Wales Governing Body received the annual report on membership and finances for 2016. The overall picture was more negative than positive, with particular decline from 2015 in Easter communicants (down 6%), baptisms (down 8%), and confirmations (down 21%), as well as a fall (for the fifth year in succession) in planned direct giving (the principal source of parochial income). In terms of membership indicators, growth was confined to Christmas communicants (up 2%), average under-18 worship attendance (up 3%), and average over-18 weekday attendance (up 5%). Congregations at ‘additional services’ also rose (by 4%). There was a continuing surplus of income over expenditure, notwithstanding increased outlay in 2016 as new projects were started, which was said to reflect growing confidence at the grass roots. In the Governing Body’s debate on the report, Revd Richard Wood of Bangor observed his plea in 2016 for the Church to cut out its dead wood had been met with ‘a stony silence’, and he urged it to ‘stop giving time, effort, energy, and money to that which has failed’. The report is available at:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/cinw/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/42416-CIW-Memberships-and-Finances-2016.pdf

Faith schools

The Fair Admissions Campaign (FAC), which wants all state-funded schools in England and Wales to be open to all children regardless of religion or belief, has updated its digest of research about faith schools and religious selection of pupils. Sources date from 2001 to the present and are arranged in reverse chronological order. They comprise a mixture of official reports, academic studies, investigations by faith bodies, and opinion polls. The digest is preceded by an overview (pp. 2-9) from FAC, which concludes: ‘religious selection is not popular. High-performing schools are popular. And the socio-economic selection brought about by religious selection often leads religiously selective schools to be high-performing schools.’ The 100-page document can be accessed at:

http://fairadmissions.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/2017-08-29-FINAL-Religious-Selection-Research-Survey.pdf

Religious education

The National Association of Teachers of Religious Education (NATRE), the Religious Education Council of England and Wales (REC), and RE Today Services have published The State of the Nation: A Report on Religious Education Provision within Secondary Schools in England. It is based on three datasets: an online survey of 790 schools; the Department for Education’s School Workforce Census for 2010-15; and entries for GCSE Religious Studies for 2014-16. The headline-grabbing finding (from the School Workforce Census) is that 28% of schools give no dedicated curriculum time to religious education in Year 11, in contravention of their statutory duties, and affecting 800,000 pupils. Two shorter supplementary reports by NATRE were issued at the same time: GCSE Religious Studies, 2014-2016 and Levels of Provision of Religious Education in Schools where Different Legal Requirements Apply. All three documents can be accessed via the links in the press release at:

https://www.natre.org.uk/news/latest-news/800-000-secondary-pupils-lose-out-on-religious-literacy/

The REC has separately published the interim report of the Commission on Religious Education (CORE), entitled Religious Education for All, which offers a comparable overview of provision, drawing upon the written and oral evidence presented to it, including statistics. CORE was initiated by REC but is independent and has recommended that religious education should encompass the teaching of non-religious as well as religious worldviews. Its report can be found at:

http://www.commissiononre.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Commission-on-Religious-Education-Interim-Report-2017.pdf

Scottish religiosity

An online poll of 1,016 Scottish adults aged 16 and over, conducted by Survation on behalf of the Humanist Society Scotland (HSS) between 8 and 12 September 2017, has revealed that just 24% of Scots regard themselves as religious, 72% saying they are not, with 4% declining to answer. This represents a reduction in the number of avowedly religious people in Scotland since 2011, when a study by Progressive/YouGov returned it as 35% (against 56% not religious). Based on this evidence, HSS is questioning the ways in which the population census and other religious surveys are being carried out, arriving at higher figures of Scottish religious adherence. Data tables from the Survation poll can be found at:

http://survation.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Final-HSS-Tables-1c0d1h6-080917MBJRFSTJNHCH-I.pdf

Scottish social capital

The contribution of faith communities in Scotland to its national life was celebrated in a debate of a motion tabled by Kate Forbes MSP in the Scottish Parliament on 12 September 2017, commending the achievements of the Serve Scotland coalition of community organizations. The debate was informed by an estimate that voluntary work by Scottish faith groups through social projects produces an economic impact of almost £100 million each year in terms of time and resources. For a transcript of the debate, see:

https://www.theyworkforyou.com/sp/?id=2017-09-12.11.0

For a press release from the Evangelical Alliance Scotland summarizing the background data, which derive from the Cinnamon Network, see:

https://www.eauk.org/current-affairs/media/press-releases/voluntary-work-from-scottish-faith-groups-produces-almost-100m-of-economic-impact-each-year.cfm

Anti-Semitism

What is claimed to be ‘the largest and most detailed survey of attitudes towards Jews and Israel ever conducted in Great Britain’ is reported in Daniel Staetsky, Antisemitism in Contemporary Great Britain: A Study of Attitudes towards Jews and Israel, published by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR). In partnership with the Community Security Trust, JPR commissioned Ipsos MORI to poll 5,466 Britons aged 16 and over by a combination of face-to-face and online interview between 28 October 2016 and 24 February 2017. The sample included boosts for Muslims, the far-left, and the far-right. Staetsky proposes an ‘elastic view’ of the extent of anti-Semitism in Britain, differentiating the counting of serious anti-Semites on the one hand (who number no more than 5% of the population) from the measurement of the diffusion of anti-Semitic ideas and attitudes (held to some extent by a further 25% of Britons) on the other, the latter not necessarily translating into open dislike of Jews. Hard-core negativity towards Israel was demonstrated by 12% of the population, with an additional 21% exhibiting softer negativity and a total of 56% holding at least one anti-Israel attitude (and 62% at least one anti-Israel and/or one anti-Semitic attitude). As a general rule, anti-Israel sentiments were not found to be anti-Semitic, but the stronger a person’s anti-Israel views, the more likely they were to hold anti-Semitic attitudes. Both anti-Semitic and anti-Israel attitudes were substantially higher among Muslims than in society at large. Somewhat counter-intuitively, despite current political discourses, this was not the case for left-wingers with regard to anti-Semitism (although it was for anti-Israelism). The 82-page report, incorporating a 16-page methodological section, is available at:

http://www.jpr.org.uk/documents/JPR.2017.Antisemitism_in_contemporary_Great_Britain.pdf

Jews and home help

Nine-tenths (91%) of 1,028 self-identifying British Jewish adults employ some kind of help around the home, according to a telephone poll by Survation in July 2017 on behalf of World Jewish Relief (WJR). The commonest form of domestic assistance was the cleaner, engaged by 65% of Jews, including 54% who have a cleaner in at least once a week and 20% several times a week. Other widespread types of help during the course of the year were window cleaners (59%), gardeners (51%), and handymen (41%). Least called on were chefs, au pairs, and carers. The majority (57%) of respondents said they would struggle without help in the home, lack of time being the principal reason given, especially by under-35s. Full data tables are not available, but WJR’s press release is at:

https://www.worldjewishrelief.org/news/512-91-of-jewish-community-employs-home-help-new-survey-reveals

OFFICIAL AND QUASI-OFFICIAL STATISTICS

Sikh ethnicity and the 2021 census

The Times for 12 September 2017 (p. 19) ran a short news story about a Sikh campaign to secure recognition of ‘Sikh’ as an ethnic, as well as a religious, group at the 2021 census of the UK, noting that 113 MPs had signed a letter to the chief executive of the UK Statistics Authority requesting the change. At the 2011 census, more than 83,000 Sikhs refused to choose one of the listed options in the question on ethnicity, preferring to write in ‘Sikh’ in the space for ‘any other ethnic group’.

The story was followed up in several letters to the editor. On 13 September (p. 28), Malathy Sitaram, a retired schoolteacher from Swindon, wrote to express surprise that some UK Sikhs declined to be recognized as Indians, arguing that Hindu Punjabis and Sikh Punjabis speak the same language and frequently intermarry. In similar vein, on 14 September (p. 32), Randhir Singh Bains wrote from Gants Hill to deny that Sikhs were an ethnic group, as opposed to being Punjabis, and to suggest that the leaders of the campaign to designate Sikhs as such a group were Sikh separatists who wanted to carve a Sikh state out of India. But on 18 September (p. 28), Surinder Singh Bakhshi of Birmingham reminded the readers of The Times of Lord Templeton’s judgement in the House of Lords in the case of Mandla v. Dowell Lee in 1983, that Sikhs were an ethnic group and, indeed, almost a nation.

In the background, the Office for National Statistics ran a census test in Hounslow and Wolverhampton in 2017 on Sikhs as an ethnic group, the interim report on which suggested: ‘There is no indication from the findings that the religious affiliation and ethnic group questions are capturing different Sikh populations. All respondents who stated they were ethnically Sikh also stated their religious affiliation was Sikh.’ The report is available at:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/census/censustransformationprogramme/progressanddevelopment/questiondevelopment/summaryreport2017ethnicgroupquestiontestsikhethnicgroupandreligiousaffiliationfindings

Religious slaughter

The number of animals killed without pre-stunning has risen sharply since 2013, when European Union and UK legislation allowing an exemption from humane slaughter on religious grounds (to meet the requirements of Jews and Muslims) came into force. This is according to an analysis by the British Veterinary Association (BVA) of the Food Standards Agency’s report on animal welfare for the quarter April-June 2017, which revealed that 18% of poultry and 24% of sheep and goats are now slaughtered without pre-stunning. The BVA’s press release, including a link to the Agency’s report, is at:

https://www.bva.co.uk/news-campaigns-and-policy/newsroom/news-releases/grave-concern-over-rise-in-animals-killed-without-stunning/

ACADEMIC STUDIES

Science and religion (1)

New data on public attitudes to evolution in the UK and Canada were released by the Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum project at the 2017 British Science Festival in Brighton. The UK fieldwork was conducted online by YouGov on behalf of Newman University among 2,129 adults aged 16 and over between 12 May and 6 June 2017.

The majority (71%) of all UK respondents, and even 62% of those identifying as religious or spiritual, accepted evolutionary (natural selection) or theistic (divinely guided) evolutionary accounts of the origin of species, including humans. Only 9% of the whole sample, and 16% of religious or spiritual, selected the creationist statement that ‘humans and other living things were created by God and have always existed in their current form’. Similarly, just 12% in the UK found it difficult to accept evolutionary science in relation to their personal beliefs, and no more than 19% of the religious or spiritual. Paradoxically, though, a bigger proportion (28%) in the UK agreed with the proposition that ‘animals evolve over time but evolutionary science cannot explain the origin of human beings’, suggesting a degree of confusion on the subject in some minds.

Various other facets of religion were illuminated by the study. Approximately half the UK interviewees were not religiously disposed: 52% professed to be neither religious nor spiritual (atheist, non-religious, agnostic, and freethinker being the commonest self-descriptions, in that order of priority); 50% expressed no real interest in religion or spirituality; and for 54% religion did not play an important part in shaping their identity and worldview. When it came to experts, theologians were perceived as reliable by 38% of the entire population and 49% of the religious or spiritual; they actually ranked bottom out of 15 professions in terms of reliability and were well beaten by evolutionary scientists (72%). A press release, with links to a (rather ‘busy’) summary report and full data tables, can be found at:

https://sciencereligionspectrum.org/in-the-news/press-release-results-of-major-new-survey-on-evolution/

Science and religion (2)

The interaction between science and religion was further illuminated in another multinational survey by Ipsos MORI on behalf of the Scientific and Medical Network, and funded by the Salvia Foundation. Online interviews were conducted in November-December 2016 with samples of 1,000 science, engineering, medical, or technical research professionals in each of three countries – France, Germany, and the UK. In the UK, 45% of respondents were categorized as religious or spiritual, comprising 13% practising religious, 18% non-practising religious, and 14% self-describing as spiritual but not belonging to a religion; an equivalent number (46%) were atheist or agnostic. The proportion for whom religion or spirituality was important to the way they led their lives was smaller (35%) than the total of professing religious or spiritual, 14% saying very important and 21% fairly important. Religious observance was relatively low, attendance at religious services at least monthly being reported by 13% and prayer at least weekly by 17%. Asked about the relationship between science and religion, 44% of UK scientists thought the two fields were independent and could not be compared; 21% saw science and religion as complementary; and 25% viewed them as mutually exclusive, contradicting each other. The pattern of replies for the relationship between science and spirituality was not dissimilar, albeit the figure for mutually exclusive dropped to 16%. Partial data tables (with breaks within country by gender, age, marital status, and highest educational qualification) are available at:

https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2017-09/science-spirituality-professions-tables-2017.pdf

British religion and the Second World War

Mass Observation, the independent social research organization established in 1937 to investigate the anthropology of everyday life in Britain, consciously set out to create an archive of life on the home front during the Second World War. Religion was not neglected, and its outputs in this area have been surveyed in a recent presentation by Clive Field: ‘British Religion and the Second World War: An Audit of Sources in the Mass Observation Archive’. Although best known for its qualitative and ethnographic research methods, Mass Observation did also deploy statistical techniques, especially to analyse replies from its self-selecting and demographically unrepresentative national panel of observers and from direct and indirect interviews with samples of the general population. The presentation is available at:

https://clivedfield.wordpress.com/presentations/

NEW DATASETS AT UK DATA SERVICE

SN 8244: Annual Population Survey Three-Year Pooled Dataset, January 2014-December 2016

The Annual Population Survey is compiled by the Office for National Statistics in partnership with the devolved administrations in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. It incorporates a sub-set of key variables from the several Labour Force Surveys and is designed to be sufficiently robust and large-scale to produce reliable estimates at local authority level. The three-year merged dataset for 2014-16 is based on 543,298 face-to-face and telephone interviews with adults and young persons living away from the parental home. A question on religious affiliation is included: ‘what is your religion?’ in Britain and ‘what is your religious denomination?’ in Northern Ireland. A catalogue description of the dataset is available at:

https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=8244&type=Data%20catalogue

SN 8252: British Social Attitudes Survey, 2016

The British Social Attitudes (BSA) Survey, 2016 was conducted between July and November of that year by NatCen Social Research on behalf of a consortium of Government departments and charitable funders. There were 2,942 respondents, who were interviewed face-to-face and by self-completion questionnaire. The standard background questions about religious affiliation (current and by upbringing) and attendance at religious services were included, which can be used as variables to analyse replies to all elements of the main questionnaire (covering politics, welfare, health, education, transport, official statistics, employment, trade unions, and retirement and pensions). An analysis by religion of the replies to the morality-related questions inserted by NatCen (especially attitudes to voluntary euthanasia, abortion, and capital punishment) is likely to prove rewarding. The only other specifically religious content will be found in the self-completion questionnaires for sub-samples A and C, which were asked about the influence of religious organizations and other bodies on government actions and their role in the provision of public services. A catalogue description of the dataset is available at:

https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=8252&type=Data%20catalogue

Just before the release of this dataset at UKDA, NatCen published a press release about the religious affiliation question, showing that a record number of Britons (53%) professed to belong to no religion in 2016, rising to 71% among 18-24-year-olds (contrasting with just 27% of over-75s). The decline in religious affiliation has been relentless since BSA began in 1983, the Church of England having been particularly badly affected, with the Anglican market share now reduced to 15%, half the number in 2000. The press release, with a link to trend data tables, can be found at:

http://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media-centre/latest-press-releases/bsa-34-record-number-of-brits-with-no-religion.aspx

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

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Counting Religion in Britain, June 2017

Posted on July 2, 2017 by Clive D. Field

Counting Religion in Britain, No. 21, June 2017 features 23 new sources. It can be read in full below. Alternatively, you can download the PDF version: No 21 June 2017

OPINION POLLS

Religion and the general election

The actual political alignment of the principal religious groups at the general election held on 8 June 2017 was recorded by Lord Ashcroft in a poll of 14,384 electors who had voted by post or in person. Fieldwork was conducted in Britain (excluding Northern Ireland) on 6-9 June through a combination of telephone and online interviews. As the table below indicates, Christians were disproportionately likely to support the Conservatives, largely a function of the older age profile of Christians, while non-Christians and religious nones were inclined to favour Labour. The pro-Labour stance of non-Christians, which was far greater than in 2015, tracked the traditional pro-Labour allegiance of black and minority ethnic communities, albeit it was ten points less than the 2017 BME figure (as a consequence of the strongly pro-Conservative leanings of Jews). The pro-Labour stance of nones reflected their relative youth and Labour’s success in 2017 in reaching out to young people generally. The distribution of all votes is naturally affected by the collapse in UKIP support since 2015. A substantial minority of all the faith groups indicated that they had made up their minds about how to vote within a week of polling day: 33% of Christians, 38% of non-Christians, and 34% of nones. Data tables are available at:

http://lordashcroftpolls.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/GE-post-vote-poll-Full-tables.pdf

% down	All voters	Christians	Non-Christians	Religious Nones
2017 general election
Conservative	41.3	51.5	27.7	29.4
Labour	39.1	31.2	56.8	47.6
Liberal Democrat	9.2	8.5	8.6	10.2
UKIP	2.9	3.1	1.2	2.9
Another party	7.4	5.7	5.6	9.9
2015 general election(recalled vote)
Conservative	37.0	44.9	30.2	26.8
Labour	30.6	26.3	42.6	35.0
Liberal Democrat	9.8	8.4	10.0	11.6
UKIP	12.3	13.8	7.6	11.0
Another party	10.4	6.7	9.7	15.6

Meanwhile, two pre-election polls by Opinium Research had investigated the voting intentions and attitudes to political issues of members of the UK’s black and ethnic minorities. Online fieldwork was conducted between 2 and 7 May and between 30 May and 1 June with, respectively, 511 and 607 respondents. The answers to all questions were disaggregated by religious affiliation, with the sub-samples of Christians (29% averaged across the two surveys), Muslims (28%), and religious nones (28%) being sufficiently large to be statistically robust. Full data tables can be accessed via the links in the blog post at:

http://opinium.co.uk/political-polling-ethnic-minorities-30th-may-2017/

Personal religious beliefs of politicians

One casualty of the 2017 general election was Tim Farron. Although re-elected to Parliament, he stood down as leader of the Liberal Democrats immediately afterwards, citing the difficulty of reconciling his Christian beliefs with serving as a political leader, his views on whether or not homosexuality is a sin having become a focus of the initial stages of the election campaign. Asked more generically, in an online poll by YouGov on 15 June 2017, about politicians who found their party’s ideology at odds with their personal religious views, 46% of the 5,526 Britons questioned felt that politicians should stay true to their religious convictions compared with 20% wanting them to privilege the party ideology (the remaining 34% were undecided). Conservatives (59%) and over-65s (62%) particularly wanted politicians to put their religion first, whereas 18-24s (26%) and Liberal Democrats (27%) placed above-average emphasis on fidelity to party ideology. Results are available at:

https://yougov.co.uk/opi/surveys/results#/survey/38a3a410-51ad-11e7-81f3-2ab0a50a8b9c

Forces for good

Lord Ashcroft’s poll covered a range of other political issues, the results for which were disaggregated by the three principal religious groups. The following table shows the proportion of each ranking, on a scale running from 0 to 10, certain trends as a force for ill (0-4), a mixed blessing (5), or a force for good (6-10). The higher the mean score, the more positive the group was towards the trend concerned. Reflecting their relatively elderly profile, Christians emerged as the community with the least progressive views, their conservatism exemplified in their disproportionate enthusiasm for capitalism. The internet was seen as the most positive development by all groups, albeit nones were also especially attracted to the green movement.

Mean scores	All voters	Christians	Non-Christians	Religious Nones
Multiculturalism	5.42	4.92	6.51	5.93
Social liberalism	5.66	5.16	6.29	6.27
Feminism	6.37	6.01	6.39	6.87
Green movement	6.40	5.90	6.87	7.00
Globalization	5.46	5.41	5.82	5.47
Internet	7.03	6.92	7.22	7.17
Capitalism	5.35	5.61	5.21	5.02
Immigration	4.97	4.51	5.88	5.45

Religious affiliation

The most recent data on religious affiliation derive from an aggregate of five online Populus polls during May 2017 and the online component of Lord Ashcroft’s post-vote general election survey (noted above). The question was: ‘to which of the following religious groups do you consider yourself to be a member?’ Results are tabulated below.

	%
Christian	52.3
Muslim	2.1
Hindu	0.6
Jew	0.7
Sikh	0.2
Buddhist	0.6
Other non-Christian	1.6
No religion	40.2
Prefer not to say	1.7
N =	23,477

Humanism

Marking its relaunch as Humanists UK, the British Humanist Association (BHA) has recently released the second tranche of findings from a survey it commissioned last year, for which 4,085 Britons aged 18 and over were interviewed online by YouGov on 28-29 July 2016. They revealed that 44% professed to belong to no religion, one-half being cradle nones and one-third raised as Anglicans. One-third of the whole sample met the BHA’s definition of being a humanist, as reflected in their selection of the humanist answer to three statement options (these answers were: ‘science and evidence provide the best way to understand the universe’; ‘what is right and wrong depends on the effects on people and the consequences for society and the world’; and ‘our empathy and compassion give an understanding of what is right and wrong’). The proportion meeting the definition varied significantly by age, from 46% of under-25s falling to 23% of over-55s. Of those fulfilling the criteria, 72% self-identified as humanists, 8% did not, with 19% uncertain. Interestingly, one-third of the sub-sample holding humanist beliefs actually claimed to belong to some religion, leading the BHA to conclude that 22% of the population are real humanists in (a) being non-religious and (b) subscribing to humanist beliefs. Full data tables can be accessed via the link in the press release at:

https://humanism.org.uk/2017/06/15/new-poll-shows-one-in-five-are-humanists-and-a-third-hold-humanist-beliefs/

God

One-half of adults either believe in God (17%) or some form of god or spirit (33%), according to an app-based survey by YouGov published on 15 June 2017. The plurality (45%) believes there is no kind of god or spirit, only the material world, while 5% venture other replies. Topline results are available at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/06/15/who-should-be-included-brexit-talks-god-vs-materia/

The same proportion of the population as believe in God or a spirit, 50% of 5,526 Britons interviewed online by YouGov on 15 June 2017, still consider it appropriate that the national anthem includes references to God, just 22% saying it is wrong (with 28% uncertain). The greatest level of support for the divine appearance in the national anthem is recorded among UKIP voters (67%), Conservatives (68%), and over-65s (69%), while Labour voters (33%), Scots (36%), and Scottish Nationalists (46%) are most inclined to think it wrong for God to be invoked in the national anthem. Results, disaggregated by standard demographics, are at:

https://yougov.co.uk/opi/surveys/results#/survey/38a3a410-51ad-11e7-81f3-2ab0a50a8b9c

Faith-based schools

Government plans to abolish the present cap preventing new faith-based schools from recruiting more than half their pupils on religious grounds find little favour with the electorate, according to a Populus poll on behalf of the Accord Coalition, for which 2,033 Britons were interviewed online on 5-7 May 2017. Forced to choose, four-fifths of respondents supported the status quo, including majorities of adherents of the two denominations (Church of England and Roman Catholic Church) which have the most faith schools. Just 20% in both Britain and England agreed that new state-funded faith schools should be allowed to select up to 100% of their pupils on the basis of faith, albeit this option appealed to 33% of Catholics and even higher proportions of the rather small numbers of Muslims and Jews in the sample. Full data tables are available at:

http://accordcoalition.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Religious-Schools-Survey.pdf

Inter-faith relations

A majority (53%) of young people aged 18-24 sense that religious intolerance in Britain has increased during the past five years, according to an online poll of 1,002 of them undertaken by ICM Unlimited on behalf of Hope Not Hate and the National Union of Teachers between 30 May and 1 June 2017. Just 18% thought religious intolerance was decreasing, with 13% detecting no change and 16% undecided. Asked about relations between particular faith communities, 30% assessed that Christians and Muslims do not get along with each other, compared with 33% saying the same about people of no faith and Muslims, and 19% about people with no faith and people with faith. Data tables are available at:

https://www.icmunlimited.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017_hopenothate_18-24s_poll.pdf

Attitudes to Islam

In an eight-nation study for Handelsblatt, undertaken online by YouGov between 21 May and 6 June 2017, a plurality (47%) of the 1,974 Britons interviewed detected a fundamental clash between Islam and the values of their society. This was much the same proportion as in the United States (45%) and France (48%), albeit it fell short of the majorities recorded in Germany (53%), Sweden (56%), Denmark (59%), Norway (59%), and Finland (60%). Just under one-quarter (23%) of Britons perceived Islam as generally compatible with British values, while 15% agreed with neither option and 16% did not know what to think. Topline results are available on p. 23 of the data tables at:

http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/1eqs14w9mx/HandelsblattResults_Topline_May2017_tracked_W.pdf

Simultaneously, in YouGov’s app-based survey published on 21 June 2017, a majority of Britons acknowledged that British society was very (5%) or somewhat (54%) Islamophobic. A minority considered that it was not really (31%) or not at all (8%) Islamophobic. Topline results only are available at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/06/21/islamophobia-uk-brexit-talks-divorce-bill-and-futu/

Islamist terrorism

In the wake of the deadly Islamist attacks in Manchester on 22 May and London on 3 June 2017, 52% of Britons thought most British Muslim leaders could be doing a lot more to stop British Muslims being radicalized and to combat terrorism. The proportion was especially high among over-65s and Conservatives (66% each) and UKIP voters (76%). Just under one-third (29%) of the 2,130 adults interviewed online by YouGov for The Times on 5-7 June 2017 believed the Muslim leadership was doing all it reasonably could while 19% were unable to express an opinion. In a supplementary question, 7% of respondents claimed to have had difficult or embarrassing conversations with Muslim friends or colleagues in recent years on the subject of extremism or terrorism, and this was especially likely to have been the case in London (12%). Full data tables are available at:

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/d8zsb99eyd/TimesResults_FINAL%20CALL_GB_June2017_W.pdf

In a separate app-based poll by YouGov published on 6 June 2017, 75% of adults agreed that, in the light of recent terror attacks, Britain should be less tolerant of the rights of radical Islamists to express themselves. The topline result only is available at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/06/06/terrorism-and-general-election/

In the early hours of 19 June 2017, a van deliberately ploughed into worshippers who had just attended Ramadan prayers outside the Finsbury Park mosque in London, killing one person and injuring nine others. Eyewitness reports suggested that the van’s driver had vowed to kill Muslims. The authorities at the mosque criticized the media for initially failing to report the incident as terror-related. Quizzed online later the same day, 59% of 4,305 respondents to a YouGov app-based poll agreed that the attack outside the mosque could properly be described as an act of terrorism, with 23% dissenting and 18% uncertain. Results, with breaks by demographics, are available at:

https://yougov.co.uk/opi/surveys/results#/survey/75c6bfe0-54db-11e7-862a-1eb0da735179

Jewish opinions

In the May 2017 issue of Counting Religion in Britain, we reported on the initial results from a telephone poll of 515 self-identifying British Jews undertaken by Survation for the Jewish Chronicle on 21-26 May 2017. In its edition of 9 June 2017 (pp. 1-2), the newspaper headlined the findings from two additional questions. The first concerned the extent to which respondents were optimistic or pessimistic about the future of Jews in the UK; a plurality (47%) felt very or quite optimistic while 23% were pessimistic and 26% neutral on the subject. In the second question, the sample was asked whether they sensed that Israel was heading in the right or wrong direction under the leadership of its Prime Minister, Benjamin (‘Bibi’) Netanyahu; another plurality (41%) perceived the direction to be right against 33% saying it was wrong and 26% undecided. No data tables are in the public domain, as yet, but the newspaper’s coverage can be read at:

https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-jewish-chronicle/20170609/281500751225361

FAITH ORGANIZATION STUDIES

Methodist statistics for mission

Methodist membership in Britain has declined by 3.5% year-on-year during the decade to 31 October 2016, now standing at 188,398, according to the Methodist Church’s latest triennial Statistics for Mission report. Net losses over the triennium were split between recruitment losses (55%) and retention losses (45%). Average weekly (Sunday and weekday) attendances at services are 202,100, only 14% of whom are by young people, with an estimated 500,000 individuals present at non-service activities. The 22-page report is available at:

http://www.methodist.org.uk/media/2625881/conf-2017-42-Statistics-for-Mission.pdf

Christians against Poverty

Christians against Poverty (CAP)’s Client Report for 2016 draws upon the charity’s client databases and 1,217 responses to its annual debt help survey, undertaken by post and online between September and November 2016. Low income is the most frequently-cited cause of debt, followed by relationship breakdown and mental ill-health. The mean annual household income of CAP’s new clients in 2016 was £14,700, a real-terms decrease on the 2015 figure, compared with the national average of £26,300. The overwhelming majority (89%) of clients had income below the national average and 63% were living below the poverty line. By the time they had sought CAP’s help, they had amassed outstanding debt balances equivalent to 97% of their annual income. The report can be downloaded from:

https://capuk.org/fileserver/downloads/policy_and_government/client_report.pdf

OFFICIAL AND QUASI-OFFICIAL STATISTICS

Armed forces diversity statistics

The proportion of UK service personnel professing no religion is continuing to grow steadily and, as at 1 April 2017, the proportion stood at just under one-quarter for both the regular forces and the reserves. In the case of regular forces, the figure was highest for the Royal Navy (30%) and lowest for the Army (21%). Further information is available in the Ministry of Defence’s latest biannual diversity statistics report at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-armed-forces-biannual-diversity-statistics-2017

Religiously aggravated offending in Scotland

The number of charges relating to religious prejudice brought in Scotland in 2016-17 under the two relevant statutes was 719, representing an increase of 12% on the 642 in 2015-16. Roman Catholicism was the religion most often the subject of reported abuse, with 384 charges in 2016-17, 28% more than the year before, albeit not as high as in previous years. Charges related to Protestantism amounted to 165, to Islam 113, and to Judaism 23. Glasgow had the biggest concentration of charges (30%). The majority (91%) of all charges involved male accused. Full details are contained in the 24-page report by Rebecca Foster and Katherine Myant, Religiously Aggravated Offending in Scotland, 2016-17, which can be downloaded from:

https://beta.gov.scot/publications/religiously-aggravated-offending-scotland-2016-2017/

ACADEMIC STUDIES

British Social Attitudes Survey

NatCen Social Research has published the report on British Social Attitudes Survey, 34, which took place between July and November 2016. Interviews were achieved with 2,942 adults aged 18 and over, with some questions put to the full sample and others to part (one-third or two-thirds) samples. The standard questions on religious affiliation and attendance at religious services were included, the former revealing that 53% of respondents professed to belong to no religion, with 15% being Anglicans, 9% Roman Catholics, 17% other Christians, and 6% non-Christians. Other questions on religion do not appear to have been asked. Media coverage of the report has focused disproportionately on the chapter by Kirby Swales and Eleanor Attar Taylor (pp. 85-126) dealing with moral issues, notably on the continued growth in social liberalism with regard to pre-marital sex, same-sex relationships, abortion, and pornography (attitudes to euthanasia remain largely unchanged). This greater liberalism has been increasingly embraced by Christians, notably in terms of same-sex relationships, although across all the topics examined people with a religion were still less likely to hold liberal views than those with no religion (to a significant extent, this probably tracks the social conservatism of older people, who are disproportionately religious). These differences would doubtless be accentuated if only practising religious were considered; however, as the dataset from the survey has not yet been made available, this level of analysis cannot be undertaken at present. The remaining chapters concern tax and benefit manipulation, the role of government, civil liberties, Brexit, and immigration but have no religious content. The published report can be found at:

http://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media/39196/bsa34_full-report_fin.pdf

European Social Survey

Since its inauguration in 2002, the European Social Survey (ESS) has proved a useful source of data on a limited range of religious topics across the twenty or so countries (including the United Kingdom) covered in each wave. Some of its potential in this regard is illustrated in three of the sixteen chapters in Values and Identities in Europe: Evidence from the European Social Survey, edited by Michael Breen (London: Routledge, 2017, xxv + 314 pp., ISBN: 978-1-138-22666-1, hardback, £110). One, by Ryan Cragun (pp. 17-35), is a case study of secularization in Ireland while the other two chapters focus on analyses at aggregate level of Round 6 of ESS (2012): Anna Kulkova, ‘Religiosity and Political Participation across Europe’ (pp. 36-57) and Caillin Reynolds, ‘Religion and Values in the ESS: Individual and Societal Effects’ (pp. 58-73). Few UK-specific statistics are cited. The book’s webpage is at:

https://www.routledge.com/Values-and-Identities-in-Europe-Evidence-from-the-European-Social-Survey/Breen/p/book/9781138226661

Anglican church growth

In ‘Intentionality, Numerical Growth, and the Rural Church’ (Rural Theology, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2017, pp. 2-11), David Voas revisits a survey he conducted in 2013 as part of the Church of England’s Church Growth Research Programme. This found no strong connection between numerical growth and worship style or theological tradition, the crucial factor being that congregations engage in reflection and make intentional choices about their future direction. The quantitative and qualitative evidence for that conclusion is summarized in this article and implications explored for rural churches, which are often conservative in character. To the extent that congregations are inward-looking, follow inherited practice, and resist change, Voas contends, it may be difficult for them to avoid stagnation or decline. Thus, the revitalization of tradition is a challenge for rural clergy and parishioners. Access options to the article are outlined at:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14704994.2017.1298265

Jewish vote

In two recent posts on his blog, University of Leicester academic Daniel Allington applies regression analysis to the results of the 2017 general election for the twenty British constituencies with the highest Jewish population at the 2011 census. He concludes that:

Many Jewish voters very probably turned away from the Labour Party between 2015 and 2017 (in the light of perceived anti-Semitism within the Party)
There is no indication that these lost voters switched to the Conservative Party in 2017
These voters seem rather more likely to have voted for the Liberal Democrats

The posts can be found at:

http://www.danielallington.net/2017/06/electoral-cost-left-wing-antisemitism/

http://www.danielallington.net/2017/06/jewish-voters-labour-conservative-liberal-democrat/

Roman Catholicism in the 1970s and 1980s

In a letter to The Tablet (10 June 2017, p. 17), sociologist of religion Mike Hornsby-Smith expressed concern about the long-term future of the archive of his quantitative and qualitative research into English Roman Catholicism in the 1970s and 1980s. This had led to countless published outputs, including two substantial books: Roman Catholics in England: Studies in Social Structure since the Second World War (1987) and Roman Catholic Beliefs in England: Customary Catholicism and Transformations of Religious Authority (1991). The archive had been deposited in the library of Heythrop College, part of the University of London. However, arising from financial challenges and following the failure of partnership discussions with, successively, St Mary’s University Twickenham and the University of Roehampton, the Jesuits in Britain have decided to close the College at the end of the 2017/18 academic year and have already sold the College buildings to a property developer. None of the College’s academic departments is relocating to another higher education institution and no firm plans are yet in place to secure the future of the College’s extensive and important library and archive, other than, in the short term, to pack it up and move it offsite somewhere. Hornsby-Smith has also deposited his own personal diaries, of a Catholic layman from the 1950s to the present, at the library.

Living by Numbers

The vital contribution which ideas of number, magnitude, and frequency make in shaping our everyday lives is rehearsed in Steven Connor, Living by Numbers: In Defence of Quantity (London: Reaktion Books, 2016, 296 pp., ISBN: 9781780236469, £15, hardback). The book’s webpage is at:

http://www.reaktionbooks.co.uk/display.asp?ISB=9781780236469&nat=false&stem=true&sf1=keyword&st1=Living%2Bby%2Bnumbers&m=2&dc=13

NEW DATASETS AT UK DATA SERVICE

SN 8165: Active People Survey, 2015-2016

The Active People Survey, inaugurated in 2005-06, is commissioned by Sport England to gauge participation in sport and active recreation. Wave 10, conducted by TNS BMRB between 1 October 2015 and 30 September 2016, achieved 164,458 telephone interviews with adults aged 14 and over throughout England. The demographic questions asked of a random 50% of respondents included two on religion: ‘what is you religion, even if you are not currently practising?’ and ‘do you consider that you are actively practising your religion?’ A catalogue description of the dataset is at:

https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=8165&type=Data%20catalogue

SN 8188: Scottish Social Attitudes Survey, 2015

The 2015 Scottish Social Attitudes Survey was undertaken by ScotCen Social Research, on behalf of the Scottish Government and other public sector funders, between July 2015 and January 2016. Face-to-face interviews and self-completion questionnaires were achieved with 1,288 adults aged 18 and over in Scotland. The survey instrument included a special module on discrimination and positive action, which had last been run in 2010, and which explored, among other things, opinions of religious groups in respect of long-term relationships, employment, and religious dress. Particular attention was paid to attitudes towards Muslims. Additionally, there were the standard background variables on religious affiliation and religion of upbringing and, for those with a religion, frequency of attendance at religious services or meetings other than for the rites of passage. A catalogue description of the dataset is at:

https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=8188&type=Data%20catalogue

A report on the discrimination module – Scottish Social Attitudes, 2015: Attitudes to Discrimination and Positive Action – was published by the Scottish Government in September 2016. This is separately available at:

http://www.ssa.natcen.ac.uk/media/38903/attitudes-to-discrimination-and-positive-action-2015.pdf

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

Posted in Attitudes towards Religion, Historical studies, News from religious organisations, Official data, Religion and Ethnicity, Religion and Politics, Religion and Social Capital, Religion in public debate, Religious beliefs, Religious prejudice, Survey news | Tagged Accord Coalition, Active People Survey, armed forces, Benjamin Netanyahu, black and minority ethnic voters, British Humanist Association, British Muslim leaders, British Social Attitudes Survey, British values, Christians against Poverty, church growth, Church of England, Daniel Allington, David Voas, debt, discrimination, Eleanor Attar Taylor, European Social Survey, Faith schools, Finsbury Park mosque, forces for good, fundamental clash, general election, God, Handelsblatt, Heythrop College, Hope Not Hate, humanism, Humanists UK, ICM Unlimited, inter-faith relations, Islam, Islamist terrorism, Islamophobia, Israel, Jewish Chronicle, Jews, Katherine Myant, Kirby Swales, Liberal Democrats, Lord Ashcroft, Methodist Church, Michael Breen, Mike Hornsby-Smith, Ministry of Defence, morality, NatCen Social Research, national anthem, National Union of Teachers, Opinium Research, party ideology, political leaders, politics, Populus, poverty, Reaktion Books, Rebecca Foster, Religious Affiliation, religious intolerance, religious prejudice, religiously aggravated offending, Roman Catholic Church, Routledge, Rural Theology, Scotland, Scottish Government, Scottish Social Attitudes Survey, social liberalism, Steven Connor, Survation, terrorism, The Times, Tim Farron, voting, YouGov | Leave a comment

Counting Religion in Britain, May 2017

Posted on June 2, 2017 by Clive D. Field

Counting Religion in Britain, No. 20, May 2017 features 27 new sources. It can be read in full below. Alternatively, you can download the PDF version: No 20 May 2017

OPINION POLLS

Global Trends, 2017

Results from the second wave of the Ipsos MORI Global Trends Survey (the first wave being in 2013) have recently been published, based on online interviews with 18,180 adults aged 16-64 across 23 countries between 12 September and 11 October 2016, including 1,000 in Great Britain. Abbreviated topline results for the three specifically religious questions are tabulated below, for Great Britain, the United States, and the all-country mean. They confirm the international relative irreligiosity of Britons. Britain ranked eighteenth on interest in having a more spiritual dimension in life and nineteenth on the importance attached to religion. Full topline data can be found at:

https://www.ipsosglobaltrends.com/data/

% down	Great Britain	United States	All countries
Religious affiliation
No religion	48	18	26
Spiritual but not religious	5	11	8
Christian	41	62	47
Non-Christian	5	9	19
Interest in having more spiritual dimension in daily life
Agree	40	67	58
Disagree	53	28	35
Neither/don’t know	7	5	7
Religion/faith very important
Agree	30	68	53
Disagree	65	28	41
Neither/don’t know	5	4	6

Supernatural beliefs

The incidence of various supernatural beliefs has been gauged by BMG Research in an online poll of 1,630 Britons on 13-16 May 2017. Topline results are tabulated below, revealing a span of belief from 16% in astrology to 51% in karma. Disbelievers outnumbered believers with regard to astrology, ghosts/spirits, and life after death. Women were far more likely to believe than men, apart from in life on other planets, when the positions were reversed. In terms of age, and somewhat curiously, the greatest level of belief in life after death was actually among under-35s (39%), falling away through successive cohorts to reach 21% for the over-75s. A similar pattern obtained for belief in life on other planets, held by 55% of under-35s. Breaks were also given for social grade and past voting (in the general election and European Union Referendum). Data tables are at:

http://www.bmgresearch.co.uk/british-public-reveal-beliefs-new-survey/

% across	Believe	Disbelieve	Unsure
Karma	51	30	19
Life on other planets	49	22	29
Fate/destiny	47	34	19
Ghosts/spirits	36	41	23
Life after death	34	36	30
Astrology/horoscopes	16	66	17

Trust in the Church

The Church ranked seventeenth in nfpSynergy’s latest survey of public trust in 24 institutions. Of the 1,000 Britons aged 16 and over interviewed online in February 2017, 33% said they trusted the Church a great deal (9%) or quite a lot (24%) while 58% trusted it not much (28%) or very little (30%). The most trusted institutions were the National Health Service (71%) and the armed forces (70%), the least trusted multinational companies (18%) and political parties (12%). A report on the survey can be downloaded from:

https://nfpsynergy.net/free-report/trust-charities-and-other-public-institutions-may-2017

Churches and communities

Despite their scepticism about the Church as a national institution, one-half of UK adults claim they would consider the closure of their nearest church a significant loss to their local community and one-third would campaign against its closure (the same proportion who said they would provide financial support if their local church experienced financial difficulties). This is according to research commissioned by Ecclesiastical Insurance from OnePoll, for which 4,500 UK adults were interviewed online in February 2017. Local churches were regarded as part of the history of their community by 51% of respondents and as part of the fabric of their community by 36%. Data tables are not available but Ecclesiastical’s press release will be found at:

https://www.ecclesiastical.com/images/churches%20a%20significant%20to%20local%20communities.pdf

Funerals

Kate Woodthorpe’s Keeping the Faith surveys the role of religious beliefs in contemporary UK funerals. It was prepared for Royal London, which is the country’s largest mutual life, pensions, and investment company. Although the report is essentially qualitative, there are occasional glimpses into quantitative online research commissioned by Royal London from YouGov among three separate samples (cumulating to 3,240 individuals) who had been responsible for organizing a funeral in recent years. The report can be found at:

https://www.royallondon.com/Documents/PDFs/2017/Royal%20London%20-%20Keeping%20the%20Faith.pdf

Talking Jesus

Insights into the religiosity of 2,000 English young people aged 11-18 are provided by a newly-released online ComRes survey undertaken between 7 and 19 December 2016 on behalf of HOPE and the Church of England. A majority (51%) was not religious in the sense of being disbelievers or uncertain believers in God, the remainder comprising 20% Anglicans, 11% Roman Catholics, 10% other Christians, and 8% non-Christians. Irreligiosity increased with age, being 48% among 11-13-year-olds, 51% for 14-16-year-olds, and 57% for 17-18-year-olds. A majority (54%) also doubted that Jesus Christ was a real person who had actually lived while 63% disbelieved in, or were unsure about, His Resurrection. Of the 825 Christians, 51% described themselves as an active follower of Jesus, with 47% claiming to read the Bible at least monthly, 65% to pray with the same frequency, 51% to attend church once a month or more, 40% to participate in church-related youth activities, and 41% to have talked about Jesus with a non-Christian within the past month. Full data tables, extending to 208 pages, are available at:

http://www.comresglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Hope-Church-of-England-Perceptions-of-Jesus-Survey-Data-Tables.pdf

Papal power

United States President Donald Trump and Pope Francis recently held their first face-to-face meeting at the Vatican. Asked on 26 May 2017 which of these two world leaders has the more power, 49% of 7,134 YouGov British panellists replied the United States President and 16% the Pope, with 15% regarding them both as equally powerful and 20% undecided. Only in Scotland (22%) and among Scottish National Party voters (29%), both sub-samples with (in all likelihood) an above-average number of Catholics, did the Pope fare a little better. Data are available at:

https://yougov.co.uk/opi/surveys/results#/survey/88c1aff0-41f4-11e7-94a8-2ab0a50a8b9c

Jewish vote

The overwhelming majority (77%) of Jews intend to vote for the Conservatives in the forthcoming general election (8 June 2017), 13% for Labour, 7% for the Liberal Democrats, and 2% for another political party. This is according to a telephone poll of 515 self-identifying British Jews undertaken by Survation on behalf of the Jewish Chronicle on 21-26 May 2017, once electors who were unlikely to vote or undecided or refused to say had been excluded from the calculation. There appeared to be two main reasons for the Jewish disinclination to support Labour. One was Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, with 44% of respondents agreeing they would be much or a little more likely to vote for the party were he not its leader. The other was the perceived level of anti-Semitism among Labour Party members and elected representatives, 39% rating it at the highest point on a five-point scale. Full data tables are available at:

http://survation.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Final-JC-VI-Poll-5c1d5h.pdf

Ramadan

Asked by BMG Research which religious group is served by Ramadan, 27% of 1,374 Britons interviewed online on 19-22 May 2017 were unable to say (15%) or gave an incorrect answer (12%). People of no religion (70%) were less inclined to know than Christians (76%) that Ramadan is associated with Islam and Muslims. The full data table is available via the link at:

http://www.bmgresearch.co.uk/one-quarter-british-adults-dont-know-ramadan-muslim-celebration/

Islam and intolerance

Two-fifths (41%) of Britons agreed with the statement ‘Islam is an intolerant religion’ in an app-based survey by YouGov reported on 11 May 2017 at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/05/11/girl-jobs-vs-boy-jobs-home-ai-help-make-decisions-/

Islam and extremism

Four-fifths of Britons are either very (43%) or somewhat (36%) concerned about extremism in the name of Islam, according to the Spring 2017 Pew Global Attitudes survey, for which 1,066 adults aged 18 and over were interviewed by Kantar Public UK by telephone between 6 March and 3 April. The combined figure of 79% was three points less than when the question was last asked in Britain in 2015 and also below the level of concern found in Italy (89%), Germany (82%), Spain (82%), and Hungary (80%), being identical to the median for 10 European Union countries. British results varied by age (from 61% of under-30s to 87% of over-50s) and by political alignment (from 61% of left-leaners to 86% of right-leaners). Remaining Britons were either not too concerned (15%) about extremism in the name of Islam or not at all concerned (5%). Pew’s press release can be found at:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/24/majorities-in-europe-north-america-worried-about-islamic-extremism/

On his recent visit to the Middle East, United States President Donald Trump described the world’s fight against Islamic State and Islamist extremism as a battle between ‘good and evil’. One-half of 7,420 Britons interviewed online by YouGov on 22 May 2017 agreed with this description, the proportion being especially high among Conservatives (63%), over-65s (67%), and UKIP voters (71%). The other half of the sample divided between those who rejected the terminology of good versus evil (24%) and don’t knows (26%). Full data are at:

https://yougov.co.uk/opi/surveys/results#/survey/775c5c60-3ed4-11e7-bbfa-4e47a0d22bac

Manchester bomb

On 22 May 2017, an Islamist suicide bomber detonated an explosive device outside the Manchester Arena, killing 22 people. It was the worst terrorist incident on British soil since the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005 and was hailed by Islamic State (IS). In the following days, YouGov ran several online surveys which touched on the event and its implications.

On 24-25 May, on behalf of The Times, 2,052 Britons were asked about the advisability of implementing specific new measures to combat terrorism in Britain. Among the options was encouraging imams in mosques in Britain to preach solely in English. Only 37% deemed this ‘the right thing to do’, including a majority of over-65s (55%) and UKIP voters (70%). A plurality (41%) was opposed, considering it would be an over-reaction, peaking at 60% of Liberal Democrats and 63% of under-25s. The remaining 22% were unsure. Thinking about how the rest of the world deals with the threat posed by IS, a plurality (46%) judged it likely to be solved by military force whereas 18% advocated dialogue with 37% uncertain. Two-thirds of interviewees viewed the threat of IS as arising wholly or partially from social, religious, and political issues in the Middle East. Data tables are at:

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/dcfgflapq2/TimesResults_170525_VI_Trackers_Terrorism_W.pdf

On 25 May, YouGov asked respondents to an app-based survey whether they thought religion-motivated terrorism could ever be stopped. The majority (68%) doubted that it could be while 23% thought it could be halted and 9% were unsure. Anger (71%), concern (57%), and shock (56%) were the commonest reactions to the Manchester outrage, although 71% said their personal confidence had been unaffected by it. Topline results are at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/05/25/religion-motivated-terrorism-personal-confidence-r/

On 25-26 May, on behalf of the Sunday Times, YouGov asked 2,003 Britons whether they approved of the Government’s counter-terrorism strategy of early identification of people in danger of being radicalized, including a requirement for schools and social projects to report extremist sympathies to the authorities. The overwhelming majority (73%) approved of this approach, but there was a minority of 10% who deemed it inappropriate, on the grounds that it intruded too much into the lives of those who had not committed any crime and risked alienating law-abiding British Muslims. The proportion rose to 14% for under-25s, 15% for Liberal Democrats, and 17% for Labour voters. The remaining 17% of the entire sample was undecided. For further details, see p. 11 of the data tables at:

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/fpwbs2u7v8/SundayTimesResults_170526_VI_W.pdf

On 26 May, YouGov asked respondents to an app-based survey whether terrorist attacks by IS should be considered as a criminal act or an act of war. The majority (58%) opted for the former description, 34% for the latter, with 8% undecided. Topline results are at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/05/26/terrorism-uk-who-has-more-power-pope-or-us-preside/

FAITH ORGANIZATION STUDIES

Faith in Research

The Church of England’s annual Faith in Research Conference was held in Birmingham on 17 May 2017 and attended by 95 delegates. As usual, there was a mix of plenary sessions and parallel streams showcasing the most recent qualitative and quantitative research into faith matters, not exclusively Anglican-related. Highlights of the 17 presentations included first results from wave 1 of the longitudinal panel survey into ‘Living Ministry’ and from the ‘Talking Jesus’ study among 11-18-year-olds in England fielded by ComRes (noted above). Slides from the majority of the presentations are already available at:

https://www.churchofengland.org/about-us/facts-stats/research-statistics/faith-in-research-conferences/faith-in-research-2017.aspx

Belonging to church

The Faith in Research Conference was chaired by David Walker, Bishop of Manchester, whose recent book is an example of the genre of empirical theology: God’s Belongers; How People Engage with God Today and How the Church Can Help (Abingdon: Bible Reading Fellowship, 2017, 158 pp., ISBN: 978-0-85746-467-5, £7.99, paperback). In it, Walker proposes a fourfold model of belonging to church, through relationship, place, events, and activities, replacing the traditional dichotomy between church members and non-members. His particular concern is with Anglican occasional churchgoers, investigated through his surveys of attenders at harvest festival services in the Diocese of Worcester in 2007 and at cathedral carol services at Worcester in 2009 and Lichfield in 2010. The detailed findings from these studies have been reported in a series of academic papers, listed in the bibliography on pp. 156-7, but, selectively and relatively unobtrusively, they are drawn upon to help sustain the argument in this book, whose purpose is essentially missional. The volume’s webpage can be found at:

https://www.brfonline.org.uk/9780857464675/

Godparents

In advance of special services to celebrate Godparents’ Sunday on 30 April 2017, the Church of England released a calculation that at least six million people have been godparents at a Church of England christening since the start of the new Millennium. This reflected that there were more than two million baptisms of infants and children between 2000 and 2015, with a minimum requirement of three godparents for each person baptised. The Church of England’s press release is at:

https://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2017/04/church-services-to-celebrate-role-of-godparents.aspx

Church Commissioners

The Church Commissioners, who manage investable assets amounting to £7.9 billion and who contribute some 15% of the Church of England’s income, have presented to Parliament their annual report for 2016. The total return on investments for that year was 17.1%, compared with 8.2% for 2015, and well ahead of the target of inflation plus 5%. Indeed, the Commissioners notched up their strongest performance for more than three decades, with notable successes in global equities, timber, and indirect property. The report can be found at:

https://www.churchofengland.org/media/3983111/cc-annualreport-2016.pdf

Ethnic churchgoers

In his latest monthly column for the Church of England Newspaper (12 May 2017, p. 9), reprinted in No. 51 (June 2017, p. 2) of his bimonthly magazine FutureFirst, Peter Brierley usefully collates the statistical evidence from church censuses about the proportion of BME churchgoers since 1998. Although the picture is mixed, Brierley contends that there has been especially rapid growth of Black Christians, both within White congregations and in Black churches. In England in 2017, Brierley estimates, 30% of all church attenders are BMEs (and 40% of evangelicals) while in London the majority (51%) are.

Youth culture

A parallel piece of research to the ‘Talking Jesus’ study, mentioned above, is Youth for Christ’s Gen Z: Rethinking Culture, based on a survey completed by 1,001 Britons aged 11-18 in November-December 2016. The questionnaire, covering four core areas (culture, influences, priorities, and religion and faith), was scripted, hosted, and managed by DJS Research while using the Youth for Christ online platform. Almost half (46%) of respondents professed no religion, 43% were Christian, and 7% non-Christian. With regard to beliefs, 32% said they believed in a God, 22% in ghosts and spirits, and 47% in neither. Among believers in God 59% considered themselves a follower of Jesus and the Christian faith but just 41% prayed (four-fifths of them at least once a week). The 44-page report can be downloaded from:

https://yfc.uk/gen-z-rethinking-culture-report-released/

ACADEMIC STUDIES

Religious nones

In Catholic Research Forum Reports, 3, published by the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society at St Mary’s University Twickenham, Stephen Bullivant analyses The ‘No Religion’ Population of Britain: Recent Data from the British Social Attitudes Survey (2015) and the European Social Survey (2014). The British Social Attitudes Survey revealed that 49% of adults identified as belonging to no religion. They were predominantly white (95%) and male (55%), although among under-35s men and women were equally likely to be religious nones. Three-fifths had been brought up with a religious identity whereas fewer than one in ten of those reared nonreligiously currently subscribed to a religion. For every one person brought up with no religion who had become a Christian, 26 people brought up as Christians professed no religion at the time of interview. On the other hand, according to European Social Survey statistics, 15% of nones still rated themselves as religious and/or prayed monthly or more. The report is available at:

https://www.stmarys.ac.uk/research/centres/benedict-xvi/docs/2017-may-no-religion-report.pdf

Religious affiliation and party political liking

In a blog on LSE’s Religion and the Public Sphere website, Siobhan McAndrew utilizes data from wave 10 of the 2015 British Election Study Internet Panel (with fieldwork conducted by YouGov between 24 November and 12 December 2016) to investigate the liking of adults for the main political parties. Scores, on a scale running from 0 to 10, were generally below 5, with the exception of a score of 5.6 by Anglicans towards the Conservative Party. The lowest score was 2.3, by non-Christians towards UKIP. Non-Christians and Catholics showed a stronger liking for Labour while there was little variation between religious groups when it came to the Liberal Democrats. Factoring in other demographic variables, identities, and values tended to attenuate these associations. The post can be found at:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/religionpublicsphere/2017/05/religion-and-party-liking-how-members-of-different-faith-communities-feel-about-different-political-parties/

Religious affiliation and Brexit

In his latest blog on the British Religion in Numbers website, Ben Clements offers an analysis of the voting of religious groups in the 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union (EU), based upon data from wave 9 of the 2015 British Election Study Internet Panel (with fieldwork conducted by YouGov between 24 June and 6 July 2016). The most pronounced findings were the predisposition of Anglicans to leave and of non-Christians and no religionists to remain in the EU. The post can be found at:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/2017/how-religious-groups-voted-at-the-2016-referendum-on-britains-eu-membership/

Catholic vote

In another blog for the LSE’s British Politics and Policy website, Ben Clements examines the party political preferences of Roman Catholics, mainly based on trend data from British Election Studies and British Social Attitudes Surveys. He shows that, historically, Catholics have disproportionately favoured the Labour Party, especially in Scotland, but that the link has become weaker in recent years, as expressed both in voting behaviour at general elections and overall party allegiance. Scotland apart, older and female Catholics have been most drawn to the Conservative Party. The post can be found at:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/catholic-voters-in-britain-what-are-their-political-preferences/

Muslim women

Muslim women’s civic and political involvement in Britain and France, with particular reference to Birmingham and Paris, is investigated by Danièle Joly and Khursheed Wadia in Muslim Women and Power: Political and Civic Engagement in West European Societies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, xviii + 322 pp., ISBN: 978-1-137-48061-3, hardback, £86). Harnessing Joly’s expertise as a sociologist and Wadia’s as a political scientist, it distils their and others’ secondary literature and reports on fresh empirical research, notably participant observation, interviews, focus groups, and a questionnaire completed by 119 Muslim women in Britain and 107 in France (the results from which are described as ‘reliable rather than statistically valid’). The demographic context is derived from census and other sources. The authors argue that Muslim women’s interest in and knowledge of politics and their participation in both institutional and informal politics is higher than expected. The book’s webpage is at:

http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137480613

Ministerial deployment

Despite their frequent assertions of a priority for the poor, religious groups distribute their active stipendiary ministers inversely to socio-economic deprivation (measured at household and neighbourhood levels) and (implicitly) to pastoral care needs, and it seems unlikely that this relationship has occurred by chance. So claims Michael Hirst in his analysis of data, aggregated to local authority areas, from the 2011 census of population in ‘Clergy in Place in England: Bias to the Poor or Inverse Care Law?’ which is published in the ‘early view’ edition of the journal Population, Space, and Place. Parallels are drawn by the author with the concept of inverse medical care law proposed by Julian Hart. By its very nature, the primary source deployed cannot differentiate between ministers who live in less deprived areas but who work in more deprived ones. It also necessarily excludes retired, self-supporting, and non-stipendiary ministers. Access options to the article are outlined at:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/psp.2068/full

Comparative historical secularization

The seemingly greater religiosity of the United States over Western Europe has been a central element of investigation and debate in the scholarly literature of secularization. A comparative religious history of these two areas, noting both parallels and divergences, is now attempted in Secularization and Religious Innovation in the North Atlantic World, edited by David Hempton and Hugh McLeod (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, xiv + 407 pp., ISBN: 978-0-19-879807-1, £75, hardback). It comprises an introduction by McLeod followed by nine pairs of chapters, eight pairs exploring particular themes (such as evangelicalism, gender, and popular culture) and the last offering a separate conclusion by each editor which, notwithstanding their different approaches and emphases, provides a degree of coherence to what might otherwise be quite a disparate volume of insightful case studies. Of the 17 individual contributors, the solitary sociologist of religion is Grace Davie; the rest are essentially religious historians. Although chronological coverage starts with the eighteenth century, there is a special focus on the second half of the twentieth century. Likewise, consideration of Western Europe is disproportionately about Britain. Descriptive statistics are referenced throughout the work but there are no tables, while several opportunities are missed for systematic comparative quantitative analysis, notably for the past half-century, which might simultaneously have provided some common criteria for measuring secularization. The volume’s webpage can be found at:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/secularization-and-religious-innovation-in-the-north-atlantic-world-9780198798071?cc=gb&lang=en&

David Martin on secularization

David Martin is a notable absentee from the line-up of Hempton and McLeod’s book, notwithstanding he has written extensively about secularization, including about the comparative experience of Europe and America. In his Secularisation, Pentecostalism, and Violence: Receptions, Rediscoveries, and Rebuttals in the Sociology of Religion (London: Routledge, 2017, xi + 194 pp., ISBN: 978-0-415-78859-5, £115, hardback), Martin, who is now in his late 80s, offers an autobiographical cum bibliographical retrospect of the three core themes of his scholarship during the past half-century. The 10 chapters include one (pp. 57-85) which recapitulates the sociology of religion in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s and briefly considers the contribution of religious statistics, of which Martin was evidently initially quite sceptical, and specifically references British Religion in Numbers. The book’s webpage can be found at:

https://www.routledge.com/Secularisation-Pentecostalism-and-Violence-Receptions-Rediscoveries/Martin/p/book/9780415788595

NEW DATASET AT UK DATA SERVICE

SN 8168: Scottish Household Survey, 2015

The Scottish Household Survey, initiated in 1999, is undertaken on behalf of the Scottish Government by a polling consortium led by Ipsos MORI. Information is collected about the composition, characteristics, attitudes, and behaviour of private households and individuals in Scotland; and about the physical condition of their homes. For the 2015 survey (January 2015-March 2016) data were gathered on 10,330 households and 9,410 adults. The specifically religious content of the questionnaire covered: religion belonged to; experience of discrimination or harassment on religious grounds; and incidence of volunteering for religious and other groups. A catalogue description for the dataset is available at:

https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=8168&type=Data%20catalogue

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

Posted in church attendance, Historical studies, Ministry studies, News from religious organisations, Religion and Ethnicity, Religion and Politics, Religion in public debate, Religious beliefs, religious festivals, Religious prejudice, Rites of Passage, Survey news | Tagged Anti-Semitism, astrology, Ben Clements, Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society, Bible, Bible Reading Fellowship, black Christians, BMG Research, British Election Study Internet Panel, British Politics and Policy, British Religion in Numbers, British Social Attitudes Survey, church attendance, Church Commissioners, Church of England, ComRes, criminal act, Daniele Joly, David Hempton, David Martin, David Walker, discrimination, DJS Research, Donald Trump, Ecclesiastical Insurance, ethnic churchgoers, European Social Survey, European Union Referendum, extremism, Faith in Research, fate, follower of Jesus, funerals, general election, Generation Z, ghosts, Global Trends, God, godparents, good and evil, HOPE, Hugh McLeod, imams, importance of religion, Ipsos-MORI, Islam, Islamic State, Jesus Christ, Jewish Chronicle, Jews, Kantar Public UK, Karma, Kate Woodthorpe, Khursheed Wadia, life after death, life on other planets, liking for political parties, local community, Manchester, Michael Hirst, Middle East, ministers, Muslim women, Muslims, nfpSynergy, OnePoll, Oxford University Press, Palgrave Macmillan, Peter Brierley, Pew Global Attitudes Project, places of worship, Pope Francis, Population Space and Place, power, prayer, preaching in English, Ramadan, Religion and the Public Sphere, Religious Affiliation, religious belonging, religious nones, Roman Catholics, Routledge, Royal London, Scotland, Scottish Household Survey, secularization, self-assessed religiosity, Siobhan McAndrew, socio-economic deprivation, spiritual dimension in daily life, Stephen Bullivant, Sunday Times, supernatural beliefs, Survation, Talking Jesus, terrorism, The Times, trust in the Church, United States, volunteering, voting, Western Europe, YouGov, young people, youth culture, Youth for Christ | 1 Comment

Religion and the British Social Attitudes 2015 Survey

Posted on January 9, 2017 by Ben Clements

The British Social Attitudes (BSA) 2015 survey dataset was released recently and this post provides a brief analysis of long-running data on religion available from the BSA surveys. It focuses on religious affiliation, religion of upbringing and religious attendance.

Firstly, Figure 1 reports the time-series data on affiliation for the period 1983-2015. Noteworthy features include the long-term decline in the proportion identifying as Church of England (40% in 1983, 19% in 2015), increased identification with non-Christian faiths over recent decades (3% in 1983, 8% in 2015), broad stability in levels of Catholic identification (10% in 1983, 9% in 2015), and the steady upwards climb of the proportion with no affiliation (32% in 1983, 49% in 2015). The proportion of other Christians has increased over time, from 15% in 1983 to 17% in 2015. However, the composition of this group has shifted. The proportion identifying as non-denominational Christians has risen over time, with a decreasing share professing a denominational affiliation – in particular, with the Nonconformist churches.

Figure 1: Religious affiliation in Britain, 1983-2015

Source: Author’s analysis of BSA surveys.

Secondly, Figure 2 shows the levels of religious attendance over time. For clarity of presentation, attendance has been divided up into three categories: attends once a month or more often (or frequent attendance); attends less often (infrequent attendance); does not attend. In contrast to the shifting patterns of affiliation across recent decades, attendance shows a picture of somewhat less marked change. The proportion reporting that they never attend religious services (beyond going for the traditional rites of passage) has risen from 56% in 1983 to 65% in 2015. There has been some decline levels of frequent and infrequent attending: attending once a month or more fell from 21% in 1983 to 18% in 2015 (with weekly-attending falling from 13% to 10%); the respective figures for those attending less often are 23% and 17%.

Figure 2: Religious Attendance in Britain, 1983-2015

Source: Author’s analysis of BSA surveys.

Third, Table 1 provides a summary of the three long-running indicators of religion carried in the annual BSA surveys – affiliation, religion of upbringing and attendance. The data on religion of upbringing show that the proportion saying they were raised within the Church of England has fallen from over half (55%) in 1991 (when the question was first asked) to around three-in-ten in 2015. The proportion saying they were raised within a Catholic household is the same in each survey. The proportion raised in some other Christian context has increased (from 22% to 28%). The internal composition of this category has shifted markedly over time. In 1983, the 22% was comprised of 19% who had a particular denominational affiliation and 3% who did not. In 2015, the 28% was made up of 10% with a denomination and 18% with no denominational affiliation. The proportion whose religion of upbringing was a non-Christian faith was 3% in 1983 and 9% in 2015. There has been a marked increase in the proportion saying they were not raised within any religion: from 6% in 1983 to 20% in 2015.

Table 1: Summary of religious indicators, 1983 and 2015

Affiliation	1983 (%)	2015 (%)
Church of England	40	17
Roman Catholic	10	9
Other Christian	17	17
Other religion	2	8
No religious affiliation	31	49
Religion of upbringing	1991 (%)	2015 (%)
Church of England	55	29
Roman Catholic	14	14
Other Christian	22	28
Other religion	3	9
No religion	6	20
Attendance	1983 (%)	(2015)
Once a month or more often	21	18
Less often than once a month	22	17
Never attends	56	65

Source: Author’s analysis of the BSA 1983 and 2015 surveys.

Percentages have been rounded and may not sum to 100.

Fourthly, and looking at the religious data in the BSA 2015 survey more detail, Table 2 shows the levels of non-affiliation, not having been raised within a religion and non-attendance at religious services for sex and age group.

Table 2: Indicators of secularity by demographic group

		No religious affiliation (%)	No religious upbringing(%)	Does not attend religious services (%)
*Sex*	Men	55	21	69
	Women	43	19	62
*Age group*	18-24	63	37	68
	25-34	58	31	66
	35-44	54	24	65
	45-54	51	18	65
	55-64	45	12	68
	65-74	34	7	61
	75+	24	5	59

Source: Author’s analysis of the BSA 2015 survey.

Having no affiliation is somewhat more common amongst men than women, as is not attending religious services. Across the age groups, there is considerable variation in two of the three indicators of secularity. Younger age groups are much more likely to report that they did not have a religious upbringing and do not have currently have a religious affiliation. There is much less variation across age groups in terms of the proportion not attending church or some other place of worship. Whereas amongst 18-24 year olds, 63% have no affiliation (compared to 24% of over 75s) and 37% were not raised within a religious faith (compared to just 5% of over 75%s), a majority in both groups said that they do not attend religious services (aged 18-24: 68%; aged 75 and over: 59%).

Posted in church attendance, Measuring religion, News from religious organisations, Survey news, Uncategorized | Tagged British Social Attitudes, British Social Attitudes 2015 Survey, British Social Attitudes Survey, British Social Attitudes Surveys, church attendance, Religious affilation, religious attendance, religious belonging, religious upbringing, Social Surveys, Survey Data, surveys | 1 Comment

Counting Religion in Britain, December 2016

Posted on January 1, 2017 by Clive D. Field

Counting Religion in Britain, No. 15, December 2016 features 37 new sources. It can be read in full below. Alternatively, you can download the PDF version: no-15-december-2016

OPINION POLLS

Importance of Christmas

More than nine in ten Britons celebrate Christmas, according to a poll by YouGov, conducted online on 1-2 December 2016 among a sample of 2,022 adults, and on behalf of the British Humanist Association (BHA). The groups least likely to celebrate Christmas are the 18-24s, the never married, and Londoners (15% each); full-time students (19%); and non-Christians (although cell sizes were small). Religious nones are about as likely as the rest of the population to celebrate Christmas. However, when presented with a list of twelve factors which might make Christmas an important time of year for them, respondents assigned the two explicitly religious aspects to the bottom two places. Celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ was ranked eleventh in order of importance, chosen by 22% overall, albeit by 31% of over-55s and 32% of retired people; even among professing Anglicans and Catholics, the proportion did not reach more than 39% and 55%, respectively. Attending a religious service was put last, on 15%, the two extremes being Catholics (39%) and religious nones (3%). By far the most valued facets of Christmas were spending time with family (76%) and giving presents to friends or family (63%). The BHA’s press release, incorporating a link to the full dataset, can be found at:

https://humanism.org.uk/2016/12/16/friends-family-food-and-giving-the-real-meaning-of-christmas-revealed/

Christmas Day shopping

Notwithstanding the statutory prohibition on large shops opening on Christmas Day, 17% of UK adults (rising to 21% of men and 28% of 18-24s) want them to be open on the day, according to an online survey by OnePoll for Nationwide Current Accounts undertaken between 30 November and 5 December 2016. Moreover, 29% of the 2,000 respondents admitted to having popped to the corner shop on Christmas Day, mostly for food or drink items or batteries, the figure peaking at 41% in Scotland. Boredom and last-minute needs were the main reasons for wanting Christmas Day trading. The Nationwide press release is at:

http://www.nationwide.co.uk/about/media-centre-and-specialist-areas/media-centre/press-releases/archive/2016/12/14-open-all-hours

Belief in God

The Times took advantage of the Christmas season to check on the current level of belief in God in Britain. It commissioned YouGov to run an online poll among a sample of 1,595 adults on 18-19 December 2016. Belief in God or a higher spiritual power was expressed by 28%, four points less than in February 2015, while avowed disbelief had risen over the same period from 33% to 38%. A further 20% believed in some sort of spiritual power but not in God and 14% were unsure what to think. Disbelief peaked among 18-24s (46%) and men (50%). The survey also enquired into the claimed frequency of church attendance other than for rites of passage and intended churchgoing over Christmas, both questions eliciting characteristically aspirational replies. The detailed poll findings have not yet been posted online but the article about them in the print edition of The Times for 23 December can be read (if you register with a few details or you are already a subscriber) at:

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/belief-in-god-slumps-after-turbulent-year-mqz9j7mlh

Humanist ceremonies

More than two-thirds (68%) of the British public are aware that it is possible to have a humanist celebrant at ceremonies marking rites of passage, and 30% claim to have attended one or more such humanist ‘services’ according to a poll by YouGov for the British Humanist Association (BHA), for which 4,085 adults were interviewed online on 28-29 July 2016. Attendance at humanist ceremonies is greatest for Scottish Presbyterians (63%) and Scots generally (58%), reflecting the fact that in Scotland – unlike in England and Wales – it is possible to have a humanist wedding. Self-identified humanists apart (56% of whom have been to a humanist ceremony), the next highest proportions are among groups whose age increases their likelihood of going to funerals, for which humanist celebrants have been on offer since the late 1970s (for the over-55s the figure is 40%, the retired 42%, and the widowed 48%). In a second YouGov poll for the BHA, conducted between 29 November and 1 December 2016 among 4,375 Britons, 14% indicated they would wish to have a humanist funeral themselves, including 27% of residents of Scotland and North-East England. Another form of non-religious funeral was chosen by a further 14%, a Christian funeral by 36%, another religious funeral by 3%, while 34% in the aggregate were undecided, did not want any ceremony, or preferred not to say. The BHA’s press release, incorporating a link to the full datasets, can be found at:

https://humanism.org.uk/2016/12/08/14-of-britons-would-opt-for-a-humanist-funeral-as-new-figures-show-bha-ceremonies-more-popular-than-ever/

Welsh humanists

The majority (51%) of adults in Wales do not regard themselves as belonging to any particular religion, while 35% identify with a humanist approach to life and morality by selecting the ‘humanist answer’ to three statement questions about the understanding of the universe and of right and wrong. This is according to the findings of a YouGov poll conducted in the Principality on behalf of the British Humanist Association (BHA) between 17 and 21 November 2016, for which 1,000 Welsh residents were interviewed online. Demographic sub-groups especially predisposed to the humanist viewpoint included: cohabitees (45%), religious nones (47%), and persons aged 25-34 (50%). The proportion of religious nones peaked among under-25s (73%) and 25-34s (69%). The BHA’s press release, incorporating the wording of the three statement questions as well as a link to the full dataset, can be found at:

https://humanism.org.uk/2016/11/30/nearly-a-million-welsh-adults-have-a-humanist-approach-to-life-yougov-research-shows/

Trust in the Church

The Charity Awareness Monitor (CAM), from nfpSynergy, includes a regular module on trust in public bodies and institutions, and headline findings from the October 2016 fieldwork, for which 1,000 Britons aged 16 and over were interviewed online, have just been released. Respondents were asked to rate the trustworthiness of 24 organizations. The proportion expressing quite a lot (27%) or a great deal (8%) of trust in the Church was 35% compared with 56% who had very little (29%) or not much (27%) trust. The Church lay in fourteenth position in terms of trustworthiness, the most trusted bodies being the National Health Service and the armed forces. The Church’s rating has been fairly stable in recent CAMs, being trusted by 36% in May 2016 and 33% in October 2015. The latest report from nfpSynergy can be found at:

http://nfpsynergy.net/press-release/nfpsynergy-trust-charities-report-december-2016

Trust in the clergy

Clergy/priests were ranked seventh in the Ipsos MORI Veracity Index, 2016, for which 1,019 Britons aged 15 and over were interviewed face-to-face between 14 October and 1 November 2016. Asked whether they generally trusted each of 24 professions or groups to tell the truth, 69% of respondents said they trusted clergy/priests to do so, well behind nurses (93%), doctors (91%), and teachers (88%), but far ahead of politicians generally (15%), government ministers (20%), and journalists (24%). One-quarter did not trust clergy/priests with 5% undecided. The Veracity Index was first run in 1983, when clergy/priests headed a shorter table of 13 professions with a trustworthiness score of 85%, but confidence in them has been slipping somewhat since then. The topline and disaggregated data for 2016 are available at:

https://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/publications/1896/Enough-of-Experts-Ipsos-MORI-Veracity-Index-2016.aspx

Religious observance in Scottish schools

A majority (55%) of Scots believes that children should not be made to participate in religious observance at school, an online poll by YouGov for the Scottish edition of The Times has found. As many as 38% of all Scots (and 48% of Scottish National Party voters) feel there should be no place for collective worship in the Scottish education system and a further 17% want children to be able to opt out, even without parental consent. One-quarter (24%) favour withdrawal with parental consent while just 11% agree that religious observance should be compulsory in all schools with no ability to opt out. The current arrangements for collective worship in Scottish schools date back to 1872 and the Scottish Government has been slow to respond to demands for change. The detailed poll findings have not yet been posted online but the article about them in the print edition of The Times for 29 December can be read (if you register with a few details or you are already a subscriber) at:

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/scotland/take-religion-out-of-the-classroom-9j6x06mzw

Muslim numbers

Britons greatly overestimate the number of Muslims living in the country, according to the latest annual Perils of Perception study from Ipsos, conducted in 40 nations between 22 September and 6 November 2016. The average guess at the current proportion of Muslims in Britain was 15% and of the likely number in 2020 22%, three times the reality and projection. Britain was not alone, for many other Western countries also greatly overestimated their Muslim populations while Muslim majority nations tended to underestimate them. British fieldwork was conducted online among a sample of 1,000 adults aged 16-64. Topline results have been posted at:

https://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/3817/Perceptions-are-not-reality-what-the-world-gets-wrong.aspx

Muslims and terrorism

One-third of Britons think religious views are a common cause of individual acts of terrorism, according to the 4,812 respondents to one of YouGov’s app-based polls on 22 December 2016. An identical proportion agree that terrorist acts carried out by Muslims reveal something significant about the nature of Islam itself, thirteen points more than judge terrorism perpetrated by Catholics or Protestants to say something about the nature of Christianity. Conservative and UKIP voters are particularly inclined to conflate Muslims and Islam when it comes to terrorism, at 40% and 62%, respectively, as are men (41%). Half the sample sought to distance Islam from terrorist acts committed by Muslims, the most charitably disposed groups being Liberal Democrat and Scottish National Party voters (60%) and 18-24s (61%). Full results have been posted at:

https://yougov.co.uk/opi/surveys/results#/survey/52dc14d0-c82c-11e6-947e-eebe41e67c16

Killing Muslims

On 12 December 2016 in London, a man stabbed another passenger on a crowded train after having shouted ‘I want to kill a Muslim’. Two days later, in one of its app-based polls, YouGov asked 4,055 adult Britons whether they considered this man to be a terrorist or not. One-quarter of respondents was undecided and the remainder divided. Two in five (39%) judged the attacker to have been a terrorist, peaking at 52% of 18-24 year olds, while 36% said he was not. Full results have been posted at:

https://yougov.co.uk/opi/surveys/results#/survey/b85cf140-c1e1-11e6-9034-eebe41e67c16

Muslim opinions

British Muslims are living in a state of ‘unsettled belonging’, according to a new report by Policy Exchange and based upon the numerically most extensive survey of that community to date, for which 3,040 self-identifying Muslims were interviewed face-to-face by ICM Unlimited between 19 May and 23 July 2016. Taken as a whole, the three authors (Martyn Frampton, David Goodhart, and Khalid Mahmood) of Unsettled Belonging: A Survey of Britain’s Muslim Communities conclude, British Muslims ‘are loyal to the UK, and with essentially “normal” and familiar priorities and concerns; yet equally, they remain disturbed by fears about discrimination and narratives that foreground a sense of Muslim victimhood’. Such a worldview acts as a break on assimilation into mainstream society, the separateness of British Muslims being most obviously seen in tendencies to be religiously devout, to hold socially conservative views, to favour implementation of elements of Sharia law, to believe in conspiracy theories, and to remain ambivalent about the challenges posed by extremism. These and other issues are explored in the core chapters which dissect Muslim opinion under the seven headings of priorities, engagement, integration, education, radicalization, sympathizers (with violence and terrorism), and conspiracy theories. In presenting their findings, the authors (rightly) emphasize the complexity and diversity of Muslim views and the difficulties of generalizing about the Muslim community as a whole, which they see as, in reality, a patchwork of communities that fails to identify fully with any single national gatekeeper body for Muslims (the marginal influence of the Muslim Council of Britain being especially highlighted). The 87-page report is available to download at:

https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/PEXJ5037_Muslim_Communities_FINAL.pdf

The full data tables, extending to 1,511 pages and covering both Muslims and a control sample of 2,047 Britons, can be found at:

https://www.icmunlimited.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Policy-Exchange-ICM-Muslims-Survey-web.pdf

Self-assessed religiosity

The full data tables from the Policy Exchange survey (see above) offer plenty of scope for in-depth analysis. Here we take just one of the questions put to both Muslim and control samples: ‘how religious do you consider yourself to be?’ Respondents were invited to answer on a scale running from 1 (not religious at all) to 10 (fully devout) where a mean score of 5.5 presumably represented the hard boundary between not religious and religious. For adult Britons in the control sample the mean score was 3.51, denoting quite irreligious, even Christians not managing more than 5.06 and the normally relatively religious over-75s only 4.46. In fact, few demographic sub-groups in the control sample broke through the threshold of 5.5, the principal exception being those who had attended a place of religious observance once or more during the past week, many of whom would have been devout non-Christians (including Muslims). Not unexpectedly, by far the least religious in the control sample were people who professed no religion (1.37). In the Muslim sample, the mean score was 7.09, reaching 8.00 among Muslims aged 65 and over.

Importance of religion

Another angle on the personal saliency of religion was explored in wave 86.2 of Eurobarometer, undertaken by TNS on behalf of the European Commission in the 28 member states of the European Union (EU) and five candidate countries. UK fieldwork was completed between 5 and 14 November 2016 by means of face-to-face interview with 1,343 adults aged 15 and over. Asked to select from a list of twelve values a maximum of three which were most important to them personally, only 4% of UK respondents chose religion, far fewer than respect for human life, human rights, and peace – which shared joint first place on 41% each. UK citizens also gave religion a low score as a factor creating a feeling of community within the EU (7%) and as a value best representing the EU (3%). Topline results for all countries surveyed are available at:

http://ec.europa.eu/COMMFrontOffice/publicopinion/index.cfm/Survey/getSurveyDetail/instruments/STANDARD/surveyKy/2137

FAITH ORGANIZATION STUDIES

Doing God by doing good

Theos think tank was launched in November 2006 with an essay on Doing God. To mark its anniversary, Nick Spencer has written Doing Good: A Future for Christianity in the 21st Century (London: Theos, 2016, 70pp., ISBN 978-0-9931969-7-3). The first of the report’s three chapters reviews what has happened to Christianity in the UK during the past decade or so, citing much of the statistical evidence for decline, particularly in terms of religious affiliation and attendance, and for the growth of other religions. Drawing on the work of Charles Taylor, chapter 2 situates the current state of Christianity in its wider social context, both spiritual and temporal, and touches on the ‘spiritual but not religious’ phenomenon, quoting relevant sample survey data. Chapter 3 focuses on an observed trend in Christianity to social action, which Spencer sees as running counter to the overall narrative of decline and which he dubs Christian ‘social liturgy’ (to distinguish it from the ‘social gospel’ which flourished in the early twentieth century and is often seen to have ended in failure). This social liturgy is viewed by Spencer as a ‘healthy redirection’ of Christianity and as central to its future in the UK – ‘doing God’ by ‘doing good’. The report is available at:

http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/files/files/Doing%20Good%205.pdf

Christian funders

Another new report from Theos is by Ben Ryan and concerns Christian Funders and Grant-Making: An Analysis (48pp., ISBN 978-0-9931969-5-9). For the purposes of this study, Christian funders were defined as registered charities that make grants to organizations (as opposed to individuals) and that have some form of Christian ethos, excluding those supporting only a single church, school, or hospital. Within England and Wales 268 such funders were identified from the Charity Commission’s database, and the report offers a quantitative profile of their focus, denominational identity, income, and largest awarded grant. Additional qualitative insights were gained through interviews with 21 funders and 16 grant recipients. Five recommendations are offered for making the Christian funding sector ‘maximally effective’. The report is available at:

http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/files/files/Reports/Christian%20funders%20-%20for%20download-FINAL.pdf

Faith schools

In its latest report – Jon Andrews and Rebecca Johnes, Faith Schools, Pupil Performance, and Social Selection – the Education Policy Institute (EPI) has reopened the question of the effectiveness of faith schools by reanalysing official statistics from the Department for Education. Examining the raw data in isolation, pupils at faith schools, including those from disadvantaged backgrounds, tend to do better than their counterparts at non-faith schools, in terms of their overall attainment and the progress they make, in both primary and secondary sectors in England. However, EPI found that these outcome gains largely disappear after adjusting for pupil characteristics such as disadvantage, prior attainment, and ethnicity. In particular, faith schools educate a lower proportion of disadvantaged children than non-faith schools, a lower proportion with special educational needs, and a larger proportion of high-attaining pupils. Therefore, it is concluded, increasing faith school provision, as the Government intends to do, may not yield places of a significantly higher quality than in non-faith schools and may also come at the price of greater social segregation and diminished social mobility. The report is available at:

http://epi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Pupil_characteristics_and_performance_at_faith_schools.pdf

Meanwhile, the Department for Education has been required by the UK Statistics Authority to amend its recent Green Paper, following a complaint by the British Humanist Association (BHA) over the ‘misleading’ figures it presented on the impact of religious selection at faith schools. See the BHA’s press release at:

https://humanism.org.uk/2016/12/09/department-for-education-ordered-to-amend-misleading-faith-school-figures-by-uk-statistics-authority-following-bha-complaint/

Catholic schools

The Catholic Education Service for England and Wales has published the digest of its 2016 census of Catholic schools and colleges, which, for the third year running, achieved a return of 100%. In separate reports for England and Wales, there are details of: the number, type, and size distribution of schools and colleges; the number of pupils disaggregated by school type, Catholicity, gender, ethnicity, eligibility for free school meals, and special educational needs; and the number, qualifications, Catholicity, and ethnicity of teaching and support staff. Appendices provide additional breaks by diocese. One of the new features of this year’s census which has attracted some media attention has been the religious breakdown of the one-third of the 783,000 pupils at maintained Catholic schools and colleges in England who are not Catholic. One-half of them are from other Christian denominations, 10% are Muslims, and 23% have no religion (the balance of 17% presumably representing other non-Christian religions or religion not stated). Overall, 90% of students at maintained Catholic schools and colleges have a faith background, with 84% being Christian. In recent years, the proportion of Catholic pupils at these schools and colleges has been stable in the primary sector but gently declining at secondary and tertiary levels. The reports can be accessed via the links at:

http://www.catholiceducation.org.uk/ces-census

Rooted in the Church

As part of its Renewal and Reform programme, the Church of England has been wrestling with the question ‘what helps root young people in the worshipping life of the Church of England so that they continue to engage with the Church as a place of spiritual nurture and growth into their adult years?’ In pursuit of an answer, the Church’s Education Office commissioned Research by Design to conduct empirical research in a sample of 210 Anglican congregations between September 2015 and February 2016. Respondents comprised two groups of current or former attenders at an Anglican church, 878 parents of children aged 11-30 and 641 young adults aged 16-30, who participated by face-to-face interview or, more commonly, by means of self-completion online or paper questionnaires. Thirty individuals (14 young adults and 16 parents) were followed up by telephone interview, to gain qualitative insights. Six main conclusions were distilled from the evidence, relating to the importance of: building a culture of inter-generational relationships; ensuring churches are inclusive of all ages in their leadership and worship; recognizing young people and young adults as equal members of the Body of Christ; admitting baptized children to Holy Communion before confirmation; making churches unconditionally welcoming for young people; and supporting church youth workers and leaders. The Rooted in the Church Summary Report is available at:

https://www.churchofengland.org/media/3775547/rooted-in-the-church-summary-report-nov-2016.pdf

Non-churchgoers

Will Bissett has combined the skills acquired from a business background and his role as an ordained minister in the Church of England to write Outside In (Bloomington, IN: WestBow Press, 2016, xii + 111 + xiii + 149pp., ISBN 978-1-5127-4199-5, paperback, $19.95). The work, based on postgraduate research conducted by online questionnaire in January-February 2013, explores the perceptions of God, Jesus, Christianity, Christians, and Church among 228 persons in the UK who were regular churchgoers (80), Christians with low or no churchgoing (70), or religious nones (78). Respondents comprised an opportunity sample and thus are unlikely to be representative of the target population (which was principally non-churchgoers), even if a reasonable age and gender balance was coincidentally achieved. The project’s value is thus more illustrative than quantitative. Part II of the book sets out the research findings, while part I seeks to identify their practical theological relevance for the Church in addressing its ‘image problem’. The volume’s webpage is at:

http://bookstore.westbowpress.com/Products/SKU-000944035/Outside-In.aspx

OFFICIAL AND QUASI-OFFICIAL STATISTICS

Casey Review

The Department for Communities and Local Government has published The Casey Review: A Review into Opportunity and Integration, by Dame Louise Casey (ISBN 978-1-4098-4953-7). The 199-page study was commissioned in July 2015 by the then Prime Minister and Home Secretary as one in a long line of attempts to address community integration and cohesion. There is a significant amount of religious content in the new review, and not just confined to the separate chapter on religion (pp. 121-36). The coverage disproportionately highlights issues affecting British Muslims, including a summary of their attitudes (pp. 68-72). Although the review conducted no new quantitative research, it does draw upon pre-existing census, other official, and sample survey data. The report can be downloaded from:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/574565/The_Casey_Review.pdf

Is Britain fairer?

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has published a three-page factsheet on religion or belief in connection with its quinquennial review of equality and human rights in Britain, entitled Is Britain Fairer? The factsheet cites statistics for the principal religious groups in relation to fear or experience of crime, educational qualifications, employment and earnings, health, and political engagement. It is available at:

https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/key_facts_and_findings-_religion_2.pdf

ACADEMIC STUDIES

Religion and education

Religion and Education around the World is the Pew Research Center’s latest report on global trends. It assembles data on the educational attainment of adherents of six faith groups (Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and religiously unaffiliated) from 151 different countries. Five educational indicators are used: no formal schooling; primary schooling only; secondary schooling; post-secondary education; and average years of schooling. Statistics are drawn from census and other sources, in the case of the UK from the 2011 population census. In terms of length of schooling, Hindus were the best educated group (with a mean of 13.9 years) in the UK and Christians the least (11.8), although the latter statistic reflects the disproportionately elderly profile of Christians, many of whom grew up when the official school-leaving age was lower than now and post-secondary education opportunities were limited. The report and sortable detailed tables are available at:

http://www.pewforum.org/2016/12/13/religion-and-education-around-the-world/

Pew Global Attitudes Project, 2015

The Pew Research Center has also released the dataset from the Spring 2015 Pew Global Attitudes Survey, undertaken in 40 nations, including Great Britain (where telephone interviews were conducted among a sample of 999 adults on 8-28 April). Topics of religious interest comprised: concern about Islamic State and attitudes to military actions against it; frequency of private prayer; opinions of Jews and Muslims; attitudes to freedom of religion; and importance attached to religion. Findings on these subjects have mostly already been reported by British Religion in Numbers. The dataset can be downloaded from the Pew Global Attitudes Project website.

Late secularization

In a characteristically spirited article, Steve Bruce anticipates ongoing secularization in Britain: ‘The Sociology of Late Secularization: Social Divisions and Religiosity’, British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 67, No. 4, December 2016, pp. 613-31. Secularization has been shown to be a generational process, he contends, and the scale of it is now too large and well established to be reversed by further immigration, outbreeding of the non-religious by the religious, or conversion. Bruce additionally highlights the socially and culturally distinctive character of the diminishing band of religious when compared with the religious indifference and ignorance of mainstream society, as well as the decreasing social interaction between these two populations. The strong identification of religion with migration and minorities has amplified the sense that it is alien. Statistical and other evidence is cited in support of the argument. Access options to the article are outlined at:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-4446.12219/full

Religious polarization

Some support for the idea of increased polarization between a religious core minority on the one hand and a non-religious majority on the other is provided by Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme in ‘The Remaining Core: A Fresh Look at Religiosity Trends in Great Britain’, British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 67, No. 4, December 2016, pp. 632-54. She draws upon a sophisticated analysis of British Social Attitudes Survey data from 1983 to 2012 (for affiliation and attendance), including the three International Social Survey Program (ISSP) religion modules of 1991, 1998, and 2008 (for religious beliefs and attitudes). She argues that the religiously committed group (defined as those professing a religion and saying they attend church at least once a month) has stabilized proportionally since the Millennium and among cohorts born since the 1960s, attributing this to demographic gains from immigration and higher than average fertility. Religious decline is continuing but now sourced from previously nominal affiliates reassigning themselves as religious nones. Moreover, according to ISSP, there is a growing divide between the religiously committed and the religiously unaffiliated in terms of both their religious beliefs and opinions about the public role of religion. Access options to the article are outlined at:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-4446.12205/full

Religious nones

Important insights into non-religion are contributed by Ben Clements and Peter Gries in their ‘“Religious Nones” in the United Kingdom: How Atheists and Agnostics Think about Religion and Politics’, published in the First View edition of Politics and Religion. The article draws upon an online survey of 1,248 UK adults by YouGov in Spring 2014 to examine how those who identify as atheist or agnostic differ from the religiously affiliated in terms of religiosity (belief, behaviour, and salience of faith), left-right ideology, and socio-political policy preferences. Secular groups are shown to be more left-leaning than religious people while atheists and agnostics differ both from each other and especially from the religiously affiliated on matters of public policy, the religious effect being especially pronounced with regard to attitudes towards the legalization of same-sex marriage. Access options to the article are outlined at:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-religion/article/div-classtitlereligious-nones-in-the-united-kingdom-how-atheists-and-agnostics-think-about-religion-and-politicsdiv/6A1FC1367FF84CDBB4EAF99047F0CDDE

Anglican Communion

Growth and Decline in the Anglican Communion, 1980 to the Present, edited by David Goodhew (London: Routledge, 2017, 352pp., ISBN 978-1-472-43364-0, £24.99, paperback) comprises an introduction and conclusion by Goodhew, an afterword by Graham Kings, an overview by Todd Johnson and Gina Zurlo of ‘The Changing Demographics of Global Anglicanism, 1970-2010’, and 13 geographical chapters (five on Africa, four on Asia, two on the Americas, and one on England). The volume has been five years in the making and comes with fulsome commendations, Grace Davie, for example, describing it as ‘a veritable goldmine. It contains a huge amount of mostly numerical information on the Anglican Communion in all its fullness.’

The chapter on the Church of England is contributed by David Voas, telling a story of net absolute and relative decline (in terms of the number of stipendiary clergy, electoral roll members, communicants, attendances, and occasional offices, all to 2012-13) but with marked geographical variations (notably the emergence of the dioceses of London, Southwark, Oxford, and Ely as the Church’s equivalent of academia’s ‘golden triangle’). Voas also offers an explanation of church decline as the product of generational replacement, as reflected in national sample surveys. He concludes with a summary of three ‘counter-currents’, or good news stories in the life of the Church: a substantial increase in giving, the rise in attendances at cathedral services, and Fresh Expressions of Church. The book’s webpage is at:

https://www.routledge.com/Growth-and-Decline-in-the-Anglican-Communion-1980-to-the-Present/Goodhew/p/book/9781472433640

Early Primitive Methodism

The proletarian and democratic self-image of the early Primitive Methodist movement during the first half of the nineteenth century is challenged in Sandy Calder’s The Origins of Primitive Methodism (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2016, xvii + 293pp., ISBN 978-1-78327-081-1, £75.00, hardback). Using a mixture of quantitative and qualitative evidence, Calder paints a picture of a connexion led in its formative years by a fairly prosperous elite of middle-class preachers and lay officials and appealing to a respectable working-class constituency drawn to its ‘old-time’ religion. Major primary sources include baptismal registers and the official census of religious attendance in 1851, considered in, respectively, chapters 6 and 7. Neither is analysed in as much statistical depth as might be desired, although some useful methodological points are made. The author’s claims about the social profile of Primitive Methodism in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the roots of its eventual failure, are insecurely founded and require reassessment in the light of the tabulation of the denomination’s vital registers published in the third volume (2015) of The Dissenters by Michael Watts, which presumably appeared too late for Calder to consult. The book’s webpage is at:

https://boydellandbrewer.com/the-origins-of-primitive-methodism-hb.html

Free Churches and the Labour Party

Few students of British politics will not be familiar with the repeated claims made by Morgan Phillips, when General Secretary of the Labour Party in the late 1940s and 1950s, that socialism in Britain owed more to Methodism than to Marx. But what was the reality? In a revision of his doctoral thesis, Peter Catterall has provided at least part of an answer in his Labour and the Free Churches, 1918-1939: Radicalism, Righteousness, and Religion (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, xiv + 322pp., ISBN 978-1-4411-1589-8, £90.00, hardback). His sources are principally qualitative – notably contemporary newspapers, autobiographies and biographies, and archival – but, wherever possible, he does endeavour to quantify them. Thus, there are tables showing: the numbers of Free Church ministers or laity who stood as Parliamentary candidates or were elected as MPs (table 2 and appendix); and the religious affiliations of Labour MPs (table 9), members of the Parliamentary Committee/General Council of the Trades Union Congress (table 10), members and officers of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party (table 11), and of Labour councillors in Bolton (table 12), Bradford (table 13), Liverpool (table 14), and Norfolk (table 16). There are also tables recording the lobby voting in the House of Commons of Free Church Labour, Liberal, and Conservative MPs on three key issues (tables 15, 17, and 19). The Free Churches provided a disproportionate number of Labour Parliamentary candidates but Catterall does not believe that this reflected the electoral behaviour of Free Church voters between the wars, with a strong lingering attachment to the Liberal Party and even some shift towards the Conservatives. The book’s webpage is at:

http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/labour-and-the-free-churches-1918-1939-9781441115898/

Scottish Muslims

Relative to England, Scotland’s Muslim population is tiny (77,000 at the last census), but it has nevertheless already been extensively investigated by academics. Recently, two more studies have been added to the scholarly literature.

Khadijah Elshayyal, Scottish Muslims in Numbers: Understanding Scotland’s Muslim Population through the 2011 Census (Edinburgh: Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World, 2016, 60pp., ISBN 978-1-5272-0181-1, paperback) unpacks the census results for Scottish Muslims under four principal headings of demography, civic life, inequalities, and labour market issues. It can be downloaded from:

http://www.ed.ac.uk/files/atoms/files/scottish_muslims_in_numbers_web.pdf

Stefano Bonino, Muslims in Scotland: The Making of Community in a Post-9/11 World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017, xv + 240pp., ISBN 978-1-4744-0802-8, paperback, £19.99) is more qualitative in its approach, its principal primary source being ethnographic fieldwork in Edinburgh between 2011 and 2013, and grounded in a substantial bibliography. A particular focus is on the evidential balance between integration and discrimination, with an upbeat epilogue envisaging ‘a Scottish communitarianism, where diversity and human universals meet’. A fuller exposition of Scottish sample survey data about the incidence of Islamophobia would have been helpful. The book’s webpage is at:

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-muslims-in-scotland.html

Child abuse

An Exploration of Knowledge about Child Abuse Linked to Faith or Belief has been compiled by Lisa Oakley, Kathryn Kinmond, Mor Dioum, and Justin Humphreys on behalf of the National Working Group on Child Abuse Linked to Faith or Belief. The research was led by Manchester Metropolitan University in partnership with the Victoria Climbie Foundation and the Churches Child Protection Advisory Service. It is based upon the responses of a self-selecting sample of 1,361 professionals who completed an online survey on the subject, 57% of whom had backgrounds in faith organizations, 23% in the police, and 11% in teaching. Although 61% of informants were confident they understood the term ‘child abuse linked to faith or belief’, only 33% felt they could identify indicators of it, just 25% had received specific training on the issue, and a mere 12% were familiar with the National Action Plan in the area. The report is available at:

http://vcf-uk.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/An-Exploration-of-Knowledge-about-Child-Abuse-linked-to-Faith-or-Belief.pdf

Mathematics of Christmas

A quirky new book with which to close our coverage of the year is Hannah Fry and Thomas Oléron Evans, The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus: The Mathematics of Christmas (London: Doubleday, 2016, [6] + 138pp., ISBN 978-0-857-52460-7, hardback, £9.99). The authors, both professional mathematicians, offer us, according to the blurb, ‘a dazzling, magical mathematical tour [of Christmas] complete with graphs, diagrams and sketches’. The ten short chapters cover: the indisputable existence of Santa Claus; decorating the tree; buying presents; secret Santa; wrapping presents; cooking turkey; Christmas crackers; the Queen; how to win at Monopoly; and watching Santa’s weight. Although the actual religious content is minimal, reflecting the reality of the modern Christmas, the work is a fun read, a light-hearted introduction to the uses of mathematical modelling, and doubtless the nearest we will come to seeing mathematicians letting their hair down. The book’s webpage is at:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1113056/the-indisputable-existence-of-santa-claus/

British Religion in Numbers

A further update of the British Religion in Numbers (BRIN) source database has just taken place, as follows: new entries have been created for 86 British religious statistical sources, 70 of them from 2016; 40 existing entries have been augmented, mostly by additional bibliographical references; and 4 existing entries have been consolidated into 2. The total of sources described in the database now stands at 2,636, disproportionately sample surveys. Sources can be browsed at:

Source List

An advanced search facility is available at:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/search/

NEW DATASETS AT UK DATA SERVICE

SN 8078: ONS Opinions Survey, Census Religion Module, 2009

Between 2007 and 2009 the Office for National Statistics (ONS) trialled five different types of question concerning religious affiliation to help inform its decision about the final wording to be used in the 2011 census of population (this experimentation, and its outcome, is briefly described in Clive Field’s article in Religion, Vol. 44, No. 3, 2014, pp. 368-9). The vehicle for the trialling was the ONS Opinions Survey, a monthly omnibus of a cross-section of the British adult population. Between April and July 2009 the additional religion module put to interviewees in the survey asked ‘which of these best describes you?’ followed by a list of six world faiths and options to specify another religion or no religion, with spontaneous comments on the question by respondents also being noted. SN 8078 comprises a secure access version of the dataset for this module. A catalogue description of the dataset with links to documentation is available at:

https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=8078&type=Data%20catalogue

SN 8100: Scottish Health Survey, 2015

The Scottish Health Survey, 2015 is the eleventh in a series initiated in 1995. It was conducted by ScotCen Social Research on behalf of the Scottish Government, 6,418 adults aged 16 and over living in private households throughout Scotland being interviewed face-to-face between January 2015 and February 2016. A belonging form of question about religious affiliation was asked of all respondents, which can be used as a variable for analysing answers to all other questions, whether health-related or not. Additionally, questions about the experience of discrimination or harassment on religious and other grounds were included in Version A of the questionnaire, which was put to a part-sample. A catalogue description of the dataset with links to documentation is available at:

https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=8100&type=Data%20catalogue

SN 8116: British Social Attitudes Survey, 2015

The annual British Social Attitudes Survey is undertaken by NatCen Social Research on behalf of the Economic and Social Research Council and a consortium of government departments and charitable funders. In 2015 fieldwork was completed between July and November, interviews being achieved with 4,328 adults aged 18 and over living in private households throughout Britain (representing a response of 51%). The standard questions on religious affiliation (current and by upbringing) and attendance at religious services were put to the entire sample. Additionally, sub-samples B and D answered (via self-completion questionnaire) a question on their experience of discrimination with regard to work, including on the grounds of religion. A catalogue description of the dataset with links to documentation is available at:

https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=8116&type=Data%20catalogue

Please note: Counting Religion in Britain is © Clive D. Field, 2016

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Counting Religion in Britain, September 2016

Posted on October 1, 2016 by Clive D. Field

Counting Religion in Britain, No. 12, September 2016 features 26 new sources. It can be read in full below. Alternatively, you can download the PDF version: no-12-september-2016

OPINION POLLS

Religious affiliation

Lord Ashcroft’s latest large-scale political poll, conducted online among 8,011 voters between 11 and 22 August 2016, included his customary question about professed ‘membership’ of religious groups. As the following table indicates, the proportion identifying with no religion has increased steadily in similarly-sized Ashcroft surveys for the second half of each year since 2011, by almost five points over this quinquennium. There has been a corresponding reduction in self-identifying Christians, who seem destined to lose their overall majority share within a matter of years. Indeed, religious nones are already in the ascendant among under-35s and supporters of green and nationalist political parties. Full breaks by demographics are contained in table 65 at:

http://lordashcroftpolls.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/The-New-Blueprint-Full-data-tables-Sept-2016.pdf

% down	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016
Christian	56.0	54.2	52.6	53.2	51.2	51.4
Non-Christian	6.4	7.3	7.4	6.5	6.5	6.1
None	35.8	36.3	37.7	37.9	40.1	40.5
Prefer not to say	1.8	2.2	2.3	2.3	2.1	2.0

Importance of religion

Asked in a YouGov Daily app-based survey on 14 August 2016 about the importance they attached to their religion, 47% of Britons replied that they had no religious beliefs. Of the remainder, 13% said religion was very important to them, 16% somewhat important, and 21% not very important. Topline results are published at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/08/14/funding-farmers-lose-memory-personal-importance-re/

Obsessions

Just 4% of Britons admitted to being obsessed about religion, according to another YouGov Daily app-based survey on 28 September 2016. Given a list of ten things to be obsessed about, 44% said they were obsessed about none of them. Money (29%), food (26%), and politics (18%) topped the list of obsessions, with religion coming in joint last position with the arts. Topline results are published at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/09/28/david-cameron-and-theresa-may-claims-and-counter-c/

Human extinction

Almost half of Britons (49%) anticipate that the human race will die out at some stage, according to YouGov, which interviewed a sample of 1,581 adults online on 11-12 September 2016. The remainder did not believe it would expire or were unsure what to think. Asked to pick up to three from a list of 12 possible causes of human extinction, the top-rated choices were a nuclear bomb (38%), climate change (31%), a pandemic (27%), and a meteor or asteroid (26%). But 8% considered that a religious apocalypse could bring human life to an end, rising to 18% of UKIP voters and 12% of 18-24s. Still more, 27%, agreed that the government should be developing contingency plans against a religious apocalypse, varying by demographic sub-groups between 22% and 36%. Full data tables can be accessed via the link in the blog post at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/09/26/end-isnt-nigh/

Burkas and burkinis

Debate about Islamic women’s dress, notably the wearing of burkas and/or burkinis in public, reignited in several European countries during the summer. In Britain, according to an online poll by YouGov on 24-25 August 2016, a majority (57%) of the sample of 1,668 adults was in favour of a law banning the wearing of the burka, three points less than in 2012, with 25% opposed to a prohibition and 18% undecided. Endorsement of a ban was highest among Conservatives (66%), persons aged 50-64 (68%), over-65s (78%), people who had voted for the UK to leave the European Union (78%), and UKIP supporters (84%). Only among 18-24s and those who had voted to remain in the European Union did opponents outnumber proponents, albeit they never constituted a majority. The distribution of female opinion was broadly the same as the national average. However, when it came to the burkini, just a plurality of 46% agreed with a legal ban, with 30% against (including almost half of 18-24s and ‘remainers’) and 24% unsure. The lower level of support for prohibition of the burkini may be related to the fact that, unlike the burka (as popularly defined), it does not cover the face. Detailed results can be accessed via YouGov’s blog post on the survey at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/08/31/majority-public-backs-burka-ban/

Attitudes to the burkini were further explored in another YouGov poll, for which 4,052 Britons were interviewed online on 31 August 2016. The question this time was not whether the burkini should be legal in the UK but, following controversy in France, whether it is acceptable to wear one at the beach. A small majority (51%) thought it was acceptable, but 35% disagreed (including 61% of UKIP voters and 46% of over-60s), with 14% uncertain. Data are posted at:

https://yougov.co.uk/opi/surveys/results#/survey/2fc0ca50-6f66-11e6-87b8-005056900101

Circumcision

In 2013 the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted a resolution about violation of the physical integrity of children which, inter alia, expressed concern about the circumcision of young boys for religious reasons. The matter was aired in one of YouGov Daily’s app-based surveys on 5 August 2016, respondents being asked whether infant male circumcision should be banned or not. Four options were given, multiple answers being permitted. In reply, two-fifths of Britons said that it should be banned with a further one-quarter wanting it discouraged. Support for circumcision on religious grounds stood at 14%, the same proportion as thinking the practice should be encouraged for health reasons. Topline results are published at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/08/05/circumcision/

Anti-Semitism (1)

Concerns that anti-Semitism has not been rooted out of the Labour Party will not go away. The latest revelation is that 87% of a sample of 1,864 British Jewish adults felt that the Labour Party is too tolerant of anti-Semitism among its MPs, members, and supporters. Significant numbers of Jews also said the same about the Green Party (49%), the United Kingdom Independence Party (43%), the Scottish National Party (40%), and the Liberal Democrat Party (37%). Only the Conservative Party (13%) is perceived as having a good track record at combating anti-Semitism in its midst. The survey was commissioned by the Campaign against Antisemitism, and full results will be released in October 2016 as part of the Campaign’s Antisemitism Barometer. Meanwhile, its press release can be found at:

https://antisemitism.uk/caa-launches-manifesto-for-fighting-antisemitism-as-poll-reveals-extent-of-antisemitism-crisis/

Anti-Semitism (2)

One-third of 3,660 Britons interviewed online by YouGov on 27 September 2016 agreed (either strongly or somewhat) that anti-Semitism has become so deeply entrenched in our thought and culture that it is often ignored and dismissed. The proportion thinking so was highest among the over-60s (42%) and lowest for UKIP voters (26%). Dissentients numbered 37% while 30% of respondents did not know what to think. Demographic breakdowns of results are at:

https://yougov.co.uk/opi/surveys/results#/survey/ec63a420-8497-11e6-b0e1-005056900101

Lucky charms

Avid television viewers of the Rio Olympic and Paralympic Games may have noticed many athletes carrying lucky charms or performing little routines to bring them luck. Respondents to one of YouGov Daily’s app-based surveys of Britons on 17 August 2016 were asked whether they thought these charms and routines actually helped athletes to do well. Only 9% said they had no effect whatsoever, as many as 86% perceiving a psychological benefit in helping the athletes’ state of mind. A further 4% agreed with this suggestion but also believed that lucky charms and routines can genuinely bring about good luck. Topline results are published at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/08/17/state-schools-and-oxbridge-luck-charms-gdp-and-len/

FAITH ORGANIZATION STUDIES

Funeral music

Even funerals are no longer immune from secularization. Not only is the proportion of them conducted by religious celebrants fast diminishing, but religion is disappearing from their content. Co-operative Funeralcare’s latest biennial survey of funeral music confirms the trend, 54% of its funeral directors stating that hymns are the funeral music genre declining fastest in popularity. In a survey of over 30,000 funerals conducted by the group, seven of the top ten pieces of funeral music in 2016 were secular, the chart being headed by Frank Sinatra’s My Wat. Although the other three were hymns, they had all slipped since the 2014 rating: The Lord is My Shepherd from second to fifth position, Abide with Me from third to ninth, and All Things Bright and Beautiful from sixth to seventh. Outside the top ten, the next most requested hymns were How Great Thou Art, Amazing Grace, and The Old Rugged Cross. Co-operative Funeralcare’s press release is at:

http://www.co-operativefuneralcare.co.uk/arranging-a-funeral/organising-the-day/funeral-music/Survey/2016/

Christians and the supernatural

Two-thirds of practising Christians in the UK claim to have personally experienced the supernatural, more than half of them during the past year and one-quarter in the previous week. This is according to a study conducted by Christian Research in July 2016 among 1,409 self-selecting members of its online Resonate panel, disproportionately Protestant, male, and over 55 years of age. Most of the claimed experiences involved answered prayer and healing. Two-thirds of the sample thought that paranormal or evil forces could be behind the supernatural as well as the divine, and a similar proportion agreed that an over-emphasis on ‘miracles’ gave Christianity a bad name. The survey was commissioned to coincide with the launch of a new book written by the co-pastors of Soul Survivor Watford: Mike Pilavachi and Andy Croft, Everyday Supernatural: Living a Spirit-Led Life without Being Weird (Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 2016, 239pp., ISBN 978-0-7814-1499-9, $16.99, paperback). However, it should be noted that no results appear in the book itself. The foregoing account is largely based on the coverage by Premier Christian Radio and the Church Times at, respectively:

https://www.premier.org.uk/News/UK/Two-thirds-of-UK-Christians-have-experienced-the-supernatural

and

https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2016/2-september/news/uk/christians-supernatural-experiences-surveyed

Contemporary evangelicals

The Evangelical Alliance is celebrating its 170th anniversary. As part of the commemoration, it has conducted another wave in its 21st Century Evangelicals project. Almost 1,500 members of its self-selecting research panel were interviewed online. Some headline findings from the study are published in an article in the September-October 2016 issue of the Alliance’s IDEA Magazine (pp. 14-15). Overwhelmingly, evangelicals said they were committed to sharing the gospel with their personal networks and to passing on the Christian faith to the next generation. However, 62% also believed British evangelicalism would increasingly depend upon the contribution of black and minority ethnic Christians, with 71% looking to growing immigration and the arrival of asylum seekers as a further opportunity to evangelize. Asked about future priorities for the Alliance, the protection of religious liberty topped the list. The article is freely available online at:

http://www.eauk.org/idea/upload/idea_magazine_septoct2016_webversion.pdf

Church Growth in East London

In Church Growth in East London: A Grassroots View, recently published by the Centre for Theology & Community, Beth Green, Angus Ritchie, and Tim Thorlby summarize insights into church growth derived from interviews with 13 church leaders in East London between March and May 2014. Eight of the places of worship visited were Anglican, and the rest from other traditions (one Baptist, one Pentecostal, one Roman Catholic, and two non-denominational). Nine of the 13 had black majority congregations. Seven reported numerical growth during the previous five years. Church-planting and immigration were identified as the two distinctive factors which have helped growth. The 52-page report, including reflections by the Bishop of Chelmsford (Stephen Cottrell) and recommendations for future action, can be found at:

http://www.theology-centre.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Church-Growth-digital.pdf

Church bell-ringing

The centuries-old tradition of church bell-ringing may be under threat because of a shortage of new recruits. This is according to a survey, by BBC local radio, of 180 delegates to the 2016 annual conference of the Central Conference of Church Bell Ringers. Three-quarters of the delegates said that it had become harder during the past ten years to attract new members of any age, and an even higher proportion claimed that it was difficult to recruit young people under 21. More than half (54%) agreed that declining church attendance had exacerbated the problem. At the same time, three-fifths of delegates thought the actual demand for bell-ringing had increased in the previous decade. The BBC’s press release about the survey is at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-37257729

Church of England parochial finance

A 28-page report on the Church of England’s parish finance statistics for 2014 has revealed a £41 million or 4% surplus of income (£989 million) over expenditure (£948 million). Viewed as absolute figures, total income has increased by 30% since 2004 and income from planned giving (as opposed to the collection plate and other means) by as much as 53%, even though the number of planned givers has fallen steadily since 2007, in line with declining church attendance. In real terms, however, adjusting for inflation, overall income has dropped by 5% since 2004 and planned giving by 8% since 2009, while expenditure has remained fairly steady. Data are reported nationally for each year from 2004 to 2014 and by diocese for 2014 alone. Parish Finance Statistics, 2014 can be found at:

https://www.churchofengland.org/media/2853794/2014financestatistics.pdf

Church of England ministry

Two new reports from the Church of England exemplify the challenges which it faces with regard to the future availability of stipendiary and other clergy. The 18-page Ministry Statistics in Focus: Stipendiary Clergy Projections, 2015-2035 has been prepared by Research and Statistics and derives from the Church Commissioners’ payroll system. It shows that, if the number of ordinands and average retirement age remain unchanged (the status quo model), then the pool of stipendiary clergy will decline steadily, from 7,400 in 2016 to 6,300 in 2035. Of the three other projection models explored, only achievement of the ambitious Renewal and Reform target of a 50% increase in ordinations by 2023, and its maintenance thereafter, would ensure stability in stipendiary clergy numbers at around 7,600 full-time equivalents. The second report, Ordained Vocations Statistics, 1949-2014, runs to 22 pages and has been compiled by the Ministry Division. It charts the annual number of recommended candidates for the various forms of Anglican ministry (not just stipendiary) and, since 1988, their demographic characteristics (gender, age, and ethnicity). There is a particular focus on the years 2010-14 and there are also brief case studies of three dioceses. Both reports can be accessed via:

https://churchsupporthub.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Cover-note-for-stats-reports-FINAL-LINKS.pdf

Church of England cathedrals

Cathedral Statistics, 2015 have recently been released by Church of England Research and Statistics. The 18-page annual publication contains the usual range of information about numbers of worshippers, communicants, occasional offices, attenders at other activities, volunteers, visitors, names on the community roll, and musical life in the 42 English cathedrals, often with trend data back to 2005. Unsurprisingly, the largest metric was for visitors, 9,490,000 (albeit 7% down from the recent high in 2013) plus a further 1,040,000 at Westminster Abbey. The report can be found at:

https://www.churchofengland.org/media/2859050/2015_cathedral_statistics.pdf

Church in Wales statistics

The annual report on Church in Wales membership and finance for 2015 generally depicted ongoing decline. Of 12 indicators of participation in parish life, only two showed an absolute increase between 2014 and 2015: confirmations (+7%) and funerals (+1%). By contrast, there was a 6% decrease in the number of weddings and a 5% reduction in Sunday attendance by both adults and young people and in Pentecost communicants. Average Sunday congregations have now fallen below 1% of the Welsh population. The Church’s Governing Body, at its recent meeting in Lampeter, had originally been asked merely to ‘take note of’ the report but it was in no mood simply to do that and passed a resolution that it did so ‘with a heavy heart’ and with a request for an urgent investigation into the factors underlying church growth in the minority of parishes which were experiencing it. The membership and finance report is available at:

http://cinw.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Ag19-MembershipFinance_en.pdf

The Governing Body’s debate on the report received full-page coverage in the Church Times (23 September 2016, p. 13) at:

https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2016/23-september/news/uk/declining-figures-noted-with-a-heavy-heart

Jewish students

The Union of Jewish Students, which represents 8,500 Jewish students in the United Kingdom and Ireland, has provided The Jewish Chronicle with the 2016 distribution of Jewish university students, summarized by the newspaper in its issue of 23 September 2016 (p. 88). Three universities (Birmingham, Leeds, and Nottingham) have more than 1,000 Jewish students. Five have more than 500: Bristol, Cambridge, Manchester, Oxford, and University College London. Nine have more than 100, 10 more than 50, and 29 fewer than 50.

OFFICIAL AND QUASI-OFFICIAL STATISTICS

Scottish Household Survey, 2015

The proportion of Scots claiming to belong to no religion has increased from two-fifths to one-half within the space of just six years, according to the latest data from the Scottish Household Survey, for which a random sample of almost 10,000 adults is interviewed annually by a consortium led by Ipsos MORI on behalf of the Scottish Government. The growth in religious nones has largely been at the expense of allegiance to the Church of Scotland, whose market share has declined from one-third to one-quarter since 2009. Adherents of the Roman Catholic and other Christian Churches and of non-Christian faiths have shown reasonable stability (see table, below). Non-Christians, however, are far more likely than affiliates of other religious to record that they have been subject to discrimination or harassment within the past three years, although this is not necessarily on religious grounds. Scotland’s People Annual Report: Results from the 2015 Scottish Household Survey is available, alongside associated data tables, at:

http://www.gov.scot/Publications/2016/09/7673/0

% down	2009	2011	2013	2015
None	40	42	46	50
Church of Scotland	34	32	28	25
Roman Catholic	15	16	15	14
Other Christian	8	8	8	8
Non-Christian	3	3	3	3

Scottish Social Attitudes Survey, 2015

The Scottish Government has also published the 103-page report Scottish Social Attitudes, 2015: Attitudes to Discrimination and Positive Action. It is based on the fourth in a series of special discrimination modules of the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey which the Scottish Government has sponsored since 2002, for which 1,288 Scottish residents aged 18 and over were interviewed by ScotCen Social Research between July 2015 and January 2016. They were questioned about discrimination and positive action in relation to age, disability, gender, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, race, and religion. Religion-related issues are discussed throughout the report but there is also a separate chapter (pp. 53-9) on religious dress and symbols. In general, discriminatory attitudes were found to have declined since the last module in 2010, including on the part of those with a religious affiliation. Nevertheless, varying degrees of negativity continued to be exhibited towards Muslims:

65% thought a bank should definitely or probably be able to insist a Muslim woman employee remove the veil while at work (69% in 2010)
41% agreed that Scotland would begin to lose its identity if more Muslims came to live in Scotland (50% in 2010)
41% did not know anybody who was a Muslim (46% in 2010)
20% would be unhappy if a close relative married or formed a long-term relationship with a Muslim (23% in 2010)
18% thought a bank should definitely or probably be able to insist a Muslim woman employee remove the headscarf while at work (23% in 2010)
13% considered a Muslim would be unsuitable as a primary school teacher (15% in 2010)

The report can be downloaded from:

http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0050/00506463.pdf

ACADEMIC STUDIES

Secularization in Britain and America (1)

Half a century has passed since Bryan Wilson (1926-2004) published his Religion in Secular Society: A Sociological Comment as part of ‘The New Thinker’s Library’, a series from C. A. Watts, which was a small London firm associated with the rationalist movement. The sociology of religion was still in its infancy in Britain at that time, but Wilson offered a pithy assessment of the secularization pattern in England, including an opening chapter summarizing the quantitative evidence, as well as a comparative treatment of religion in America. Reprinted by Penguin in 1969, his book quickly established itself as the key international text for the modern theory or paradigm of secularization.

Now Steve Bruce, who has assumed Wilson’s mantle as the leading exponent of secularization, has edited Religion in Secular Society: Fifty Years On (Oxford University Press, 2016, xix + 258pp., ISBN 978-0-19-878837-9, £27.50, hardback). It reproduces the full text of the 1969 edition of Wilson’s work, together with an introduction and two appendices by Bruce. The introduction (pp. vii-xix) provides a short biography of Wilson and a commentary on the style and argument of Religion in Secular Society. The first appendix (pp. 231-40) summarizes and evaluates the most common or important criticisms of Wilson’s thesis, while the second (pp. 241-58) outlines the major changes in the nature and status of religion in the United Kingdom (with a goodly use of statistics) and United States during the past 50 years. Bruce concludes that: ‘By and large, the record of changes in “religion in secular society” since 1966 fits Wilson’s secularization model better than it fits the alternatives.’ The book’s webpage is at:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/religion-in-secular-society-9780198788379?q=Religion%20in%20secular%20society&lang=en&cc=gb

Secularization in Britain and America (2)

Most scholarship has asserted that the United States is an exception to the secularization model in Western societies, on account of its much higher levels of religiosity. But, focusing on trends rather than levels, David Voas and Mark Chaves argue in a recent article in American Journal of Sociology (Vol. 121, No. 5, March 2016, pp. 1517-56) that the United States should no longer be regarded as a counter-example to secularization. This is for two reasons: (a) American religiosity is now known to have been declining for decades and (b) this decline has been produced by the same generational patterns as characterize religious declension elsewhere in the West, with each successive cohort less religious than the preceding one. This intergenerational effect is documented by the authors through analysis of population census data for Australia (1971-2011) and New Zealand (1986-2013) and cross-sectional survey data for the United States (1972-2014), Canada (1985-2012), and Britain (1983-2013). The British findings (discussed on pp. 1530-4) derive from the British Social Attitudes Surveys, three-survey moving averages demonstrating that religious affiliation has reduced from one cohort to the next for years of birth going back to the beginning of the twentieth century, especially in the early post-war decades. Access options for ‘Is the United States a Counterexample to the Secularization Thesis?’ are outlined at:

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/684202

Theistic belief

Research in the empirical psychology of religion is increasingly characterized by the deployment of attitude scales. In 2012 Jeff Astley, Leslie Francis, and Mandy Robbins proposed the use of the seven-item Astley-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Theistic Belief as a means of operationalizing measurement of attitudes across the major theistic faith traditions. The psychometric properties of this scale have now been further examined among three sub-samples (cumulative N = 10,678) drawn from the 2011-12 Young People’s Attitudes to Religious Diversity project, for which year 9 and 10 pupils (aged 13-15) attending state-maintained secondary schools throughout the United Kingdom completed questionnaires. The data supported the internal consistency reliability and construct validity of the instrument with all three groups and thus confirmed its suitability for application in subsequent research. The full report can be found in Leslie Francis and Christopher Alan Lewis, ‘Internal Consistency Reliability and Construct Validity of the Astley-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Theistic Faith among Religiously Unaffiliated, Christian, and Muslim Youth in the UK’, Mental Health, Religion, and Culture, Vol. 19, No. 5, 2016, pp. 484-92. Access options to the article are outlined at:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13674676.2016.1206871

Science and religion

Berry Billingsley explored the attitudes toward science and religion of 670 pupils aged 14-17 from eight English secondary schools for a paper read at the recent annual conference of the British Educational Research Association. The results showed that for many respondents science was an insufficient explanation of what it means to be a person, with 54% believing humans have souls, 52% that life has an ultimate purpose, and 45% in God. The paper was briefly reported by TES at:

https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/troubled-souls-a-higher-purpose-new-study-shows-how-pupils-view

NEW DATASET AT UK DATA SERVICE

SN 8012: Scottish Election Study, 2011

The Scottish Parliament Election Study, 2011 was conducted online by YouGov on behalf of the Universities of Strathclyde, Edinburgh, and Essex and with funding from the Economic and Social Research Council. A panel of 2,046 Scottish electors was interviewed both pre- and post-election, between 25 April 2011 and 24 April 2012. The questionnaire covered a range of political and related topics, the answers to which can be analysed by two religious variables: religious affiliation (using a belonging form of question) and frequency of attendance at religious services. A catalogue description for the dataset can be found at:

https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=8012&type=Data%20catalogue

Posted in Historical studies, Ministry studies, News from religious organisations, Official data, Religion and Politics, Religion in public debate, Religious beliefs, Religious prejudice, Rites of Passage, Survey news | Tagged American Journal of Sociology, Angus Ritchie, Anti-Semitism, Astley-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Theistic Belief, athletes, BBC, Berry Billingsley, Beth Green, British Social Attitudes Survey, Bryan Wilson, Burka, burkini, Campaign against Antisemitism, Cathedrals, Centre for Theology and Community, Christian Research, Christopher Alan Lewis, church bell-ringing, church growth, Church in Wales, church membership, Church of England, circumcision, clergy, Co-operative Funeralcare, David Voas, discrimination, Evangelical Alliance, evangelicals, funeral music, human extinction, importance of religion, Ipsos-MORI, Islamophobia, Jewish Chronicle, Labour Party, Leslie Francis, London, Lord Ashcroft, lucky charms, Mark Chaves, Mental Health Religion and Culture, Muslims, obsessions, Oxford University Press, parish finance, practising Christians, Religious Affiliation, religious apocalypse, religious dress, Resonate, rites of passage, science, ScotCen Social Research, Scottish Election Study, Scottish Government, Scottish Household Survey, Scottish Social Attitudes Survey, secularization, Soul Survivor, Steve Bruce, supernatural, theistic belief, Tim Thorlby, Union of Jewish Students, United States of America, YouGov | 2 Comments

Counting Religion in Britain, August 2016

Posted on August 29, 2016 by Clive D. Field

Counting Religion in Britain, No. 11, August 2016 features 25 new sources. It can be read in full below. Alternatively, you can download the PDF version: No 11 August 2016

OPINION POLLS

Weddings in church

Only 11% of Britons now claim to attend religious services at least monthly (the conventional definition of ‘regularly’ these days), and 65% admit they never or practically never attend. Nevertheless, a slight majority (52%) still considers it is acceptable to have a church wedding even if you are not a regular churchgoer or not religious, against 31% who deem it unacceptable and 17% who do not know what to think. Discounting those in a civil partnership (too few for the results to be meaningful), the demographic sub-group least likely to judge a church wedding acceptable in these circumstances are people living as married (44%), with divorced persons (37%) most likely to consider it inappropriate. The questions were asked by YouGov as part of an online survey of 1,692 adults on 8-9 August 2016 on the subject of wedding customs, and full data tables are available via the link in the blog at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/08/10/majority-wedding-traditions-are-still-popular-dont/

In practice, of course, only a minority of individuals marrying now opt for a religious ceremony. In England and Wales in 2013, the last year reported, the proportion was 28%, the lowest figure since the commencement of civil registration in the early Victorian era.

Religious conversion

The overwhelming majority of Britons (85%) would not be prepared to convert to a religion, if asked to do so by a long-term romantic partner, the proportion consistently exceeding four-fifths in all demographic sub-groups. This was a far greater number than expressed unwillingness to agree to any of a partner’s 11 other requests, only opposition to becoming a vegan (76%) and cutting off contact with a friend (71%) coming close. Just over one-tenth (11%) were unsure how they would respond to being asked by their partner to convert to a religion, while 5% said they had already done so or would be prepared to do so, peaking at 7% of adults aged 18-24 years. The survey was conducted by YouGov among an online sample of 1,652 persons on 28-29 July 2016, and the data table can be accessed via a link in the blog at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/08/01/id-do-anything-love-i-wont-do/

Economic migrants

Religion is not a factor which Britons deem important when considering whether an economic migrant should be allowed into the UK, according to a poll by YouGov on 24-25 August 2016, for which 1,668 adults were interviewed online. In fact, it came bottom of a list of 14 characteristics, just 31% saying the religion of economic migrants was significant and 59% not. The demographic sub-groups most likely to think religion was an issue to be taken into account were people who had voted for the UK to leave the European Union in the referendum on 23 June (44%), over-65s (45%), and UKIP voters (60%). Overall, Britons attached greatest weight as economic immigration criteria to having a criminal record, proficiency in English, level of education, and possession of skills in an area where the UK has a skills shortage. The data tables can be accessed via a link in the blog at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/08/26/one-five-say-uk-should-not-admit-single-migrant-tu/

Jews and DIY

Do-it-yourself (DIY) is not normally something associated with British Jews. Indeed, they have a bit of a reputation within their community for not doing it, but 47% of them (and 58% of men) claimed to have engaged in some form of DIY during the past month, in a survey commissioned by World Jewish Relief. One-third had even carried out some DIY during the past week, although they seem to be fighting a losing battle since 53% still have DIY jobs outstanding at home. Changing a light bulb and hanging pictures were the commonest tasks undertaken, but painting, changing fuses, assembling furniture, and fixing toilets also featured prominently. Two-fifths of Jews had never attempted any DIY or had not done so during the past year, lack of knowledge, time, and motivation being the main reasons. The sample of 1,002 self-identifying British Jews were members of Survation’s Jewish panel and were interviewed, mostly by telephone, on 27-29 June 2016 (although the results have only just been released). Data tables can be found at:

http://survation.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Final-WJR-Poll-270616SPRCCH-1c0d0h2-DIY.pdf

Islamic State (1)

A majority of Britons (57%) approves of the use of military force to get rid of Islamic State (IS), according to a YouGov/Eurotrack poll on 21-22 July 2016 for which 1,673 adults were interviewed online. Men (65%), over-60s (66%), Conservatives (69%), and UKIP supporters (74%) were most in favour. A further 13% thought only non-violent means should be used to eliminate IS, while 11% opted to accept the existence of IS but to try to isolate it, the remaining 19% being don’t knows or giving other answers. A plurality (43%) considered the British government should be doing more to combat Islamic extremism, against 32% who judged it was doing as much as it reasonably could, 10 points up on the figure in December 2010. The data table can be accessed via a link in the blog at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/08/04/terrorist-attack-britain-expected-84-people/

Islamic State (2)

Subsequent to the preceding poll, footage emerged of members of the SAS (British special forces) fighting IS in Syria. In one of its instant app-based surveys, on 10 August 2016, YouGov ascertained that 55% of the British public endorsed the deployment of the SAS in Syria without a vote in Parliament, 30% disapproving and 15% being unsure. However, this sample of Britons was split on the commitment of additional British ground troops in Syria to fight IS, 39% being in favour, 38% against, and 22% undecided. These topline findings are reported at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/08/10/sas-fighting-isis-british-troops-syria-hinkley-poi/

Islamic State (3)

In a further release of data from its Spring 2016 Global Attitudes Survey, the Pew Research Center revealed that 71% of the 1,460 Britons interviewed supported the US-led military campaign against IS in Iraq and Syria. Nevertheless, when it came to a broader strategy to defeat terrorism around the world, 57% feared that relying too much on military force would create hatred leading to more terrorism, compared with 34% thinking overwhelming military force is the best way to defeat terrorism. Unsurprisingly, the sub-group endorsing the use of overwhelming military force against terrorists in general was also disproportionately more likely (82%) to back the campaign against IS. Pew’s press statement is at:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/08/22/europeans-back-anti-isis-campaign-but-have-doubts-about-use-of-force-in-fighting-terror/ft_16-08-17_terrorismglobal_isisfight/

FAITH ORGANIZATION STUDIES

Faith schools

Faith schools in general, and non-Christian and Catholic schools in particular, have an unusually low proportion of poor pupils in England compared to what would be expected from their catchment areas. The comparison was made between the number of children eligible for free school meals and levels of economic child deprivation in the area, both official statistics. These data have been extensively mined in the recent past by key stakeholders in the debate about faith schools, either to defend their record of social inclusion (especially on the part of the Catholic Education Service for England and Wales) or to criticize them for exacerbating inequalities. This latest research was conducted by education data analysis organization SchoolDash and published in its blog (with faith school statistics in figures 4, 8, and 11) at:

https://www.schooldash.com/blog.html#20160802

Church leaders and football

August is traditionally the ‘silly season’ for the media, when ‘real’ news is hard to find, and Christian media organization Premier is apparently no exception. According to a report in the Church of England Newspaper for 19 August 2016 (p. 3), it has surveyed 200 Christian leaders in the UK and ascertained that one in seven admit to skipping a church service in order to watch their football team play and one in five to praying for it to win. Respondents were also asked which Premier League team they supported, Arsenal, Liverpool, and Manchester United topping the list, in that order.

Anglican church growth

It is the number of clergy in a benefice, rather than the number of churches, which is associated with the likelihood of church growth or decline in the Church of England (measured in terms of attendance), according to an unpublished report by Fiona Tweedie and summarized in the Church Times for 5 August 2016 (p. 6) at:

https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2016/5-august/news/uk/church-growth-is-linked-to-more-clergy

Jewish statistics

The Jewish Chronicle has become the second UK religious newspaper to launch a regular column focusing on religious statistics. Jonathan Boyd, Executive Director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) and a previous occasional contributor to the newspaper, launched his monthly ‘View from the Data’ in the issue of 10 June 2016 with a piece on defining Jewish identity. This has been followed by articles on JPR’s report on intermarriage and Jews (8 July 2016) and Pew Research Center’s measurement of anti-Semitic attitudes in Britain since 2004 (5 August 2016). The latter, entitled ‘We May Be Better Off in the UK’, noted that ‘the vast majority of Brits actually view Jews in an overwhelmingly favourable light’, with Britain shown by Pew to be ‘one of the least antisemitic societies in the world’. This most recent column can be found at:

http://www.thejc.com/node/161537

The first religious newspaper to publish a regular column on religious statistics was the Church of England Newspaper, to which Peter Brierley has been contributing on a monthly basis for several years.

Anti-Semitic incidents

The Community Security Trust’s latest report on anti-Semitic incidents in the UK covers the period January-June 2016, during which 557 were logged, a rise of 11% over the equivalent six months in 2015 and the second highest total for the first half of any year since the Trust began to collect statistics. Three-fifths of incidents occurred in April-June when anti-Semitism (particularly in relation to the Labour Party) and racism and extremism more generally were to the foreground in public debate and the media. However, there was no spike immediately following the Brexit vote in the European Union referendum of 23 June, as was seen with other forms of hate crime. Four-fifths of incidents were recorded in the main Jewish centres of Greater London and Greater Manchester, although the number in the latter area actually fell. The report is available at:

https://cst.org.uk/public/data/file/4/f/Incidents_Report_-_Jan-June_2016.pdf

Scottish Jewry

The Scottish Council of Jewish Communities has published a 34-page report on the results of a small-scale investigation into Scottish Jewry which it conducted in 2015, with financial assistance from the Scottish Government: Fiona Frank, Ephraim Borowski, and Leah Granat, What’s Changed about Being Jewish in Scotland – 2015 Project Findings. The questionnaire (reproduced in appendix 2) was completed by a self-selecting and demographically rather skewed sample of 119 Jews in Scotland, 46 of whom had also responded to a similar survey in 2012. Additionally, 195 people attended focus groups in connection with the study. The principal impression to emerge from the survey was that living in Scotland has become a more negative experience for many Jews, in terms of a sense of insecurity and alienation born of societal anti-Semitism largely rooted in the Middle East situation (and specifically the conflict in Gaza in the summer of 2014). The report can be read at:

http://www.scojec.org/resources/files/bjis2.pdf

Jews and the Labour Party

After conducting a ballot of its members, in which 59% voted, the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) has nominated Owen Smith for leader of the Labour Party in the current Labour leadership election. Smith secured a resounding 92% of JLM votes against just 4% for Jeremy Corbyn, the Party’s present leader, a further 4% making no nomination. This result is perhaps unsurprising, given that Corbyn has not entirely succeeded in dissociating either the Party or himself from accusations of condoning anti-Semitism. The JLM, which has been affiliated to the Labour Party since 1920, reported the ballot on its website at:

http://www.jlm.org.uk/labourleadership

Islamophobic tweets

Demos has recently published a report on Islamophobia on Twitter, March to July 2016, written by Carl Miller, Josh Smith, and Jack Dale from the think-tank’s Centre for the Analysis of Social Media. It focuses especially on the 215,000 tweets sent in English and from around the world in July 2016, and which were identified (from automated content analysis) as being of an Islamophobic nature. In addition to analysis of the global dataset, the report contains a section on Islamophobic tweets sent from the UK during the months of May, June, and July 2016, the daily average being 468 in July compared with 380 in May and 351 in June. There was a particularly large spike in Islamophobic tweets in the UK between 11 and 17 July, coinciding with the Islamist atrocity in Nice and the attempted military coup in Turkey. The report, which also includes a reasonably full description of methodology, can be found at:

http://www.demos.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Islamophobia-on-Twitter_-March-to-July-2016-.pdf

OFFICIAL AND QUASI-OFFICIAL STATISTICS

Employment opportunities for Muslims

Employment Opportunities for Muslims in the UK, the second report for Session 2016-17 of the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee, is partially based on quantitative evidence, abstracted from official and other sources. It shows that Muslims still suffer the greatest economic disadvantage of any group in society. For example, according to the Department for Work and Pensions, Muslim unemployment rates for persons aged 16-64 in 2015 were more than twice the national average (13% compared to 5%), while 41% of Muslims were economically inactive against 22% of the whole population in this age range. The disadvantage was greater still for female Muslims, 58% of whom were economically inactive, with 65% of economically inactive Muslims being women, albeit there has been some improvement since 2011. More generally, the Committee highlighted a lack of detailed data and research on faith and race discrimination and disadvantage, urging the Government to take steps to address this deficiency. The report, including links to the published evidence, is available at:

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmwomeq/89/89.pdf

Ritual slaughter of animals

The Times of 13 August 2016 reported that the new monthly survey of abattoirs to be undertaken by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) would not routinely record the number of animals killed without being stunned first. This legal exemption from pre-stunning is granted to meet the ritual slaughter requirements of Jews and Muslims, to the consternation of the British Veterinary Association (BVA), which has long campaigned to end it on animal welfare grounds. The BVA had been hoping that the FSA would regularly report on animals killed in this way but the FSA claimed this would impose too onerous an information-gathering burden on abattoirs. Instead, the FSA proposes to collect statistics on religious slaughter periodically but has not set a date for doing so next (the last exercise being in 2013).

In a letter to The Times published on 16 August 2016, the FSA’s chairman (Heather Hancock) sought to clarify its position. She wrote: ‘Our new system for gathering animal welfare data will capture information on a more continuous basis than the former animal welfare survey. This data will show the number of establishments in England and Wales using non-stun slaughter or a combination of stun and non-stun slaughter. This routine data will be regularly supplemented with additional information on the numbers of animals that are slaughtered by these methods.’ According to a report in the newspaper on the same day, the FSA’s clarification has been welcomed by the BVA, which believes that more animals are killed without being stunned than is strictly necessary to meet the needs of Jews and Muslims.

Religious Studies GCE A Levels

There were 27,032 entries for GCE A Level Religious Studies (RS) in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland in the June 2016 examinations, according to the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ). This represented an increase of 4.9% on the 2015 total compared with a decrease of 1.7% for all subjects. The number of RS entries has risen steadily since the Millennium, there being only 9,532 in 2001. Seven in ten candidates for RS in 2016 were female, 15 points more than the mean for all subjects. The proportion of RS examinees securing a pass at A* to C grade was 80%, against 78% for all subjects, although there were fewer than average RS successes at A*. Additionally, there were 38,493 entries for GCE AS Level RS, 3.9% less than in 2015, AS Levels generally losing ground. Full tables for both A and AS Level, showing breaks by gender and grade within home nation, are available at:

http://www.jcq.org.uk/examination-results/a-levels/2016/a-as-and-aea-results

Religious Studies GCSE O Levels

The results for GCSE O Level RS were released by the JCQ the week after the A Level data were published. There were 296,010 entries for the full course GCSE in RS in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland in June 2016, an increase of 0.1% on 2015 compared with a decrease of 0.7% in entries for all subjects. A much smaller proportion of candidates for GCSE O Level RS were female (54%) than for GCE A Level RS. The cumulative number obtaining a pass between A* and C for the full course GCSE O Level RS was 72%, five points more than the average across all subjects. The short course in GCSE O Level RS (equivalent to half a GCSE) continued its steep decline, with 17% fewer candidates in June 2016 than in June 2015, in line with the progressive disappearance of short courses generally. Full tables are available at:

http://www.jcq.org.uk/examination-results/gcses/2016

Scottish marriages

Details of the mode of solemnization of marriages in Scotland in 2015 are contained in Vital Events Reference Tables, which has been published recently. Of the 29,691 marriages, 14% were celebrated in the Church of Scotland, 5% in the Roman Catholic Church, and 18% in other places of worship, while 52% were civil and 11% humanist weddings. Until 1968 the majority of Scottish marriages were solemnized in the Church of Scotland. Further information, including some historical trend data, can be found at:

http://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/statistics-and-data/statistics/statistics-by-theme/vital-events/general-publications/vital-events-reference-tables/2015

ACADEMIC STUDIES

British Social Attitudes Survey

The long-term decline in religious affiliation may have momentarily bottomed out, according to the latest findings from the British Social Attitudes (BSA) Survey, released by NatCen. Of the 4,328 adult Britons interviewed between 4 July and 2 November 2015, 43% professed to be Christian (17% Anglican, 9% Catholic, and 17% other Christian), 8% non-Christian, and 48% to have no religion. The totals for Christians and nones were, respectively, one point up and one point down on the 2014 figures, the historic BSA peak for no religion being 51% in 2009. However, the proportion of nones in 2015 was much higher (62%) among the under-25s and 58% for those aged 25-34. It will be recalled that BSA uses a ‘belonging’ form of question which produces significantly lower levels of religious affiliation than other formulations, for example the question asked in the official census of population. NatCen’s press release, including toplines for religious affiliation back to 1983, is available at:

http://www.natcen.ac.uk/news-media/press-releases/2016/august/british-social-attitudes-religious-decline-comes-to-a-halt/

Prior to NatCen’s release, the results had been previewed in the Sunday Telegraph, which optimistically entitled the report in its print edition ‘Christian Faith on Rise despite “Age Time Bomb”’. Notwithstanding, comments which the newspaper had sought from sociologists of religion Linda Woodhead and Abby Day made it clear that the long-term trajectory was still downward. As Day explained, the current plateau is ‘the pause at the edge of the cliff’, with decline bound to resume as older and more religious generations die off. The longer, online version of the Sunday Telegraph’s article can be found at:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/07/decline-of-religion-in-britain-comes-to-a-halt–major-study-sugg/

After the NatCen release, the story was inevitably widely reported as a positive development in the Christian print and online media. It was even the lead article on the front page of the Church of England Newspaper for 12 August 2016 and the subject of a lengthy editorial in the Methodist Recorder for 19 August 2016 (p. 6). However, the reporting was generally reasonably balanced, sticking close to the NatCen script. The Church Times (12 August 2016, p. 3), for example, had the foresight to speak to Linda Woodhead, who highlighted that the three-year moving averages indicated the trend was clearly toward diminished religious affiliation. But the Roman Catholic weekly The Tablet (13 August 2016, p. 24) could not resist pointing out that the 1% increase in professing Christians was due to the 1% rise in self-identifying Catholics.

Religious prejudice and discrimination

The incidence of religious prejudice and its relationship to unlawful discrimination and hate crime are explored in chapter 6 (pp. 71-82) of Dominic Abrams, Hannah Swift, and Lynsey Mahmood, Prejudice and Unlawful Behaviour: Exploring Levers for Change (Equality and Human Rights Commission Research Report 101, ISBN 978-1-84206-677-5). The report, by a team from the Centre for the Study of Group Process at the University of Kent, is based on a review of academic and grey literature published in Britain between 2005 and 2015, and covers both general religious prejudice and particular manifestations (anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and sectarianism in Scotland). It is available to download from:

https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/research-report-101-prejudice-and-unlawful-behaviour.pdf

Secularization narratives

Although not especially statistical in content, a recent article by Jeremy Morris sheds light on the attraction of secularization narratives to Anglican commentators in the 1950s and 1960s: ‘Enemy Within? The Appeal of the Discipline of Sociology to Religious Professionals in Post-War Britain’, Journal of Religion in Europe, Vol. 9, Nos 2-3, 2016, pp. 177-200. It does not mention the deployment of empirical sociology by other denominations in Britain, notably in the Roman Catholic Church (through the Newman Demographic Survey) and the Methodist Church. The article, which forms part of a special issue on pastoral sociology in Western Europe from 1940 to 1970, can be accessed at:

http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/18748929-00902004

NEW DATASETS AT UK DATA SERVICE

SN 5050: English Longitudinal Study of Ageing

The English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) is conducted by NatCen Social Research on behalf of a consortium of academic bodies and government departments. Launched in 2002, ELSA investigates ageing and quality of life issues among a panel (periodically refreshed) of adults aged 50 and over living in private households in England. The latest (25th) edition of the dataset, released in August 2016, comprises waves 0-7 of the survey. For wave 7, undertaken between June 2014 and May 2015, data were collected on 9,670 individuals by means of face-to-face interview, self-completion questionnaire, and clinical and physical measurements. The self-completion questionnaire for wave 7 featured various questions about religion, covering religious affiliation, membership of church or other religious groups, activity in organized religion, attendance at religious services within the past year, importance of religious faith, importance of religion in daily life, prayer or meditation, and religion as a source of meaning and purpose in life. The catalogue description for the dataset is at:

https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=5050&type=Data%20catalogue

SN 8037: Youth Social Action Survey, 2015

The Youth Social Action Survey is sponsored by the Cabinet Office and aims to determine the proportion of young people involved in social action (to help others or the environment) in the UK. It is planned to repeat the study each year for 2014-20. Fieldwork for this second wave was conducted by Ipsos MORI on 2-19 September 2015 by means of face-to-face interviews with 2,021 10-20 year-olds. The questionnaire included one item about religious affiliation using a ‘belonging’ form of wording. Topline analysis revealed that young people professing some religion were more likely to have participated in meaningful social action during the previous twelve months than those without (45% versus 39%). The catalogue description for the dataset is at:

https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=8037&type=Data%20catalogue

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Counting Religion in Britain, June 2016

Posted on July 7, 2016 by Clive D. Field

Counting Religion in Britain, No. 9, June 2016 features 24 new sources. It can be read in full below. Alternatively, you can download the PDF version: No 9 June 2016

OPINION POLLS – BREXIT

The referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union (EU), held on 23 June, was unquestionably the single most important event of the month, and its outcome (a vote to leave the EU) is likely to have far-reaching consequences. Although religion barely surfaced in the heated public and political debates which preceded the referendum, religious elements were occasionally featured in some of the pre- and post-referendum opinion polling.

Pre-referendum: voting intentions of religious groups

ORB International’s online poll for The Independent, conducted among 2,052 British electors on 8-9 June 2016, seems to have been the last pre-referendum survey to have recorded the prospective referendum voting intentions of the principal religious groups. In line with previous polls, it demonstrated the wish of a majority of Christians to leave the EU, as tabulated below. The statistics have been calculated from the full data available at:

http://www.opinion.co.uk/perch/resources/orbindependent-friday-10th-june-final-data-tables.pdf

% across	Remain	Leave
All	47	53
Christians	43	57
Non-Christians	52	48
No religion	51	49

Pre-referendum: voting intentions of practising Christians

In contrast with the views of professing Christians, noted above, 54% of 1,200 practising (churchgoing) Christians (laity and church leaders) in membership of Christian Research’s online Resonate panel indicated an intention to vote to remain in the EU at the referendum, in a survey launched on 9 June 2016. This was four points up on the figure from a similar Resonate poll in March. Just over one-quarter (28%) were planning to vote to leave. Awareness of the recent open letter on the referendum by former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, which argued that leaving the EU would threaten peace in Europe, was limited, nearly half the respondents not having heard about it at all. Other topics covered in the June Resonate omnibus were attitudes to the National Health Service and the Investigatory Powers Bill. A press release about the survey is at:

http://www.christian-research.org/reports/privacy-nhs-and-the-referendum/

Pre-referendum: voting intentions and science

Assaad Razzouk, the Lebanese-British energy entrepreneur, commissioned ComRes to undertake, between 29 May and 5 June 2016, a telephone poll of two sub-samples of 809 adults intending to vote to remain in or leave the EU, exploring their attitudes to science. One of the statements to which respondents were invited to react was ‘people who question the theory of evolution have a point’. Answers are tabulated below, revealing that Britons who were more sceptical about the EU also found it more difficult to accept the theory of evolution. Data tables can be found at:

http://www.comres.co.uk/polls/assaad-razzouk-eu-referendum-and-science-poll/

% across	Agree	Disagree
Remainers	36	59
Leavers	46	47

Pre-referendum: intervention of religious figures

During the course of the referendum campaign, several prominent religious leaders and groups made their views known on whether the UK should remain in or leave the EU, including the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. The majority of these religious opinion formers argued in favour of remaining. However, the British public was not inclined to attach much weight to their counsel, according to a YouGov poll for the Today programme on BBC Radio, undertaken on 13-14 June 2016 among an online sample of 1,656 adults. Asked which of 13 types of people they trusted for their statements on remaining or leaving, senior religious figures ranked eighth, albeit only 15% trusted what they said about the EU and no more than 24% in any demographic sub-group (those intending to vote remain). Three-fifths distrusted senior religious figures on the EU, peaking at 71% among men. The only consolation for religious leaders was that electors exhibited net distrust in all the types of people on the list, save academics, who notched up a net trust score of 6%. A topline summary is shown below.

% across	Trust	Distrust
Academics	43	37
Economists	38	39
People from well-known businesses	37	43
People from well-known charities	37	40
People from the Bank of England	36	45
People from international organizations	32	46
Think tanks	28	44
Senior religious figures	15	61
Political leaders of other countries	14	67
Politicians from Britain	13	72
Well-known actors and entertainers	12	61
Well-known sports people	10	64
Newspaper journalists	10	74

Data tables can be found at:

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/x4iynd1mn7/TodayResults_160614_EUReferendum_W.pdf

Post-referendum: actual voting of religious groups

Lord Ashcroft polled 12,369 electors after they had voted in the referendum, 11,369 of them interviewed online and 1,000 by telephone. The reported voting of the major religious groups is tabulated below, from which it will be seen that, in line with voting intentions in pre-referendum surveys, Christians inclined to be leavers and non-Christians and religious nones to be remainers. Age probably largely accounts for this pattern since in general older people were most likely to have voted to leave the EU and younger people to remain; Christians have a disproportionately elderly profile and non-Christians (particularly Muslims) and nones a disproportionately younger profile. Details of voting by religion can be found on p. 10 and of the demographics of religious belonging (including when respondents made their minds up about how to vote in the referendum) on pp. 56-9 of the full computer tables at:

http://lordashcroftpolls.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/How-the-UK-voted-Full-tables-1.pdf

% across	Remain	Leave
All	48	52
Christians	42	58
Muslims	70	30
Other non-Christians	53	47
No religion	55	45

Post-referendum: actual voting of Jews

Almost twice as many Jews voted to remain in the EU as elected to leave, 59% versus 31%, according to a telephone poll of 1,002 members of a pre-recruited panel of self-identified British Jews interviewed by Survation for the Jewish Chronicle on 27-29 June 2016. A further 9% did not vote or refused to say how they had voted. Jews aged 55 and over (38%) or who supported the Conservative Party (39%) were among those most inclined to leave, and respondents aged 35-54 (67%) were among those most disposed to stay. Unsurprisingly, given this voting pattern, only 28% of Jews expressed satisfaction with the result of the referendum, 60% being unhappy, while 39% claimed to feel less safe in the light of the outcome and 57% to being pessimistic about the future. Asked who should be the next Prime Minister, following David Cameron’s resignation, a plurality (39%) of Jews plumped for Theresa May. The Jewish Chronicle’s coverage of the poll, with a link to the full data tables, can be found at:

http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/159839/brexit-vote-triggers-fears-over-security

OPINION POLLS – OTHER TOPICS

Charitable giving

Religious causes received 13% of charitable donations in 2015, the same as children and young people’s causes, but three points behind medical research. However, religious causes notched up the highest average donation (£49) of all types of charity, as well as the highest median donation (£16). Over-65s were almost three times as likely to report donating to religious causes as 16-24s (17 per cent versus 6%). Data derive from the Charities Aid Foundation report UK Giving, 2015: An Overview of Charitable Giving in the UK during 2015, which is based upon face-to-face interviews conducted by GfK NOP with 4,160 UK adults aged 16 and over in February, May, August, and November 2015. It can be found at:

https://www.cafonline.org/docs/default-source/personal-giving/caf_ukgiving2015_1891a_web_230516.pdf?sfvrsn=2

Religious education and faith schools

YouGov has recently (and very belatedly) posted on its website the data tables for an online poll it conducted among 2,198 UK adults on 14-15 September 2015. It was commissioned by Ideate Research in discussion with the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in advance of a major debate on faith and education staged as part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas on 21 October 2015. Some headline findings were included in a press release from AHRC on that date, which attracted very little media coverage, but this is apparently the first time that detailed results have entered the public domain. The survey found that 77% of the population considered that religious education (RE) should be a compulsory (45%) or optional (32%) part of the national curriculum, with only 17% dissenting; paradoxically, notwithstanding their relatively low religiosity, 18-24s were keenest (53%) on compulsory RE. As the table below indicates, views about faith schools were decidedly more mixed, especially in the case of Islamic schools, which almost half the sample wished to see prohibited. When it came to changes affecting UK society over the next half-century, very few (8%) thought religious leaders would be best able to lead such changes, with just 7% suggesting they would be best equipped to help the general public understand the changes.

Attitudes to … (% down)	Christian schools	Islamic schools	Jewish schools
Should be allowed and receive state funding	44	12	16
Should be allowed but not receive state funding	32	34	43
Should not be allowed in UK	16	44	28

Data tables are at:

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/v50s4c7q5d/YG-Archive-10616-IdeateResearch.pdf

Freedom of speech

A newly-published ComRes poll commissioned by the Conservative Woman, for which 2,050 adults were interviewed online on 7-9 May 2016, revealed Britons to be somewhat ambivalent about legislative limitations on freedom of speech designed to protect people’s rights not to be offended by what others say. Two of the eight statements the sample was invited to respond to had a religious dimension. One asked whether it was right to have laws against ‘hate speech’ even if it might mean, for example, that Christian preachers could be arrested for repeating something in the Bible. In reply, almost twice as many contended that it was not right to have such laws as agreed that it was, 47% versus 26%, with a majority of men, over-55s, and residents of Northern England and the West Midlands opposed to such restrictions and no more than 31% in any demographic sub-group in favour of them. In similar vein, three-fifths (61%) of interviewees disagreed with the suggestion that persons who criticize Islam should be punished by hate speech laws, the proportion rising to seven in ten among men and over-55s; just 15% agreed with the proposition, and no more than 28% in any sub-group. Full data tables are available at:

http://www.comres.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/ComRes_Freedom-of-Speech-Poll_tables.pdf

Trust in religious leaders

Young people generally do not trust religious leaders or other authority figures, according to an online poll of 1,351 Britons aged 18-30 conducted by YouGov for Hope not Hate on 6-13 May 2016. Three-fifths of respondents said that they did not trust religious leaders very much (29%) or at all (31%), with just 22% registering a great deal (3%) or a fair amount (19%) of trust, the positive rating standing highest among non-whites (30%), part-time workers (30%), and Scots (31%). The only two of the eight groups asked about which were trusted by a majority were teachers or academics and other young persons. Summary findings are tabulated below, and full data tables can be found at:

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/ej63u31ku2/HopeNotHateResults_YoungPeople_160513_website.pdf

% across	Trust	Distrust
A teacher/academic	72	13
A young person like yourself	50	31
A trade union leader/official	31	45
A religious leader	22	60
A TV or sports star	16	66
A leader of multinational company	16	65
The media	13	73
A politician	10	76

Islamic State

Islamic State is the top of eight international concerns in Britain, with 79 per cent of the public regarding it as a major threat to our country and a further 16 per cent as a minor threat. This is according to the latest report from the Pew Global Attitudes Project, for which 1,460 Britons aged 18 and over were interviewed by TNS BMRB by telephone between 4 April and 1 May 2016. The full ranking of concerns, with comparisons for France and Germany (where, alongside Italy and Spain, Islamic State was seen as an even greater threat than in Britain), is tabulated below, while Pew’s report on the survey can be found at:

http://www.pewglobal.org/2016/06/13/europeans-face-the-world-divided/

% regarding as a major threat	Britain	France	Germany
Islamic State	79	91	85
Global climate change	58	73	65
Cyberattacks from other countries	55	68	66
Large number of refugees	52	45	31
Global economic instability	48	73	39
China’s emergence as a world power	31	43	28
Tensions with Russia	28	34	31
United States power and influence	24	28	25

FAITH ORGANIZATION STUDIES

Faith-based charities

New Philanthropy Capital’s ongoing programme of research into faith-based charities has resulted in a further brief report: David Bull, Lucy de Las Casas, and Rachel Wharton, Faith Matters: Understanding the Size, Income, and Focus of Faith-Based Charities. The 43,352 faith-based charities in England and Wales represent 27% of all charities and receive 23% (£16.3 billion) of the charity sector’s income. However, four-fifths of the income of faith-based charities is concentrated in just 1,719 organizations. Despite the inroads of secularization, proportionately more faith-based than non-faith-based charities have been registered with the Charity Commission during the past 10 years, 34% versus 25%. Relative to their non-faith-based counterparts, faith-based charities are especially active in the fields of overseas aid, human rights, and anti-poverty. The report can be found at:

http://www.thinknpc.org/publications/faith-matters/

Church of England ministry statistics

The Church of England has published Ministry Statistics, 2012 to 2015, showing national trends in numbers of stipendiary and self-supporting clergy, and their age, gender, and ethnic profiles. Detailed diocesan-level tables are also available in a separate Excel file. The data primarily derive from a new clergy payroll system, introduced in 2012, supplemented by Crockford’s Clerical Directory. This means that there is not strict methodological comparability with earlier statistics. Although overall totals of ordained ministers have remained stable since 2012, at just over 20,000, there has been a decline of 4% in stipendiary clergy over the four-year period, with the steady increase in female ministers not offsetting the steady decline in their male counterparts. As at 31 December 2015, 26% of stipendiary clergy were women, including 7 diocesan or suffragan bishops, 26 archdeacons, and 6 cathedral deans. One-quarter of stipendiary parochial clergy were aged 60 and over, ranging by diocese from 9% to 41%. Full details can be found at:

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

Leadership of large Anglican churches

At the end of 2015, of the 112 Church of England churches with a Usual Sunday Attendance of at least 350, only three were led by women. In a recent paper, Liz Graveling explores why, more than two decades after women were admitted to the priesthood, so few are reaching these positions. Her research has involved statistical analysis of the current leadership of large churches and semi-structured interviews with 22 ordained ministers, mainly Evangelicals. Factors contributing to the gender imbalance are found to be: career progression time-lag; discrimination; social processes; incompatible social roles and working conditions; and organizational structures and dynamics. Graveling’s 25-page paper on ‘Vocational Pathways: Clergy Leading Large Churches’ is available at:

http://www.ministrydevelopment.org.uk/UserFiles/File/TRIG/Vocational_pathways_large_churches.pdf

Baptist statistics

The Baptist Union of Great Britain has recently launched a church statistics page on its website. It is currently limited to returns of membership and attendance for 2015, but the intention is to add information for past years in due course. In 2015 there were 126,144 members of the 2,028 churches in England and Wales belonging either to the Union or another Baptist Association, with 2,724 baptisms (equivalent to 2% of membership). Average attendance at the main weekly service, scaled up for missing data, numbered 159,360, sub-divided between 14% children, 7% young people, 8% young adults, 40% other adults, and 30% seniors. Full details, including geographical breakdowns, can be found at:

http://www.baptist.org.uk/Articles/471032/Church_Statistics.aspx

Quaker statistics

The Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain has published an annual Tabular Statement of membership since 1862, based on information provided by area meetings and collated by the Recording Clerk. Membership at the end of December 2015 stood at 13,401, just 126 less than in 2014, and representing the smallest decrease for two decades. This contrasted with sharper 12-month declines in attenders (minus 5%) and of children not in membership (down 14%). For the first time in 2015, the gender breakdown of adults included the option to identify as other than a man or woman; 1 member and 44 attenders (36 of them in Scotland) were recorded as such. Also new for 2015 was the production of statistics at local meeting level, available as supplementary online tables. The Tabular Statement, which contains a significant amount of historical data (in some cases going back to 1935), can be accessed via the link at:

https://www.quaker.org.uk/news-and-events/ym/documents-1

Islamophobia (1)

The European Network against Racism (ENAR) has published Forgotten Women: The Impact of Islamophobia on Muslim Women in the United Kingdom, researched between December 2014 and January 2016 by Bharath Ganesh and Iman Abou Atta (both of Faith Matters), with support from the European Union, the Open Society Foundations, and the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. The 75-page report mostly draws upon pre-existing official statistics, polling data, legislation, case law, and secondary literature to illustrate the inequalities and discrimination which affect Muslim women in the UK, especially as regards employment opportunities and experience of hate crimes. There is a particular dependence upon Faith Matters’ own Tell MAMA database of Islamophobic incidents, which is not yet universally recognized as an authoritative source. On the whole, the analysis seems to add little to previous overviews covering similar ground, although it perhaps has some value in a comparative context, since it forms one of a series of seven simultaneous national reports (the others examining Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, and Sweden). The document, with a four-page fact sheet on the UK, which serves as an extended executive summary, can be downloaded from:

http://www.enar-eu.org/Forgotten-Women-the-impact-of-Islamophobia-on-Muslim-women

Islamophobia (2)

Meanwhile, Tell MAMA has published its 60-page annual report for 2015, entitled The Geography of Anti-Muslim Hatred. A record number (437) ‘offline’ or in person anti-Muslim incidents were recorded by the organization during the year, 50% involving abusive behaviour and 17% assault. Three-fifths of the victims were women and three-quarters of the perpetrators were men (predominantly white). Tell MAMA received fewer (364) notifications of online incidents than in previous years, which it attributes to better policing by social media platforms of hate speech, abuse, and trolling. The report is available at:

http://tellmamauk.org/wp-content/uploads/pdf/tell_mama_2015_annual_report.pdf

ACADEMIC STUDIES

Religion and well-being

A meta-analysis of 139 English-language academic studies exploring links between religion and well-being is offered by Nick Spencer, Gillian Madden, Clare Purtill, and Joseph Ewing, Religion and Well-Being: Assessing the Evidence (London: Theos, 2016, 91pp., ISBN 978-0-9931969-4-2). The overwhelming majority of these studies are international, and disproportionately American, reflecting the relatively late beginning of measurement of well-being in the UK, especially in the form of official statistics. Using five conceptions of religion and four of well-being, the authors detect a variable but mostly positive correlation between the two. The book can be freely downloaded from:

http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/files/files/Reports/Religion%20and%20well-being%207%20combined.pdf

Spencer has also written a blog about the report for the LSE’s newly-launched Religion and the Public Sphere website. This can be read at:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/religionpublicsphere/2016/06/28/is-religion-good-for-you-analysing-three-decades-worth-of-academic-research-on-the-relationship-between-religion-and-well-being/

British Social Attitudes, 2015

The book-length report on the 33rd British Social Attitudes Survey, based on interviews with a random probability sample of 4,328 Britons aged 18 and over by NatCen between August and November 2015, was published this month. The dataset has not yet been released nor has the questionnaire. Although none of the chapters in the report focuses on religion, the technical appendix (p. 123) does reveal the weighted results of the question on religious belonging, with 48% self-identifying as religious nones, 17% as Anglicans, 9% as Roman Catholics, 17% as other Christians, and 8% as non-Christians. The report is available at:

http://bsa.natcen.ac.uk/latest-report/british-social-attitudes-33/introduction.aspx

Psychological profiles of Anglican congregants

The subject of psychological type and temperament profiles of Anglican congregations in England has been re-examined by Leslie Francis, Howard Wright, and Mandy Robbins through a study of 196 attenders at three services at one particular church, situated against the normative profile generated by 3,302 worshippers at 140 churches reported in International Journal of Practical Theology in 2011. The authors conclude that individual churches are able to offer diverse provisions which result in congregations with distinctively different psychological profiles. ‘Temperament Theory and Congregation Studies: Different Types for Different Services?’ is published in Practical Theology, Vol. 9, No. 1, March 2016, pp. 29-45, and access options are outlined at:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1756073X.2016.1149679

NEW DATASETS AT UK DATA SERVICE

SN 7975: National Survey of Bereaved People, 2012 – SN 7977: National Survey of Bereaved People, 2013 – SN 7978: National Survey of Bereaved People, 2014 – SN 7979: National Survey of Bereaved People, 2015

The National Survey of Bereaved People, alternatively known as VOICES: Views of Informal Carers, Evaluation of Services, is an annual survey (begun in 2011) designed to measure the quality of end-of-life care, especially during the last three months of life. It is undertaken in England by the Office for National Statistics on behalf of the Department of Health by means of a postal questionnaire completed by the persons who registered a random sample of deaths. There were 22,635 respondents in 2012, 22,661 in 2013, 21,403 in 2014, and 21,320 in 2015, each of whom provided an assessment of the care received by the deceased (including spiritual support during the final two days), together with background details about the deceased (including religious allegiance). Catalogue descriptions and documentation can be found at:

https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=7975&type=Data%20catalogue

https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=7977&type=Data%20catalogue

https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=7978&type=Data%20catalogue

https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=7979&type=Data%20catalogue

SN 7995: Scottish Surveys Core Questions, 2014

The report on this dataset was considered in Counting Religion in Britain, No. 8, May 2016. The dataset itself has now been deposited with the UK Data Service, and a catalogue description and documentation can be found at:

https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=7995&type=Data%20catalogue

PEOPLE NEWS

Bill Pickering (1922-2016)

William Stuart Frederick Pickering, pioneer British sociologist of religion and Anglican clergyman, died on 23 May 2016, aged 94. He taught successively at King’s College London (1955-56); St John’s College, University of Manitoba (1956-66); and the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1966-87), from where he retired to Cambridge. He is perhaps best known nowadays for his writings on Émile Durkheim and for establishing the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies at the University of Oxford, as well as the journal Durkheimian Studies and the Durkheim Press. However, some of his earliest work was in the empirical sociology of religion. His 1958 doctoral thesis, ‘The Place of Religion in the Social Structure of Two English Industrial Towns (Rawmarsh, Yorkshire and Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire)’, remains a ground-breaking study of the British religious landscape in the 1950s, employing a range of archival, census, and life history approaches. Sadly, little from this was ever published, mainly as essays in Vocation de la sociologie religieuse (1958) and Archives de Sociologie des Religions (1961). He also analysed the statistical background to the Anglican-Methodist Conversations (1961), patterns of post-war churchgoing (1972), and the endurance of rites of passage (1974). An important monograph, Theological Colleges: A Sociological Appraisal, written in the 1970s and based on a survey of British colleges in 1968-69, never made it into print.

Posted in church attendance, Ministry studies, News from religious organisations, Organisational data, People news, Religion and Politics, Religion and Social Capital, Religion in public debate, Religious prejudice, Survey news | Tagged Arts and Humanities Research Council, Assaad Razzouk, Baptist Union, BBC, Bharath Ganesh, Bill Pickering, Brexit, British Social Attitudes Survey, charitable giving, Charities Aid Foundation, Christian Research, church attendance, church membership, Church of England, Clare Purtill, clergy, ComRes, Conservative Woman, David Bull, Department of Health, end-of-life care, European Network against Racism, European Union, Faith schools, faith-based charities, freedom of speech, GfK NOP, Gillian Madden, hate speech, Hope Not Hate, Howard Wright, Ideate Research, Iman Abou Atta, Islam, Islamic State, Islamophobia, Jewish Chronicle, Jews, Joseph Ewing, large churches, Leslie Francis, Liz Graveling, Lord Ashcroft, Lucy de Las Casas, Mandy Robbins, ministry, Muslims, NatCen, National Survey of Bereaved People, New Philanthropy Capital, Nick Spencer, Office for National Statistics, ORB International, Pew Global Attitudes Project, politics, Practical Theology, practising Christians, psychological type, Quakers, Rachel Wharton, referendum, Religion and the Public Sphere, Religious Affiliation, religious education, religious leaders, Religious Society of Friends, Resonate, science, Scottish Surveys Core Questions, senior religious figures, Survation, Tell MAMA, The Independent, theory of evolution, Theos, threat, TNS-BMRB, trust, voting, well-being, women, YouGov | 2 Comments

Stephen Bullivant on contemporary Catholicism

Posted on June 28, 2016 by Siobhan McAndrew

It was a great pleasure to see the launch of Stephen Bullivant’s report, ‘Contemporary Catholicism in England and Wales‘, at the House of Commons on 24 May 2016. I first heard of Stephen’s interest in a data-driven approach to the question of Catholic vitality in 2013, when the British Academy issued a call for currently practising academics to expand their skillset by learning quantitative methods. Stephen was successful both in being awarded a British Academy Quantitative Skills Acquisition Award and also in thereafter becoming a quantitatively-proficient sociologist with quite alarming ease.

It’s wonderful to see Stephen’s progress as a quantitative sociologist, having begun his academic life in philosophy and theology, and a tribute both to the BA scheme and his own commitment to enriching both conceptual and empirical frameworks for understanding contemporary religiosity. He visited the BRIN team at Manchester, and attended some classes and pointers, but ultimately needed little formal training. So it’s very encouraging to see the resulting contributions to both academic and public debate in this fashion.

Having read the report with great interest, we next need to probe further the drivers of change in contemporary Catholicism. The report presents an array of estimates of the Catholic community in Britain, and one of the clearest findings is that, while those raised Catholic are more likely to ‘stick’ than those raised Anglican, a very large proportion of those raised Catholic still leave the faith. So, why has lapsation occurred?

A good deal of work shows that the drift away from religion in Western societies is generational in nature: those born in the 1930s who stayed religious tended to see that about half their children born in the 1950s and 60s retained religion, and in turn they saw about half their children retain religion. We also have witnessed fairly high rates of immigration from quite religious societies, which has provided a countervailing trend. And there are some people whose families have been secular for generations. So in that regard, many people in Britain have a religious background, with links to faith communities via parents and grandparents; a significant but small minority is highly religious; and another significant minority is highly secular.

But what of the Catholic community in particular? For some separate research Stephen and I are hoping to take forward, the Nuffield Foundation funded some work to digitise and re-analyse a random sample survey of young people in the 1950s, where young Catholics, mostly Irish but sometimes Polish, Italian, or Afro-Caribbean, were well-represented. This was large enough to allow detailed analysis of religiosity and lapsation among a critical social generation.

From this we have found that for young English people as a whole, attending church less often over the course of their adolescence was predicted by:

Being in work rather than in school;
Being married; and
Having more to do on a Sunday.

We also see that those who reported no religious affiliation were more likely to be members of political associations, which suggests that some exchanged religious identities for political identities.

Among Catholics, however, of those who attended church less often in their later teens and early 20s than they had in childhood, very little predicted lapsation except not being a member of a social club or other association. Perhaps lapsation can be understood by the rise of the consumer society, and personal independence, through work or marriage. Some of it therefore may be down to value shifts, from values stressing conformity to those stressing personal choice.

Catholics were, however, less likely to drop their attendance compared with Anglicans and others, backing up Stephen’s finding that religious retention is relatively good. We don’t know why there is this difference yet. My suspicion is that doctrine is not the major factor – and that it is that it is something to do with the family and community environment, and moral socialisation in the family rather than the appeal of church services themselves, or doctrinal questions. Catholics were more recent immigrants in the 1950s and 60s, and there was community and parental pressure to attend.

We do see generational change in the young ethnic minority British too, in the present day – in the wider Christian, Hindu and Muslim communities. Those who are second generation British rather than first show slight shifts in communal practice such as mosque attendance, and clearer shifts in private prayer.

The strong showing which Stephen reports here of ethnic minority Catholics in terms of attendance is not a surprise – we know from a great deal of US work, and some British work, that religious communities are important for immigrants and people of immigrant origin because, as termed by Hirschman, they provide refuge, respect, and resources.

These are just some questions which we could probe further. Others relate to the importance of education for religiosity. The sociologist Sarah King-Hele analysed the BSA for 1983-2008 and distinguished different social generations, from those born in the 1910s to those born in the 1970s. She found as follows:

Most changes in attendance could be explained by generational change rather than the wider climate making those already practising less religious.
The average proportion of Catholic weekly attenders dropped from 57% among the 1910s cohort to just 16% among the 1970s cohort in the 2000s. So for Catholics of my generation weekly attendance is an aberration.
Higher levels of weekly attendance is linked to having children in the household of primary school age, and being married.
Levels of strong belief in God among Catholics declined (47%-35%) in Britain over the 1983-2008 period. However, most explanatory variables didn’t really predict anything – apart from having primary school aged children, which predicted stronger belief
Education strongly predicts attendance, which raises the question of class. Further analysis of the BSA could perhaps identify whether Catholicism in Britain has become more middle-class since 1983. The shift of some social and moral communities from having a working class to middle class basis is a change found elsewhere in society.

All in all, Bullivant’s paper is of great interest and his longer-term research programme extremely promising. There has been a great deal of scholarly interest in British Islam, and the experience of people of visible ethnic minority background. We can learn a lot, however, about earlier waves of immigration and how religion – including Catholicism – worked to help people become established as British citizens. To paraphrase the American moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, religion both binds and blinds. Our task as social scientists is to understand the drivers and consequences of both.

Posted in church attendance, Measuring religion, Religion and Ethnicity | Tagged Affiliation, Attendance, British Social Attitudes Survey, Catholicism, generational change, lapsation, Sarah King-Hele, Stephen Bullivant | Leave a comment

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