Counting Religion in Britain, February 2023

Counting Religion in Britain, No. 89, February 2023 features 15 new sources of British religious statistics. The contents list appears below and a PDF version of the full text can be downloaded from the following link No 89 February 2023

OPINION POLLS

  • Same-sex marriage and the Church of England: two YouGov polls
  • Should religious people be allowed to hold top government jobs? YouGov/Theos poll
  • Religious affiliation in Great Britain: aggregate data from five Yonder polls in 2022
  • Lenten traditions and observances
  • British Jewish attitudes to Israel and Israeli politics

FAITH ORGANIZATION STUDIES

  • CAP/Brendan Research mapping of Greater Manchester church closures
  • Church of England clergy spouses and partners: Clergy Family Network survey
  • Community Security Trust’s anti-Semitic incidents report, 2022
  • Muslim Census exploration of Muslim women’s faith experiences
  • Growth of the Muslim humanitarian charity sector in the UK
  • Faith as a barrier to discussing LGBT+ topics in schools

OFFICIAL AND QUASI-OFFICIAL STATISTICS

  • Religious census of England and Wales, 2021: additional analyses
  • Coronavirus chronicles: updating ethnic and religious contrasts in Covid-19 deaths

ACADEMIC STUDY

  • History of the humanist movement in modern Britain

NEW DATASET

  • Edinburgh Burgh Churches: Seat Rent Revenues, 1860–1925

 Please note: Counting Religion in Britain is © Clive D. Field, 2023

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A less Christian future for England and Wales

The breakdown of the census religion counts by age and sex, released 30 January 2023, helps us to picture the religious landscape in the decades ahead. The obvious change is well known, though perhaps not yet fully grasped: the proportion of the population that is Christian is being squeezed from two directions. People of Christian heritage increasingly say that they have no religion, and at the same time, Islam and other minority religions have a growing share.

The graph below shows the percentage of people in the Christian and no religion categories by age, according to the 2021 census in England and Wales. The two lines are in nearly mirror image: Christian losses are mostly gains to no religion. Parents answer the census questions for their children, and as many are not inclined to ascribe a religious affiliation to infants or young children, the Christian line starts very low. By about age 10 children are described as Christian with roughly the same frequency as their parents (who are around age 40). Teenagers start to demonstrate their independence, and so we see a hump in the reported affiliation of children. The Christian share hovers around 30 percent for adults now in their 20s and rises steadily across older generations, approaching (though not quite reaching) 80 percent in the earliest cohorts. Conversely, more than half of people in their 20s have no religion, while among the elderly not quite one in ten are unaffiliated.

The picture for the three largest religious minorities – Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs – is interestingly different. Children are assigned to a religion immediately. Muslims constitute more than 10 percent of every year of age through 18, though the proportion falls rapidly thereafter. There is an additional bulge in the 30s and early 40s, however, which might be the result of refugee inflows or spousal migration in the past decade or two.


It is simple to predict that within a few decades, at least one in six people in England and Wales will belong to a non-Christian religion, even in the absence of further immigration. Muslims will be 11%, Hindus 2%, Sikhs 1%, and other groups (including Buddhists and Jews) a further 2%. In practice migration will continue to boost both Christian and non-Christian numbers. At some point it is likely that some people of non-Christian heritage will say that they have no religion, but for the moment these ethno-religious labels are a persistent component of social identity.

In a previous post, I noted that many people who ticked the Christian box in the 2011 census chose ‘No religion’ ten years later. We can learn more by looking at the no religion shares of the Christian-heritage population (estimated by summing the Christian, no religion and religion not stated categories) in 2011 and 2021. The graph below is focused on people aged 25 and older, who are generally living independently and have reasonably settled identities. Census respondents aged 25+ in 2011 were 35+ in 2021, and we can compare their responses in the two censuses.

The shift towards no religion is distributed remarkably evenly across all years of age. It is slightly more pronounced among younger cohorts, but the intercensal gap is relatively constant. As Sir Bernard Silverman pointed out in his comment on my post last week (and as I mentioned in a BRIN post ten years ago about the 2011 results), however, this comparison almost certainly underestimates the amount of individual switching that occurred. Net migration to the UK has added at least two million people over the past decade, most of whom will have a religious identity. The additional Christians will have depressed the ‘no religion’ proportions shown above for 2021. If the new arrivals were disproportionately young adults, the drift from Christian to no religion in those birth cohorts will be more pronounced than implied by this graph. More precision will have to wait until further data from the census become available.

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Christian decline: How it’s measured and what it means

The 2021 census in England and Wales suggests that self-identified Christians are now less than half the population. Anyone following the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey will regard this development as old news: it has put the Christian share below 50% in every year since 2009, with estimates as low as 38% in 2018 and 2019. The esteem accorded to official statistics, however, helps to explain headlines such as “Christians now a minority in England and Wales for first time” (Daily Telegraph, 29 November 2022).

 
It is worth remembering the features of each data source. To start with the census:

  • It seeks to reach everyone in the population.
  • It is conducted by the Office for National Statistics in England and Wales and by comparable public agencies in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
  • Completion of the census form is a legal requirement, though the question on religion is voluntary.
  • The question “What is your religion?” could be viewed as implying that everyone has one, though the first option listed is “No religion.”
  • There are tick-boxes for world religions (Christian, Muslim, etc.) rather than specific denominations; there is also the option to choose ‘Other religion’ and write in a response.
  • The question on religion directly followed the one on ethnicity in 2001 and 2021, which might imply that it is about family heritage rather than formal affiliation. In 2011 these topics were separated by questions on language.
  • The form is often completed by one person in the household on behalf of some or all of the individuals in it.

As for the British Social Attitudes survey:

  • It goes to a random sample of individuals aged 18 and above.
  • It is carried out by NatCen, a leading survey company.
  • The question is “Do you regard yourself as belonging to any particular religion?”
  • The response options include denominational labels, for example Church of England, Roman Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian, which might induce people who are not involved with a specific church to select ‘No religion’.

Regarding this last point, BSA respondents can identify themselves simply as ‘Christian – no denomination’, a category that probably includes committed members of evangelical and Pentecostal independent churches on the one hand and nominal Christians on the other. It seems likely that many non-churchgoers who in the past might have accepted ‘Church of England’ as a default label are now opting for the unspecified ‘Christian’ designation instead: the category has grown considerably in recent years, from 3% in 1983 to 13% in 2018. Unfortunately, NatCen now supplies only a summary variable for religion rather than the full breakdown shown in the questionnaire. Among Christians, the only groups identified are Church of England, Catholic and other. It is noteworthy, though, that in 2020 the ‘other Christians’ outnumbered Anglicans and Catholics combined. Once Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists are subtracted, the ‘Christian – no denomination’ share is probably around 17%.

One plausible explanation for the differences in religious affiliation reported by the census and BSA survey is that the census question “What is your religion?” encourages people to choose one, in conjunction with the breadth and vagueness of the undifferentiated Christian category, which can easily be interpreted – particularly in this context – as a quasi-ethnic identity. By contrast, asking about belonging to any particular religion, where the usual answers include specific denominations, may nudge respondents without concrete connections to choose ‘no religion’ instead of a nominal Christian identity.

The fact that the Christian category on the census seems to be more inclusive than the same label used in surveys is only part of the mystery, however. The BSA survey has been running since 1983. Religious affiliation as measured by its question has declined steadily since that time, but the decline is wholly explained by cohort replacement. Elderly self-identified Christians die and are replaced in the population by young people who have no religion. Within each generation, average levels of affiliation are virtually unchanged during adulthood. Around 80% of people born around 1920 had a religion, and that percentage did not change significantly from one year to the next; by contrast, fewer than 30% of people born around 1990 regard themselves as belonging to a religion, and again that level has remained stable. Each successive birth cohort is less religious than the previous one, but the average within each cohort stays fairly constant over time.

Interestingly, the census measure of religious identity has been different. While generational differences are very apparent in the census figures from 2001 and 2011, the declines in Christian identification from one census to the next (2001 to 2011 and then 2011 to 2021) are much too large to be explained by cohort replacement alone. Millions of people who ticked the Christian box in one census chose ‘No religion’ ten years later.

The Christian share of the population in England and Wales is falling fast, as measured by the census: from 72% in 2001 to 59% in 2011 and then 46% in 2021. Using the detailed results on religion from 2011 together with the age distribution in 2021 (published earlier in the autumn), it is possible to estimate what the Christian share of the population would have been if religious identity was a stable characteristic. If change was purely the result of cohort replacement, 54% of the population would still be Christian.

Many people whose religious identity was nominal, weak and volatile were evidently classified as Christian in previous censuses. Quite a few still choose that affiliation – the Christian percentages remain higher than those from the BSA – but a substantial number have decided that ‘no religion’ is a more appropriate label. The term ‘disaffiliation’ might be applied to this shift, but it is hard not to suspect that most of the people concerned were scarcely affiliated in any real sense to begin with. When religion plays little part in one’s life, affiliation may amount to no more than a somewhat arbitrary decision about which box to tick.

Why has there been such stability in the BSA measure of affiliation and such instability in the census measure? The answer is presumably that the BSA question captures people whose religious identity is at least moderately strong and persistent, while the census picked up millions of nominal Christians for whom religion was not really part of their personal or social identity. Many have fallen off the fence into self-declared non-religion. There has been some convergence between the two data sources.

The generational contrasts in the census are now just as large as in the BSA. While we will have to wait for the release of more complete data to be sure, it is likely that around 80% of people aged 85+ will have called themselves Christian in 2021 but perhaps only 30% among those in their early 20s. Indeed, the Christian share will probably be less than 40% in all age groups below 45.

If what we know about religious change is correct, the slide in Christian affiliation will continue for decades into the future. In these circumstances, the role of the Church of England is naturally being questioned. Again, the BSA survey is arguably more helpful than the census, as it encourages respondents to identify with a particular Christian denomination. The age gradient for affiliation is especially steep: among the hundreds of respondents in the 18-24 age group, only three in 2018 and two in 2019 identified themselves as Anglicans. In order to obtain reliable estimates, we can pool the datasets from 2018, 2019 and 2020. One finds that just 4% of people in England under the age of 45 regard themselves as belonging to the Church of England.

As a final remark, our attention has been focused here on self-identification with a religion, and no single measure of religious involvement can tell the whole story of secularization. (Note, by contrast, Clive Field’s use of 21 key performance indicators in his recent book Counting Religion in Britain 1970–2020.) The problem is especially acute when affiliation is treated as binary: present or absent. In the United States, the General Social Survey (GSS) question on religious preference has since 1974 been followed by one that asks “Would you call yourself a strong X or a not very strong X?”, where X is the group chosen. About one in ten respondents volunteer the description “somewhat strong” and are so recorded. The GSS thereby discerns four levels of affiliation: strong, somewhat strong, not very strong, none.

This approach has important advantages. Renouncing any religious identity is a high bar, and relatively few people born before the end of the Second World War reached this threshold of secularity. There was little change before the Baby Boom generation in the proportion of Americans saying they have no religion. By contrast, strong / somewhat strong affiliation weakened for every successive generation from as far back as we can see, to people born more than a century ago. It seems likely that the same would be true of Britain.

If religious decline started earlier than some scholars suggest, it also seems to be continuing past the point when many expected to see a levelling out. (I was co-author of a book chapter published in 2010 entitled ‘The triumph of indifference’, but by the end of that decade I was commenting in British Social Attitudes: the 36th Report on the surprisingly assertive secularity of the unaffiliated.) The debate will continue, not least when more data from the census become available, but theories that link secularization to particular periods or generations seem hard to sustain.

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Counting Religion in Britain, December 2022

Counting Religion in Britain, No. 87, December 2022 is a special 14-page edition devoted to the first release of data from the religion question in the 2021 Census of Population in England and Wales.

This issue of BRIN’s monthly bulletin consists of tables, commentary, and a selection of media reporting of the results of the religious census. A copy of the full text can be downloaded from this link No 87 December 2022

Any other items of religious statistical news from December will be held over to the January 2023 edition of Counting Religion in Britain.

At the time of writing, the most significant new resource, apart from the census, is the Church of England’s Statistics for Mission, 2021, which can be found at: https://www.churchofengland.org/system/files/private%3A//2022-12///2021StatisticsForMission.pdf

The BRIN team wish all our users a peaceful and restful festive break. We look forward to ‘seeing’ you again in 2023.

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Counting Religion in Britain, November 2022

Counting Religion in Britain, No. 86, November 2022 features 16 new sources of British religious statistics. The contents list appears below and a PDF version of the full text can be downloaded from the following link No 86 November 2022

OPINION POLLS

  • The UK’s first Hindu prime minister
  • Contact with and attitudes towards local churches: ComRes poll for Church of England
  • What makes someone a good member of society? Pew Global Attitudes Survey
  • The Open Generation: Barna Group survey of teens around the world
  • Ipsos MORI Veracity Index, 2022: trust in clergy and priests to tell the truth
  • Removal of British citizenship: Shamima Begum, the Islamic State bride (continued)

FAITH ORGANIZATION STUDIES

  • Coronavirus chronicles: the place of families in church post-Covid-19
  • Praying online with the Church of England via podcast and app
  • Community use of church buildings in the Church of England Diocese of Ely
  • Methodists and their hymnbook(s): a new survey
  • Muslims and the cost of living crisis
  • Profiling the ‘nones’: latest Theos report

OFFICIAL STATISTICS

  • Religious census of England and Wales, 2021
  • Coronavirus chronicles: Scottish faith communities and the impact of Covid-19

ACADEMIC STUDIES

  • Coronavirus chronicles: more analyses by Village and Francis of their 2020–21 surveys
  • Meatless Fridays, Roman Catholics, and mitigating climate change

 Please note: Counting Religion in Britain is © Clive D. Field, 2022

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Counting Religion in Britain, October 2022

Counting Religion in Britain, No. 85, October 2022 features eight new sources of British religious statistics. The contents list appears below and a PDF version of the full text can be downloaded from the following link No 85 October 2022

OPINION POLL

  • Importance of teaching Religious Studies at secondary school

OFFICIAL STATISTICS

  • Hate crimes in England and Wales, 2021–22
  • Race Disparity Unit’s consultation on standards for ethnicity data

ACADEMIC STUDIES

  • Catholics in Contemporary Britain: new sociological data and insights
  • Baby boomers as architects of religious change
  • The statistical movement in Victorian Britain
  • Coronavirus chronicles: psychological wellbeing of Church of England clergy and laity

NEW DATASET

  • UK Data Service, SN 9011: National Survey for Wales, 2021-2022

 Please note: Counting Religion in Britain is © Clive D. Field, 2022

PS Operational considerations have necessitated the early filing of the October edition of Counting Religion in Britain. Any new sources from the second half of the month will feature in a subsequent edition.

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Counting Religion in Britain, September 2022

Counting Religion in Britain, No. 84, September 2022 features thirteen new sources of British religious statistics. The contents list appears below and a PDF version of the full text can be downloaded from the following link No 84 September 2022

OPINION POLLS

  • Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (1926–2022): public attitudes to her funeral
  • Self-reported religious behaviour: Savanta ComRes poll for the Church of England (2)
  • Importance attached to religious and other freedoms and rights
  • Inaugural Global Faith and Media Study

FAITH ORGANIZATION STUDIES

  • Articles in the October 2022 edition of FutureFirst
  • Statistics of the Scottish Episcopal Church as at 31 December 2021
  • 180 years of Jewish population change in the UK
  • Coronavirus chronicles: the UK Jewish experience of Covid-19

ACADEMIC STUDIES

  • The future of religion in Britain – according to Linda Woodhead
  • Sex and religiosity in Great Britain in the early 2010s
  • Coronavirus chronicles: lay churchgoers’ attitudes towards online Holy Communion

NEW DATASETS

  • UK Data Service, SN 9005: British Social Attitudes Survey, 2020
  • UK Data Service, SN 9006: Annual Population Survey, Three-Year Pooled Dataset, January 2019-December 2021

Please note: Counting Religion in Britain is © Clive D. Field, 2022

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Counting Religion in Britain, August 2022

Counting Religion in Britain, No. 83, August 2022 features fourteen new sources of British religious statistics. The contents list appears below and a PDF version of the full text can be downloaded from the following link No 83 August 2022

OPINION POLLS

  • Self-reported religious behaviour: Savanta ComRes poll for the Church of England
  • Latest YouGov trackers on perceived influence of religion and beliefs about god(s)
  • Trustworthiness of clergy and priests: public perceptions in Britain and worldwide
  • Attitudes towards religious groups in contemporary England: HOPE Not Hate report

FAITH ORGANIZATION STUDIES

  • Methods of estimating the Roman Catholic population of England and Wales
  • Anti-Semitic incidents in the United Kingdom, January-June 2022
  • Tottenham Hotspur Football Club and the use of the ‘Y word’

OFFICIAL AND QUASI-OFFICIAL STATISTICS

  • Non-stun slaughter of farm animals: latest Food Standards Agency data
  • Public examination results in Religious Studies, June 2022: A Levels and GCSEs

ACADEMIC STUDIES

  • Coronavirus chronicles: Liverpool Cathedral’s online music outreach in lockdown
  • Scottish Catholics not so distinctive from their English and Welsh counterparts
  • Separatist Presbyterianism in Scotland
  • The History of Methodist Insurance in Britain

NEW DATASETS

  • United Kingdom Data Service, SN 4562: Great Britain Historical Database, Census Data, Religion Statistics, 1851 (second edition) and SN 8945: Great Britain Historical Database, Census Data, Education Statistics, 1851 (first edition)

Please note: Counting Religion in Britain is © Clive D. Field, 2022

Posted in Attitudes towards Religion, church attendance, Covid-19, Historical studies, Ministry studies, News from religious organisations, Official data, Religion and Education, Religion and Social Capital, Religion in public debate, Religious beliefs, Religious Census, Religious prejudice, Survey news | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment