American Religiosity – Viewed from Britain

Posted on June 18, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Much has been written about the perceived contrasts between a secularizing Western Europe and a continuingly religious United States. One example is the book by Peter Berger, Grace Davie and Effie Fokas on Religious America, Secular Europe? (Ashgate, 2008), synthesizing a range of evidence.

More specific, based on the International Social Survey Program 2008, is David Voas and Rodney Ling, ‘Religion in Britain and the United States’, British Social Attitudes: The 26th Report, edited by Alison Park, John Curtice, Katarina Thomson, Miranda Phillips, Elizabeth Clery and Sarah Butt (Sage, 2010), pp. 65-86.

But what is the judgment of the court of public opinion? Do the people consider that America is religious? Some new insights into this topic are available in the latest report from the Pew Global Attitudes Project, released on 17 June and available for download at:

http://pewglobal.org/files/pdf/Pew-Global-Attitudes-Spring-2010-Report.pdf

Fieldwork was undertaken in 22 nations, one of them Great Britain, where 750 telephone interviews were conducted with adults aged 18 and over between 15 April and 2 May 2010 under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International. Contact was made with households with both landline and mobile only telephony.

Respondents were asked the simple question: ‘Is the US too religious a country or not religious enough?’

In Britain 47% claimed that the US is too religious, 21% not religious enough, with 14% stating that the balance is about right and 18% don’t knows. The trend is for Britons to see the US as too religious (the May 2003 figure being 33% and May 2005 39%), with a decline in those saying it is not religious enough (35% in 2003 and 27% in 2005).

The proportion of Britons thinking that the US is too religious was the second highest among all the nations covered in the survey, only being exceeded by France (71%), with Germany on 46% and Japan on 42%. At the other end of the scale, countries with Muslim majority populations recorded by far the lowest figures, including Turkey (8%), Egypt (8%), Pakistan (6%), Lebanon (3%) and Jordan (1%). 

The percentage of Britons stating that the US is not religious enough was the smallest of all the 22 countries. At 21% it was just one-third of the number of Americans holding this opinion (64%, up from 58% in 2005). Even higher figures than in the US were recorded in Jordan (89%), Egypt (81%) and Indonesia (67%). In all, majorities or pluralities in 18 nations said the US is insufficiently religious.

So, in general, Americans decidedly think that the US could do with more religion while the British increasingly feel that the US has more than enough already. This finding cannot be dismissed as a manifestation of anti-Americanism in general since 65% of Britons entertain a favourable view of the US and 73% of the American people. It either reflects the long-standing British discomfort about wearing religion on the sleeve or is yet another indicator that faith is being squeezed out of the public square in Britain.

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Values and Religion

Posted on June 5, 2010 by Clive D. Field

A social psychological view of the connection between religion and values is offered in the recent article by Miriam Pepper, Tim Jackson and David Uzzell, ‘A Study of Multidimensional Religion Constructs and Values in the United Kingdom’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 49, No. 1, March 2010, pp. 127-46.

The data derive from a general public sample and a churchgoer sample from two relatively affluent English towns. For the former, 2,000 questionnaires were hand-delivered to households in six diverse localities in Woking in March-April 2006, of which 260 were completed (13% response).

For the churchgoer sample 704 questionnaires were given out at 13 churches in Guildford in March-June 2006, of which 272 were returned (39% response). The churchgoer sample was older and more highly educated than the general sample.

The article attempts a systematic examination of the relationships between religiousness, conceptualization of God and value priorities. The values stem from Shalom Schwartz’s theoretical work: universalism, benevolence, conformity-tradition, security, power, achievement, hedonism, stimulation and self-direction.

The four religious indicators employed were: self-assessed religiosity, self-assessed spirituality, religious affiliation and attendance at a place of worship. In the general sample 23% of respondents had no religion and 53% never attended religious services. Conceptualization of God was measured on a five-point scale of agreement with 20 adjectives to describe God.

The quantitative aspects of the work are mainly presented through correlations with tests for statistical significance. The conclusions are summarized in the abstract thus:

‘Religiousness aligns most strongly along the conservation/openness to change value dimension, and spirituality is rotated further toward self-transcendence values. Findings suggest a shift among the religious away from an emphasis on security.

God concepts are uniquely related to some value types. Particularly among the churchgoers, for whom God concepts may be especially formative, characteristics attributed to God are reflected in value priorities. These findings support the theoretical assertion that conceptualization of God is a foundational religious belief implicated in more specific values, attitudes and beliefs.’  

For those of us whose religion and values diet has hitherto derived from the World Values Surveys, this new research can be quite difficult to digest!

To access this article, check first whether your institution (if you have one) has a print or online subscription to Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. If not, you can order a copy from the British Library Document Supply Centre or pay for access via the publisher’s website at:

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123306094/issue

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Janet Eccles on Statistical Approaches to the Study of Religion

Posted on June 2, 2010 by itswebinfra

We have just been sent this (challenging!) contribution by Janet Eccles, a PhD candidate at Lancaster University supervised by Linda Woodhead.

Janet is conducting extremely interesting research into female affiliates and disaffiliates who have lived through the 1960s, primarily using interview and participant observation methods. As a consequence of her findings and those of others in the field, she is arguing for a more nuanced and qualitative approach to understanding religiosity. We clearly think that religiosity can be measured statistically – but we are throwing the floor open!

 

Challenging Statistical Approaches

By Janet Eccles

How much can statistics tell us about the state of ‘religion’ in Britain today, or in the past? Gordon Lynch has recently stated that

            ‘narrow conceptions of belief persist both in terms of the emphasis on survey data measuring respondents’ attitudes to creedal statements (eg, Voas and Crockett, 2005)  and the use of interviews to try to elicit the core beliefs and spirituality of those within and beyond institutional religion (eg, Hunt, 2003)’ (2010, 40).

 Propositional understandings of belief persist, he argues, even in the face of evidence that they make little sense to research respondents (Smith and Denton 2005). Lynch, in fact, is writing in a chapter for a new volume on religion and material culture in which much more emphasis is laid on the material, the objects people exchange and display, and the spaces in which they perform.  

In addition, Callum Brown has declared that

            ‘religious statistics are invariably circulating discourses on ecclesiastical machismo, national righteousness, class commentary or moral judgement  (sometimes all at once), and require to be treated as such (2003, 43)’.

He calls for the ‘on/off binary approach’ of religious statistics to be carefully reassessed to expose the structures which he says have been ‘imposed so cavalierly upon the past and the present’.

Piety or religiosity may be expressed in many different ways, both now and in the past – outside conventional church traditions altogether, for example. Some forms of religiosity are beyond practical forms of measurement. Statistics ‘take the personal out of the past, and treat it as “another world” which it may not be’ [emphasis in original].

 Meanwhile, speaking of contemporary times, David Lyon (2000) points out that beliefs and practices that were once sealed within an institutional form now ‘flow freely over formerly policed boundaries’ (2000, 43). Moreover, flexible practices currently demanded in the workplace undermine any ‘sense of permanent belonging that comes from telling the same “story” ’ (2000, 128).

All commitments, professional, social or religious, these days are ‘until further notice’, which, again, poses a problem for making assumptions about the state of people’s religiosity.

Finally, Robert Hinde (2010) has argued that although the ‘methods now available for enhancing the validity of questionnaires’ (as used in determining religiosity, for example) ‘are sophisticated, problems still arise in their construction, administration and interpretation’, referring readers to Brown (1987) for a critical review (2010, 235).

My own research, asking participants to tell me something of their life history, including anything they might describe as religious or spiritual, confirms a number of the points made above. Although ticking the box for non-churchgoer, for example, some of my participants had the same – if not stronger – beliefs in God or the afterlife, say, than some long-standing attenders, who often seemed to find it difficult to talk about God at all. One participant has been baptised in three different types of church and says she finds that committing herself to a particular church means she will immediately want to leave it – something she has done with amazing regularity over the course of her adult life. Can this kind of religiosity be adequately contained in a statistic?

Janet can be contacted at janet dot eccles at care4free dot net.

References

C. Brown, ‘The Secularization Decade: What the 1960s have done to the Study of Religious History’. In The Decline of Christianity in Western Europe, 1750-2000, ed. H. McLeod (CUP, 2003).

L. B. Brown, The Psychology of Religious Belief, (Academic Press, 1987).

R. Hinde, Why Gods Persist: a Scientific Approach to Religion, (Routledge, 2010).

K. Hunt, ‘Understanding the Spirituality of People Who Do Not Go to Church’. In Predicting Religion: Church, Secular and Alternative Futures, eds. G. Davie, P. Heelas and L. Woodhead (Ashgate, 2003).

G. Lynch, ‘Object Theory: Toward an Intersubjective, Mediated and Dynamic Theory of Religion’. In Religion and Material Culture: the Matter of Belief, ed. D. Morgan (Routledge, 2010).

D. Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times (Polity, 2000).

C. Smith and M. L. Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press, 2005).

D. Voas and A. Crockett, ‘Religion in Britain: Neither Believing nor Belonging’, Sociology (2005), 39/11, pp. 11-28.

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Religion and the Hidden Wealth of Nations

Posted on May 14, 2010 by Siobhan McAndrew

I got hold of David Halpern’s The Hidden Wealth of Nations back in December, and was surprised to see earlier today that there are still comparatively few reviews available for this important book. I suppose this is down to the lead time of academic journals (although there is coverage in the New York Times and by the Today programme).

Halpern used to work in government as Chief Analyst at the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, which produced notable reports on social capital and on the economics of well-being inter alia. This most recent book summarises the literature on life satisfaction, social capital, morality and values, and inequality, together with discussion of implications for public policy design. I don’t intend to post a full review here since this is not quite the arena for it, but of great interest was the attention devoted to religion.

Halpern’s discussion of religion is in a chapter called ‘The Politics of Virtue’, concerned with moral behaviour writ large. Despite Britons being generally averse to seeing politicians parade their personal religiosity,

‘an everyday sense of moral values and a shared sense of what is acceptable behaviour, is key to making a society work – it is part of the ‘hidden wealth’ of a successful nation’ (p. 91).

Such inclusion of religion as an aspect of social capital (broadly defined) is comparatively unusual in UK studies. In the broader social sciences, analysts still tend to omit religion or religiosity as an explanatory variable (something which explains other outcomes). This may be for theoretical reasons – for example, because researchers think that ethnicity or ‘authoritarian attitudes’ variables capture the effects they are looking for; or because researchers may see religion as to complex to capture by a single measure.

Halpern uses the religion variables devised for the World Values Survey, which ran in five waves (1981-1984, 1990-1993, 1995-1997, 1999-2004 and 2005-2006 – a sixth is planned for 2010-2012). For example, he presents national-level data on at least weekly religious attendance 1994-2004 plotted against that for 1981-1991: attendance has been falling from previous high levels in Malta, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Poland and most of Western Europe, and notably in India. Attendance has been increasing, however, in Nigeria, Mexico, and Italy (although we can’t tell whether these differences are significant, or whether they may be explained by factors such as an ageing population or demographic change). No change was apparent in Britain or Turkey, which sit on the 45-degree line.

Data is also presented in graph form on beliefs and practice in 1994-2004 in the UK, US, and a third group of ‘all countries’ combined. The categories are: at least weekly attendance at services; belief in the devil, belief in hell; belief in life after death; belief in heaven; reporting that religion is very or rather important in life; reporting that religion gives comfort and strength; and belief in God. UK rates appear to be well below that for the US for every category, and in most cases below that for all countries, except for belief in life after death and heaven (and again we can’t be sure if these differences are significant). A quibble here is my personal dislike for the use of trend lines to link categorical data, which can be visually misleading.

A further chart presents the proportion of respondents of all countries reporting that they follow the Ten Commandments, and the proportion feeling that ‘most people’ follow them. The correlation between individual belief in God is displayed next the proportion feeling that most people follow them. The results for individual following of each of the commandments for the US and UK are also added. The intention is to show that for the most doctrinally demanding commandments – not taking the Lord’s name in vain, not worshipping false idols, not following other gods – the correlation with personal belief in God is high. However, for the commandments to respect parents, keep the Sabbath and to refrain from adultery, the correlation with personal belief in God is weak. Halpern suggests that

‘it used to be that if you knew someone’s religious values within a country, you would have a pretty good sense of what their other moral and ethical values would be. This is much less true today’ (p. 95).

Regarding the secularisation thesis, Halpern suggests:

‘Researchers in the 1970s and 1980s generally expected religiosity to fall. They got the headline trend wrong for a couple of reasons. First, the countries on which early conclusions were based – essentially Western Europe – turn out to be relatively atypical. Second, they were misled by the strong age profile of religious beliefs. Younger people tend to have far less religious beliefs giving the impression that there is a big shift underway towards less religious beliefs. But it turns out that as people age they tend to get more religious, even if they don’t necessarily become as religious as their parents. Third, even within Western Europe, many countries have taken in many immigrants who are more religious than the original citizens. Finally, many researchers are secular, and presumed that a rational world would follow their lead’.

It would be helpful here to have some references, particularly that for the finding of age effects. A reference to Inglehart and Norris’ Sacred and Secular (2003) would have been useful here too. (I also raised an eyebrow at the last point – do we actually know they are secular, or that their world views influence their analysis?)

Belief in God correlates with various moral attitudes: ‘sex outside of marriage, abortion, divorce, homosexuality, suicide and so on’. But crucially he also finds that across European countries ‘there has been a clear and consistent drop in the association between people’s religious beliefs and their moral values’ (p. 95). In contrast, the correlation between beliefs and other values has strengthened in North America.

At the same time, the pattern of change in moral values is broadly similar across Western countries:

‘People have generally become considerably more tolerant of a clutch of personal-sexual behaviours, notably: homosexuality, prostitution, euthanasia, divorce and taking soft drugs… characteriz[ing] a key shift in society towards greater personal-sexual permissiveness’ (pp. 96-97).

There are some values, though, where people have become less tolerant: ‘cheating on taxes, claiming benefits that you are not entitled to or lying in your interest… [and] attitudes to adultery have hardened, despite being strongly correlated with other personal-sexual attitudes that have in general been characterized by increasing tolerance. Unlike most of the other personal-sexual behaviours (such as homosexuality), adultery doesn’t just affect consenting adults, but implies that someone is being cheated and probably hurt’ (p. 97).

In conclusion, ‘We have selectively clipped out the bits we don’t like, such as Hell and the Devil, and religion has become increasingly inconsequential to our other beliefs…. [b]ut there has not been a great moral collapse… patterns of value change are following their own, generally secular, moral logic of development’ (p. 97).

Reflecting on what religion provides to secular societies, he suggests that

‘big questions about ethics and identity in secular societies remain, including whether there is something else that people still look for that secular societies have yet to give them. We noted in Chapter 1 that being religious seems to boost happiness, and our models suggest that around two-thirds of this effect comes from the satisfactions and support received from being part of a community. For some reason, this function doesn’t seem to make it onto Freud’s list. Religious beliefs and practices perhaps offer something that secular societies still struggle to capture – such as around identity, a feeling of connection, and the marking of key transitions in life’ (pp. 97-98).

So, what are the implications, particularly for a policy-facing text concerned with how government should work better to improve citizens’ well-being? In the UK, the established churches exist by statute, while other religions fall largely under the ambit of the Charities Commission. Beyond that, religion falls under the auspices of the Department for Communities and Local Government, as a minorities (or security) issue.

Although personal and social religiosity matters for well-being, it’s not something that governments in secular societies influence directly. Disestablishment is unlikely to be a priority at present. Otherwise, religions are more or less equal and free to operate how they use within the law. To influence religion or religiosity through policy would be more than odd. Nevertheless, this does not stop us from looking at how religion matters, and considering what secular alternatives might need support where people have needs that religion, or religious organisations, can no longer satisfy. This book is an important contribution.

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Religiosity and Party Choice

Posted on April 21, 2010 by Siobhan McAndrew

It’s interesting to read Justin Parkinson, Political Reporter at the BBC, on Christianity and the election.

Clive Field has already posted extensively earlier this week here and here on the ComRes/CPanel survey of Christians’ political attitudes, conducted 30 March-12 April. The think-tank Theos also commissioned a poll of religion and politics on 17 and 18 February, which Clive has covered here.

It’s noteworthy that in the European elections of 2009, the Christian Party – established five years earlier – won 250,000 votes, or 1.6 per cent nationally. While this was not a significant result at the national level, it was nevertheless ahead of Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party. The party also polled 2.9 per cent in London. Andrew Brown has set out some interesting thoughts on the Christian Party here.

My personal guess, though, is that strong Christians won’t swing the election this time, although this is almost pure intuitivism.

First, it is incredibly difficult to predict what will happen now – whether the Lib Dem surge is going to last, and how that will affect the outcome. As far as I’m aware, psephologists had not expected the leaders’ debates to matter much, beyond a brief bounce. If there is a great deal of switching, particularly from none to Lib Dem (and particularly by the under-25s), and turnout is affected, it’s difficult to predict both shares of votes and how they translate to seats.

Second, my guess is that there are very few Christians who vote as Christians, rather than in line with their political ideology which in turn is more likely to be driven by socio-economic status, as well as perception of the apparent fitness for government of different parties and party leaders.

Third, the ‘Christian vote’ is not an enormous constituency. A quick look at the British Social Attitudes survey for 2008 suggests that about 9% of the population are Christians who attend church weekly or more (and there is other evidence to suggest that people over-report their church attendance – David Voas alluded to this earlir this week in his post on Easter church attendance).

I did a basic analysis of party choice and religiosity for this year’s British Social Attitudes report. This suggested that after controlling for other socio-demographic variables, there was a weak but positive correlation between religiosity (strength of religiousness, rather than just religious identity) and likelihood of supporting Tory or Labour compared to no party (you have to have a base category so in this case it was ‘none’). For the Lib Dems, and other parties (Greens, Nats and others combined), there was no difference comapred with the ‘nones’.

The next question was whether this was causal, or whether the causality might run the other way (from political alignment to religiosity). I’m doing further work at the moment which suggests it is causal.

But even if there were such a relationship at the national level, what does this mean for this election? Expressing a party choice in the 2008 BSA survey was cheap talk, almost two years ago. Furthermore, where are the ‘strong Christians’ living? I can imagine that many older, traditional, staunch Anglicans (for example) live in safe seats, where even if their vote is partly determined by their religiosity, this might have negligible impact.

It’s also difficult to test. We could gather data on congregations at the constituency level, or compile many case studies. One possibility might be the Taking Part survey which provides neighbourhood-level measures of religious practice in the 2007/8 survey (though it doesn’t collect data on party choice). This could be used to calculate constituency-level measures of practice using http://geoconvert.mimas.ac.uk/ and incorporated into a constituency-level study.

Ideally we would have a very large survey including measures of religious affiliation and strength of religiosity, with enough detail to look at how these correlate with party choice at the constituency level – or at least the marginal constituencies.

An interesting insight is the following work by Ed Fieldhouse and Dave Cutts on electoral turnout (rather than party choice) by South Asian communities in 2001, which found differences between Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims.

There is undoubtedly more work out there which looks at religion (particularly religious affiliation rather than religiosity) and voting at ward level – so please send links because I have much to learn here. In some areas parties may sponsor candidates who they think can help deliver part of a community vote. Other cases include the Respect alliance which in some areas has appealed to a Muslim anti-war vote. Ingrid Storm’s PhD research suggests a link between ‘ethnic Christianity’ and attitudes to immigration. If true, this may partly account for the increasing use of ‘Christian Britain’-type language of the BNP.

If you have more to add on Christianity and the forthcoming election – or religiosity and politics writ large – please add your thoughts below.

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The Nationality of Numbers

Posted on April 16, 2010 by Ingrid Storm

by Ingrid Storm.

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

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

DenmarkBritainRel

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

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

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

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

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


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