In the Firing Line

Posted on April 20, 2010 by Clive D. Field

One of the more surprising religion-related news stories in recent weeks has been the row which developed over the use of models of ‘generic Eastern buildings’ on the Ministry of Defence (MoD)’s firing range at Bellerby, North Yorkshire. They were designed to simulate an overseas environment in which British troops might be operationally deployed.

However, the Bradford Council for Mosques thought the mock-ups looked suspiciously like mosques. Under a barrage of criticism, not just from Muslims, the Ministry issued a public apology and partly dismantled the offending structures.

YouGov tested popular opinion on the subject in an online survey among a representative sample of 2,404 adult Britons aged 18 and over on 9-12 April 2010. The results of this poll, with breaks by gender, age, social grade and region, are posted at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Muslims-12.04.pdf

28% of respondents thought that it was wrong for the MoD to use mosque-like replicas on the firing range, with women (33%) and Scots (35%) being especially critical. 64% could find nothing specifically wrong in what the MoD had done, including 74% of men. There were 9% don’t knows.

35% wanted the mosque-like replicas to be changed, the figure rising to 41% for women and 45% for Scots. 54% (with 64% of men) thought they should be retained since they helped the training of the armed forces. 12% expressed no view either way.

30% agreed that the MoD had not thought or worried about the potential fallout from using the mosque-replicas, 39% disagreed, with 32% neutral or don’t knows.

29% agreed with the chairman of the Bradford Council for Mosques that the MoD’s actions reinforced existing negative perceptions of Muslims, implying that mosques were places of danger which were legitimate ‘targets’. The figure rose to 32% for women, 34% for those aged 18-34 and 35% for Londoners. 44% disagreed with the chairman, with 27% undecided.

In a subsequent online poll (12-14 April among 2,095 adults), YouGov asked respondents to imagine an alternative scenario, whereby a foreign defence ministry had used models of Christian churches on its firing ranges, to simulate the conditions of war in a Christian country.

Interestingly, opinion was more evenly divided in this case, 40% considering it would be wrong for the foreign defence ministry to do this (including 33% of men and 47% of women), and 42% finding nothing objectionable (57% of men and 27% of women).

In other words, 12% more of the population are worried about the use of replica churches on firing ranges than about the use of replica mosques. Perhaps this is another subtle manifestation of British Islamophobia?

This second YouGov poll can be found at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Pope-12.04.pdf

Posted in Survey news | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Pope Benedict on the Back Foot

Posted on April 20, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Pope Benedict XVI has just celebrated the fifth anniversary of his accession to office, but his position is coming increasingly under fire in the wake of mounting revelations about the Roman Catholic Church’s complicity in the clerical abuse of children in the past.

No overall public opinion rating of the Pope appears to have been undertaken in Great Britain since we last reported on the matter on this website (‘What do we think of the Pope?’, 26 February 2010).

However, YouGov has inserted a couple of pertinent questions in its online survey of a representative sample of 2,095 adults aged 18 and over between 12 and 14 April 2010. You will find the detailed results, broken down by gender, age, social grade and region, at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Pope-12.04.pdf

The first question asked Britons whether it was right for the Pope (when a Cardinal in 1985) to resist the immediate defrocking of a Californian priest with a criminal record of sexually molesting children on the grounds that ‘the good of the universal Church’ had to be taken into account.

91% of respondents condemned the Pope for taking this position and argued for immediate defrocking of a priest under such circumstances. Only 3% considered ‘the good of the universal Church’ was a relevant factor, with 7% don’t knows.

The second question alluded to efforts by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, two prominent atheists, to get human rights lawyers to produce a legal case for charging the Pope, during the forthcoming papal visit to England and Scotland (16-19 September), over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Church.

Just 15% of the sample favoured the Pope being granted immunity from prosecution while in Britain (11% because the Vatican is a state and 4% because the Pope is a religious leader).

79% (with no great differences by demographic sub-groups) contended that the Pope should not have legal immunity (11% because they do not consider the Vatican to be a state and 68% because, whether a state or not, nobody should be above the law). The don’t knows again amounted to 7%.

The 1982 papal visit to Britain by Pope John Paul II excited a fair bit of controversy, but this year’s visit by Pope Benedict XVI looks set to stir up even more hostility. Not only does the scandal of child abuse in the Church look set to run and run, but secularists and humanists are clearly on the offensive (see our post ‘Cyber warfare breaks out over the papal visit to Britain’, 15 March 2010), elements of the Church of England have been stung by the Pope’s surprise announcement of self-governing ordinariates for former Anglicans, while the ‘no popery’ tradition of British Protestantism is not entirely extinguished.

Posted in Survey news | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Religious Easter

Posted on April 8, 2010 by Clive D. Field

It is a little after the event, but there does appear to have been one opinion poll this Easter which took the pulse of religiosity. It was conducted online on 1-2 April by YouGov among a representative sample of 1,503 adult Britons aged 18 and over.

The poll was commissioned by the Sunday Times which included three religion-related questions in what was essentially a political omnibus study. The newspaper never actually reported on these particular questions in its print or online editions, but the relevant data tabulations have been posted by YouGov on its own website at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-ST-tracker-02.04_0.pdf

Interviewees were first asked whether they had a religious faith or not. 43% replied that they did, 51% that they did not, with 6% uncertain. Men (40%) were somewhat less likely to believe than women (46%), and those aged 18-34 years significantly less (33%) than those aged 55 and over (51%).

Regionally, the lowest proportion of believers was in southern England outside London (40%), the capital itself returning 47% thanks to the greater concentration of immigrants there, who often incline to be religious. One of the most interesting breaks was by voting intention, 40% of Labour supporters having a faith as against 52% of Conservatives. Does this augur that religion will be a feature of the general election campaign?

People who declared that they had a faith were then asked a supplementary question about the religion to which they belonged. Of this 43% sub-sample, 54% stated that they were Church of England, 16% Roman Catholic, 17% some other Christian denomination and 11% of some other religion. The Anglican contingent was strongest among Conservative voters (67%) and residents of the Midlands and Wales (65%).

The full sample was finally asked whether they intended to go to any kind of religious service over the Easter weekend. 13% said that they did expect to go to a place of worship and 82% that they did not. These ‘churchgoers’ were disproportionately likely to be women, older persons and non-manual workers, albeit the demographic differences were not huge.

If 13% did actually attend a religious service, this would imply a total of more than 6,000,000 adults in the pews over the Easter weekend. This seems an implausibly high number, reinforcing past opinion poll experience that the path to salvation is paved with good intentions, with respondents consistently inflating their prospective or retrospective religious observance.

More objective data are hard to come by, the Church of England being one of the few Christian bodies to count its Easter worshippers. In 2008, the last reported year, all age Anglican attendance on Easter Eve and Easter Day was 1,415,800. This figure is actually lower than the highest attendance in an ‘ordinary’ week (1,667,000).

Posted in Survey news | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Attitudes to Muslims: Round-Up of Recent YouGov Polls

Posted on February 24, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Founded only in 2000, YouGov has rapidly become one of the best-known polling companies in contemporary Britain. It operates mainly via online interviews among a panel of more than 250,000 adults aged 18 and over.

Although YouGov has undertaken relatively few religion-specific surveys, relevant questions often lie buried among some of its more general studies. The following data on attitudes to Islam and Muslims have been taken from the tabulations of recent polls posted at:

http://www.yougov.co.uk/corporate/archives/press-archives-intro.asp

  • Only 13% of all adults feel that most Muslims are integrated into British society, 60% maintaining that many lead completely separate lives and a further 21% that most lead completely separate lives (fieldwork 12-13 November 2009, n= 2,026)
  • 80% of all adults support Government’s recent decision to ban the radical group Islam4UK, which was planning to hold a march through Wootton Bassett in protest at the war in Afghanistan, while 14% disagree, arguing that freedom of speech is more important (fieldwork 14-15 January 2010, n= 2,033)
  • 81% of all adults consider that Anjem Choudary, Islam4UK’s spokesperson, is cynically abusing the benefits system by claiming £25,000 a year in benefits, despite being a qualified lawyer (fieldwork 14-15 January 2010, n= 2,033)
  • 32% of all adults are worried that they and their immediate family might be victims of an attack by Islamic terrorists in Britain, whereas 64% are not concerned (fieldwork 5-7 January 2010, n= 10,344)
  • 62% of all adults are convinced that Islamic terrorism is a slightly or much bigger problem for Britain than other Western countries, with 29% thinking it is no worse a problem (fieldwork 5-7 January 2010, n= 10,344)
  • Of adults believing Islamic terrorism to be a worse problem for Britain, 38% attribute this to Britain’s relationship with the USA, 35% to the failure to punish or expel Islamic radicals who preach violence, and 24% to the number of Muslim immigrants in Britain (fieldwork 5-7 January 2010, n= 10,344)
  • 42% of young people aged 14-25 believe that Muslims often suffer unfair discrimination in Britain, as against 20% thinking this to be true of the Jews, the other religious group enquired about – the numbers feeling they received unfair advantage were 21% and 5% respectively (fieldwork 18-25 November 2009, n= 3,994)
Posted in Survey news | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment