Dimensions of Religious Prejudice

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

Religious discrimination in the European Union

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Religiously aggravated offending in Scotland

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

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

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

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

 

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Churchgoers and the Recession and Other News

The following statistics appeared on Monday and Tuesday this week:

Women bishops and the image of the Church of England

Although the measure for women bishops yesterday narrowly failed to secure the necessary two-thirds majority in all three houses of the Church of England’s General Synod, 67% of the general public were in favour of women becoming bishops in the last test of opinion prior to the synodical vote. Women (71%) are somewhat more supportive than men (64%). A further 13% of all adults are against the idea of women bishops (including 31% of 54 Muslims interviewed), while 20% are undecided.

As for the overall image of the Church of England, a slight majority (55%) agrees that it remains an important part of our national identity, and this is especially true of the over-65s (71%); dissentients amount to 29% (42% in Scotland) and don’t knows to 17%. Fewer (42%) think that the Church of England is a significant moral influence on the nation, just 3% more than the 39% who take the opposite line (rising to 62% among those of no faith), with 19% uncertain. Only 13% disagree with the suggestion that the Church of England’s relevance to the country is in long-term decline; 66% agree and 21% express no view.

Source: Online survey by ComRes, on behalf of ITV News, of 2,055 Britons aged 18 and over on 16-18 November 2012. Data tables were published on 19 November and are available at:

http://www.comres.co.uk/polls/ITV_News_Index_19Nov2012_Women_Bishops.pdf

Churchgoers and the recession

The same ComRes/ITV News survey ran various questions on the state of the economy and personal finances, and the results were separately analysed for the sub-sample (16%) claiming to attend church at least once a month. The data suggest that these ‘regular’ churchgoers may have weathered the economic storm better than most people. In particular, churchgoers (32%) are more likely than all adults (18%) to say they have more money to spend on non-essentials than last year. Similarly, 48% of churchgoers contend that their personal financial situation is generally heading in the right direction, compared with 37% of all Britons. Perhaps for this reason, churchgoers are also much more inclined than the norm (40% versus 26%) to argue that the Government is in control of the economy. The explanation for the relatively advantageous position that churchgoers find themselves in probably lies in the fact that they have a somewhat higher socio-economic status than the population as a whole. For instance, in this poll, whereas 16% of the latter fell into the top (AB) social group, for churchgoers the figure was 19%.  

Education of religious leaders

Nationally prominent religious figures are less likely to have been educated at independent schools than professional leaders as a whole, but they are more likely to have gone to Oxford or Cambridge Universities. Of 265 religious leaders who received their secondary education in the UK, 37% had attended independent schools, against 45% for all professional groups (ranging from 13% for the police to 68% in public service). A further 15% of religious leaders went to a direct grant school, 35% to grammar school, 2% to a secondary modern school, and 11% to an unspecified type of state school. At tertiary level, 41% of 311 religious leaders had been educated at Oxbridge, 10% more than the norm for all professional groups (ranging from 1% of pop musicians to 62% in the diplomatic service). The remaining religious leaders mostly went to the top 30 UK research universities (33%) or other UK universities (15%).

Source: Analysis of the educational backgrounds of 8,654 individuals whose names appeared in the birthday lists of The Times, The Sunday Times, The Independent or The Independent on Sunday during 2011. Such names were, presumably, often abstracted from Who’s Who. The research was undertaken by the Sutton Trust, a charity dedicated to the promotion of social mobility, in association with Dr John Jerrim of the Institute of Education in London. For breakdowns by different professions see Tables 4 and 5 in The Educational Backgrounds of the Nation’s Leading People, published by the Trust on 20 November 2012 and available at:

http://www.suttontrust.com/research/the-educational-backgrounds-of-the-nations-leading-people/

 

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London Church Census and Other News

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

London church census

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

http://brierleyconsultancy.com/londoncensus

State school admissions

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

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

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

UK giving

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

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

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

 

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Sunday Times Religion Poll

The Sunday Times took advantage of the expected announcement of the appointment of Justin Welby as the next Archbishop of Canterbury (eventually confirmed on 9 November) to include several questions on religion in the latest weekly omnibus poll which YouGov conducts on the newspaper’s behalf.

Online interviews were undertaken on 8 and 9 November 2012 with a representative sample of 1,642 Britons aged 18 and over, of whom 546 considered themselves to belong to the Church of England (even if not practising).

According to the study, rather more than one-third (37%) of all adults claim to believe in God, peaking among Anglicans (49%), those regarding themselves as richer than most people (47%), the over-60s (46%), women (43%), and Conservative voters (43%). One-fifth (21%) say they do not believe in God but do believe in some sort of spiritual higher power. Disbelievers in either God or a higher power number 29% and are particularly to be found among the 18-24s (39%) and men (37%). The remaining 13% do not know what to think about God.

Regular attendance (once a month or more) at a place of worship, other than for the rites of passage, is reported by 12% of Britons, rising to 17% in London, 18% for the self-designating rich, 19% of Scots, and 27% for believers in God. One-third are very occasional churchgoers (including 46% of Anglicans, 42% of Conservative voters, and 40% of the over-60s), while 53% admit that they never worship (with 59% among those aged 25-39, 62% of those considering themselves as poorer than most, and 84% of disbelievers in God).     

Turning to the Church of England, YouGov asked how well it had been led in recent years. Not unexpectedly, 36% found it hard to make an assessment (including 49% of Scots, 45% of under-40s, and 45% of disbelievers in God). Of the rest, just 28% think the Church has been well-led, Liberal Democrats and Anglicans being most positive, both on 42%, and 37% badly-led (with 46% of Conservatives, 46% of the over-60s, and 44% of men).

Naming names, the sample was then invited to rate the leadership of Rowan Williams, the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury. Again, 39% could offer no view, with slightly more arguing he has done a good job (36%) than a bad job (25%). Most critical of Williams are Conservatives (39%), the over-60s (37%), and those perceiving themselves to be richer than most people (36%). More Anglicans assess that Williams has done a good job (49%) than the contrary (25%). A ComRes survey in England in August-September this year recorded a much higher approval rating (53%) for Williams’s leadership.

The majority (52%) found the next question completely beyond them, being unable to rank Williams against his predecessor Archbishops of Canterbury. Of those who ventured an answer (probably not well-informed in many cases), 4% judge Williams to be the best Archbishop of Canterbury of recent times, 7% one of the best Archbishops but not the very best, 17% a good Archbishop but not one of the very best, 11% a poor Archbishop but not one of the very worst, 4% one of the worst Archbishops of recent times but not the very worst, and 4% the worst Archbishop of recent times. Two-fifths of Anglicans describe Williams as the best, one of the best or a good Archbishop, compared with 28% of all Britons.

Two issues which are currently at the top of the Anglican in-tray are women bishops and same-sex marriage. Informed that Welby favours the former, respondents were asked whether the Church of England should permit women to become bishops. An overwhelming majority (77%) agree it should, including 89% of Liberal Democrat voters and 89% of the 18-24s, albeit just 69% of believers in God (and 80% of Anglicans). Only 9% of Britons are opposed (among them 16% of believers in God, 15% of Conservatives, and 13% of the over-60s and self-classifying rich), with 14% undecided.

Told that Welby does not endorse legalization of same-sex marriage, 51% of the sample went on to support a change in the law to enable such marriages to take place, the 18-24s (71%) and disbelievers in God (66%) being the strongest backers. Opponents numbered 38%, including 61% of the over-60s, 53% of believers in God, 52% of Conservatives, and 47% of Anglicans. 12% express no opinion.

In addition to these religious topics, replies to the political questions were all disaggregated by belief/disbelief in God and for the sub-group of Anglicans. The analysis reinforces some traditional stereotypes in that professing Anglicans are still more likely to vote Conservative than the norm (39% against 32%), while disbelievers in God or a spiritual higher power are more likely to be Labour voters than average (52% against 44%). On the other hand, the differences were only marginal when it came to the sample’s support for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney in the recent American presidential elections.

None of these findings is published in today’s print edition of The Sunday Times. However, the full data tables from this poll are freely available at:

http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/zksfqcd9sa/Sunday%20Times%20Results%2009-111112%20VI%20and%20Tracker.pdf

 

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Death of Robert Currie, Carol Services

 

Death of Dr Robert Currie

It is with great sadness that BRIN records the recent death, on 13 September 2012 (just twelve days after that of his wife and fellow scholar, Pamela), of Dr Robert Currie, Fellow and Tutor in Politics (1967-2000) and Emeritus Fellow (2000-12) of Wadham College, Oxford. Born in Bristol in 1940, the son of a postman, he was educated at Cotham Grammar School and The Queen’s College, Oxford, gaining firsts in history and then divinity, with a view to becoming a Methodist minister. However, he ultimately decided to enter academic life and studied for a doctorate at Nuffield College, Oxford, which he gained in 1966. His thesis, on ‘The Divisions and Reunion of British Methodism, 1791-1932, with Special Reference to Social and Organisational Factors’, was published by Faber in 1968 as Methodism Divided: A Study in the Sociology of Ecumenicalism.

Parts of Methodism Divided were underpinned by an analysis of historical British Methodist membership data, which stimulated Currie to become principal investigator for a major ‘Statistical Survey of Religion in Britain and Ireland since 1700’, funded by the then Social Science Research Council. His collaborators were Alan Gilbert, Currie’s doctoral student who completed his own thesis in 1973 on ‘The Growth and Decline of Nonconformity in England and Wales, with Special Reference to the Period Before 1850’ (subsequently repackaged as Religion and Society in Industrial England, Longman, 1976) and Lee Horsley. Their research culminated in Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Clarendon Press, 1977).

Although long out of print, Churches and Churchgoers has been a hugely influential book during the past thirty-five years, partly because of the textual section on the dynamics of church growth (which has contributed to debates on secularization) and partly on account of the substantial appendix which collated time series of, in the main, church membership data for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (despite the book’s title, it actually included few statistics from the eighteenth century and little about church attendance). Currie was very helpful to BRIN in 2008-09 in consenting to the reproduction on the BRIN website of this appendix in Excel format, thereby smoothing the path for negotiations with Oxford University Press.

After Churches and Churchgoers Currie’s academic interests moved on, and thus the volume remains his principal monument to his career-stage in the quantification of religion. Gilbert continued to be involved in research into the social history of religion in Britain and Australia (his native land), but he became progressively more committed to higher education administration, culminating in his appointment as President of the University of Manchester. Gilbert died in 2010, at the tragically early age of 65 and just months after his retirement. Horsley is happily still with us, as Reader in Literature and Culture at Lancaster University.    

Obituaries of Dr Currie can be read at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2012/oct/23/robert-currie-obituary

http://www.oxfordtimes.co.uk/news/obits/obituaries/9967073.robert_and_pamela_currie/

http://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/community/obituaries/obits/9950761.couple_shared_academic_life_and_passion_for_books/

Carol Services

More than one-fifth of the population (22%) claim to be planning to attend a carol service in church during the forthcoming Christmas period, and a further 17% recall they have been to such a service at least once during the past five years. Apart from the ‘don’t knows’ (6%), the remaining 55% are neither planning to go to a church carol service this year nor have been in the previous quinquennium. Groups most likely to go to a carol service in 2012 include the over-65s (27%), public sector employees (28%), the top (AB) social grade (29%), residents of Eastern England (30%), Christians (34%), and regular churchgoers (83%). As with all predictive polling, it seems inevitable that some of these good intentions may not be acted upon at all or will translate into attendance at a carol concert in a non-church venue (such as a school).

The question used to measure ordinary levels of churchgoing, other than for the rites of passage, was somewhat different to the one commonly deployed. About one-quarter (26%) of respondents affirmed that they currently attend church, sub-dividing into 9% worshipping regularly (not defined), 7% occasionally, and 10% rarely. Of the 73% who do not attend, 30% say that they have done so formerly and 43% have never been churchgoers. Regular attenders peak among the over-65s and Londoners (both 13%), and ABs and residents of Eastern England (both 14%), while the never-attenders are concentrated in the 18-24s (57%) and those professing no faith (72%). The 9% figure for regular attendance seems a good deal less inflated than in many polls, although it is still higher than the weekly rate of 6% revealed by the last (2005) English Church Census. Of course, many worshippers now consider themselves to be ‘regular’ even if they do not attend week-by-week.

Source: Online survey of 2,097 adult Britons aged 18 and over interviewed by ComRes on 12-14 October 2012, on behalf of Premier Christian Media. Full data tables published on 31 October at:

http://www.comres.co.uk/polls/Premier_Religion_at_Christmas_October2012_2.pdf

 

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Churchgoing in York and Other News

Herewith three news items which have come to hand during the final week of October:

Churchgoing in York

The churchgoing history of York from 1764 to the present day is recounted, statistically, in part II (chapter 6, pp. 113-56) of Robin Gill’s new book, Theology Shaped by Society: Sociological Theology, Volume 2 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, ISBN 978-1-4094-2597-7, £19.99, paperback – also available as a hardback and an e-book). This is both an update and a re-evaluation of the case study of York which featured in chapter 9 of Gill’s earlier works, The Myth of the Empty Church (1993) and The ‘Empty’ Church Revisited (2003). It is based upon church censuses (local, except for 1851), Anglican visitation returns, and original fieldwork by Gill, in co-operation with individual places of worship. It does not utilize Christian Research’s English church census data for the York unitary authority, available for 1989, 1998, and 2005.

Table 6.1 on p. 151 summarizes adult church attendance in York for six years between 1901 and 2010. This would perhaps have been more meaningful had estimates of the adult population of York been included, together with a footnote about any boundary changes which may have impacted the figures. In absolute terms, churchgoing is continuing to decline in the city, down by (what many would consider) a modest 5.3% between 2001 and 2010. Catholicism has experienced the sharpest contraction (14.2%), with the Church of England falling by just 2.4% during this decade and the Free Churches by 0.4%.

The good fortunes of the Free Churches reflect the vibrancy of newer churches and Christian fellowships, some of which were overlooked by Gill in his previous surveys, and which are heavily dependent upon immigrants and/or students. By contrast, the ‘historic’ Free Churches, notably the Methodists, are still struggling, as they mostly are everywhere. Similarly, the Anglicans benefit disproportionately from the pull of York Minster and the evangelical ministry of St Michael-le-Belfrey, the subject of an ethnographic study by Mathew Guest, Evangelical Identity and Contemporary Culture (2007).

In conceptual terms, the data are less related to historical and sociological debates about secularization than to contemporary challenges and strategies of mission and church growth. Drawing upon the influential Anglican report on Mission-Shaped Church (2009), the metaphor of needing to defuse the ‘ticking time-bomb’ of church decline (related to failures in the intergenerational transmission of faith from parents to children) is invoked by Gill several times. Notwithstanding the current vibrancy of the newer manifestations of ‘Free Churchism’ – charted further by David Goodhew’s chapter on New Churches in York in Church Growth in Britain, 1980 to the Present (2012) – Gill concludes that the churchgoing situation in York remains ‘fragile’.

The BIG Welcome

The BIG Welcome was launched by British Baptists in 2010 to encourage Christians to invite the unchurched to a service or event at their church. From 2012 the Methodist and Elim Pentecostal Churches have also become involved, making this a sort of Free Church equivalent to Back to Church Sunday (covered in previous BRIN posts), which was started in 2004 within the Church of England and has become progressively more ecumenical, albeit (in quantitative terms) still essentially Anglican (in 2011 58,000 of the 77,000 additional churchgoers were at Anglican places of worship).

By comparison with Back to Church Sunday, the BIG Welcome is a relatively modest affair. In 2011 280 Baptist churches participated, out of 3,215 in England, Wales and Scotland in 2010, just 9%. About 3,000 people came to a church event for the first time in September 2011, 10.7 per participating church. In 2012 the number of churches involved has been 330 out of a combined total of 9,330 Baptist, Methodist and Elim congregations, or 4%. New individuals coming to a BIG Welcome service on Sunday, 23 September this year amounted to 3,660, 11.1 per participating church. Although 87% of participating churches have already indicated they will get involved in the initiative again in 2013 (the other 13% saying they might do so), the future of the BIG Welcome is actually in some doubt on account of impending restructuring at the Baptist Union headquarters in Didcot.

Source: Number of churches (in 2010) from Peter Brierley’s UK Church Statistics, 2005-2015. BIG Welcome data mainly from a report published on Baptist Times Online on 31 October 2012, available at:

http://www.baptisttimes.co.uk/index.php/national-news/597-support-for-big-welcome

Religious Discrimination

In several respects, Britain has become more tolerant and less prejudiced during the past four decades, according to a recent poll of adults. Compared with the 1970s, 81% now feel that there is less discrimination against homosexuals than there used to be, 79% less against black people, 78% less against women, and 64% less against Asians. Of secular groups, only ageism bucks the trend, with 33% saying that discrimination against the elderly has got worse over the years (albeit 6% fewer than those thinking it has decreased).

On the religion front, anti-Semitism is perceived to have abated, with 58% claiming there is less discrimination against Jews than in the 1970s, 7% more, and 25% about the same. However, Muslims, who had a relatively low public profile and were significantly less numerous four decades ago, have not been so fortunate, with 48% of all adults contending that they experience more discrimination, 33% less, and 11% a similar amount as before. Three-tenths also feel that discrimination against Christians has grown, and this is especially so among men (35%) and Conservative voters (41%). Equivalent proportions believe that discrimination against Christians has lessened (32%) or remained static (29%).

Source: Online survey by YouGov among 1,637 adult Britons aged 18 and over on 22-23 October 2012. Full data tables published on 26 October and available at:

http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/605x8bbko6/Discrimination%20results%20121023.pdf

 

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God Trumped by Aliens – and Other News

God Trumped by Aliens

More people believe in the existence of life on other planets (53%) than believe in God (44%, which is a lower proportion than in other polls, possibly explained by a difference in question-wording). Only Northern Ireland bucks the trend; here belief in aliens stands at 30%. One-fifth think unidentified flying objects (UFOs) have landed on earth, and one-tenth claim to have seen one (more so among men than women). A staggering 52% contend that evidence of UFOs has been covered up in order not to compromise the stability of government.

Source: Survey by Opinion Matters conducted online among a representative sample of 1,359 UK adults, and on behalf of 2k Games, publishers of the new alien-themed videogame XCOM: Enemy Unknown, where the task is to save the world from enemy invasion. Full data are not in the public domain (although BRIN has requested them), and details for this post have been taken from coverage in various online media following the launch of the product on 12 October.

Religion and Ageing

Religious affiliation remains at a relatively high level among the over-50s, although (as with most religious indicators) it is greater among women (89%) than men (79%). There is also variation by age, the proportion with no religion falling steadily from the 55-59 cohort (27% of men and 20% of women) to those aged 80 and over (13% and 5% respectively). Wealth likewise makes a difference, both men and women in the lower wealth groups being more likely to espouse a religion than those in higher wealth groups; in the highest wealth group the number with no religion stands at 27% of men and 17% of women. The religion reported is overwhelmingly Christian, with non-Christians amounting to only 3% of older men and 2% of women.

Moreover, those over-50s who actively practise their faith by attending religious services have somewhat enhanced levels of psychological well-being compared with those who never attend worship. This effect, which is statistically significant, is reflected in ‘less depression, greater affective well-being, higher eudemonic well-being and greater life satisfaction’. Frequency of attendance (‘“dose-response” effects’) is not necessarily material: ‘participants who reported attending religious services a few times a year had similar levels of psychological well-being on several measures to those who were regular attenders’. In the case of life satisfaction, mean scores are 19.8 for non-attenders, 20.9 for those worshipping a few times a year, and 21.4 for those attending two or three times a month or more often.

Source: Wave 5 of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), in which 10,274 English adults aged 52 and over were surveyed by NatCen between July 2010 and June 2011, through a combination of face-to-face interview and self-completion questionnaire. The dataset is available at the Economic and Social Data Service as SN 5050. The report, The Dynamics of Ageing, edited by James Banks, James Nazroo and Andrew Steptoe, was published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies on 15 October 2012. Tables 4A.81-85 (pp. 175-7) and S3a-b (p. 271) are especially relevant for BRIN users. The document can be downloaded from: 

http://www.ifs.org.uk/elsa/report12/elsaW5-1.pdf

Challenges to the Christian Journey

Male and female Christians face somewhat different challenges in their faith journey, according to a recent poll of regular churchgoers. For men the top six (out of thirteen) hurdles are perceived to be: societal pressure to behave in certain ways (50%), work-life balance (47%), pornography (39%), financial pressures (38%), integrity in the workplace (36%), and materialism (35%). For women the greatest challenge is considered to be family life problems (54%, 22% more than is thought to affect men), followed by work-life balance (51%), societal pressure to behave in certain ways (50%), media portrayal of women (45% – twice the difficulty of media portrayal of men), materialism (30%), and sexual pressures (27%).

Pornography comes last on the list of challenges said to be faced by women; at 3%, it is deemed to be an insignificant problem compared with the thirteen-fold greater temptation for Christian men. Interestingly, more male churchgoers (43%) than female (34%) think pornography is an issue for men, although there is an even greater difference by age, 62% of the 18-34s citing pornography as a male problem against 25% of the over-65s. Denominationally, members of New Churches (63%) and Pentecostals (48%) are most exercised by the snare of pornography for men, albeit the sub-samples are small. Pornography causes far more angst than alcohol and drugs, the latter combination said by 15% to be a challenge for men and 6% for women.

Source: Online survey of 510 churchgoing Christians in the UK, conducted by ComRes for Premier Christian Media via Cpanel between 14 and 28 September 2012. Full data tables published on 23 October at: 

http://www.comres.co.uk/polls/Premier_Men_and_Women_Christian_Journey_04Oct2012.pdf

Halloween

There are signs that the commercialization of Halloween, the curious hybrid of paganism and a Christian feast of the dead (All Hallows’ Eve, on 31 October), may have peaked. Despite the best (and hitherto very successful) efforts of the superstore chains to manufacture a Halloween market, its value may have dipped this year. It is anticipated that UK consumers will spend £268 million on Halloween-related products in 2012 (including £78 million on dressing up), which is less than Planet Retail’s estimates of the size of the Halloween market in 2011 (£315 million) and 2010 (£280 million). The biggest spenders on Halloween are younger adults and those with families.

Although 53% of UK adults agree that Halloween is a ‘fun event for kids’, 45% dismiss it as an ‘unwelcome American cultural import’ and 33% fail to see the funny side of trick or treating. Only 23% claim that they will participate in a Halloween activity in 2012, 6% fewer than expect to take part in a Bonfire Night event. In terms of specific Halloween activities, 4% of adults plan to go trick or treating with children, 7% to dress up their children, 6% to dress up themselves, 7% to attend a party, 4% to host a party, and 8% to carve a pumpkin. Pumpkin-carving is forecast to be down significantly in 2012, doubtless because prices of the fruit have risen as a consequence of the poor weather.

Source: Online survey by YouGov among 2,167 UK adults aged 16 and over, undertaken between 1 and 8 October 2012. Part of a business intelligence report on Halloween and Bonfire Night by YouGov’s Sixth Sense arm, which costs £1,750. This is a bit beyond the means of BRIN, so we have been unable to view the full data. However, there was a press release on 24 October about the research, and that is freely available at:

http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/x6n5fpfblc/Bonfire%20Night%20Halloween%20press%20release.pdf

 

 

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Anglican Themes – and Funeral Hymns

The cluster of news stories which have come to hand within the last four days mainly concern the Church of England, but a couple are also of wider interest:

Church of England Growth?

The Church of England launched a new website on 2 October 2012 as a showcase for its 18-month Church Growth Support Programme, which is exploring the factors relating to the spiritual and, particularly, numerical growth of the Church. A team from the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex, led by Professor David Voas (co-director of BRIN), has been appointed to undertake the data analysis and church-profiling strands of the research. In addition to being able to track the progress of these and the other two strands, the website incorporates several other valuable features, albeit still under development, including: key Anglican statistics; guide to church growth literature; case studies of growing churches; and an interactive discussion board on church growth issues. The site can be accessed at:

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

Or Church of England Decline?

A hitherto little-reported aspect of the Church of England’s General Synod in July 2012 was part of a speech by Andreas Whittam Smith, First Church Estates’ Commissioner, touching on the adverse demography of the Church of England. On the assumption that the ageing of Anglican congregations continues, he forecast that the number of worshippers could fall to as little as 125,000 in 2057, unless corrective action could be taken. The story has been picked up by Peter Brierley, in articles in FutureFirst, No. 23, October 2012, p. 5 and in The Church of England Newspaper, 14 October 2012, p. E1. Projecting Anglican attendance figures forward on the basis of what is known of the age profiles of Sunday worshippers from the various English church censuses, Brierley’s charts also point to what some might term a ‘doomsday scenario’, with attenders under 30 years of age likely to decline by 80% between 2000 and 2030, compared with just one-quarter for the over-65s. On present trends, Brierley’s best estimates are that 300,000 will attend Anglican Sunday services by 2030 and 500,000 in an average week (Sunday and weekday combined). Under such circumstances, he suggests, some cathedrals might need to be ‘decommissioned’ and 9,000 of the current 16,000 churches could close.

Church of England Cathedrals

Brierley’s gloomy long-term prognostications for English cathedrals are somewhat at variance with the upbeat tone of Spiritual Capital: the Present and Future of English Cathedrals, which was prepared and published (on 12 October 2012) by Theos and the Grubb Institute, and commissioned by the Foundation for Church Leadership and the Association of English Cathedrals. The report is empirically underpinned by an online survey carried out by ComRes on 10-12 August 2012 among 1,749 English adults aged 18 and over, supplemented by local case studies of Canterbury, Durham, Lichfield, Leicester, Manchester, and Wells Cathedrals (comprising 1,933 quantitative and 257 qualitative interviews).

The national poll revealed that 27% of resident adults (i.e. excluding overseas visitors) claimed to have visited a Church of England cathedral at least once during the previous 12 months. This equates to 11,300,000 people, 20% more than the Church of England’s own estimate for visitors to its cathedrals in 2010, with the trend clearly downward since 2000 (this discrepancy is not commented on in the report). The profile of these self-identifying visitors is shown to be fairly broad in terms of standard demographics and religious background. Specifically, they include significant numbers of non-churchgoers, non-Christians, and those of no religion, thereby confirming that ‘cathedrals have a particular capacity to connect spiritually with those who are on or beyond the Christian “periphery”’ – hence the ‘spiritual capital’ of the title.

Of course, a contrary interpretation is that visitors often relate to the heritage and cultural functions of cathedrals as much as, if not more so, to their role as places of worship, and some of the ComRes poll evidence points in this direction. For example, only 13% disagreed with the statement that cathedrals are more of historical than spiritual importance, and 15% that they would go to one for its history and architecture rather than for any religious or spiritual experience. Likewise, just 17% would go to a cathedral to learn more about Christianity, and 22% for spiritual support. These reservations notwithstanding, Spiritual Capital can be recommended as an excellent source of data, not simply about visitor numbers, but about visitor motivations, experiences, and attitudes, together with wider reflections on the role of cathedrals in the Church and society. The report is at:

http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/files/files/Reports/Spiritual%20Capital%2064pp%20-%20FINAL.pdf

and the full national polling data at:

http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/files/files/Polling/Cathedrals%20Final%20Data%20PDF.pdf

Heritage Tourism

Despite the optimism of the Theos and Grubb Institute report, English cathedrals may actually have had a poor summer in terms of tourism, sharing in the general malaise of all leading visitor attractions caused by the prolonged wet weather and the disruptive effects of the Olympic Games. Figures released by the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (ALVA) on 8 October 2012 indicated that the heritage and cathedrals group of attractions in London (among them, St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey) reported a fall of visitor numbers of 20% comparing May-August 2012 with May-August 2011, while the decline in the rest of England was 6%. Retail spend at these attractions also decreased, by 20% in London and 9% elsewhere in the country. ALVA’s press release is at:

http://www.alva.org.uk/images/assets/84741_851645_121009.pdf

Additional information will doubtless become available when Visit England publishes, next year, Visitor Attractions Trends in England, 2012. The 2011 survey, released in July 2012, included returns from 102 places of worship, recording aggregate details of admissions, revenue, marketing, services, and employment. This 2011 report is at:

http://www.visitengland.org/insight-statistics/major-tourism-surveys/attractions/index.aspx

English Religious Beliefs

The Theos and Grubb Institute research into English cathedrals, discussed above, also collected a range of religious data about the respondents in the ComRes national survey, seemingly in an attempt to link cathedrals with what the report describes as ‘emergent spiritualities’. These data naturally have independent value. The number of adults claiming to ‘belong’ to a religion was 64%, 39% being Anglicans (two-thirds of them over 45), 16% other Christians, and 9% non-Christians; this left 34% professing no religion (rising to 46% of the 18-24s). Claimed attendance at religious services once a month or more was 15%, almost certainly an exaggeration. Firm belief in God (‘I know God exists and I have no doubts about it’) stood at just 19%, with 42% classified as atheists or agnostics; the remaining 39% fell into three categories in the ‘middle ground’ (including those believing in a higher power but not God). Belief in God as a universal life force was 40%, compared with belief in a human soul (60%), life after death (41%), angels (35%), the Resurrection of Jesus (31%), and reincarnation (26%). The number holding all six beliefs was just 12%, peaking at 20% in London. These figures have reduced somewhat over time. For instance, in Gallup’s Television and Religion survey in England in December 1963-January 1964 atheists and agnostics numbered 14% and 50% then believed in life after death. Even the number believing in a soul has dropped from the high of around 70% which was reached in several polls in the 2000s. BRIN has some time series on religious beliefs at:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/figures/#ChangingBelief

Funeral Music

Hymns are gradually being squeezed out of the musicological repertoire at funerals, according to research published by Co-Operative Funeralcare on 15 October 2012, and based on a study of 30,000 funerals conducted by the company (the UK’s largest funeral director) during the past year. In 2005 hymns accounted for 41% of all funeral music requests, but the proportion in 2012 has been reduced to 30%, less than half that of pop music requests. The imbalance might have been even worse, were it not for the fact that one-quarter of funeral homes have had to refuse to play a piece of music on the grounds of taste, usually because clergy conducting the ceremony felt the choice inappropriate. The most popular hymns, in order of frequency of requests, are currently Abide with Me, The Lord is My Shepherd, and All Things Bright and Beautiful. Co-Operative’s press release is at:

http://funeralcarenews.co-operative.coop/branch-news/funeral-survey-charts-the-demise-of-popular-hymns.html

 

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Respect for Clergy and Other News

Herewith some news stories about British religious statistics which have come to hand during the past fortnight; they are arranged in order of release date.

Evangelicals and Money

Evangelical Christians are not immune from the economic downturn, with 15% feeling their absolute income has dropped considerably and a further 24% slightly during the last three years. Taking inflation into account, one-fifth contends their income has fallen a lot behind the cost of living and one-half a little below. One-fifth also has a household income of under £20,000 (against 54% with between £20,000 and £50,000, and 25% with more than £50,000). 7% have no savings at all and 18% have less than £1,000 in savings. 43% try to find a bargain whenever possible, and 28% use charity shops frequently because they are cheaper. In the past, 56% have turned to family and friends to borrow money, 25% have received financial help from their church or another Christian, and 11% have been refused credit or a loan after a credit check. 42% currently have some form of debt, although only 3% are concerned about it. 12% sometimes find themselves asking God for more money. At the same time, 63% of evangelicals believe in tithing (and more so among the over-55s), with 14% being the estimated proportion of their income (after tax) which is given away to the church and to Christian and charitable causes.

Source: Online questionnaires completed, in May 2012, by 1,237 members of the Evangelical Alliance’s self-selecting research panel of UK evangelical Christians, a response rate of 43%. A 20-page report, Does Money Matter?, was published by the Alliance on 10 September 2012 in its 21st Century Evangelicals series. It is available at:

http://eauk.org/church/resources/snapshot/upload/does-money-matter-lower.pdf

Respect for Clergy

Ministers and priests enjoy a lower standing in Britain than in Canada or the United States. Whereas 76% of Americans and 66% of Canadians have a great deal or a fair amount of respect for the clergy, the same is true of only 54% of Brits (marginally down on two previous polls, 57% in August 2009 and 56% in July 2010). Of 25 professions evaluated, ministers and priests ranked joint sixteenth (with actors and artists) in Britain, well behind nurses (93%), doctors (90%), scientists (88%), and engineers and veterinarians (both on 86%). Still, at least the men and women of the cloth outperformed journalists (20%), bankers and politicians (each on 15%), and car salesmen (14%), whose reputations really are in tatters.

Source: Online interview with 2,010 adult Britons on Angus Reid Public Opinion’s Springboard UK panel on 30 and 31 August 2012. Press release, with topline findings only for all three countries, published on 2 October 2012 and available at:

http://www.angus-reid.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/2012.10.02_Professions.pdf

Current Issues in the Church of England

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Anglican churchgoers rate the performance of Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury more highly than practising Christians as a whole. Three-fifths think that he has been a good leader of the Church of England (against 44% of all churchgoers); 48% of Anglicans say Williams has been clear in telling people what he believes and why (versus 37% of all churchgoers, with 41% disagreeing); and 49% against 38% respectively regard him as having helped the Church of England to remain relevant in modern Britain. Anglicans are also more likely than all churchgoers to support women bishops in the Church of England (74% compared with 57%, with 66% of Catholics opposed), 38% of Anglicans being poised to take a less favourable view of the Church if it fails to move in this direction.

Source: Online interview with 510 UK adult churchgoers via the ComRes Cpanel between 14 and 28 September 2012. Full data tables, published on 5 October, available at:

http://www.comres.co.uk/polls/ComRes_Women_Bishops_Oct2012.pdf

Identical questions were put by ComRes to a general population sample of 2,594 adults aged 18 and over in England between 24 August and 9 September 2012. The results have already been summarized by BRIN at:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/2012/september-snippets/ and

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/2012/rating-rowan-williams-and-other-new-sources/

Pastoral Research Centre

The Pastoral Research Centre (PRC), an independent trust for applied socio-religious research, and focused primarily on the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, launched a website on 9 October 2012. Current content includes a potted history of both the PRC and its predecessor organization, the Newman Demographic Survey (which was established in 1953). There is also a brief description of the PRC’s Newman Collection (comprising archival and library material), much of which will eventually go to Durham University. Details of PRC publications (mostly with a statistical bent) will be added in due course. The site is at:

http://www.prct.org.uk/

Joking Apart

Although churchgoing Christians in the UK are mostly supportive of freedom of expression at the level of principle, significant numbers apparently hold ambivalent or contradictory positions in practice. On the one hand, 74% agree that freedom of expression should not be curbed even if it offends those with deeply-held religious convictions; 76% praise tolerance in the face of aggressive anti-religious attacks; and 69% accept that ‘strong anti-Christian opinion provided opportunities to exchange ideas’. On the other, 61% believe that UK Christians are too tolerant of anti-Christian expression; 40% are unhappy with the portrayal of the Christian faith in the media or popular culture; and the reinstatement of the offence of common law blasphemy or blasphemous libel is opposed by just two-fifths. In the wake of the international controversy surrounding the Innocence of Muslims film, 84% are willing to defend believers of another faith from anti-religious sentiment even though they personally disagree with the basis of that faith; 34% think that the film should not have been allowed to enter the public domain.

Source: Online survey of 2,100 churchgoing Christians via Christian Research’s panel, Resonate. Fieldwork apparently took place in September 2012, following the furore over Innocence of Muslims. The foregoing topline data have been abstracted from reports in the Daily Telegraph, 10 October 2012 and on the Christian Today website. The full data have yet to be released by Christian Research.

Heritage at Risk

A higher proportion of England’s religious heritage assets appear to be at risk than is the case with any other type. Some 17.4% of places of worship appearing on the national listed buildings register and which have been surveyed to date (the work is incomplete) have been designated as at risk by English Heritage. This compares with 16.6% of scheduled monuments, 14.0% of registered battlefields, 8.7% of protected wreck sites, 6.6% of conservation areas, 6.1% of registered parks and gardens, and 3.0% of all grade I and grade II* listed buildings.

Source: Summary report of the Heritage at Risk, 2012 survey, published by English Heritage on 12 October 2012, and available at:

http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/publications/har-2012-national-summary/HAR-2012-national-summary.pdf/

 

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Rating Rowan Williams and Other New Sources

There follows a round-up of British religious statistics published between 26 and 28 September 2012, arranged in order of their date of release. Additionally, it should be noted that, although the Office for National Statistics issued a statistical bulletin on 28 September relating to the Integrated Household Survey for April 2011-March 2012, this year’s bulletin, unlike the previous two editions, did not report the data on religious profession, being confined to the questions covering sexual identity and health/smoking.

Rating Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams, the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury, has slipped on a few banana skins (both within and outside the Church of England) during his tenure of office, but English public opinion remains fairly well disposed towards him. In a recent poll a slight majority (53%) rated him as a good leader of the Established Church, rising to 59% of the over-65s and residents of Eastern England; 15% disagreed, with 32% undecided. Despite his reputation for ‘wooliness’, slightly more (55%) considered Williams had been clear in telling people what he believes and why, against 16% dissenting and 29% unsure. But he was deemed to have been somewhat less successful in helping the Church of England remain relevant in modern Britain, even though a plurality (46%) credited him with this achievement; 27% took the contrary line, the top (AB) social group being far more critical (32%) than the lowest (DE, 21%), with 27% as don’t knows. 

Source: ComRes survey for BBC Local Radio in which 2,594 English adults were interviewed by telephone between 24 August and 9 September 2012. Published on 26 September. Data tables available at:

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

Religious Education

It is often argued that the role of religious education (RE) in the curriculum is threatened by the introduction of the English Baccalaureate (EBacc), notwithstanding the subject’s legal protection under the Education Act 1944. In fact, 33% of schools recently claimed that those legal requirements to study RE are not being met at Key Stage 4 (the two years incorporating GCSEs and other public examinations). One-quarter (24%) reported a reduction in the number of specialist staff employed to teach RE for 2012/13, and 54% that they would have no entries for the GCSE short course in RE in 2014 (with 18% having no entries for the full course). These figures all represent a decline on previous surveys, and the EBacc was invariably cited as the cause. One-fifth of schools stated that they attempt to deliver the full GCSE course in RE over less than the recommended teaching time of 120-140 learning hours.

Source: Survey (fourth in a series) by the National Association of Teachers of Religious Education (NATRE), undertaken online during the six weeks following 19 June 2012 among a self-selecting sample of 625 secondary schools in England. Published on 27 September. Full analysis available at:

http://www.retoday.org.uk/media/display/NATRE_EBacc_Survey_2012_Final.pdf

Islamophobia

Only 41% of Britons questioned deemed it possible for the West and the Muslim world to coexist in peace, against 43% who perceived fundamental conflict between the two, one or other side having to prevail in the end. In the United States, by contrast, a plurality (47%) felt coexistence to be feasible, 8% more than picked the conflict option. In Britain Liberal Democrat voters were most inclined to take the optimistic position (58%) and Conservatives most pessimistic (49%). Very few (17%, 3% less than in the United States) wanted the Government to give financial aid to Muslim countries in the so-called Arab Spring to enable them to make the transition to democracy, with 69% opposed. Opinion was probably clouded by recent violence in Muslim nations directed against the United States in protest against the Innocence of Muslims video on YouTube. Fully one-third of Britons (and two-fifths of Conservatives) assessed that one-half or more of people in the Muslim world supported this violence.

Source: YouGov survey of 1,739 adult Britons, interviewed online on 23-24 September 2012. Fieldwork was also undertaken in the United States. Published on 27 September, with exclusive coverage in The Guardian for that day. Data table available at:

http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/2ga029dolx/West%20and%20Muslim%20world%20120926.pdf

Cultural Boycott of Israel

British public opinion towards Israel has tended to become more negative over the years. The Jewish state is no longer simply regarded as the ‘underdog’ in the Middle East, but is often cast in the role of ‘aggressor’. There are growing calls for boycotts of Israel, and there have recently been several high-profile disruptions of Israeli cultural performances in this country. As many as 17% of Britons contend that Israeli actors, dancers or musicians should not be welcome to perform in Britain, against 53% who say the opposite and 30% undecided. Moreover, 27% of adults think that British actors, dancers or musicians should not perform in Israel, compared with 37% who believe they should and 36% uncertain.

Source: YouGov survey for the Jewish Chronicle in which 1,739 adult Britons were interviewed online on 23-24 September 2012 (i.e. the same survey as the preceding entry). Published on 28 September, the headline in the Jewish Chronicle proclaiming ‘Massive majority opposes boycott’. Data table available at:

http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/0kh4fq1eb8/Jewish%20Chronicle%20Results%20120924.pdf

Feelings towards Religious Groups

‘There are common factors underlying less positive feelings towards religious groups. These include being male, holding no or lower-level qualifications, supporting a minor political party or having no partisan attachment, and lower levels of political engagement. Age, religious affiliation, personal importance of religion, and ideological beliefs show a more complex set of relationships with feelings towards religious groups.’ On a 0-100 scale, the feeling thermometer scores of attitudes to seven religious groups ranged from 46.8 towards Muslims to 62.6 towards Protestants, with the average across all groups being 56.2.

Source: Secondary (bivariate and multivariate) analysis of data from samples C and D (n = 2,236) of the British Social Attitudes Survey, 2008 by Ben Clements, ‘The Sources of Public Feelings towards Religious Groups in Britain: the Role of Social Factors, Religious Characteristics, and Political Attitudes’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, Vol. 27, No. 3, October 2012, pp. 419-31. Published on 28 September. Article pay-per-view option at:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13537903.2012.722036

 

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