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Jewish and Muslim Press and Other News

Posted on April 6, 2014 by Clive D. Field

Jewish press

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

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

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

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

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

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

Muslim press

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

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

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

Methodist statistics

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

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

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

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

Religion and social grade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Religious slaughter

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

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

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

Supernatural, Superstition, and Other News

Posted on March 30, 2014 by Clive D. Field

Supernatural and superstition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scottish independence

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

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

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

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

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

2021 census

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

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

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

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

2011 census

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

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

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

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

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

Church of England health check

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

Attitudes to Israel

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

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

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

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

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

Latest Anglican Mission Statistics and Other News

Posted on March 22, 2014 by Clive D. Field

Church of England mission statistics

The Research and Statistics Department of the Church of England published Statistics for Mission, 2012 on 21 March 2014. The report extends to 65 pages and includes 25 tables and 42 figures, with data disaggregated to diocesan level, plus extensive commentary. As well as presenting the statistics for 2012, comparisons for 2003-11 are also often given, recalculated to reflect a new estimation procedure for parishes/churches not making any return or sending an incomplete return (in 2012 some estimation was done for 27% of parishes/churches). Other procedural changes have also been implemented, so it is recommended that the methodological notes in the report be studied. The document can be downloaded from:

http://churchofengland.org/media/1936517/statistics%20for%20mission%202012.pdf

As ever, the picture which emerges from these annual returns is a complex and mixed one, both at national and diocesan levels. However, although it is certainly not all doom and gloom (for example, one-fifth of parishes exhibited some signs of growth, and 1,900 ‘fresh expressions’ of church were noted), the dominant trend remains downward. BRIN’s key headlines from the report are:

Church attendance

A measure of the worshipping community is reported for the first time, 1,010,000 who attend services at least once a month, 20% being aged 0-17, 52% 18-69, and 28% 70 or over (against 12% in the population, and ranging from 13% in the Diocese of London to 41% in the Diocese of Norwich)
Joiners and leavers are also reported for the worshipping community, 73,000 (among them 38,000 who had not previously been churchgoers) and 51,000 respectively (albeit the latter figure is believed to be an undercount), with joiners representing 7% of the worshipping community
All age average weekly attendance in October has slowly declined between 2008 and 2012, by 4% to reach 1,047,000 (paradoxically, more than the worshipping community), four-fifths of these individuals worshipping on Sunday (three-fifths in the case of children and nine-tenths for adults)
All age usual Sunday attendance halved between 1968 (when first returned) and 2012, although it has levelled out somewhat since 2009

Festival attendance

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day attract the largest congregations of the year (three times those on a usual Sunday), albeit somewhat smaller in 2012 (2,521,000) than 2011 and 4% less than 2008; nevertheless, attendance is affected by the day of the week Christmas falls upon and by the weather, 2006 being by far the best year in the past decade
Christmas Eve and Christmas Day services in 2012 achieved the greatest penetration of the population (5%) of any Anglican performance measures, the proportion rising to 9% in four southern dioceses
Christmas Day and Christmas Eve communicants similarly fluctuate year-on-year and represented 37% of Christmas congregants in 2012
Easter Eve and Easter Day attendances amounted to 1,395,000 in 2012, slightly up on 2011 but 2% down on 2008; there appears to be some variability, perhaps depending upon whether the date of Easter is early or late in any particular year
Easter communicants (once the litmus test of Anglican membership) represented 70% of Easter attendances in 2012 and have fallen by 4% since 2008; they equalled 8% of the adult population in 1930 but just 2% in 2012

Membership

Numbers on the electoral rolls continue to decline, with sharp falls whenever the roll is renewed, followed by modest increases as new people are added to the roll; the figure was 1,187,000 in 2012, or 3% of the adult population (compared with 4% in 1995 and a peak of 15% in the late 1920s)
There were 23,000 confirmations in 2012, barely one-tenth of the 1901 figure, and 29% lower than in 2003, with, as always, the majority of confirmands (59%) female

Rites of passage

Infant and child baptisms decreased by 5% between 2003 and 2012, but, within that total, child baptisms have risen by 23%, almost certainly explained by parents seeking to maximize chances of getting their children into a church school (a similar phenomenon occurring for the same reason among Roman Catholics)
The absolute number of marriages conducted by the Church of England has remained broadly stable since 2003 but is much diminished from former times (according to data collected by the state rather than the Church)
The number of funerals conducted by the Church of England was, at 162,000, 13% fewer in 2012 than 2008 (and 50,000 less than in 2003), the 2012 figure being equivalent to 34% of all deaths (ranging from just 16% in the Diocese of London to 63% in the Diocese of Hereford)

Funeral planning

Speaking of funerals, SixthSense, the market intelligence arm of YouGov, published a new consumer report on funeral planning on 21 March 2014. This appears to contain some information that BRIN readers would find of interest, including about types of funeral and officiants at services, and which is almost impossible to obtain from other sources. Unfortunately, we have no findings to share with you since the report costs a cool £3,500 to download, which is a bit beyond our (non-existent) budget! The research is based upon two partially overlapping samples of UK adults aged 18 and over, interviewed online on 8-19 January 2014, one being nationally representative (n = 2,072) and the other of people who had organized a funeral in the past five years (n = 1,488). Public domain outputs are currently restricted to a press release at:

http://yougov.co.uk/news/2014/03/21/reflecting-personality-prevalent-modern-day-funera/

and an outline of content and methodology at:

http://reports.yougov.com/sectors/lifestyle/lifestyle-uk/funeral-planning-2014/

Clergy wellbeing

Clergy are certainly not the best-paid occupation in Britain, but they enjoy the greatest life satisfaction, according to an unpublished analysis by the Cabinet Office of ‘Life Satisfaction by Occupation in Mid-Career’, some data from which have obviously been released to the press to coincide with a new report from the Legatum Institute on Wellbeing and Policy. Using official statistics (from the Annual Population Survey for 2011-13 in the case of life satisfaction), 274 occupations were ranked in terms of mean income and satisfaction, and clergy headed the league table for the latter, with publicans and managers of licensed premises propping it up. The top ten occupations in terms of life satisfaction are:

	Occupation	Mean Income £	Satisfaction Rating (out of 10)
1	Clergy	20,568	8.291
2	Chief executives/senior officials	117,700	7.957
3	Managers/proprietors in agriculture/horticulture	31,721	7.946
4	Company secretaries	18,176	7.930
5	Quality assurance/regulatory professionals	42,898	7.891
6	Health care practice managers	31,267	7.843
7	Medical practitioners	70,648	7.836
8	Farmers	24,520	7.808
9	Hotel/accommodation managers/proprietors	32,470	7.795
10	Skilled metal/electrical/electronic trades supervisors	35,316	7.795

The complete table, which is based on occupations for which there were more than 200 observations, can be found on various media sites, perhaps most conveniently on the BBC’s at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26671221

There is also a visualization of the data on page 72 of the Legatum Institute report at:

http://li.com/docs/default-source/commission-on-wellbeing-and-policy/commission-on-wellbeing-and-policy-report—march-2014-pdf-.pdf?sfvrsn=5

The findings will doubtless lead to much debate (and denial) about the extent to which money buys happiness and particular occupations are ‘cushy’. The clergy have long been the butt of jokes about only working one day a week, but there is also a fairly extensive body of evidence about the stress levels which they experience.

Sigbert Jon Prais (1928-2014)

Professor Sigbert Jon Prais FBA died on 22 February 2014, aged 85. Born in Frankfurt, he left Germany with his family as a Jewish refugee from the Nazis in 1934 and settled in Birmingham, becoming a British citizen in 1946. Following tertiary education at the Universities of Birmingham and Cambridge, his career was spent in economics, in a variety of contexts, in Britain and abroad. He had been Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute of Social and Economic Research since 1970. An obituary was published in the online edition of The Times for 19 March 2014 and (heavily abridged) in the print edition of 20 March; this can be viewed by subscribers.

Prais’s principal publications were, not unexpectedly, on economic subjects. However, he also had a keen interest in Jewish statistics and demography, apparently commencing with a survey of Birmingham Jewry in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. During the 1960s and early 1970s he made a major contribution to professionalizing the collection and analysis of Jewish statistics for Britain. The need was great for, in a seminal paper to a two-day conference in April 1962, he lamented that ‘there is hardly a single figure that can be quoted with any firmness for the Jewish community of Great Britain today’. He was influential in the establishment by the Board of Deputies of British Jews in 1965 of a Statistical and Demographic Research Unit, and acted as its Honorary Consultant for some time.

At this period, also, Prais wrote a series of important articles on aspects of Jewish demography for the Jewish Journal of Sociology, several in conjunction with Marlena Schmool (who later became head of the Research Unit). These papers were subsequently reprinted by the Board of Deputies in its Studies in Anglo-Jewish Statistics Reprint Series. The titles which BRIN has identified are:

1967 (Vol. 9, No. 2)*: ‘Statistics of Jewish Marriages in Great Britain, 1901-1965’
1968 (Vol. 10, No. 1)*: ‘The Size and Structure of the Anglo-Jewish Population, 1960-65’
1970 (Vol. 12, No. 1)*: ‘Synagogue Marriages in Great Britain, 1966-8’
1970 (Vol. 12, No. 2)*: ‘Statistics of Milah and the Jewish Birth-Rate in Britain’
1972 (Vol. 14, No. 2): ‘Synagogue Statistics and the Jewish Population of Great Britain, 1900-70’
1973 (Vol. 15, No. 2)*: ‘The Fertility of Jewish Families in Britain, 1971’
1974 (Vol. 16, No. 2): ‘A Sample Survey on Jewish Education in London, 1972-73’
1975 (Vol. 16, No. 1)*: ‘The Social Class Structure of Anglo-Jewry, 1961’

Contributions by Prais on Jewish statistics to edited volumes include:

1964: ‘Statistical Research: Needs and Prospects’, Jewish Life in Modern Britain, edited by Julius Gould and Shaul Esh, London: Routledge & Kegan Pail
1972*: ‘Méthodes de recherches démographiques sur le judaisme britannique: rapport sur les travaux du groupe de recherche statistique du Board of Deputies’, Démographie ei identité juives dans l’Europe contemporaine, edited by Willy Bok and Isiel Oscar Schmelz, Bruxelles: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles
1981: ‘Polarization or Decline’, Jewish Life in Britain, 1962-77, edited by Sonia and Vivian Lipman, New York: K.G. Saur

Asterisked publications were co-authored with Schmool. The foregoing is likely to be an incomplete list, so, if you spot omissions, do let BRIN know.

Posted in church attendance, News from religious organisations, Official data, People news, Rites of Passage, Survey news | Tagged Annual Population Survey, Cabinet Office, church attendance, Church of England, clergy, funerals, Jewish Journal of Sociology, Jewish statistics, life satisfaction, Marlena Schmool, religious festivals, rites of passage, Sigbert Jon Prais, SixthSense, wellbeing, YouGov | Leave a comment

Science and Religion and Other News

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Clive D. Field

Science and religion

Public Attitudes to Science, 2014: Main Report was published on 14 March 2014. The fifth in a series which began in 2000 (but effectively going back to 1988 for some topics), it draws upon face-to-face interviews conducted by Ipsos MORI with 2,064 UK adults aged 16 and over (including a booster sample of 16-24s) between 15 July and 18 November 2013. The research was commissioned by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Economic and Social Research Council. The main report can be accessed, alongside a technical report, topline findings, and detailed data tables for all adults and separately for young adults, at:

http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/3357/Public-Attitudes-to-Science-2014.aspx

As part of the contextual information gathered from respondents, a number of religion-related science questions were asked, the results of which (at headline level, for all adults) are shown in the following tables:

Q12B: ‘We depend too much on science and not enough on faith’

% down	1988	1996	2000	2008	2011	2014
Agree	44	41	38	34	29	30
Disagree	34	31	35	38	46	47
Neither	19	25	22	25	23	21
Don’t know	3	3	4	3	1	2

The number agreeing that we depend too much on science and not enough on faith has diminished over time, from 44% in 1988 to 30% today. This either reflects a growing public confidence in science or a decreased attachment to faith, and probably both. In the latest survey the proportion in agreement was highest among the DE social group (42%), Londoners (42%), over-75s (43%), respondents with low scores on a science knowledge quiz (43%), people with no educational qualifications (46%), BMEs (56%), and weekly attenders at religious services (56%).

Q12F: ‘God created the earth and all life in it’

% down	2011	2014
Agree	39	41
Disagree	37	37
Neither	21	20
Don’t know	3	3

The public is fairly evenly divided on this matter, but a small plurality of all adults inclines to creationism. However, among the 16-24s 48% in 2014 disagreed with the proposition. Agreement in the latest survey was strongest among women (47%), the over-75s (58%), the DEs (58%), people with no educational qualifications (59%), respondents with low scores on a science knowledge quiz (60%), Londoners (60%), Northern Irish (79%), BMEs (82%), and weekly attenders at religious services (90%).

Q12H: ‘It is possible to believe in a god and still hold the view that life on earth, including human life, evolved over time as a result of natural selection’

% down	2014
Agree	62
Disagree	19
Neither	16
Don’t know	3

Three-fifths thought evolution compatible with a belief in a god (and, perhaps implicitly, with some kind of divine role in the origins of life). Variations by demographic sub-groups were not pronounced.

QL: ‘Which of the following comes closest to your view about the origin and development of life on earth?’

% down	2014
Humans and other living things were created by God and have always existed in their current form	19
Humans and other living things evolved over time, in a process guided by God	26
Humans and other living things evolved over time by natural selection, in which God played no part	41
I have another view on the origins of species and development of life on earth, which is not included in this list	9
Don’t know/refused	5

Answers to this question are broadly compatible with Q12H, in that about two-thirds of all adults and three-quarters of the 16-24s subscribed to the theory of evolution. However, 26% of the former thought that evolution was guided by God, with a plurality of 45% thus according God some role in the origins of humans and other living things (38% for 16-24s); this is consistent with the replies to Q12F. Just under one-fifth of the full adult sample were pure creationists, disproportionately respondents with low scores on a science knowledge quiz (41%), Northern Irish (43%), BMEs (50%), and weekly attenders at religious services (56%).

Several of the above questions find parallels in other surveys covered by BRIN. Recent examples include:

Special Eurobarometer 401 at:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/2013/end-of-year-round-up/

Wellcome Trust Monitor, Wave 2 at:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/2013/religious-marriages-and-other-news/

God and morality

Many people around the world continue to think it is necessary to believe in God to be a moral person, but this view is more commonly held in poorer than wealthier countries, and it certainly does not reflect opinion in Britain. This is according to a compilation of data from surveys conducted in 40 countries by the Pew Research Center in Spring 2011, Spring 2013, and Winter 2013-14 and published in a 22-page report on 13 March 2014 at:

http://www.pewglobal.org/files/2014/03/Pew-Research-Center-Global-Attitudes-Project-Belief-in-God-Report-FINAL-March-13-2014.pdf

British statistics are only available for three data points, the most recent being in Spring 2011, when 1,000 adults aged 18 and over were interviewed. The proportion of Britons disagreeing that it is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good values has increased from 73% in Spring 2002 to 75% in Spring 2007 to 78% in Spring 2011. Those thinking that it is necessary to believe in God to be moral have reduced from 25% to 20% over the same period.

Among the 39 other nations surveyed only China (14%), France (15%), and the Czech Republic and Spain (19% each) now subscribe less than Britain to the necessity of belief in God as the basis for morality. Britain also comes bottom of the list of English-speaking western countries; in the United States the figure remains as high as 53% and in Canada 31%, while in Australia it is 23%. In two nations (Indonesia and Ghana) 99% of adults contend that belief in God is a prerequisite for being moral. Twenty other countries also record majorities in favour of this position, consistently so in those with predominantly Muslim populations.

Opinion formation

What impact does religion have on shaping our personal opinions? Not a lot, apparently, at least relative to other factors, according to recent surveys by Ipsos MORI for the Chartered Institute of Housing Scotland, which were published on 12 March 2014. Interviews were conducted by telephone with representative samples of 1,001 adults in Scotland on 20-25 February 2014 and of 868 in England and Wales on 8-10 March 2014. The question asked was: ‘What impact, if any, would you say each of the following factors has had in explaining why you hold the opinions that you do?’ A press release, topline results, and detailed data tables can be found at:

http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/3353/Scots-more-likely-to-think-their-attitudes-are-related-to-where-you-come-from.aspx

In both England and Wales and in Scotland the majority of respondents were clear that religion had no impact at all in shaping their opinions, although 6% more of the Scots than the English and Welsh said it had a big or small influence. The impact (big or small) of religion was greatest (45%) among the over-55s in Scotland but the age effect was not so marked south of the border. The topline figures are:

% down	E&W	Scot
Big impact	12	16
Small impact	16	18
No impact at all	70	65
Don’t know	2	1

A list of the various factors having some impact (aggregate of big and small) on opinions appears below. The table shows that religion was the least decisive influence on opinions in both England and Wales and Scotland, with personal experiences being dominant. With the exception of social class, each of the eight factors had more impact on the Scots than the English and Welsh, and this was especially true of country of residence, the views of parents and friends, and gender.

%	E&W	Scot
Personal experiences	85	90
Age	65	69
Social class	63	64
Country in the UK that you come from	61	75
Parents’ opinions	48	65
Friends’ opinions	47	61
Gender	34	46
Religion	28	34

Papal bestseller

The latest issue of the Catholic Herald (14 March 2014, p. 1) reports that Evangelii Gaudium: The Joy of the Gospel by Pope Francis has become something of a bestseller in Britain. The Catholic Truth Society (CTS), the official publisher to the Holy See, has apparently sold more than 25,000 copies since this apostolic exhortation was published on 4 December 2013, twice as many as any previous papal encyclical, and the most successful Vatican document since Unitatis Redintegratio, the Vatican II decree on ecumenism, which sold 85,000 copies in Britain after its promulgation in 1964. CTS describes the success of Evangelii Gaudium as ‘an ecclesial event’, although its sales must of course be set against the size of the Roman Catholic population of Britain (4,155,000 in England and Wales according to the Pastoral Research Centre and 841,000 in Scotland at the 2011 census). The report in the Catholic Herald is at:

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2014/03/13/publisher-evangelii-gaudium-is-romes-biggest-seller-for-decades/

Catholic converts

The Catholic Church in England and Wales published details on 11 March 2014 of those who participated in the Rite of Election at Catholic cathedrals on 8-9 March 2014. Participants were intending adult converts to Catholicism who will be received into the Church at forthcoming Easter Vigils (some of whom will also be baptised, others already being baptised into another Christian denomination). Although not all converts are able to attend the Rite, the figures give some indication (by diocese) of trends in those joining the Catholic Church in adulthood. Discounting the special factor of the creation of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, designed for ex-Anglicans, it will be seen from the following table that the statistics have been fairly flat in recent years.

Diocese	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014
Westminster	797	829	734	675	712
Southwark	517	517	481	457	503
Brentwood	306	362	333	282	334
Birmingham	NA	302	255	207	213
All other dioceses	1,830	1,921	1,692	1,459	1,524
Ordinariate	NA	795	200	NA	NA
Total	3,450	4,726	3,695	3,080	3,286

Details for each diocese for all of the above years can be found via the links at:

http://www.catholic-ew.org.uk/Home/News/Rite-of-Election-2014

Anglican church growth

Further to our post of 18 January 2014, concerning the launch event for the overview report on the Church of England’s 18-month research programme into numerical church growth, we may note that the final reports on the individual strands of the programme are all now available for download at:

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

They comprise:

[1-2] David Voas and Laura Watt, Numerical Change in Church Attendance: National, Local, and Individual Factors, 93pp.
[3a] John Holmes and Ben Kautzer, Cathedrals, Greater Churches, and the Growth of the Church, 109pp.
[3b] Church Army Research Unit, An Analysis of Fresh Expressions of Church and Church Plants Begun in the Period 1992-2012, 137pp.
[3c] David Goodhew with Ben Kautzer and Joe Moffatt, Amalgamations, Team Ministries, and the Growth of the Church, 199pp.
[4] David Dadswell and Cathy Ross, Church Planting, 88pp.

Orthodox numbers

The number of members of Orthodox churches in the UK is estimated to have roughly doubled since 2000 and stood at 460,000 in 2013, according to Dr Peter Brierley, writing in his monthly column on church statistics in the Church of England Newspaper, 14 March 2014, p. 14. This growth is mostly attributed to immigration, with, for example, big increases in Bulgarians and Ukrainians resident in this country between 2001 and 2011. Eastern Orthodox currently account for 91% of the membership (including 51% in the Greek Orthodox Church), Oriental Orthodox for 8%, and other Orthodox for 1%. The geographical distribution of the Orthodox is said to be: 86% in England, 9% in Scotland, 3% in Wales, and 2% in Northern Ireland.

Posted in church attendance, News from religious organisations, Survey news | Tagged Catholic Truth Society, Chartered Institute of Housing Scotland, church growth, Church of England, Church of England Newspaper, Creationism, Department for Business Innovation and Skills, Economic and Social Research Council, Evangelii Gaudium, evolution, faith, God, Ipsos-MORI, morality, natural selection, opinions, origin of life on earth, Orthodox Churches, Peter Brierley, Pew Research Center, Pope Francis, Rite of Election, Roman Catholic Church, science, Vatican | Leave a comment

Papal Track-Record and Nones

Posted on March 12, 2014 by Clive D. Field

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

Pope Francis one year on

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

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

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

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

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

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

Religious profession

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

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

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

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

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

Fuzzy nones

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

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

Atheism

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

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

Dr Robert Currie (1940-2012)

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

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

More Scottish Census Data and Other News

Posted on March 1, 2014 by Clive D. Field

More Scottish census data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anglican ordinands

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

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

Spotlight on Seventh-Day Adventists

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

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

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

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

Schools and creationism

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

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

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

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

A sixtieth anniversary

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

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

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

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

Welfare Reform and Other News

Posted on February 23, 2014 by Clive D. Field

Welfare reform (1)

Recent attacks by church leaders from several denominations on the Coalition Government’s welfare and benefits reform programme seem to be giving the British public pause for thought, according to a YouGov poll for today’s edition of The Sunday Times, for which 2,141 adults were interviewed online on 20-21 February 2014. Asked whether they agreed with the church leaders’ criticisms, which branded the reforms as a ‘disgrace’ and leaving some people at risk of ‘destitution’, opinion was evenly divided, 42% agreeing and 42% disagreeing. Most negative about the Government’s policy were Labour voters (71%) and Scots (57%), while those more inclined to reject the views of the church leaders included Conservative supporters (77%) and residents of southern England outside London (50%). For the full results, see p. 9 of the data tables at:

http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/7ievwsmlza/YG-Archive-Pol-Sunday-Times-results-140221.pdf

This is not the first intervention about the current Government’s welfare reform programme on the part of church leaders. For BRIN’s previous coverage of public reaction to such intervention, see:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/2013/sunday-times-religion-poll-2/ [17 March 2013]

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/2012/lords-spiritual/ [27 January 2012]

Welfare reform (2)

Meanwhile, opinion about the welfare system shows some signs of division along religious lines, according to a ComRes poll conducted online among a sample of 2,027 adult Britons aged 18 and over on 6-8 December 2013. Results were released on 19 February 2014 to coincide with the publication of the latest report from the think-tank Theos, The Future of Welfare, comprising 12 essays introduced and edited by Nick Spencer. The data tables for the survey can be found at:

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

Some of the key findings to emerge from the research include:

Non-Christians are most confident that the welfare state will survive in something like its present nature and scale in 30 years, 45% against 31% for Christians and 28% for people of no faith, the plurality view among the latter groups being that it will survive but in a diminished form.
Christians (75%) take a harder line than non-Christians (63%) or those without religion (60%) in believing that the receipt of welfare benefits should be dependent on prior financial contributions through the tax system, just 19% of Christians disagreeing.
Christians (63%) are also much more likely to disagree with the suggestion that everyone should receive benefits, irrespective of whether they have been paying taxes, this being 10% more than the religiously unaffiliated and 26% more than for non-Christians (51% of whom actually agree with the proposition).
A plurality among people of no faith (49%) do not think that the relatively wealthy should be entitled to some welfare benefits even if they have been paying taxes, whereas both Christians (58%) and non-Christians (53%) deem such entitlement to be perfectly appropriate (albeit 37% of each say not).
Paradoxically, all faith groups (ranging from 64% of those without religion to 70% of Christians) agree that welfare benefits should be a safety net for only the poorest in society.

Of course, such results do not establish any causal effect for religion in shaping views on welfare, and differences are likely to be attributable in the main to underlying demographics, especially of age and social class/wealth. For example, those of no religion will be found disproportionately among younger age cohorts who are, overall, perhaps more economically challenged than their parents’ generation. This may well explain why many of them feel unsympathetic to the relatively wealthy drawing down welfare benefits.

Seven deadly sins

Asked to nominate the worst of the seven ‘deadly sins’ in a recent YouGov poll, a plurality of Britons (43%) replied greed. This sin easily surpassed wrath (18%), sloth (11%), envy (7%), gluttony (5%), lust (3%), and pride (3%). However, when it came to confessing their own one or two worst vices, gluttony and sloth topped the list, at 25% each, followed by pride (19%), wrath (15%), envy (12%), greed (9%), and lust (8%). So, while greed is considered to be the worst sin, it is the one which people are much less likely to own up to themselves. Detailed figures are supposedly available through the link embedded in the YouGov blog post of 20 February 2014, but the link is broken (BRIN has reported it to YouGov), so only the blog is currently available at:

http://yougov.co.uk/news/2014/02/20/greed-deadliest-sin/

Ethnicity and generational change

The first of the 2014 issues of Ethnic and Racial Studies (Vol. 37, No. 1) comprises nine articles on the theme of generational change (between first and second generations) among ethnic minorities in Britain. Several of these essays explore the religious dimension, drawing especially upon the British Election Study Ethnic Minority Survey (EMBES) in which a cross-section of 2,787 ethnic minority respondents was interviewed, face-to-face and by self-completion questionnaire, from 7 May to 31 August 2010. The contributions likely to be of most interest to BRIN readers are:

Lucinda Platt, ‘Is There Assimilation in Minority Groups’ National, Ethnic, and Religious Identity?’ (pp. 46-70). Platt’s principal finding is that there is generational decline on a range of measures of religiosity for all groups with the partial exception of Muslims. This confirms other evidence of a trend of generational assimilation towards majority and away from minority identity and, in a religious sense, could be said to constitute ‘secularization’. Notwithstanding, this is partially qualified by revelations that the second generation of Hindu immigrants prioritized their religious over their ethnic identity, and that perceptions of religious discrimination enhanced common cause among people of the same faith.
Raya Muttarak, ‘Generation, Ethnic, and Religious Diversity in Friendship Choice: Exploring Interethnic Close Ties in Britain’ (pp. 71-98). Muttarak uses pooled data from the 2007-08 and 2008-09 Citizenship Surveys, rather than EMBES. Interethnic friendship patterns are shown to vary significantly by ethnic group, religion, and generation. Ethnic groups sharing similar traits (such as region of origin, race, or religion) were more likely to nominate each other as close friends, although the effect weakened between the first and second generations. In particular, Indian Muslims had a substantially higher chance of having Pakistani close friends than fellow Indians of other religious persuasions. However, black Christians (Caribbean and African) had a higher likelihood of having white British close friends than did other blacks.
Siobhan McAndrew and David Voas, ‘Immigrant Generation, Religiosity, and Civic Engagement in Britain’ (pp. 99-119). Mainly using EMBES (other surveys are drawn upon), but analysing for an intermediate (1.5) as well as first and second generations, intergenerational secularization is found across ethnic minority groups, as measured by private religious practice (especially) and religious salience. At the same time, communal religious practice appeared robust to generational decline, apart from black Caribbeans. While immigrant religiosity failed to foster generalized social trust, it is revealed to promote greater civic integration and volunteering.
Sin Yi Cheung, ‘Ethno-Religious Minorities and Labour Market Integration: Generational Advancement or Decline?’ (pp. 140-60). EMBES is used to examine four labour market outcomes: economic activity, unemployment, access to salaried jobs, and self-employment. The second generation of immigrants showed little advancement in these outcomes relative to the first generation. Substantial ethno-religious ‘penalties’ persisted for all of the outcomes except self-employment, and there was a particularly strong ‘religious penalty’ among Muslim women.
Anthony Heath and Neli Demireva, ‘Has Multiculturalism Failed in Britain?’ (pp. 161-80). Analysis of EMBES, again incorporating a 1.5 generation, demonstrates that all ethno-religious groups have displayed major change across the generations in the direction of a British identity and a reduced social distance, which can co-exist with positive orientations toward their own ethnic culture (as reflected in in-group marriage and friendship). Only a small minority of respondents had taken a separatist position, rejecting a British identity and espousing ‘radical’ socio-political positions. No evidence was found that rates of intergenerational change had been slower among groups that had made successful claims for cultural recognition (such as Sikhs and Muslims). In contrast, lower levels of integration were associated with perceptions of individual or group discrimination.

For abstracts and access options for all these articles, go to:

http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rers20/37/1#.UwOlUjZFDX4

BMRB turns 80

The British Market Research Bureau (BMRB) is celebrating its eightieth birthday year, laying claim to ‘the longest continuous heritage of any social research company in Britain’. It was established in 1933 as the research arm of advertising agency J. Walter Thompson but quickly shifted emphasis away from commercially oriented research, winning its first contract with the Government in 1939. In 1987 it joined the WPP Group which bought out TNS in 2009, resulting in the creation of TNS BMRB as one of the three constituent companies in the Kantar Group, WPP’s insight, information, and consulting division. TNS Omnibus is a separate company which powers TNS BMRB’s Public Opinion Monitor. Compared to, say, the Gallup Poll (now effectively defunct in Britain), BMRB has not been a major player in religion-related survey research. However, you will find around 30 entries in the BRIN source database where BMRB was responsible for the fieldwork, including the 1963 Political Change in Britain study for David Butler and Donald Stokes, which was the forerunner of the British Election Studies.

Posted in Historical studies, Religion and Ethnicity, Religion and Politics, Religion in public debate, Survey news | Tagged Anthony Heath, benefits, British Election Study Ethnic Minority Survey, British Market Research Bureau, church leaders, Citizenship Survey, ComRes, David Voas, EMBES, Ethnic and Racial Studies, ethnic minorities, friends, generational change, government, Immigration, integration, labour market, Lucinda Platt, Neli Demireva, Raya Muttarak, secularization, seven deadly sins, Sin Yi Cheung, Siobhan McAndrew, Sunday Times, Theos, TNS-BMRB, welfare reform, YouGov | Leave a comment

Church of England Health Check and Other News

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Clive D. Field

Church of England health check

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catholics polled on family life – the sequel

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

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

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

2011 census: Church of Scotland parish profiles

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

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

Invisible church

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

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

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

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

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

Anti-Semitic incidents

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

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

Values profile of Britain

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

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

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

Faith under fire

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

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

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

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

Bible Literacy and Other News

Posted on February 7, 2014 by Clive D. Field

Bible literacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

European Quality of Life Survey

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scottish Health Survey

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

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

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

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

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

Justin Welby as hero

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

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

Religion and voting, 1940s/50s-style

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Young Religion and Other News

Posted on January 31, 2014 by Clive D. Field

Today’s authoritative post by BRIN associate Dr Ben Clements on survey trends in religious attitudes to euthanasia will be a hard act to follow, but hopefully these eight items of religious statistical news will still be of interest to some of the BRIN readership.

Youth on religion

The first major output from the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Programme’s Youth on Religion (YOR) project was published by Routledge on 9 January 2014: Nicola Madge, Peter Hemming, and Kevin Stenson, Youth on Religion: The Development, Negotiation, and Impact of Faith and Non-Faith Identity (xii + 240p., ISBN 978-0-415-69670-8, £29.99, paperback, also available in hardback and as an e-book).

The book is based upon research undertaken in 2010 in three ethnically and culturally diverse and multi-faith areas of England, with relative social deprivation: the London boroughs of Hillingdon and Newham and Bradford in West Yorkshire. The quantitative phase of investigation comprised online questionnaires completed during lessons in February-April 2010 by 10,376 students in years 8, 10, and 12 (and thus mostly aged 13-18) at 39 secondary schools or colleges in the study areas (4,160 in Hillingdon, 3,361 in Newham, and 2,855 in Bradford). The qualitative phase involved group discussions and paired interviews with 157 students in year 12 (aged 17-18).

It goes without saying that the study areas are not typical of the country as a whole, and, moreover, respondents were not even fully representative of the relevant age group in those areas, thereby creating ‘limitations to the degree of generalisability possible from the study’ (pp. 42, 215). Care should therefore be taken in citing the statistical results because they will not necessarily exemplify the religious views of English young people overall. Commercial online youth panels exist which could have been used as the vehicle for an approximation of a national cross-section, but that is not what is on offer here. In particular, in reflection of the locations (and also differential response), the majority of participants were drawn from ethnic minorities: 40% Asian, 13% black, 10% other ethnicities, and just 37% white. As a consequence, ‘especially high levels of religious belief and practice’ are manifest (p. 215). Muslims formed the largest sub-group in the sample (35%), followed by Christians (31%), no religionists (20%), Sikhs (6%), and Hindus (5%). The numbers interviewed from other religious faiths were too small to be meaningful, even in this specific geographical context.

All that said, the volume contains a fascinating wealth of detail, with chapters on: constructions of religion; religious journeys; religious identity and expression; religion and everyday life; family and its influence; friends and schools; and religion and the community. Especially illuminated is ‘how young people in multi-faith areas get on together and how they live with difference’ (p. 17). Particular interest is likely to attach to the fourfold typology of religiosity introduced on pp. 72-88, sub-dividing the young people into Strict Adherents (24%), Flexible Adherents (32%), Pragmatists (21%), and Bystanders (23%). Unsurprisingly, the majority of Muslims were Strict Adherents, with most of the rest Flexible Adherents who ‘have negotiated ways of accommodating their religiosity within Western lifestyles’ (p. 207). Less than one-tenth of Christians were Strict Adherents, with one-fifth being Bystanders, having no real interest in religion. While four-fifths of the no religionists naturally also fell into the Bystander category, the remaining fifth were Pragmatists, taking a somewhat fluid view of their religious journey. Across the entire sample, there was ‘a tendency toward greater flexibility in religious expression’ (p. 216) as the young people evolved ‘their own personal religious identities within a prevailing ideology of liberal individualism’ (p. 217).

Although the book contains 39 figures and 12 tables, the qualitative evidence features as prominently as the quantitative, and BRIN readers will often find themselves thirsty for more numbers and also questioning some of the researchers’ decisions (for example, to use household ownership of books as some kind of ‘surrogate’ for socio-economic status, p. 35). It is to be hoped that the dataset will eventually be made available for secondary analysis, alongside the questionnaire and more details of methodology (unfortunately, the questionnaire is omitted from its customary place at the end of the book, nor is it available on the project website). Likewise, despite copious references to existing literature, much of the concern is apparently to inform theoretical debates (p. 1), and there are only incidental attempts to compare the project’s own findings with those of previous large-scale surveys, such as, from the 1990s, Leslie Francis’s Teenage Religion and Values project or Alan Smith’s investigation of adolescents in multi-faith Walsall (indeed, the latter’s 2007 book does not even appear in the bibliography of Youth on Religion).

Expectations of God

People now expect more of government than they do of God, according to an Ipsos MORI poll for King’s College London which was published on 14 January 2014, and for which 1,011 adult Britons were interviewed by telephone on 7-9 December 2013. Almost three-fifths (59%) of the public agreed with this statement, against only 29% disagreeing and 12% undecided. By contrast, many fewer (41%) thought that expectations of politicians were greater than those of God, the dissentient voice being 48%, with 11% uncertain. This doubtless reflects, less a vote of confidence in God, than cynicism about politicians, whose reputations have been tarnished by sleaze and other circumstances. Those putting greater expectations on God were especially likely to be found among the over-35s, non-manual workers, and owner-occupiers (54% in each case). For more information, see tables 63-66 at:

http://www.ipsos-mori.com/Assets/Docs/Polls/LeadershipPoll_tables.PDF

Same-sex marriage

The UK Data Service released on 22 January 2014 two datasets based on online, email, and postal responses to the Government’s public consultation in March-June 2012 on its Equal Civil Marriage (ECM) proposals for England and Wales. As with all such consultations, respondents were entirely self-selecting and almost certainly unrepresentative, demographically and/or attitudinally, of the population as a whole. One dataset comprises the 136,968 replies to the specific questions posed in the consultation, the other contains all 228,066 responses with coding of the more open-ended and free-text content. The coding framework developed by the Government Equalities Office includes the following codes:

SUPPORTIVE

Y4 Religious argument that supports ECM
Y5 Religious bodies ought to be allowed to marry same-sex couples if they wish to

NON-SUPPORTIVE

N4 Religious argument on nature of marriage and against ECM
N5 Religious bodies feel they will be forced to marry same-sex couples, even if they do not want to

OTHER

O5 All religious organizations should/must/will conduct religious marriage for same-sex couples

ISSUES

IS9 Ability of religious organizations to preach and teach their beliefs on the definition of marriage

For further information and documentation about these datasets, consult the UK Data Service catalogue record for Study Number 7394 at:

http://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue?sn=7394

Church of England health check

The current issue of the Church Times (31 January 2014, pp. 23-9) includes the first of a four-part series entitled ‘The Church Health Check’, and examining the current state of the Church of England. The first three parts will be devoted to ‘a diagnostic investigation of the patient’, while the fourth will ask ‘what remedial treatment may be required’. The theme of the first part is churches and congregations, and its contributors include Professor Linda Woodhead and Dr Peter Brierley. Woodhead (pp. 23-4) draws on her profile of Anglicans from the 2013 Westminster Faith Debates/YouGov research, arguing that it is ‘Time to Get Serious’ for ‘Anglicans are dying out’, with ‘Anglican identity … not being transmitted from one generation to the next’ and a striking disconnect between the Church’s official teachings and grass-roots social values. Brierley (pp. 24-5) examines Anglican attendances since 2000, forecasting continuing rapid decline to 2030, within three broad age bands, while also noting some pockets of church growth (such as ‘messy church’).

Elsewhere in the same issue of the newspaper (p. 3) are featured some initial findings from the online and postal survey of a self-selecting (and thus potentially unrepresentative) sample of 4,500 clerical and lay readers of the Church Times in July and October 2013. The study was undertaken in conjunction with Professor Leslie Francis and Dr Andrew Village, and the questionnaire extended to eight pages. This first glimpse reveals an excessive degree of confidence on the part of laity (40%) that their own churches would grow over the next 12 months, notwithstanding that just 27% agreed that they often invited other people to come to church, and 19% acknowledged that newcomers would not find it easy in their church.

Lord Williams of Oystermouth’s Sharia moment

When Rowan Williams, as the then Archbishop of Canterbury, suggested in February 2008 that the absorption of aspects of Islamic Sharia law into the British legal framework was inevitable, he was condemned by over two-thirds of the public and churchgoers, with two-fifths of adults calling for him to step down. A further indication of the intense interest generated by his comments, and their broader implications for the Church of England, can be found in the dramatic increase in the number of unique UK web hosts linking to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s official website. The figure for 2008 was nearly 50% higher than for 2007 and almost 25% higher than the previous peak of 2004, although it quickly fell back to trend in 2009 and 2010. The discovery has been made by Dr Peter Webster through interrogation of the Internet Archive’s collection of .uk websites for 1996-2010, a copy of which is held by The British Library. For more details, including about methodology, see Webster’s blog post of 28 January 2014 at:

http://peterwebster.me/2014/01/28/distant-reading-the-webarchive/

Methodists and deprivation

Methodism once cultivated the reputation of being a movement for the poor and marginalized, but that no longer appears to be the case if research published by Michael Hirst in the current issue of the Methodist Recorder (31 January 2014, p. 8) is anything to go by. He has mapped the postcodes of Methodist ministers in England in 2001 and 2011 to an index of multiple deprivation for each neighbourhood, revealing that they live disproportionately and increasingly (65% in 2001, 68% in 2011) in the less deprived half of the country. Indeed, the more deprived an area, the less likely Methodist ministers were to live there and the greater the decline over the decade, from a drop of 36% in the fifth most deprived areas to 10% in the fifth least deprived areas. Around 900 active ministers changed addresses between 2001 and 2011, of whom 33% moved to more deprived areas, 41% to less deprived areas, with 26% moving to areas with a similar level of deprivation. Of 700 ministers retiring between 2001 and 2011, 74% went to live in the less deprived half of England compared with the 64% who had worked there in 2001.

Methodists on the internet

The same issue of the Methodist Recorder (31 January 2014, p. 3) also included a somewhat garbled news story about research undertaken in the Cumbria District of the Methodist Church into Methodist use of the internet. BRIN has followed this up and located the original four-page report on the survey by Martyn Evans, which is also no model of clarity. The survey was conducted in October-November 2013 and obtained responses from 100 Methodist congregations in Cumbria (or 93%). Results are mostly disaggregated in the report by circuits, or groups of Methodist churches. Overall, 58% of Methodists reported having access to the internet, which is below average, in reflection, it is suggested, of the disproportionately elderly profile of Methodists and of variable broadband provision in the county. Methodist access to the internet is mostly via a home desktop (38%) or laptop (38%), with 12% using a smartphone and 10% a tablet. Internet Explorer (53%) and Chrome (27%) are the commonest browsers for Methodists. The report is currently available at:

http://www.cumbriamethodistdistrict.org.uk/254360377788.htm

National Jewish Community Survey

On 29 January 2014 the Institute for Jewish Policy Research published its latest 45-page report on Jews in the United Kingdom in 2013: Preliminary Findings from the National Jewish Community Survey, written by David Graham, Laura Staetsky, and Jonathan Boyd. Designed to complement statistics available from the 2011 census, and funded by the Pears Foundation and a consortium of Jewish organizations, the data-gathering was managed by Ipsos MORI by means of an online survey completed by a self-selecting and thus non-probability sample of 3,736 unique UK Jewish households (containing 9,895 individuals) between 6 June and 15 July 2013. The sample was principally recruited by ‘snowballing’ techniques through a large number of ‘seed’ agencies in the Jewish community. There was some under-representation of Jewish adults aged 16-39 and 80 and over, and of Jews unaffiliated to a synagogue and of the Strictly Orthodox. Weights were applied to help correct for such sampling bias.

The report presents initial results for six principal areas: generational differences between Jews; denominational switching (within Judaism); intermarriage (with non-Jews); Jewish education; charitable giving; and health, care, and welfare. A major finding is that the observance of Jewish religious rituals (such as dietary laws, Sabbath and festivals, and synagogue attendance) actually decreases with age, being lowest among Jewish over-65s and highest for Jews under 40. The likely explanation advanced for this counter-secularizing tendency is the replenishment of younger cohorts by high birth rates among Haredi and Orthodox Jews. Across the entire sample, ethno-cultural elements (such as remembering the Holocaust and combating anti-Semitism) featured strongly in defining Jewish identity, far more so than religious beliefs and even supporting Israel (although 69% of respondents still considered the latter to be important). One of the key tenets of Judaism is to help less advantaged people, and 77% viewed donating funds to charity as an important component of Jewish identity, with 93% having made a charitable donation during the previous year (three-fifths of whom had given more than £100). All these areas, and more, covered by the preliminary findings will be explored in far more detail in subsequent thematic reports. Meanwhile, you can read the initial document at:

http://www.jpr.org.uk/documents/JPR.Jews_in_the_UK_in_2013.NJCS_preliminary_findings.January_2014.pdf

Posted in Attitudes towards Religion, church attendance, News from religious organisations, Official data, Religion and Ethnicity, Religion and Politics, Religion and Social Capital, Religion in the Press, Survey news | Tagged Andrew Village, Archbishop of Canterbury, Bradford, Christians, Church of England, Church Times, Cumbria, David Graham, deprivation, God, government, Government Equalities Office, Hillingdon, Institute for Jewish Policy Research, internet, Internet Archive, Ipsos-MORI, Jews, Jonathan Boyd, Kevin Stenson, King's College London, Laura Staetsky, Leslie Francis, Linda Woodhead, London, Martyn Evans, Methodist ministers, Methodist Recorder, Michael Hirst, Muslims, Newham, Nicola Madge, Peter Brierley, Peter Hemming, Peter Webster, politcians, politics, public consultation, Rowan Williams, same-sex marriage, secondary schools, Sharia law, YouGov, young people | Leave a comment

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