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Counting Religion in Britain, October 2016

Posted on October 31, 2016 by Clive D. Field

Counting Religion in Britain, No. 13, October 2016 features 29 new sources. It can be read in full below. Alternatively, you can download the PDF version: no-13-october-2016

OPINION POLLS

Desert island Bibles

The well-known figures featured on Desert Island Discs, the long-running BBC Radio programme, are asked to select eight pieces of music to take with them on a desert island but are additionally offered as accompaniments copies of the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. Asked hypothetically, in the event of being stranded on a desert island, whether they would want to be given a copy of the Bible, only 31% of respondents to a recent poll by ComRes said that they would, falling to 18% in the youngest cohort (aged 18-24) and 10% for those with no religion. Unsurprisingly, the proportion was greatest for professing Christians (49%) but otherwise never reached more than 39% in any demographic sub-group (this for the over-65s and residents of North-West England). The majority (56%) declined to accept the Bible, rising to 83% of religious nones, while 13% were unsure what they would do. The poll was commissioned by the Church and Media Network and conducted online on 7-9 October 2016 among a sample of 2,042 adult Britons. Full data tables are available at:

http://www.comresglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/CMN_Desert-Island-Bible-Poll_Data-Tables.pdf

In former days (the programme was first broadcast in 1942), the guests on Desert Island Discs were not automatically offered the Bible and Shakespeare but had to nominate three books to take with them on a desert island. When Gallup invited a sample of Britons to select their titles in 1954, the Bible easily topped the poll, with 36% of the vote, Shakespeare being pushed into third place (5%) after the works of Dickens (7%).

Catholic Church power

Almost half of Britons think the Catholic Church is among the most powerful institutions in the world, according to a YouGov app-based survey on 18 October 2016. Presented with a list of 11 organizations and asked to select the three they judged most powerful, 57% put the United States Central Intelligence Agency in first position, but the Catholic Church came second (on 49%), beating the United Nations into third place (40%). Islamic State (ISIS) was ranked tenth. Topline results are available at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/10/18/most-powerful-people-and-institutions-world-and-br/

Exorcism

Prompted by a recent report that young Catholic priests are not interested in becoming exorcists, an app-based survey by YouGov on 21 October 2016 asked Britons whether they believed people or places can be affected by evil spirits and, if so, whether an exorcist could help. One-third (34%) of all respondents said they believed in evil spirits, with 25% thinking exorcism efficacious and 9% not. The majority (58%) expressed belief in neither, while 7% gave other answers. Topline results are available at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/10/21/posting-childs-reaction-hearing-news-his-mother-ha/

Supernatural

One-half of Britons claim to have experienced paranormal activity in their home, according to a recent pre-Halloween survey commissioned by insurance broker Towergate. One-third say they have been frightened by the supernatural in their own home at night, and one-fifth admit to having called someone (generally a parent or partner) in the middle of the night to seek comfort or support in such circumstances. One person in six reports that they have seen a ghostly figure at home and one in eight that they have moved out of a former home because they were afraid it was haunted. Fear of the supernatural is an even greater deterrent to buying properties in certain locations, with 65% unwilling to purchase near an undertaker’s premises, 62% near a graveyard, and 60% near a sinister-looking church. Many would expect a substantial discount on the asking-price to be offered to tempt them to buy allegedly haunted accommodation, although 45% insist no reduction would be sufficient to overcome their anxieties. As yet, no details of the research (including about methodology) have appeared on Towergate’s website, and the preceding account has been compiled from coverage in the online edition of the Daily Express at:

http://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/724495/Haunted-British-homes-paranormal-activity-research

Gay cake row

A Christian family bakery (Ashers) in Northern Ireland has recently lost its appeal against a conviction that found it guilty of discrimination for refusing to bake a cake supporting same-sex marriage on the grounds that it would have been at odds with the family’s religious beliefs. On the eve of the appeal court’s judgment, on 24 October 2016, YouGov asked 5,490 Britons online whether it had been acceptable for the bakery to have refused the order. A plurality (46%) judged the defendants to have behaved acceptably, including 61% of Conservative and 65% of UKIP voters, and 58% of over-60s. Two-fifths deemed the bakery’s action unacceptable, with 18-24s especially condemnatory (60%). The remaining 14% of the sample were undecided. Full results can be found at:

https://yougov.co.uk/opi/surveys/results#/survey/b97bd1a0-99c7-11e6-9434-005056901c24/question/bd5477f0-99c7-11e6-9434-005056901c24/toplines

Churches and the LGB community

Britons are somewhat divided about whether most Christian churches in the UK are welcoming to the lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) community, according to a YouGov poll commissioned by Jayne Ozanne (a campaigner on LGB issues), for which 1,669 adults were interviewed online on 11-12 October 2016. A plurality (37%) was unsure what to say. One-third considered most churches were not welcoming to LGBs, the proportion reaching two-fifths among Labour and Liberal Democrat voters, Roman Catholics, and religious nones. Three in ten electors judged the churches were welcoming to LGBs, the most optimistic sub-groups being Conservative supporters (38%), over-65s (40%), Christians as a whole (45%), and Anglicans (47%). Respondents were also asked a somewhat ambiguous lead-in question about whether the Church of England does or does not exist for everyone who wants to go to church, 47% thinking the former and 17% the latter. Full data tables are available at:

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/ofq14j098u/JayneOZanneResults_161012_CofE_Website.pdf

Satisfaction with party leaders

BMG Research’s latest political party leader approval ratings were unusually disaggregated by religious affiliation. Summary results from the online interviews with 2,026 UK adults between 19 and 23 September 2016 are tabulated below, for all voters, professing Christians, and religious nones (too few non-Christians were included in the sample to be viable). The strongest finding to emerge is that a majority of Christians are satisfied with Theresa May’s performance as Prime Minister (54%) and dissatisfied with Jeremy Corbyn’s as Leader of the Opposition (57%). Religious nones, by contrast, exhibit a markedly below average approval rating for May and a slightly above average one for Corbyn. An age effect may partly explain these divergences, Christians having a relatively elderly and nones a younger profile. Religious differences were less pronounced in the case of Nigel Farage (whose performance very few could assess, in any case) and Nicola Sturgeon (although there was a nine-point dissatisfaction gap between Christians and nones). Data tables can be found at:

http://www.bmgresearch.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/CONFIDENTIAL-BMG-POLL-Leadership-Approval-September-results-251016.pdf

% across	Satisfied	Dissatisfied	Don’t know
Theresa May as Prime Minister
All voters	43	24	33
Christians	54	19	27
No religion	32	28	40
Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Opposition
All voters	22	48	30
Christians	18	57	25
No religion	25	38	37
Nigel Farage as interim UKIP leader
All voters	11	17	72
Christians	14	15	72
No religion	7	18	75
Nicola Sturgeon as Scottish National Party leader
All voters	32	32	37
Christians	31	37	32
No religion	31	28	42

London attractions

A slight majority (58%) of Londoners claim to have visited St Paul’s Cathedral, placing it ninth in a list of 20 leading attractions in the capital, while 48% say they have been to Westminster Abbey (in sixteenth position). However, young Londoners (aged 18-24) are significantly less likely than the over-65s to have visited either of these two religious landmarks, 38% less in the case of the cathedral and 37% less for the abbey. The survey was conducted online by YouGov and is reported at:

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/10/04/natural-history-museum-tops-londoners-list-attract/

FAITH ORGANIZATION STUDIES

Legacies

A press briefing by Christian Legacy (a partnership of various Christian charities) in the run-up to Christian Legacy Week (17-23 October 2016) provided a miscellany of information about the state of the Christian legacy market in the UK. It revealed that Christian women are more likely to have included a charitable gift in their will than Christian men, 65% versus 35%. Christians overall are likely to spread their gifts across almost twice as many charities as non-Christians. Of all charitable legacies made in the past three years, 16% have been given to Christian charities or places of worship, with legacies accounting for 3% of the income of these charities. The briefing has yet to appear on the Christian Legacy website, but some previous ‘latest statistics’ can be found at:

http://www.christianlegacy.org.uk/about-christian-legacy/stats-and-facts

Christian Resources Exhibitions

The Christian Resources Exhibition held at Maidstone on 12-13 October 2016 seems set to be the last. Earlier this year, Bible Society – which acquired Christian Resources Exhibitions (CRE) in 2007 – announced that it was putting the enterprise up for sale. However, it has now admitted that no buyer has been found. CRE was founded by Christian businessman Gospatric Home in 1985 and incorporated as a private limited company in 1990. It has comprised an annual event (latterly known as CRE International) held in the South-East (most recently in London) in the late spring together with one or two smaller exhibitions each year at changing other venues. CRE was officially ranked as the country’s 47th largest consumer exhibition in 2007. Visitor numbers for the 1990s were published in UK Christian Handbook, Religious Trends, No. 2, 2000/01, p. 5.8, with around 10,000 attending CRE International, a figure still reached as late as 2011-12. However, there appears to have been some decline since, with 8,000 returned for the four-day event in 2015 and no figure seemingly published for 2016. CRE’s last reported annual turnover was £700,000 in 2005, since when the company has been dormant.

Baptist Assembly

The Baptist Assembly is the yearly gathering of delegates from the English and Welsh regional associations which constitute Baptists Together (Baptist Union of Great Britain). It combines the transaction of the formal business of the Union (including its annual general meeting) with elements of a Christian conference. The future of the Assembly has been under review for some time, in the light of falling numbers and financial pressures, and different styles and formats have been trialled in recent years. To facilitate longer-term planning, an online survey was conducted after the one-day Assembly at Oxford in May 2016, and this was completed by a self-selecting sample of 1,000 Baptists, of whom 74% had attended Assembly at some point in the past and 53% were ministers. A preliminary report on the results of the survey, focusing especially on preferences for the length, timing, and financing of future Assemblies, has been published at:

http://www.baptist.org.uk/Publisher/File.aspx?ID=180013

Catholic Directory

The Universe Media Group has announced its intention to relaunch the print edition of the Catholic Directory of England and Wales in November 2017, four years after its discontinuation, since when an online only edition has been made available. According to the latest editor’s newsletter (No. 4, 2016), this 2018 edition of the Catholic Directory will be comprehensively overhauled in terms of design and content, with several new sections introduced. However, no explicit mention is made of any plans to bring back the former statistical section, which was the sole national public domain source of current data about the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales.

Convent schools

The significant historical contribution of convent schools to the education of Catholic and other pupils in England and Wales is celebrated in Tales out of School: Recollections of Ex-Convent Girls, edited by Anthony Spencer, Pat Pinsent, and Emma Shackle (Taunton: Russell-Spencer, 2016, [4] + v + 243p., ISBN 978-1-905270-74-3, paperback, £12.00 + £1.74 p&p, available from Russell-Spencer, Stone House, Hele, Taunton, Somerset, TA4 1AJ). The core of the book consists of the reminiscences of 40 women who attended convent schools between the 1930s and 1970s, submitted in response to Spencer’s appeal in The Tablet in 2012. Summative evaluation of the material and convent schools generally is provided by the editors, each of whom has written an essay from a particular perspective. Spencer’s chapter (pp. 197-215) is sociologically-focused and statistically informed by the research of the Newman Demographic Survey (NDS), which he directed. The volume as a whole is an initiative of the Pastoral Research Centre Trust, successor body to the NDS.

OFFICIAL AND QUASI-OFFICIAL STATISTICS

Hate crimes

Home Office Statistical Bulletin 11/16, by Hannah Corcoran and Kevin Smith, reports on Hate Crime, England and Wales, 2015/16, as recorded by the police. There were 62,518 offences in which one or more hate crime strands were deemed to be a motivating factor, of which 4,400 (7%) were categorized as religious hate crimes, 34% more than in 2014/15 (almost double the 19% average rise for all forms of hate crime), although the increase may partly reflect improved notification and documentation of incidents. A good deal of the data and analysis combines, unhelpfully from our perspective, racially and religiously motivated offences, including in Annex A which examines the trends in hate crime before and after the referendum on 23 June 2016 on the UK’s membership of the European Union. The report and associated data tables can be accessed at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/hate-crime-england-and-wales-2015-to-2016

Religion of prisoners

A snapshot of the prison population of England and Wales as at 30 September 2016 has revealed that 48.6% of prisoners professed to be Christian, 20.5% non-Christian, and 30.8% to have no religion. The number of Christians was 2.0% down on the figure for 30 September 2015 while religious nones increased by 0.8% during the year. There was also a 2.3% rise in Muslim prisoners over the twelve months; they now account for 15.1% of all prisoners. The overwhelming majority (95.3%) of prisoners without religion is male, although there are actually proportionately fewer nones among men (30.7%) than women (32.5%). Full details can be found in table 1.5 of the spreadsheet ‘Prison Population, 30 September 2016’ at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/offender-management-statistics-quarterly-april-to-june-2016

Anti-Semitism

Antisemitism in the UK is the tenth report of the 2016-17 session of the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee. It considers alternative definitions of anti-Semitism (pp. 8-15) and reviews the evidence base for its prevalence in the UK – among the general public (pp. 16-26), on university campuses (pp. 33-7), and in political discourse and parties (pp. 38-49, with special reference to the Labour Party) – as well as the response of Government and the justice system (pp. 27-32). An annex (pp. 58-61) presents details of police-recorded anti-Semitic crimes. The statistical evidence is neatly summarized in a ‘key facts’ section (pp. 3-4), which incorporates links to the original sources. Most of these have already featured on the British Religion in Numbers website, but mention should be made of one which has not, a survey in May 2016 of 2,026 Labour Party members who joined after the 2015 General Election, carried out on behalf of the ESRC Party Members Project. The Committee concludes, inter alia, that, although the UK remains one of the least anti-Semitic countries in Europe, recent trends in incidents and attitudes show it to be moving ‘in the wrong direction’ (p. 51). Its report is available at:

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmhaff/136/136.pdf

Results concerning anti-Semitism and the Labour Party from the ESRC Party Members Project will be found in its submission to the Labour Party’s own enquiry chaired by the now Baroness Chakrabarti at:

https://esrcpartymembersprojectorg.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/balewebbpolettisubmission4chakrabarti3rdjune2016-1.pdf

ACADEMIC STUDIES

Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion

Volume 27 (2016) of Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion is sub-divided into a miscellany of five articles and a special section of seven contributions on prayer guest-edited by Kevin Ladd. Each section contains one article of United Kingdom quantitative interest. The miscellany includes Leslie Francis, Patrick Laycock, and Gemma Penny, ‘Distinguishing between Spirituality and Religion: Accessing the Worldview Correlates of 13- to 15-Year-Old Students in England and Wales’ (pp. 43-67), based on 2,728 respondents to the Young People’s Values Survey, and employing discriminant function analysis to isolate the specific combinations of attitudes and values which distinguished young people who described themselves as religious but not spiritual from those who saw themselves as spiritual but not religious. Among the papers in the prayer section is Leslie Francis and Gemma Penny, ‘Prayer, Personality, and Purpose in Life: An Empirical Enquiry among Adolescents in the UK’ (pp. 192-209), drawing upon questionnaires completed by 10,792 participants in the Young People’s Attitudes to Religious Diversity project (see, also, next item), and demonstrating that prayer frequency adds additional prediction of enhanced levels of purpose in life after taking all other variables into account. The volume’s webpage can be found at:

http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/books/9789004322035?showtab=chapters

Religious diversity

The 16 chapters in Young People’s Attitudes to Religious Diversity, edited by Elisabeth Arweck (London: Routledge, 2017, xi + 303 pp., ISBN 978-1-4724-4430-1, £95.00, hardback) substantially report the findings of the AHRC/ESRC-funded project of the same name which was undertaken at the University of Warwick’s Religions and Education Research Unit in 2009-12. The research involved both qualitative and quantitative strands, each represented by six contributions in the book, the qualitative essays written by Arweck or Julia Ipgrave and the quantitative ones by Leslie Francis and Gemma Penny together with another co-author in five instances. For the quantitative strand, questionnaires were completed in 2011-12 by 11,725 13- to 15-year-old students attending state-maintained schools with and without a religious character in five geographical areas (London, England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland). The results for each area are analysed in a separate chapter, positioned as a response to a research question suggested by previous scholarly research and debate in that particular area. The final section of the volume is given over to three international case studies, from Canada, the United States, and Germany. The book’s webpage is at:

https://www.routledge.com/Young-Peoples-Attitudes-to-Religious-Diversity/Arweck/p/book/9781472444301

Secularization

Clive Field was recently invited to speak about ‘Measuring Secularization in Britain’ as one of the series of Sunday evening talks on ‘Religion and Conflict’ at Somerville College Chapel, Oxford. His presentation slides have been made available at:

Presentations

Non-religion

If, as is often claimed, no religion is the fastest-growing religion in the western world, then the study of non-religion can equally be observed to be the fastest-growing area in religious scholarship. One of the latest monographs in the field is Phil Zuckerman, Luke Galen, and Frank Pasquale, The Nonreligious: Understanding Secular People and Societies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, v + 327 pp., ISBN 978-0-19-992494-1, £16.99, paperback). The volume provides a guide to the English-language social scientific literature about non-religion, as listed in its substantial bibliography (pp. 261-309). Although the focus of the book is international, the arrangement is largely thematic, so there is no systematic discussion of the situation, nor collation of the statistical evidence, for particular countries. There are some scattered references to the United Kingdom, the most substantive of which is on pp. 75-6. The title’s webpage is at:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-nonreligious-9780199924943?q=Zuckerman&lang=en&cc=gb

Ministry and history

The extent, nature, and practical implications of the engagement of Christian ministers with both general and religious history are explored by John Tomlinson in ‘Ministry and History: A Survey of Over 300 Religious Practitioners’, Theology and Ministry, Vol. 4, 2016, pp. 2.1-15. Data derive from a postal questionnaire completed in 2013-15 by 49% of 610 ordained clergy and ministers in five denominations working in parts of the East and West Midlands. The article is available on an open access basis at:

https://www.dur.ac.uk/resources/theologyandministry/TheologyandMinistry4_2.pdf

Anglican identities

Abby Day has edited an interesting interdisciplinary collection of 14 chapters on global Anglicanism: Contemporary Issues in the Worldwide Anglican Communion: Powers and Pieties (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016, xviii + 270 pp., ISBN 978-1-4724-4413-4, £65.00, hardback). Although there is a fair amount of specifically Britain-related content, the volume’s approach is overwhelmingly qualitative. Indeed, it is highly revealing (and not a little unusual) that its editor has prevailed upon the authors of the only substantial quantitative research article to write up their findings in a narrative rather than numerical form. This essay is by Leslie Francis and Gemma Penny, ‘Belonging without Practising: Exploring the Religious, Social, and Personal Significance of Anglican Identities among Adolescent Males’ (pp. 55-71). The chapter profiles the worldviews (across 10 themes) of two groups of 13- to 15-year-old students from secondary schools in England and Wales, 1,800 religiously unaffiliated and 1,488 professing Anglicans (further sub-divided by frequency of churchgoing into four sub-groups). The book’s webpage is at:

https://www.routledge.com/Contemporary-Issues-in-the-Worldwide-Anglican-Communion-Powers-and-Pieties/Day/p/book/9781472444134

Methodism and social inclusion

Despite its avowed preferential option for the poor, there is no evidence that the Methodist Church in Britain is targeting its resources towards the most deprived communities, according to new research by Michael Hirst. He has analysed cross-sectional and longitudinal data for the distribution of Methodist personnel (ministers, members, and connexional lay appointees), churches, and schools against a widely accepted 38-item index of neighbourhood deprivation for both Lower Layer Super Output Areas and Middle Layer Super Output Areas in England. He found that the immediate surroundings of most Methodist churches typify areas in the middle of the deprivation spectrum while few Methodist schools serve areas of significant deprivation. Moreover, ministers and lay appointees live predominantly in the least deprived neighbourhoods and increasingly so. Hirst’s ‘Poverty, Place, and Presence: Positioning Methodism in England, 2001 to 2011’ is published in the open access journal Theology and Ministry, Vol. 4, 2016, pp. 4.1-25 at:

https://www.dur.ac.uk/resources/theologyandministry/TheologyandMinistry4_4.pdf

British and Australian Quakers

A comparison of the beliefs and practices of British and Australian Quakers is offered by Peter Williams and Jennifer Hampton in ‘Results from the First National Survey of Quaker Belief and Practice in Australia and Comparison with the 2013 British Survey’, Quaker Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1, June 2016, pp. 95-119. The 2014 Australian study replicated 42 questions from the 2013 British enquiry (whose results were reported by Hampton in Quaker Studies, Vol. 19, 2014-15, pp. 7-136). Answers to half of these questions were remarkably similar in both surveys, but Australian respondents were found to be more likely than their British peers to describe prayer and their activities in meetings for worship as meditation; to describe the Quaker business method as finding a consensus; to believe Quakers can be helped by hearing about the religious experiences of other groups; and to be involved with other social or religious organizations or issues. Access options to the article are outlined at:

http://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/pdf/10.3828/quaker.2016.21.1.7

Catholic churchgoing

Ben Clements illuminates ‘Weekly Churchgoing amongst Roman Catholics in Britain: Long-Term Trends and Contemporary Analysis’ for the online first edition of Journal of Beliefs and Values. In the first half of the paper, four recurrent sources (British Election Studies, British Social Attitudes Surveys, European Values Studies, and European Social Surveys) are used to document a clear over-time decline in self-reported weekly church attendance by Catholic adults. In the second half, an online survey of British Catholics by YouGov in 2010 is analysed to isolate the socio-demographic correlates of regular churchgoing, weekly attenders being shown to be disproportionately older, of higher socio-economic status, and to have children in the household. Somewhat contrary to generic expectation, however, the effects of gender and ethnicity were not found to be significant. The investigation did not extend to an examination of trends in actual Mass-going by Catholics, which has been recorded by the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales for more than half a century and also in the ecumenical English Church Censuses between 1979 and 2005. Access options to the article are outlined at:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13617672.2016.1237422

Islamophobia

A cross-national study, undertaken in 15 European countries (including the United Kingdom) belonging to the Dublin System (which coordinates asylum policy in Europe), has revealed a marked anti-Muslim bias (and a corresponding pro-Christian bias) in attitudes to hypothetical asylum seekers. Data were collected by Respondi from internet panels in February-March 2016, a total of 18,030 adults being questioned online, among them 1,201 in the United Kingdom. Using a seven-point scale, where 1 denoted sending the applicant back to their country of origin and 7 granting permission to stay, each respondent was asked to rate the profiles of five pairs of asylum seekers according to nine different attributes, one of which was their religion (Christian, Muslim, or agnostic). Results are reported in an 11-page article and 121 pages of supplementary materials (mainly figures and regression tables) published in the First Release edition of Science on 22 September 2016: Kirk Bansak, Jens Hainmueller, and Dominik Hangartner, ‘How Economic, Humanitarian, and Religious Concerns Shape European Attitudes toward Asylum Seekers’. Access options to the article are outlined at:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2016/09/22/science.aag2147

Yearbook of Muslims in Europe

Yearbook of Muslims in Europe, Volume 7 (Leiden: Brill, 2016, xx + 620 pp., ISSN 1877-1432, €179.00, hardback) has been compiled by a team of five editors led by Oliver Scharbrodt. It comprises an introductory essay by Jonathan Laurence (pp. 1-10) and 44 country overviews, including one on the United Kingdom by Asma Mustafa (pp. 607-20). Commencing with this volume, statistical and demographic data have been relegated to an appendix for each chapter, which, in the case of the United Kingdom (pp. 616-17), is mainly drawn from the 2011 population census. The text of each country report otherwise focuses on developments affecting Islam and Muslims during 2014. The British Religion in Numbers source database records 53 relevant surveys for 2014, including those relating to the ‘Trojan Horse’ affair in Birmingham schools and the rise of Islamic State, but none of these is mentioned by Mustafa whose contribution runs to only half the length allotted to Belgium. The volume’s webpage is at:

http://www.brill.com/products/book/yearbook-muslims-europe-volume-7

Muslim labour market penalty

In the latest paper in his series based on UK Labour Force data for 2002-13, Nabil Khattab uses descriptive and multivariate analysis to illuminate ‘The Ethno-Religious Wage Gap within the British Salariat Class: How Severe is the Penalty?’ Although he discovered substantial differences in gross hourly pay between different ethno-religious groups, he contends that they cannot be attributed to pure ethnic or religious discrimination. Nor did he find evidence for an overarching ‘Muslim penalty’, as suggested by some other scholars, notwithstanding two Muslim groups (Muslim-Bangladeshi and Muslim-Pakistani) experienced greater disadvantage than many of the ten other ethno-religious groups included in the study. The article was published in the August 2016 issue of Sociology (Vol. 50, No. 4, pp. 813-24), and the full text is freely available at:

http://soc.sagepub.com/content/50/4/813

Halal meat

Animals slaughtered for Muslim consumption must meet specific requirements laid down in the Koran and the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed. In particular, animals must be alive at the point of ritual cut, with many Muslims traditionally believing pre-stunning prior to slaughter to be non-reversible and contrary to Halal principles. To assess current views, Awal Fuseini, Steve Wotton, Phil Hadley, and Toby Knowles surveyed 66 Islamic scholars and a non-random and disproportionately male sample of 314 consumers of Halal meat in the UK between October 2015 and March 2016. The study was funded by the Halal Food Foundation. The majority of both scholars (95%) and consumers (53%) agreed that, if an animal is stunned and then slaughtered by a Muslim and the method of stunning does not result in death, cause physical injury, or obstruct bleed-out, then the meat could be considered Halal-compliant. ‘The Perception and Acceptability of Pre-Slaughter and Post-Slaughter Stunning for Halal Production: The Views of UK Islamic Scholars and Halal Consumers’ is published in Meat Science, Vol. 123, January 2017, pp. 143-50. Access options to the article are outlined at:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0309174016303151

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

Posted in church attendance, Historical studies, Measuring religion, Ministry studies, News from religious organisations, Official data, Religion and Politics, Religion and Social Capital, Religion in public debate, Religious beliefs, Religious prejudice, Survey news | Tagged Abby Day, Anglican Communion, Anglican identities, Anti-Semitism, Ashers Bakery, Ashgate, Asma Mustafa, asylum seekers, Awal Fuseini, Baptist Assembly, BBC, Ben Clements, Bible, Bible Society, BMG Research, Brill, cake, Catholic Directory, Christian Churches, Christian Legacy, Christian Resources Exhibitions, Church and Media Network, Church of England, churchgoing, clergy, Clive Field, ComRes, consumers, convent schools, Daily Express, deprivation, Desert Island Discs, discrimination, Dominik Hangartner, Elisabeth Arweck, Emma Shackle, ESRC Party Members Project, ethno-religious groups, evil spirits, exorcism, Frank Pasquale, Gallup Poll, Gemma Penny, Gospatric Home, halal meat, Hannah Corcoran, hate crimes, history, Home Office, homes, homosexuality, House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, Islamic scholars, Islamic State, Islamophobia, Jayne Ozanne, Jennifer Hampton, Jens Hainmueller, Jeremy Corbyn, John Tomlinson, Journal of Beliefs and Values, Kevin Ladd, Kevin Smith, Kirk Bansak, Labour Force Survey, labour market penalty, Labour Party, Leader of the Opposition, legacies, lesbian gay and bisexual community, Leslie Francis, London, Luke Galen, Meat Science, Methodist Church, Michael Hirst, Muslims, Nabil Khattab, Newman Demographic Survey, non-religion, Northern Ireland, Oliver Scharbrodt, Oxford University Press, Pastoral Research Centre Trust, Pat Pinsent, Patrick Laycock, Peter Williams, Phil Hadley, Phil Zuckerman, police, political party leaders, power, prayer, prime minister, prisoners, purpose in life, Quaker Studies, Quakers, Religious Affiliation, Religious diversity, religious prejudice, religious slaughter, Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion, Respondi, Roman Catholic Church, Roman Catholics, same-sex marriage, satisfaction, science, secularization, social inclusion, sociology, spirituality, St Paul's Cathedral, Steve Wotton, supernatural, Theology and Ministry, Theresa May, Toby Knowles, Tony Spencer, Towergate, Universe Media Group, University of Warwick, Westminster Abbey, Yearbook of Muslims in Europe, YouGov, Young People’s Attitudes to Religious Diversity Project, Young People’s Values Survey | 1 Comment

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

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

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

Round-Up of Islamic State and Other Surveys

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Clive D. Field

Islamic State

There has been a further round of polling in recent days related to the advances of the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria, as summarized below, by chronological order of fieldwork. Unless otherwise stated, surveys were conducted online and among representative samples of Britons aged 18 and over.

August 2014

OnePoll reported on 29 August 2014, on the basis of 1,000 interviews, that the most popular option for resolving the IS crisis was ‘encourage peaceful negotiation’ (29%), with ‘military action – we should launch air strikes’ a close second on 27%. The proportion in facour of air strikes was higher among professing Christians (32%) than atheists (24%), although the number in both sub-groups recommending military action in the form of deploying ground troops against IS was similar (13% and 12% respectively). The survey covered knowledge of, and attitudes to, a range of current international conflicts, revealing a significant lack of understanding (including the 13% of respondents who identified the Egyptian holiday resort of Sharm el-Sheikh as a terrorist organization). As so often with OnePoll studies, there is only a blog post available online, published at:

http://www.onepoll.com/13-of-brits-think-sharm-el-sheikh-the-popular-egyptian-holiday-destination-is-a-terrorist-group/

20-22 August 2014

ComRes, commissioned by the Sunday Mirror and Independent on Sunday, reported 55% of 2,058 Britons in agreement with the suggestion that, if IS continued unchecked in Iraq, it would pose a direct threat to security on British streets; just 14% disagreed with 31% undecided. However, there was no consensus that the emergence of IS demonstrated that Britain had withdrawn from Iraq prematurely: 26% agreed, 39% disagreed, and 36% could not say. Data tables are at:

http://www.comres.co.uk/polls/SM_IoS_Political_Poll_24th_August_2014_12371.pdf

22-25 August 2014

ComRes, for ITV News, asked 2,062 Britons how the British government should respond to IS, taking into account the level of military action necessary to achieve a particular outcome. One-third (35%) thought that we should seek to defeat IS in its entirety, a big jump on the 20% recorded in the pollster’s previous survey of 15-17 August, with 23% wishing to see us concentrate on preventing IS from making further gains (29% in the earlier study). Just over one-fifth (22%) argued that Britain should not become involved, 8% down on the week before. These answers were not wholly consistent with those to another question, which asked whether the government should concentrate its efforts on preventing radicalization of Muslims in the UK, rather than engaging in Iraq and Syria, a strategy with which 58% agreed. Overwhelmingly (71%), respondents considered that people using social media to promote IS should have their accounts suspended, with only 10% dissenting, with 75% concurring that social media websites should hand over to the government the personal details of anybody using their account to organize IS activity. Data tables are at:

http://www.comres.co.uk/polls/ITV_News_Index_26th_August_2014.pdf

28-29 August 2014

YouGov’s latest weekly poll for the Sunday Times largely replicated questions about IS and Iraq asked on 21-22 August 2014, and sometimes in earlier surveys. Opinion was found to have remained constant over the week, with 77% approving of the RAF dropping humanitarian supplies to people fleeing IS, 43% of air strikes by the RAF against IS (more specifically, 37% against IS targets in Syria), 37% of supplying arms to Iraqi and Kurdish forces fighting IS, and 29% of sending British troops to help train such forces. Strong support remained for stripping Britons fighting alongside IS of their citizenship, in cases where they held dual nationality or had been naturalized (78%), and of changing the law to allow citizenship to be withdrawn from birth Britons (67%). Overwhelmingly (86%), Britons who had fought for Islamist groups abroad were deemed to pose a threat to the country on their return, while 79% held that their Islamist involvements had increased the risk of major terrorist attacks taking place in Britain. Four-fifths wished to see the prosecution of British citizens travelling to Iraq or Syria, the presumption for many respondents being that they must have gone to fight for IS, unless they could prove otherwise. Data tables are at:

http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/frletj5cgx/YG-Archive-Pol-Sunday-Times-results-140829.pdf

29-31 August 2014

Telephone interviews with 1,001 adults by ComRes for The Independent revealed continuing minority support for direct British military involvement in the fight against IS in Iraq and Syria, 35% endorsing RAF air strikes (with 50% disagreement) and 20% the commitment of British ground forces (with 69% opposed). A majority (61% versus 29%) thought that Britons suspected of joining IS should have their passports taken away and be stripped of their citizenship, albeit fewer (39%) considered that Britons travelling to Iraq and Syria should be presumed to be terrorists until they could be proved innocent. Data tables are at:

http://www.comres.co.uk/polls/The_Independent_Political_Poll_2nd_September_2014.pdf

3 September 2014

The deteriorating situation in Iraq and Syria, including an apparent beheading by IS of a second American citizen and a threat of a similar fate to a British hostage, is slowly increasing public support for RAF air strikes against IS. Based on a fairly small sample of 703 adults, by YouGov for The Sun, the figure now stands at 47%, ten points up on 10-11 August (when the question was first asked by YouGov), with 31% disapproval and 22% undecided. Support for Britain supplying arms to Iraqi and Kurdish forces fighting IS has also increased, from 28% on 11-12 August to 39% on 3 September, with 37% opposed and 24% uncertain. However, there was no greater enthusiasm than in previous polls for Britain and the USA deploying ground troops in Iraq to combat IS (with 20% in favour and 58% against, the same split as on 14-15 August). Data tables are at:

http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/ozg4t2h6kv/SunResults_140903_Islamic_State_ISIS_W.pdf

A tracker of YouGov’s recent polling on Iraq and IS is at:

http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/ogulv37v9d/YG-Archives-Pol-Trackers-Iraq-IS-Conflict-030914.pdf

Scottish religion

Further evidence that religion is on the wane in Scotland is provided by two new data sources from the Scottish Government.

The proportion of adult Scots who profess no religion stood at 46% in 2013, up by six points since 2009, according to the report and tables from the 2013 Scottish Household Survey, published on 13 August 2014, for which 9,920 individuals were interviewed. There was a corresponding fall over the same period in allegiance to the Church of Scotland, from 34% to 28%, while the number of Roman Catholics remained unchanged, at 15%. Respondents were also asked about their experience of discrimination and harassment. Discrimination was reported by 7% of all Scots but by 10% of Catholics and Christians other than Church of Scotland, and by 21% of non-Christians. For harassment the national average was 6% but 14% among non-Christians. Further information is contained in tables 2.2, 4.18, and 4.19 and in figure 2.1 at:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2014/08/7973/downloads

The majority of marriages in Scotland in 2013 were solemnized in civil ceremonies, as they have been in every year since 2005. The proportion now stands at three times the level it did in 1946-50. The principal reason why ‘religious’ weddings remain reasonably common, at 49% in 2013, is that the total is inflated by those conducted by humanist and other ‘non-religious’ celebrants, a practice which is legal in Scotland, but not yet in England and Wales. Indeed, representatives of the Humanist Society of Scotland alone officiated at 3,185 marriages in Scotland in 2013, not far short of the 4,616 celebrated by Church of Scotland ministers. If humanist and other belief weddings are excluded, then the proportion which might be considered ‘religious’, on a more conventional definition of organized religion, is reduced to 37%, the equivalent figure in 1946-50 being 83%. The fall in religious marriages has been absolute as well as relative. Whereas in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War there were an average of 35,700 per annum, there were just 10,300 in 2013, on a like-for-like basis. Weddings conducted in the Kirk have more than halved in the decade 2003-13. Details are provided in Vital Events Reference Tables 7.5, 7.6, and 7.7, published by the General Register Office for Scotland on 14 August 2014 at:

http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/statistics/theme/vital-events/general/ref-tables/2013/section-7-marriages-and-civil-partnerships.html

Trust in religious institutions

Surveys have consistently demonstrated that the under-25s are the least religious of all age groups, regardless of the measure of religiosity which is used. New research from Survation for Sky News, based on 1,004 online interviews with Britons aged 16-24 on 21-26 August 2014, has now revealed that they also tend to mistrust religious institutions, relative to other national institutions. The question asked was: ‘which of the following institutions do you trust to address your concerns/needs?’ Topline results are summarized in the table below. Distrust in religious institutions was especially high among prospective UKIP voters and residents of Wales, Scotland, and Southern England outside London (the capital itself recording 43% trust). For more detail, see tables 42-49 at:

http://survation.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Sky-Youth-Poll-Tables.pdf

%	Trust	Not trust
National Health Service	78	22
Police	66	34
Social services	53	47
Local authorities	52	48
Judiciary	42	58
Government/Parliament	31	69
Religious institutions	31	69
Mainstream media	18	82

Posted in Official data, Religion and Politics, Religion in the Press, Survey news | Tagged British citizenship, ComRes, discrimination, Independent on Sunday, Iraq, Islamic State, Islamism, ITV News, marriages, Muslims, OnePoll, Religious Affiliation, religious institutions, Scotland, Scottish Government, Scottish Household Survey, Sky News, Sunday Mirror, Sunday Times, Survation, Syria, terrorism, The Independent, trust, YouGov | Leave a comment

Things Unseen and Other News

Posted on October 17, 2013 by Clive D. Field

The latest report from Theos heads the list of seven religious statistical news stories today, comprising a further attempt by the think-tank to explore the spiritual hinterland which lays beyond institutional religion and to counter the picture of unrelenting secularization of British society.

Things unseen

‘For all that formalised religious belief and institutionalised religious belonging has declined over recent decades, the British have not become a nation of atheists or materialists. On the contrary, a spiritual current runs as, if not more, powerfully through the nation than it once did.’ So begins the latest report from the Theos think-tank, The Spirit of Things Unseen: Belief in Post-Religious Britain, published on 17 September 2013 alongside the data tables from the ComRes poll which underpins it (2,036 Britons aged 18 and over being interviewed online on 4 and 5 September 2013). The research, which was sponsored by CTVC as background for a new podcast venture, develops arguments originally advanced by Theos in its 2012 report The Faith of the Faithless (which covered England alone).

The Spirit of Things Unseen (28pp.) can be viewed at:

http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/files/files/Reports/Spirit%20of%20Things%20-%20Digital%20(update).pdf

and the data tables (34pp., including breaks by gender, age, social grade, employment sector, region, religious affiliation, and educational attainment) at:

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

Headline findings are:

77% agree that there are things in life that cannot be explained through science or other means
34% believe that people’s thoughts can be influenced by spiritual forces, 27% events in the human world can be so influenced, and 23% events in the natural world
59% believe in one or more of the following spiritual beings: God as a universal life force (30%), spirits (30%), angels (25%), the devil (14%), God as a personal being (13%), a higher spiritual being that cannot be called God (12%), demons (10%), or Jinns (3%) – 30% are sceptics
76% believe in one or more of the following: the soul (39%), life after death (32%), heaven (26%), reincarnation (16%), hell (13%), or the power of deceased ancestors (13%)
39% have undergone one or more of the following: tarot card reading (23%), star signs reading (17%), reflexology session (12%), Reiki session (8%), aura reading (6%), healing with crystals (5%), or Ayurveda session (1%)
11% have visited a spiritual or faith healer or a religious leader who specializes in praying for the sick
38% believe that prayer can heal people (but 50% do not)
17% consider prayer to be effectual in bringing about change, 51% in creating a sense of peace, while 17% feel that prayer does not work in any way
55% pray sometimes (21% at least weekly, 34% occasionally), and the rest not at all
17% perceive miracles as the result of divine intervention in nature and 42% as unusual events that cannot be explained by science, while 30% say they do not exist and are simply examples of coincidence or luck
16% have either personally experienced, or know somebody who has experienced, a miracle

Analysis by religion mostly shows that, while the religious often give the most spiritual responses, smaller but still significant numbers of the avowedly non-religious do so, also. This is particularly so in the case of ‘alternative’ practices, where there is no real difference between the religious and non-religious. On the other hand, there is a wide gap between the two groups when it comes to ‘traditional’ practices, such as prayer. Neither is it the elderly who consistently and disproportionately opt for spiritual answers. Women tend to be more spiritual in their replies than men.

The spiritual beings and beliefs questions do not seem wholly satisfactory, being too compressed. More generally, it could be argued that Theos might have been better served by replicating at least a few questions from earlier surveys, which would have had the advantage of facilitating comparisons over time. As it is, the hint (dropped several times in the report) that what is essentially a single survey snapshot might suggest that Britain is actually becoming more spiritual is evidentially unproven and thus unconvincing. As such, the debate about the current and future religious state of the nation seems set to run and run.

Storm in a bed and breakfast cup

The long-running legal case of husband and wife Peter and Hazelmary Bull versus Martin Hall and Steve Preddy moved to the Supreme Court on 9 and 10 October 2013, more than five years after the incident which gave rise to it. The Bulls are devout Christians and owners of a B&B in Cornwall, who had refused a double room to Hall and Preddy (a homosexual couple in a civil partnership), on grounds of religious conscience. A County Court in 2011 had originally found the Bulls in breach of the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2007 and awarded damages to Hall and Preddy. A subsequent appeal by the Bulls to the Court of Appeal was dismissed last year. No date has yet been fixed for a hand-down of judgment by the Supreme Court.

To coincide with the Supreme Court phase of the case, Lancaster University issued a press release on 9 October 2013 reporting the findings of two questions about the case which had been added to the second of the YouGov surveys commissioned by Professor Linda Woodhead for the 2013 Westminster Faith Debates, 4,018 Britons having been interviewed online on 5-13 June 2013. The ‘bad news’ in this poll for the Bulls is that a majority of adults (57%) do not believe that B&B owners should be allowed to discriminate against guests on the basis of the latters’ sexual orientation, and this includes a majority or plurality of all major religious groups (for example, 52% of Anglicans and 51% of Catholics). Even the most certain believers in God are anti-discrimination (49%), although 53% of weekly churchgoers are pro-discrimination. The better news for the Bulls is that a plurality (49% against 40%) think it wrong that they were ordered to pay damages. Lancaster’s press release, which has been covered by the Church Times (11 October 2013, p. 6) and The Tablet (12 October 2013, p. 28) is at:

http://www.religionandsociety.org.uk/uploads/docs/2013_10/1381315862_Christian_B&B_poll_Press_Release.pdf

Contemporary British Jewry

‘British Jews place a premium on communal belonging, albeit without an excess of piety or religiosity. They hold conservative political loyalties balanced by some liberal social views.’ So conclude sociologists Professor Linda Woodhead and Professor Steven Cohen in their analysis of the 318 self-identifying British Jews interviewed for the two YouGov polls which Woodhead commissioned for this year’s Westminster Faith Debates, with online fieldwork on 25-30 January and 5-13 June 2013. Their article, ‘Who do we think we are? Here are the facts’, contains comparisons with other religious groups in Britain and with American Jews. It was published in the print edition (p. 2) of the Jewish Chronicle for 11 October 2013 and in the online edition at:

http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/112220/new-surveys-shed-light-who-we-are

Clergy stress

Stress among the clergy has been the subject of serious sociological and psychological study for over a quarter of a century, one of the earliest empirical surveys being Ben Fletcher’s Clergy under Stress (1990). In preparation for its Building Resilience symposium (in London on 15 October and York on 17 October 2013), St Luke’s Healthcare for the Clergy commissioned Christian Research to poll 492 ordained UK clergy in August 2013, some results being published in a press release on 23 September 2013. It is assumed (but not explicitly stated) that respondents were members of Christian’s Research’s online panel, Resonate. Asked how they felt in themselves, 37% of clergy replied ‘positive and energized’, 50% said they had more good days than bad, but 12% admitted to struggling or barely coping. Although 58% had rarely or never considered giving up their role in the Church, 33% had done so occasionally, and 8% often or very frequently. Over half (53%) had never received training to understand or manage stress, with all but 23% willing to take up one or more resources to help in this regard. For further details, follow the ‘Building Resilience symposium press release’ link at:

http://www.stlukeshealthcare.org.uk/publications

Bishops’ office and working costs

On 7 October 2013 the Church Commissioners published a 13-page report on the office and working costs of the Church of England’s 113 diocesan and suffragan bishops for the year ending 31 December 2012. They amounted to £18.1 million, representing an increase of 6% over the 2011 figure. Staff were the biggest single expenditure (50%), albeit their costs grew by less than average (4%). Costs are itemized for each individual bishop, as they have been for the past 12 years, 28 of them (among them the two archbishops) actually returning a lower figure in 2012 than for 2011. On the other hand, expenditure by the Bishops of Leicester and Southwark was up in cash terms by over £50,000. Additional to these office and working costs, stipends and employer’s national insurance and pension contributions for bishops came to £5.5 million, with a further £4.7 million spent on maintaining the houses, office premises, and gardens of the archbishops and diocesan bishops (including Lambeth Palace). The grand total of central expenditure on Church of England bishops in 2012 was, therefore, £28.3 million, but this still excludes the housing costs of suffragan bishops, which are met by dioceses. The report is available at:

http://www.churchofengland.org/media/1862748/bishops%20office%20and%20working%20costs%202012.pdf

Scottish Methodist lay preachers

Right from its origins in the eighteenth century, Methodism has been dependent upon the voluntary efforts of local (lay) preachers to conduct many of its worship services, and this remains the case today. Indeed, in Scotland the proportion of services at which they officiated rose from 31% in 1996 to 39% in 2010, partly in reflection of a 31% reduction in ordained ministers in Scotland over the same period. These Scottish local preachers (both ‘fully accredited’ and ‘on trial’) are increasingly women, 39% in 1996 and 47% in 2010. They are also a progressively elderly group, with mean ages of 55 in 1996 and 64 in 2011, and with a corresponding fall in the number in full-time paid employment. In line with society, formal education levels of local preachers continue to improve, those with first or higher degrees growing from 47% in 1996 to 58% in 2011. In addition to taking preaching appointments, local preachers hold other offices in Methodism (especially church council member), while their principal leisure pursuits are reading, sport, walking, music, and gardening. These details are taken from John Sawkins, ‘Methodist Local Preachers in Scotland: Characteristics and Deployment, 1996 and 2011’, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society, Vol. 59, No. 3, October 2013, pp. 89-101.

Quaker membership statistics

Finally, an ‘overdue’ item. The 2013 Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain took place on 24-27 May, and one of the sequence of ‘documents in advance’ was a 12-page ‘tabular statement’ of membership for the year ending 31 December 2012. In total there were 478 local meetings with 13,906 members, of whom 37.4% were men, 62.3% women, and 0.3% children under 16. Member incomings during the year numbered 535, of which 66.5% were by application and 33.5% by certificate (i.e. transfer from Britain or another Yearly Meeting). Outgoings amounted to 726 (191 more than incomings), of which 33.1% were through termination of membership, 44.6% by death, and 22.3% by certificate. The Quaker death rate for the year was 23 per 1,000, well above the national average, and thus suggesting an ageing membership. Besides members, there were 8,681 attenders and 2,004 children recognized as connected with Quaker meetings but not in membership. On p. 11 will be found a record of Britain Yearly Meeting membership, disaggregated by sex, quinquennially from 1935 to 1970 and annually thereafter. Membership has not fallen so severely as for other historic Free Churches, only by 28.0% over these 77 years. The tabular statement is at:

http://www.quaker.org.uk/files/Tabular-statement-2013-web.pdf

Posted in Historical studies, News from religious organisations, Religion in public debate, Religion in the Press, Survey news | Tagged Bishops, Britain Yearly Meeting, Christian Research, Church Commissioners, Church of England, clergy, ComRes, CTVC, discrimination, finance, God, Hazelmary Bull, healing, homosexuality, Jewish Chronicle, Jews, John Sawkins, Linda Woodhead, local preachers, Martin Hall, membership, Methodist Church, miracles, office costs, Peter Bull, prayer, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society, Quakers, Religious Society of Friends, Scotland, spiritual forces, spirituality, St Luke’s Healthcare for the Clergy, Steve Preddy, Steven Cohen, stress, Supreme Court, Theos, Westminster Faith Debates, YouGov | Leave a comment

Secularization Restated and Other News

Posted on October 10, 2013 by Clive D. Field

Seven statistical news stories about religion in Britain feature in today’s post, including a summative article from Steve Bruce in reaffirmation of the secularization thesis.

Secularization restated

In Britain ‘there is no evidential warrant for describing individual beliefs and behaviour as post-secular or de-secularising’, concludes Professor Steve Bruce in a characteristically robust and entertaining restatement of the secularization paradigm: ‘Post-Secularity and Religion in Britain: An Empirical Assessment’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, Vol. 28, No. 3, 2013, pp. 369-84 (published on 2 October 2013). ‘Religion has become more contentious; it has not become more popular’ is his principal argument, supported by a high-level overview of statistics of religious membership, attendance, rites of passage, institutions, and beliefs. Nor, Bruce suggests, has the overall picture of (largely Christian) decline been offset by the undoubted growth of non-Christians (unfortunately, the paper was finalized before publication of the results of the 2011 census) and the emergence of alternative forms of spirituality. Nor, in a tantalizingly brief section, does Bruce find evidence of any compensating increased presence of religion in public life; indeed, he claims, there has been ongoing privatization. The article’s arguments and sources are essentially familiar (and perhaps still best read in full in their original incarnations), but relative newcomers to the secularization debate may benefit from it as an introductory discourse and compilation of data. Unfortunately, it is hidden behind a publisher’s pay-wall; for access options, go to:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13537903.2013.831642#.UlbieTZwbX4

Westminster Faith Debates

Professor Linda Woodhead released on 8 October 2013 the full data tables from the second YouGov poll she commissioned for the 2013 Westminster Faith Debates, in which 4,018 adult Britons were interviewed online between 5 and 13 June 2013. The data can be found at:

http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/4vs1srt1h1/YG-Archive-University-of-Lancaster-Faith-Matters-Debate-full-results-180613-website.pdf

The tables are a substantial resource for secondary research. They extend to 65 pages and include breaks of all questions by the following variables: current voting intention, 2010 vote, gender, age, social grade, region, education, ethnicity, religious affiliation, religious meeting/service attendance, and self-assessed religiosity/spirituality.

The questions cover the following religious topics: self-assessed religiosity/spirituality, religious/spiritual influences, private and public religious practices, belief in God/higher power, and sources of guidance in life. Respondents were then asked about their attitudes to: abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, faith schools, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, protests against perceived insults of faiths, immigration, the European Union, changes in British society, the welfare system, Islamist terrorism, the Church of England, Roman Catholic Church, and Margaret Thatcher versus Tony Blair as best Prime Minister.

The findings for faith schools – a discrete and substantial module in the survey – have previously been released and summarized by BRIN at:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/2013/faith-schools-and-other-news/

It would be impossible here to record the results for the full range of other subjects covered in the poll, but the final question might be worth a note. Asked which Prime Minister did more good for Britain, 39% said Thatcher, 18% Blair, 6% both equally, 28% neither, with 9% undecided. Thatcher commanded above average support from Anglicans (47%), Presbyterians (49%), and Methodists (47%). Blair was disproportionately popular with Roman Catholics (27%) and churchgoers. Muslims (42%) were most likely to say neither.

BRIN was also struck by the couple of questions surrounding Jerry Springer: the Opera, the British musical staged in London in 2003-05 before touring the UK in 2006, and which attracted strong protests from Christians on the grounds of its irreverence and profanity. Notwithstanding, the production excited little interest from pollsters at the time, so it is good to have the furore covered here, albeit almost a decade late. Reminded of the context, 52% of YouGov’s respondents felt that peaceful protests against the musical were understandable and 42% that they were justified (36% not). Catholics (54%), the historic Free Churches, Muslims (66%), and weekly attenders at services (76%) were most likely to consider the protests justified.

UK Data Service

The UK Data Service (UKDS) has recently announced the release of two historic datasets which will be of interest to BRIN users:

SN 4394: a first release of English Church Attendance Survey, 1998, undertaken by Peter Brierley, and joining the dataset for the 1989 church census, which is already held by UKDS
SN 1988: what appears to be a new edition of Conventional Religion and Common Religion in Leeds, 1982, undertaken by the University of Leeds, and based on interviews with electors and university students

More information about both studies can be found in the UKDS catalogue at:

http://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/

The UKDS JISCmail list provides regular free (mostly weekly) email alerts about the release of new datasets. To join the list, go to:

https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=UKdataservice

Religious education

A mainly qualitative assessment of the state of religious education (RE) in English primary and secondary schools is contained in a new report, Religious Education: Realising the Potential, released by Ofsted on 6 October 2013. Data mostly derive from inspections carried out in 185 schools between September 2009 and July 2012, 659 RE lessons being observed. The sample did not include voluntary aided schools or academies with a religious designation, for which alternative inspection arrangements exist. It also excluded schools judged to require special measures or given notice to improve. The overall message in the report is ‘could do better’, with eight areas of concern identified about RE. A tabular summary of the inspection data under seven headings, shown separately for primary and secondary schools, appears on p. 38. In terms of overall RE effectiveness, 42% of primary and 48% of secondary schools were considered outstanding or good, 56% and 41% respectively satisfactory, and 2% and 11% inadequate. Subject training was deemed the worst single facet of provision, with 29% of primaries and 35% of secondaries judged inadequate in this regard. The report is available at:

http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/religious-education-realising-potential

Evangelicals at work

Published on 7 October 2013, Working Faithfully? is the latest report from the 21st Century Evangelicals project, developed by the Evangelical Alliance and the six other partner organizations in its research club. It derives from an online survey in May 2013 of 1,511 members of the Alliance’s self-selecting (and thus potentially unrepresentative) panel of UK evangelicals. Respondents were overwhelmingly (91%) in manual employment and had a strong sense of calling in their job (69%). They mostly (84%) felt valued for the work they did, although 39% experienced work-related stress, 37% endured a working week of more than 40 hours, and 35% of men and 27% of women regularly brought work home with them. Almost half (44%) perceived Christians to suffer discrimination in employment often or sometimes, and 53% thought that Christians getting into trouble at work is a significant problem. However, no more than 12% claimed they had personally been discriminated against in employment for any reason, and just 2% because of a faith-related issue. Somewhat more (14%) said they had encountered hostility, exclusion or mocking from work colleagues on account of their faith, while 9% reported difficulties with their management because they were known as a Christian or had spoken up for Christian values. The report is at:

http://www.eauk.org/church/resources/snapshot/upload/Working-faithfully-PDF.pdf

Nobel peace laureates

Religious figures feature prominently in a list of past recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize considered to have been most deserving, according to a YouGov poll published on 9 October 2013, 1,879 adult Britons having been interviewed online on 7 and 8 October. The data table is at:

http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/zdg9yb4z0f/YG-Archive-Nobel-Peace-Prize-results-081013.pdf

The top six places in the list of most deserving recipients included:

1st (37%) – Mother Teresa of Calcutta, founder of the Missionaries of Charity, awarded the Prize in 1979 for her work in overcoming poverty and distress
2nd (33%) – Martin Luther King Jr, Baptist minister and American civil rights leader, awarded the Prize in 1964 for combating racial inequality through non-violence
5th (13%) – Desmond Tutu, Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, awarded the Prize in 1984 for his leadership of the campaign against apartheid in South Africa
6th (12%) – 14th Dalai Lama, awarded the Prize in 1989 for his non-violent struggle for the liberation of Tibet

Noteworthy among variations by demographic sub-groups was the disproportionately strong support for Martin Luther King and the Dalai Lama among the 18-24s (43% and 24% respectively).

Emigration to Israel

On 30 September 2013 the Institute for Jewish Policy Research published Immigration from the United Kingdom to Israel, by Laura Staetsky, Marina Sheps, and Jonathan Boyd, and based upon both Israeli and UK statistical sources. The report showed that 32,600 UK-born Jews or people of Jewish ancestry emigrated to Israel (a process known as making aliyah) between 1948 (when the Jewish state was founded) and the end of 2011, constituting about 1% of all immigrants to Israel during that period. Peak UK immigration to Israel occurred between the 1960s and 1980s, since when the numbers have mostly tailed off, albeit with a spike in the late 2000s. UK-born immigrants to Israel are disproportionately young, with a median age in the late 20s. Their departure for Israel has therefore pushed up the mean age of the Jewish community remaining in the UK and reduced the number of Jewish women of reproductive age in the UK, adversely affecting the community’s potential for growth. Nor is there a compensatory flow in the other direction, the number of UK-born Jews living permanently in Israel in the 2000s being, at 19,000, greater than the 15,000 Israeli Jews permanently living in the UK. For the full data and analysis, go to:

http://www.jpr.org.uk/downloads/JPRAliyahReport6thProof.pdf

Posted in church attendance, Historical studies, News from religious organisations, Religion and Politics, Religion in public debate, Survey news | Tagged Aliyah, church attendance, discrimination, emigration, Evangelical Alliance, evangelicals, Institute for Jewish Policy Research, Israel, Jerry Springer the Opera, Jonathan Boyd, Journal of Contemporary Religion, Laura Staetsky, Leeds, Linda Woodhead, Margaret Thatcher, Marina Sheps, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Nobel Peace Prize, Ofsted, religious education, secularization, Steve Bruce, Tony Blair, UK Data Service, Westminster Faith Debates, work, YouGov | Leave a comment

Discrimination, Identity, and Other News

Posted on October 3, 2013 by Clive D. Field

The eight stories in today’s post feature a range of topics, but religious discrimination and religious identity especially stand out. It should be noted that the latest statistical bulletin for the Government’s Integrated Household Survey, covering the calendar year 2012 and published on 3 October 2013, did not report on the religious identity question.

Religious discrimination (1)

Perceived discrimination against Muslims has increased during the past three years, but they are still not the group most discriminated against in British society; that unenviable position is thought to be occupied by people with mental health problems, followed by gypsies, transsexuals, and immigrants. This is according to a YouGov poll published on 2 October 2013 and undertaken online on 29-30 September among a sample of 1,717 adult Britons. Interviewees were shown a list of groups and asked how much discrimination they thought each suffered in Britain today, the percentages replying ‘a lot’ or ‘some’ being combined in the table below, with comparisons for January 2011 (where available). Twelve of the 15 groups covered in both surveys were believed to have suffered more discrimination over the three years, only Christians and white persons experiencing a reduction, with no change for atheists (who were the group considered to be least discriminated against). Perceived discrimination against Muslims is now 32% more than against Christians, compared with a gap of 22% in 2011. Discrimination against Jews is believed to be up by one-third.

	01/2011	09/2013
Asians	44	47
Atheists	10	10
Blacks	41	48
Christians	28	25
Disabled	NA	57
Elderly	45	50
Gays/lesbians	43	50
Ginger haired	25	26
Gypsies/travellers	60	62
Immigrants	54	58
Jews	26	34
Mentally ill	NA	67
Muslims	50	57
Transsexuals	53	60
Whites	32	30
Women	29	34
Working class	31	32

The data table for the survey can be found at:

http://cdn.yougov.com/cumulus_uploads/document/jzh49t1gqk/YG-Archive-discrimination-results-300913.pdf

Religious discrimination (2)

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has recently published Identity, Expression, and Self-Respect, Briefing Paper No. 9 in its Measurement Framework series, with some accompanying data in Excel format. The paper considers five indicators in detail, the first of which is freedom to practice one’s religion or belief, which is quantified from the 2010 Citizenship Survey (CS) for England and Wales and from HM Inspectorate of Prisons statistics. In the CS 93% of adults overall felt able to practice their religion freely, but somewhat fewer among the under-45s, several ethnic minorities, and Muslims and Sikhs (for detail, see pp. 17-18 and the table accompanying measure El1.1). Breaks by religion are also sometimes shown in connection with the secondary analysis of data for the other four indicators. The briefing paper and tables are at:

http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/key-projects/our-measurement-framework/-briefing-papers-and-data/identity-expression-and-self-respect/

Under a veil

The recent public and media debate about whether Muslim women should be permitted to wear the full face-veil or niqab started in connection with specific cases involving courtrooms and colleges. In canvassing popular opinion on the matter, ComRes therefore decided to take the prohibition of the veil in courts, schools, and colleges as ‘a given’, and to ask respondents whether female Muslims should otherwise be free to wear the veil. One-half (including 61% of over-65s and Conservatives, and 79% of UKIP supporters) thought the veil should not be worn even outside courts, schools, and colleges, and just 32% that it should be. The poll was undertaken by telephone for the Independent on Sunday and Sunday Mirror on 18 and 19 September 2013, among 2,003 Britons aged 18 and over, and the data can be found on pp. 113-16 of the tables posted at:

http://www.comres.co.uk/polls/SM_IoS_Political_Poll_September_2013.pdf

Religious identity (1)

Details of the religious self-identification of the UK’s regular armed forces personnel as at 1 April 2013 were published by the Ministry of Defence on 26 September 2013 in Table 2.01.09 of the 2013 edition of Statistical Series 2 – Personnel Bulletin 2.01. Although the proportion professing no religion has risen steadily, from 9.5% in 2007 to 16.4% today, the overwhelming majority of our service personnel continue to subscribe to some faith, and invariably (81.7% in 2013) to Christianity. Profession of no religion is highest in the Navy (22.3%) and lowest in the Army (13.5%), with 18.7% in the Royal Air Force. Non-Christians are under-represented in relation to society as a whole, which is probably mainly a reflection of the ethnic profile of the armed services. The full table is at:

http://www.dasa.mod.uk/publications/personnel/military/tri-service-personnel-bulletin/2013/2013.pdf

Religious identity (2)

In our coverage of the 2011 Scottish religion census on 28 September 2013, reference was made to potential comparisons with national sample surveys of religious self-identification in Scotland. By way of example, we show below a ten-year percentage comparison from the Scottish Household Survey (SHS), which employs a larger than average sample. The 2012 data are extracted from p. 13 of the 2012 edition of Scotland’s People (published on 28 August 2013), those for 2001-02 from the dataset accessible via the UK Data Service (applying the random adult sample weights). Although the question asked is identical to that in the census (‘what religion, religious denomination, or body do you belong to?’), these statistics refer to adults only and are thus not directly comparable to the initial census results (which are for all ages). The SHS figures also omit non-responses (because the dataset for 2012 is not yet available). The general direction of travel, of course, is similar to the changes seen in the census between 2001 and 2011, with a big increase in the number of Scots professing no religion and a large decrease in support for the Church of Scotland.

	2001-02	2012
No religion	27.8	43.1
Church of Scotland	47.4	29.7
Roman Catholic	15.1	16.0
Other Christian	7.7	7.9
Non-Christian	2.1	3.4

Scottish marriages

Section 7 of Vital Events Reference Tables, 2012 [for Scotland], published by the General Register Office for Scotland on 27 August 2013, contains three tables dealing with Scottish marriages which will be of interest to BRIN readers:

Table 7.5 lists the number of marriages solemnized by celebrants from 50 different religious and belief traditions for each year between 2002 and 2012. The key stories are the steep fall in marriages conducted by the Church of Scotland (down by 50% over this period) and the Methodist Church (down by 70%) and the rapid growth in ceremonies conducted by the Humanist Society Scotland since they were legalized in 2005; by 2012 they had overtaken Roman Catholic marriages and were closing fast on the Church of Scotland.
Table 7.6 lists the number of civil and religious marriages (the latter disaggregated by Church of Scotland, Roman Catholic, and other religions) for each year between 1961 and 2012 and each quinquennium between 1946-50 and 2006-10. Whereas civil marriages represented only 17% of the total in 1946-50, by 2006-10 the figure stood at 52%.
Table 7.7 lists marriages by ‘denomination’ for 2012, when 51% were civil, 18% Church of Scotland, 10% Humanist Society Scotland, and 6% Roman Catholic.

The tables can be found at:

http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/statistics/theme/vital-events/general/ref-tables/2012/section-7-marriages-and-civil-partnerships.html

Time use

Since the earliest days of sample surveys, it has been evident that interviewees have a tendency to overstate their recalled religious activities. This is no more so than in the case of churchgoing where claimed attendance can exceed by a factor of two the totals arrived at by actual censuses of public worship. Steve Bruce and Tony Glendinning of the University of Aberdeen have sought to illustrate the point by repurposing diary data from English respondents (aged 16 and over) to the UK Time Use Survey, 2000-01, which was conducted by the Office for National Statistics. Participants, who were drawn from a random sample of households, were required to record their main and secondary activities for each 10-minute period on the day in question, which included Sundays (3,317 individuals appear to have completed Sunday diaries). Bruce and Glendinning’s methodology and findings are contained in a four-page report on The Extent of Religious Activity in England, which is being disseminated by Brierley Consultancy, an abridged version of which appears in the October 2013 issue of FutureFirst (contact peter@brierleyres.com to obtain copies of either or both versions). The authors conclude as follows:

‘There is little religion of any form practised, public or private. Less than 11% of adults in England engage in any religious activity whatsoever (including personal prayers and meditation and consuming mass media religious programming) of any duration at any point during a typical week. Only 8.25% of adults engage in any episodes of communal practice in the company of others. Less than 7% attend church on a Sunday. Read the other way round – 7% going to church on Sunday, 8% doing some communal religion and 11% doing any religion at all – these data offer little support for the claim that the decline of conventional churchgoing has been offset by an increase in alternative religious activities.’ Of course, it must be remembered that the survey embodied a snapshot of religious activity on the day the diary was completed, and that those who do not engage in such activity on one Sunday may do so on another.

Fossil free churches

This item is not a politically incorrect reference to the age or traditionalism of churchgoers but to a new campaign by Operation Noah (an ecumenical Christian climate change charity) to encourage churches (particularly the Church of England) to disinvest in companies seeking expansion in fossil fuel reserves. The campaign, and its accompanying report (Bright Now: Towards Fossil Free Churches), was launched on 20 September 2013 and underpinned by data from Christian Research’s Resonate panel, 1,520 churchgoers replying to its August 2013 omnibus. Although more than nine out of ten churchgoers agree that churches should invest their money ethically, the majority does not see climate change as a key issue relative to other priorities (such as women bishops). In the case of Anglicans, 63% want the Church of England to take the lead in addressing man-made climate change, yet only one-quarter supports the Church disinvesting in companies extracting fossil fuels. As with most Resonate polls, full data are not in the public domain, but Operation Noah’s press release can be read at:

http://www.operationnoah.org/node/569

Posted in church attendance, News from religious organisations, Official data, Religion and Politics, Religion in public debate, Rites of Passage, Survey news | Tagged armed forces, atheists, Brierley Consultancy, Christian Research, Christians, Church of England, Church of Scotland, Citizenship Survey, climate change, ComRes, discrimination, disinvestment, Equality and Human Rights Commission, face veil, fossil fuels, freedom to practice religion, HM Inspectorate of Prisons, Independent on Sunday, Islamophobia, Jews, marriages, Ministry of Defence, Muslims, Office for National Statistics, Operation Noah, religious activity, religious dress, Religious Identity, Resonate, Scotland, Scottish Household Survey, Steve Bruce, Sunday Mirror, Sundays, time use, Tony Glendinning, YouGov | Leave a comment

Eight Shorts

Posted on May 19, 2013 by Clive D. Field

Eight short items of statistical news feature in today’s second post, clearing a small backlog which has built up during a week’s absence from the desk.

Hate crime

The overwhelming majority of the British public (84%) consider that an attack on someone because of their religion should be treated as a hate crime, second only to those who deem an attack on someone because of their race as a hate crime (88%), and ahead of the numbers regarding as hate crimes attacks on the basis of sexuality (83%), transsexuality (81%), disability (78%), gender (75%), sub-culture (68%), age (59%), weight (56%), height (51%), hair colour (51%), and political views (51%). The proportion who do not think that an attack on the grounds of religion should be classed as a hate crime is 10% overall, but 13% for men and Conservative supporters, and 14% among the 18-24s. The survey was conducted by YouGov on 14-15 May 2013 with an online sample of 1,886 adults, and the data tables are available at:

http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/i4jqy1c3rk/YG-Archive-hate-crime-results-150513.pdf

Sunday stress

Far from being a day of rest, Sunday has become the most stressful day of the week for one-third of Britons, according to a ‘Sunday Stress Audit’ of over 2,000 adults commissioned by the Really television channel. Indeed, 65% now claim to have busier schedules on Sunday than on an ordinary weekday, and 67% report that ‘Sunday blues’ kick in at some point during the day. More than half (51%) consider Sundays to be a day ‘for getting things done’, with an average of 3 hours and 36 minutes being spent on various household tasks, and 35% admitting that they nag or are nagged by their partners to carry out such chores. Such is the level of ‘busyness’ that 34% never get a lie in bed on Sunday, and 53% never get chance to read the Sunday newspapers properly. Sunday lunch (which takes 2 hours to prepare and 26 minutes to eat) and seeing extended family remain key elements of the Sunday tradition, with two-thirds getting together with their wider family at least one Sunday each month, not always without friction. Full results and methodological details of the survey have not been released, and the above summary is largely taken from the Daily Mail for 10 May 2013 at:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2322269/Sunday-Its-day-rest-day-stress-Two-thirds-say-Sabbath-busiest-time-week.html

Church organs

‘The traditional church organ is a must for special occasions but, Sunday to Sunday, congregations would rather have a guitar-based worship group.’ This is the conclusion drawn by Christian Resources Exhibitions International from a poll conducted between 26 April and 3 May 2013 among 2,250 UK churchgoers who are members of the Christian Research online panel (Resonate). A guitar-based group was the preference for ordinary Sunday services of 44% of churchgoers compared with 30% for the organ, while almost two-thirds of respondents disagreed with the statement that a church with no organ is like a pub with no beer. More than half the sample had experience of organists slipping ‘unrelated’ secular music into their repertoire. Detailed results of the poll have not been published, but there is a brief press release at:

http://www.creonline.co.uk/news.asp?pageid=13

Church Commissioners

The Church Commissioners, who make a substantial contribution to the finances of the Church of England (especially in respect of its ministry), published their annual report and accounts for 2012 on 14 May 2013. They demonstrate a return on investments of just under 10% for the year, almost matching the Commissioners’ average for the past 20 years. This return exceeds the Commissioners’ target of inflation plus 5%, as well as the performance of a comparator group of funds. The report can be found at:

http://www.churchofengland.org/media/1743919/w1025_cc_annual-report_final.pdf

A century and more of Catholic statistics

The Latin Mass Society of England and Wales has performed a useful service in collating the available national statistics of the Catholic Church in England and Wales until 2010, of ordinations since 1860, priests since 1890, and baptisms, marriages, receptions (formerly adult conversions), and estimates of Catholic population since 1913. Updating the series already available on BRIN (reproduced, with permission, from Churches and Churchgoers, 1977), they were published in spreadsheet format (as a series of tables and graphs), together with a brief and not entirely unbiased commentary, on the Society’s news blog on 17 May 2013 at:

http://www.lms.org.uk/news-and-events/news-blog/may-2013#statistics

With the exception of ordinations (where the lists of men each year have been counted), the data have been taken from the Catholic Directory for England and Wales, a commercial publication but issued with the official sanction of the Roman Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales. Although the best source we have, it should not be forgotten that, through no fault of the Catholic Directory, these figures present a variety of challenges in terms of methodology and quality, reflecting weaknesses in the Church’s statistics-gathering at diocesan and national levels. Indeed, the Catholic Directory has recently deemed them so problematical that it has ceased to publish them entirely.

The Latin Mass Society’s principal gloss on the data is to highlight ‘the striking decline of a range of statistical indications of the health of the Catholic Church in England and Wales in the 1960s and 1970s’. According to the Society’s chairman, Dr Joseph Shaw, ‘it is not fanciful to connect this catastrophe to the wrenching changes which were taking place in the Church at that time, when the Second Vatican Council was being prepared, discussed, and, often erroneously, applied’. No mention here of wider historical and sociological debates about the secularization of British society and of what some historians view as the ‘religious crisis’ of the 1960s.

Mass-Observation

Mass-Observation was a social research organization founded by Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge in 1937, employing a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods, primarily in two fieldwork areas: Bolton/Blackpool and London. Its heyday was relatively short, just twelve years until 1949, after which it was succeeded by Mass-Observation (UK) Limited, with a focus on commercial market research. From the outset it displayed a particular interest in religion, and, although only one major religion-related project (Puzzled People, based on interviews with a sample of 500 Hammersmith residents in 1944-45) was ever published, much raw material survives in the Mass-Observation Archive, on deposit at the University of Sussex since 1975, significant portions of which have been reproduced on microform and online by Adam Matthew Publications. Despite being the subject of a considerable amount of secondary literature, there has not hitherto been a full-length history. It is, therefore, a great pleasure to welcome the new book by James Hinton, The Mass Observers: A History, 1937-1949 (Oxford University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-19-967104-5). This is essentially arranged chronologically rather than thematically, but the volume does include some brief discussion of Mass-Observation’s religious research, including an account of Puzzled People on pp. 320-4.

NatCen trustees

NatCen (National Centre for Social Research), the independent and not-for-profit organization which undertakes a wide range of surveys (including the British Social Attitudes Surveys), is looking for four trustees to join its board. The closing date for applications is 17 June 2013. Further particulars are available at:

http://www.natcen.ac.uk/about-us/job-opportunities/trustee-x4

Public understanding of statistics

Although it contains nothing specific about religion, some BRIN readers may be interested in a poll conducted by Ipsos MORI for King’s College London and the Royal Statistical Society and published on 14 May. The sample comprised 1,034 British adults aged 16-75 interviewed online between 9 and 15 April 2013. In a crushing blow to the BRIN ego, only 6% of respondents agreed that online blogs report statistics accurately. About half the population (49%) have a great deal or fair amount of trust in information provided by statisticians, but the proportion falls to 23% for pollsters, albeit it climbs to 63% for trust in academics. The twenty questions and sub-questions also included some practical tests of the public’s numeracy. The topline results can be viewed at:

http://www.ipsos-mori.com/Assets/Docs/Polls/rss-kings-ipsos-mori-trust-in-statistics-topline.pdf

Posted in Historical studies, News from religious organisations, Survey news | Tagged Catholic Directory, Christian Research, Christian Resources Exhibitions International, Church Commissioners, church music, Church of England, church organs, discrimination, hate crime, Ipsos-MORI, James Hinton, King's College London, Latin Mass Society, Mass-Observation, NatCen, Really, Resonate, Roman Catholic Church, Royal Statistical Society, statistics, stress, Sundays, YouGov | Leave a comment

2011 Anglican Statistics and Other News

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Clive D. Field

As usual, there has been a lot of media interest today in the latest (2011) Statistics for Mission of the Church of England. They are always seen as something of a barometer of the spiritual state of England, and so it is appropriate that we give them a fair amount of space here, alongside five shorter items of religious statistical news.

Church of England statistics for mission, 2011

The Church of England has today released its Statistics for Mission, 2011, comprising 18 pages of tables with breaks to diocesan level and some national time series. This report (prepared by Archbishops’ Council, Research and Statistics), together with a brief press statement largely quoting the Bishop of Norwich on the more encouraging aspects of the data, can be found at:

http://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2013/05/church-annual-statistics-for-2011.aspx

The short-term picture, comparing 2011 with 2010, is a mixed but largely downbeat one, which has been the story for several years past. On the credit side, the best news was the 14.5% increase in Christmas Day attendance, albeit this must be attributed in large part to the very poor weather at Christmas 2010, which negatively impacted congregations, and to the fact that Christmas Day fell on a Sunday in 2011, which probably gave them a boost. Christmas Day communicants were up by 13.3%, for the same reasons. Usual Sunday attendance grew by 0.8%, but the report ascribes this to a new estimation process for filling in gaps on the parochial schedules. Baptisms and thanksgivings were up by 4.6% in total, including by 2.6% for infant baptisms, 7.5% for baptisms of children aged 1-12, and 44.5% for thanksgivings of children.

On the debit side, there were falls in average weekly attendance (-0.3%), average Sunday attendance (-1.2%), Easter Day attendance (-1.6%), Easter Day communicants (-0.7%), electoral roll (-0.1%), confirmations (-0.5%), marriages and blessings (-3.1%), and funerals (-2.7%, although deaths in England and Wales also fell, by 1.8%, during the year). The decreases in two of the three rites of passage must be particularly disappointing for the Church, for this is an area where it has been investing resource of late and has traditionally held sway, especially over the ‘nominals’, about whom we have heard much in recent weeks. Anglican infant baptisms now account for just 12.1% of live births and Anglican funerals for 35.7% of deaths.

These are naturally national trends, which conceal some diocesan variation. For example, the average all age weekly attendance figure ranged from an increase between 2010 and 2011 of 11.0% for Southwell and Nottingham to a decrease of 10.6% in Canterbury. Will the new Archbishop make a difference in the latter see? Well, he comes from Durham, which recorded a decline of 8.0%, so it is too soon to tell.

Taking a ten-year view (2001-11), which gives a better feel for real trends, the position is summarized in the table below, which will make for rather bleak reading for the Church, even bleaker if we factor in that the mid-year population of England grew by 7.9% over the decade (invariably making the relative decline greater than suggested by the absolute numbers).

	2001	2011	% change
Average all age weekly attendance	1,205,000	1,091,500	-9.4
Average adult weekly attendance	976,000	874,600	-10.4
Average children/young people weekly attendance	229,000	216,900	-5.3
Average all age Sunday attendance	1,041,000	898,300	-13.7
Average adult Sunday attendance	868,000	763,300	-12.1
Average children/young people Sunday attendance	173,000	134,900	-22.0
Usual all age Sunday attendance	938,000	807,500	-13.9
Usual adult Sunday attendance	781,000	690,700	-11.6
Usual children/young people Sunday attendance	157,000	116,800	-25.6
All age Easter Day attendance	1,593,100	1,365,000	-14.3
Easter Day communicants	1,134,900	979,700	-13.7
All age Christmas Day/Eve attendance	2,608,000	2,618,000	+0.4
Christmas Day/Eve communicants	1,227,900	1,008,500	-17.9
Electoral roll	1,372,000	1,206,000	-12.1
Baptisms and thanksgivings	160,200	146,330	-8.7
Confirmations	33,367	22,242	-33.3
Marriages and blessings	63,600	55,540	-12.7
Funerals	228,000	162,530	-28.7

Google ties with religion

In the latest variant of a trust in organizations survey, Google and religious institutions shared fifth equal place, 17% of Britons aged 16 and over who were interviewed reckoning that each had their best interests at heart. The 2,000 respondents were invited to rank their top three institutions from a list of sixteen. Most trusted – despite its recent high-profile failings – was the National Health Service (37%), followed by police (26%), charities (21%), and – notwithstanding the horsemeat scandal – supermarkets (19%). Least regarded as having the public’s best interests at heart were politicians (3%), the media (6%), banks (7%), and lawyers (8%) also scoring badly. These findings were released by communications agency OMD UK on 30 April 2013 as an initial output from its ongoing ‘Future of Britain’ project, in collaboration with MMR Research. The trust in organizations table is reproduced on the Sky News website at:

http://news.sky.com/story/1084991/britons-trust-google-as-much-as-religion

Religious opposition to same-sex marriage

Religious opposition to same-sex marriage in Britain is reviewed by Steven Kettell in a new article entitled ‘I Do, Thou Shalt Not’ published on 2 May 2013 in the ‘early view’ online version of Political Quarterly. Developments in Scotland are covered as well as in England and Wales. Religious arguments against same-sex marriage are analysed, the author noting how relatively little they deploy theology but rather invoke secular justifications. Some use is made of opinion poll evidence, although – inevitably for an academic journal – this is not absolutely up-to-date. Unsurprisingly, Kettell concludes that religious opposition to same-sex marriage has failed, with broader implications for religion’s public role. This is a subscription title; for access options, go to:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-923X.2013.12009.x/abstract

Equality and Muslims

Almost three-quarters of adults (73%, rising to 81% of over-60s) think it a very or fairly big problem in Britain that Muslim girls suffer discrimination at the hands of their own families by being told when to leave school and/or whom to marry, and 26% rate it as one of the most urgent problems facing the country (35% among the 18-24s and 34% among Conservatives and the highest income earners). By contrast, only 3% consider that unfair treatment of Muslim workers by their employers is an urgent problem (bottom of a list of ten equality challenges), with 73% contending that it is either not a problem at all or a fairly small problem (and 27% that it is a very or fairly big problem). These two questions were included in a survey of equality issues undertaken by YouGov for the YouGov@Cambridge think tank, with 1,925 Britons aged 18 and over being interviewed online on 25 and 26 February 2013. The detailed tables were released on 1 May and can be found at:

http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/9a679g3m9i/YG-Archive-Cam-equality%20results-260213.pdf

National Jewish Community Survey

The Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) launched the National Jewish Community Survey on 1 May, with the intention of collecting data which will complement the 2011 civilian census for ‘Jewish people living in Britain, irrespective of the nature of their Jewish identity and level of involvement in the community.’ In addition to probing Jewish identity, questions are being asked about the demographic profile and charitable behaviour of Jews. The survey, which is being funded by a consortium of Jewish community organizations and foundations, is being conducted online during May and June 2013 in association with Ipsos MORI. According to an interview given to the current issue (3 May 2013, p. 2) of the Jewish Chronicle, JPR is confident that its online methodology will not lead to under-representation of strictly Orthodox Jews ‘as Charedim have greater access to the internet than many people think’. Respondents to the survey will be recruited by invitation only, initially on a random basis, and will thus not be self-selecting. Further information about the survey is available in the FAQs posted at:

http://www.jpr.org.uk/downloads/census-faqs.pdf

BRIN on BRIN

The latest BRIN site traffic statistics, kindly collated by Siobhan McAndrew, demonstrate that usage of BRIN has continued to build since the official launch of the website just over three years ago. Since that time there have been 186,000 visits to the site by 152,000 unique visitors who have viewed 422,000 pages. Judging by their IP addresses, 70% of visitors are from the United Kingdom and 11% from the United States, although 187 different countries are represented in all. The majority of visitors (65%) arrive at the BRIN website via Google, but 13% key the BRIN URL directly, and a similar proportion come as referrals from other sites (of which guardian.co.uk heads the list). The most frequently accessed blog post to date was from 21 September 2010 on ‘How Many Muslims?’ which accounts for just over 3% of all BRIN page views.

Posted in church attendance, Historical studies, News from religious organisations, Religion and Ethnicity, Religion and Politics, Religion in public debate, Rites of Passage, Survey news | Tagged Archbishops' Council, church attendance, Church of England, discrimination, equality, Google, Institute for Jewish Policy Research, Ipsos-MORI, Jews, MMR Research, Muslims, National Jewish Community Survey, OMD UK, Political Quarterly, religious festivals, religious institutions, rites of passage, same-sex marriage, Siobhan McAndrew, Steven Kettell, YouGov, YouGov@Cambridge | 1 Comment

Dimensions of Religious Prejudice

Posted on November 24, 2012 by Clive D. Field

Two reports have been published in the last couple of days which shed light on the scale of religious prejudice in contemporary society:

Religious discrimination in the European Union

Discrimination on the grounds of religion or beliefs is perceived as more pervasive in the UK than in many other European countries. One-half of UK adults say that it is very or fairly widespread here, 5% more than when the question was last asked in 2009. The figure is well above the European Union (EU) average of 39% and only exceeded by five other EU countries (peaking in France on 66%). The proportion falls to 38% (compared with the EU average of 33%) when confined to discrimination outside the workplace, with 14% contending that insufficient is being done to advance religious diversity at work. Three in ten regard the economic recession as a contributory factor in the increase in discrimination in the labour market based on religion or beliefs.

At the same time, only 3% of UK citizens say that they felt personally discriminated against or harassed on the basis of religion or beliefs during the previous twelve months, although more (10%) claim to have witnessed or heard of somebody suffering such treatment in the same period. Friends and acquaintances across the religion or belief divide are reported by 84% in the UK, up by 5% since 2009 and 17% above the EU average. However, some 13% still feel uncomfortable at the prospect of a member of a minority religion being elected as prime minister, albeit a decrease on 21% in 2009 and lower than the EU norm, while 15% consider that wearing a visible religious symbol could put an employment candidate at a potential disadvantage.

A background question on religious affiliation revealed that 32% of UK citizens describe themselves as atheists or agnostics, 2% more than two years ago, and 9% more than in all EU nations combined (the country range being from zero in Cyprus and Romania to 59% in the Czech Republic). Of the remainder of UK adults, 15% are categorized as Catholic, 1% as Orthodox, 23% as Protestant, 19% as other Christian, 6% as non-Christian, 2% of another religion, and 2% undecided.

Source: Face-to-face interviews with 1,301 adults aged 15 and over in the UK, conducted by TNS UK between 2 and 17 June 2012 as part of wave 77.4 of Eurobarometer, and on behalf of the European Commission. Interviews were also carried out in the other 26 member states of the EU. Topline analysis of the survey can be found in Discrimination in the EU in 2012, Special Eurobarometer Report 393, published on 22 November 2012 and available to download at:

http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/eb_special_399_380_en.htm#393

BRIN’s coverage of the European Commission’s 2009 discrimination survey can still be read at:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/2010/religious-discrimination-in-the-european-union/

Religiously aggravated offending in Scotland

There was an increase of 26% in the number of charges with a religious aggravation recorded in Scotland in 2011-12 compared with 2010-11. The rise is thought to be partly attributable to greater awareness and reporting of such crimes. The main charges were breach of the peace (42%) and threatening or abusive behaviour (47%). Court proceedings were initiated in 88% of charges, some of which were ongoing at the end of 2011-12. In cases which were concluded and resulted in a conviction, punishments comprised fines (43%), community penalty (22%), and custodial sentences (20%), with 15% classified as other (such as a warning).

Two-fifths of all charges were in the city of Glasgow (albeit down from 51% in 2010-11), with 10% in North Lanarkshire. The overwhelming majority (93%) of the accused were men, and 58% were aged between 16 and 30, with 35% aged 31-50. In 57% of cases the offences were judged to be alcohol-related, 9% drug-related, and 31% football-related. Roman Catholics were the targets of abuse in 58% of charges and Protestants in 40%. Relatively few offences, 2% each, were derogatory of Islam (19 out of 876) or Judaism (14). Police officers were the most common victims (51%), with a community rather than individual abused in 30% of instances.

Source: Analysis of 876 charges with a religious aggravation brought by police in Scotland in the financial year 2011-12 under Section 74 of the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 2003. Summarized in Amy Goulding and Ben Cavanagh, Religiously Aggravated Offending in Scotland, 2011-12, published by Scottish Government Social Research on 23 November 2012, and available to download from:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/0040/00408745.pdf

Posted in Official data, Religion and Politics, Survey news | Tagged acquaintances, Amy Goulding, Ben Cavanagh, crime, Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 2003, discrimination, economic recession, Eurobarometer, European Commission, European Union, friends, harassment, prejudice, prime minister, Religious Affiliation, religious symbols, religiously aggravated offences, Scotland, Scottish Government Social Research, TNS UK, workplace | Leave a comment

London Church Census and Other News

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Clive D. Field

The following three news items have reached BRIN’s in-tray during the past few days:

London church census

A census of attendance of Greater London’s churches took place on 14 October 2012 (chosen as an ‘average’ Sunday). Commissioned by the London City Mission, it was organized by Dr Peter Brierley (of Brierley Consultancy), who, as Executive Director of Christian Research and in previous capacities, was responsible for the four English church censuses undertaken between 1979 and 2005. Following circulation of initial publicity in June, he contacted the leaders of London’s estimated 4,900 churches (well up on the 4,100 which existed in 2005) in September, inviting them to complete a two-page questionnaire about their place of worship and to return it by prepaid post or email. They were encouraged to distribute self-completion slips to each member of their congregation on census day to gather the data requested about the age, gender, ethnicity, frequency of churchgoing, length of churchgoing, and distance travelled to church. In addition to attendance statistics, a wide range of other information was sought in the questionnaire, such as about church buildings, plants, mid-week services, and employees. Reminders have recently been sent to non-respondents, including those who (through Royal Mail’s oversight) failed to receive their original mailing, so it is too early to say anything about the overall response rate. A report on the census is expected to appear in April 2013. Meanwhile, thanks are due to Dr Brierley for briefing BRIN about the census. The questionnaire and accompanying instructions for completion can still be viewed online at:

http://brierleyconsultancy.com/londoncensus

State school admissions

Almost three-quarters (73%) of adults agree (two-thirds of them strongly) that state-funded schools, including state-funded faith schools, should not be allowed to select or discriminate against prospective pupils on religious grounds in their admissions policy. Responses vary little by demographic sub-groups, apart from in Scotland where the relatively high figure of 80% perhaps reflects ongoing sensitivities about the presence and practice of Roman Catholic schools in the Scottish state sector. The proportion in disagreement with the proposition is 18%, with 9% undecided. The findings are especially topical in the light of today’s dismissal by the High Court of a judicial review of Richmond-upon-Thames council’s decision to approve two new state-funded Catholic schools with selection based on religion, wholly in one case and substantially in the other. The unsuccessful legal challenge had been mounted by the British Humanist Association and Richmond Inclusive Schools Campaign.

Source: Online survey by ComRes of 2,008 Britons aged 18 and over on 2-4 November 2012, undertaken on behalf of the Accord Coalition. The Coalition campaigns against religious discrimination and indoctrination in schools, and it particularly seeks closure of the loophole in equality legislation which enables faith schools to operate an admissions policy which discriminates against children for religious reasons. Full results of the poll were published on 12 November 2012 and are available at:

http://accordcoalition.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Accord-Coalition_Faith-Schools_November2012.pdf

UK giving

‘Religious causes’ (including churches, mosques, and synagogues) attracted the largest charitable donations by individuals in Britain in 2011/12, with a median amount given of £20 per month, up by £5 from 2010/11 and twice the median for all charitable purposes. Religious organizations received 17% of all money donated to charities in 2011/12 (a 3% increase since 2004/05), greater even than medical research (15%), hospitals (15%), children or young people (11%), and overseas (10%). Although the proportion of donors giving to religious causes was less (14%), and eclipsed by medical research (33%), hospitals (30%), children (23%) and even animals (16%), it had risen since 2009/10 (12%) and 2010/11 (13%), resuming its level of 2007/08 and 2008/09.

Source: Face-to-face interviews with 3,319 Britons aged 16 and over via the Office for National Statistics omnibus in June and October 2011 and February 2012. Despite references to the UK, Northern Ireland was not surveyed. Summarized in Joy Dobbs, Véronique Jochum, Karl Wilding, Malcolm Smith, and Richard Harrison, UK Giving, 2012: An Overview of Charitable Giving in the UK, 2011/12, published on 13 November 2012 by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations and the Charities Aid Foundation, and available at:

https://www.cafonline.org/PDF/UKGiving2012Full.pdf

Posted in church attendance, News from religious organisations, Religion and Politics, Religion and Social Capital, Religion in public debate, Survey news | Tagged Accord Coalition, admission policies, charitable giving, Charities Aid Foundation, church attendance, church census, ComRes, discrimination, Greater London, Joy Dobbs, Karl Wilding, London City Mission, Malcolm Smith, National Council for Voluntary Organisations, Office for National Statistics, Peter Brierley, religious causes, Richard Harrison, selection, state schools, Véronique Jochum | 1 Comment

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