Atheism and Other News

Posted on February 15, 2015 by Clive D. Field

 

Atheism

Two-fifths (42%) of Britons now declare that they have no religion, and the plurality (45%) of these regard themselves as atheists, according to a YouGov poll commissioned by and published in The Times on 12 February 2015, for which 1,552 adults were interviewed online on 8-9 February. The proportion of self-reported atheists in the entire population is thus 19%, rising to 31% of 18-24s, although the number of Britons who definitely do not believe in any sort of God or greater spiritual power is higher still (33% overall, 46% among 18-24s), including 9% of professed Christians. People no longer seem fazed by atheism. Not only do 88% of atheists feel comfortable about talking about their lack of religious identity, while 24% of Christians who believe in God are uncomfortable discussing their convictions, but very few adults react negatively to public figures who have openly acknowledged their atheism. Thus, only 6% of all Britons and 16% of Christians who believe in God feel more negatively about Labour leader Ed Miliband and LibDem leader Nick Clegg simply because they are atheists, and no more than 13% say the same about actor and presenter Stephen Fry following his recent outburst against ‘a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain’. The Times story (with quotes by BRIN’s David Voas) is only available online to subscribers, but YouGov has a blog on the survey, with a link to the full data tables, at: 

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/02/12/third-british-adults-dont-believe-higher-power/

Future of religion

The team blog of the Theos think tank is carrying a series of guest posts on the future of religion in Britain, timed to coincide with, and to mark, the forthcoming appearance of the second edition of Grace Davie’s seminal 1994 book on Religion in Britain (on which we will report in due course). Davie is one of the Theos bloggers, with other contributions (thus far) from David Goodhew, Nick Spencer, David Voas, and Adam Dinham.   

In the first post, published on 9 February 2015 and focusing on Christianity, Goodhew suggested that ‘the future … will be a persistent paradox of secularisation from above and resacralisation from below’. His conclusion stemmed from a somewhat caricatured critique of the alleged ‘dodginess’ of many national data on religion (including the Church of England’s) and examples of more localized church growth, from London and elsewhere. As I have said before on the BRIN website, Goodhew’s thesis is undermined by its lack of long-term historical perspective. His blog is at: 

http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2015/01/20/secularisation-from-above-resacralisation-from-below

The fourth blog, by Voas, was published on 12 February 2015 but previewed in The Times of 9 February. Voas predicts that the prospects for faith among white Britons are bleak and that ‘the future of religion in Britain is black and brown’, largely revolving around black-majority Churches and Islam. In terms of mainstream Christianity, he thinks that ‘the secularization of religious behaviour has reached the point of no return’; ‘the default position now is that we do not gather together to sing and pray and listen to an indifferent speaker deliver a thought for the week’, most ordained ministers having ‘the leadership ability of bank managers’. Orthodox belief has also declined, especially in God, which ‘has taken a battering’. The post is at: 

http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2015/02/02/what-is-the-future-for-religion-in-britain

Christians and politics

Churches Together in Britain and Ireland has recently launched a 2015 general election website to keep Christians briefed about issues and practicalities during the campaign, and to promote debate around its ‘Vision 2020 of the Good Society’. It has also collaborated with Church Action on Poverty (CAP) to commission ComRes to conduct an online survey of 2,135 practising UK Christians between 20 and 26 January 2015. The headline results were published by CAP on 13 February 2015 under the banner ‘Christians Tired of Short-Termism in Politics’. The press release, which includes a link to a summary report prepared by ComRes, can be found at: 

http://www.church-poverty.org.uk/news/pressroom/pressreleases/archive/20150213

The poll revealed that 91% of practising Christians claimed they would be more likely to vote for a Parliamentary candidate who communicated a positive long-term vision for society, and yet 88% felt that UK politicians were more interested in short-term political concerns and that the leaders of the main political parties failed to articulate such a long-term vision. Almost without exception (97%), practising Christians agreed that Churches had a key role to play in encouraging debate about what makes a good society, with 80% considering that hitherto they had been ineffective in challenging politicians to communicate their vision for society, and 68% that Churches did not talk enough in public about matters like food poverty, homelessness, and tax avoidance.    

Church of England: social action

The social action of the Church of England is examined in Bethany Eckley and Tom Sefton, Church in Action: A National Survey of Church-Based Social Action, which was published on 9 February 2015. The research, which was conducted by the Church Urban Fund (CUF) and the Church’s Mission and Public Affairs Team, was based upon an online survey of Anglican incumbents in September 2014, 1,812 of 5.097 responding (36%), with a slight skew towards larger churches and churches in London, and – possibly – an underrepresentation of those less involved in social action. Some of the questions replicated those in a previous survey by CUF in December 2011. The latest report can be read at: 

http://www.cuf.org.uk/sites/default/files/PDFs/Research/Church-in-Action-2015_0.pdf

Overwhelmingly (95%), Anglican clergy agreed that ‘engaging with the poor and marginalised in the local area is a vital activity for a healthy church’, although fewer (53%) reported that ‘we are tackling poverty as a fundamental part of the mission for our church’. The social issues which presented a major or significant problem in their communities were deemed to be: isolation/loneliness (65%), family breakdown (50%), debt (47%), lack of self-esteem/hope (46%), low income (46%), unhealthy lifestyles (45%), and mental health problems (44%). Just 7% of churches admitted not to be addressing any local issues, with 27% tackling up to four, 31% between five and eight, and 35% (disproportionately in London) nine or more. The most prevalent forms of church-based social action were schools work (76%), food banks (66%, double the 2011 figure), parent and toddler groups (60%), and lunch/drop-in clubs (53%). Activities in support of credit unions were to be found in only a minority of parishes. The main barriers to increased social action by churches were identified as resource constraints, both human (leaders and volunteers) and financial.  

Church of England: rural Anglicanism

A profile of the Church of England in the countryside was published by the Archbishops’ Council on 30 January 2015: Released for Mission: Growing the Rural Church (GS Misc 1092). It is based on a mixture of qualitative (47 interviews with clergy and lay people) and quantitative research, the statistics deriving from an analysis of the 2011 parochial returns, a summary of which is tabulated below. It will be seen that, in terms of churches and parishes, two-thirds of the Church of England is to be found in the countryside, but only about two-fifths of its clergy (who are disproportionately female) and attenders (except at Christmas). The pattern of church growth and decline in rural and urban parishes is similar. The report is available at: 

https://www.churchofengland.org/media/2148423/gs%20misc%201092%20-%20rural%20multi%20parish%20benefices.pdf 

%

Rural

Urban
Organization

 

 
Churches

65

35
Parishes

66

34
Benefices

48

52
Deaneries

67

33
Ministry

 

 
All clergy

42

58
All incumbents

43

57
Male incumbents

40

60
Female incumbents

50

50
All assistant curates

31

69
Male assistant curates

30

70
Female assistant curates

33

67
All self-supporting clergy

47

53
Male self-supporting clergy

45

55
Female self-supporting clergy

49

51
Membership and attendance

 

 
Electoral roll

46

54
Minimum attendance

37

63
Maximum attendance

43

57
Average attendance

40

60
Sum of attendance

39

61
Christmas attendance

49

51
Church growth over 10 years

 

 
Growing

18

18
Declining

25

29
Inconclusive

57

53

British Muslims in Numbers

On 11 February 2015 the Muslim Council of Britain launched an 80-page report (including 33 tables and 4 figures) on British Muslims in Numbers: A Demographic, Socio-Economic, and Health Profile of Muslims in Britain Drawing on the 2011 Census. Prepared by the Council’s Research and Documentation Committee, with Sundas Ali as lead analyst, it examines the Muslim-related data from the 2011 census for England and Wales (Scotland, which had only 77,000 Muslims, is not really covered, despite the work’s title) under four broad headings: demographics, civic life, inequalities, labour market and education. The census findings are supplemented by other empirical evidence and accompanied by a series of ‘observations’ directed at a variety of audiences and a list of priorities for future research. The report can be downloaded from: 

http://www.mcb.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/MCBCensusReport_2015.pdf

Probably the most striking demographic is the relative youth of the Muslim community, with a median age of 25 compared with 40 in the overall population, and 33% of Muslims under 16. Taken alongside factors such as immigration, this young profile seems likely to ensure the community’s ongoing rapid growth, both absolute and relative (the absolute increase from 2001 to 2011 was 75%). In terms of national identity, as many as 73% of Muslims in 2011 stated their only identity as British (or other UK national), even though 53% were born overseas. On some indicators, the incidence of deprivation among Muslims remained high, with, for example, 46% living in the 10% most deprived local authority districts, up from 33% in 2001. However, there were also signs of greater levels of educational attainment and social mobility among Muslims. 

Islamic State

New polling from YouGov for The Sunday Times, in which 1,668 Britons were interviewed online on 5-6 February 2015, has revealed that just 32% support Britain and the USA sending ground troops back to Iraq to help fight the so-called Islamic State (IS), the plurality (45%) being opposed, much the same as in October 2014 (when the question was last asked). This is despite the fact that only 20% are convinced that the current combination of Western air strikes and Iraqi and Kurdish forces will be sufficient to defeat IS, 49% alternatively indicating a need for ground troops ‘from elsewhere’. At 63%, approval of the existing RAF involvement in air strikes against IS has gone up by four points since last October, with 56% supporting an escalation of this involvement in terms of more planes and an increased number of strikes. Data tables are at: 

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/k24ox3l7ay/YG-Archive-Pol-Sunday-Times-results-060215.pdf

YouGov has also updated its Iraq, Syria, and IS tracker report to take account of the new findings. This can be viewed at:

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/51xpyhtlev/YG-Archives-Pol-Iraq-Syria-and-ISIS-060215.pdf

Conspiracy theories

YouGov online polling for YouGov@Cambridge on 3-4 February 2015 explored public attitudes to nine ‘conspiracy theories’, among a sample of 1,749 adults. One of them was a suggestion that some courts in the UK legal system are choosing to adopt Sharia law, which 18% thought was definitely or probably true, including 31% of UKIP voters and 26% of over-60s; a further 31% said it might or might not be true, while 51% were certain that it was false. Another potential conspiracy posited that humans had made contact with aliens but that the news had been deliberately hidden from the people, which 14% agreed was definitely or probably true against 61% who were clear it was not and 25% who were unsure. Nevertheless, belief in both these ‘conspiracies’ paled into relative insignificance compared with the 55% convinced that the Government is hiding the real number of immigrants in the country and the 52% that European Union officials are gradually seeking to take over all the UK’s law-making powers. Data tables are at: 

http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/bhw7u94epz/GB%20Conspiracy%20Theories%20Pilot.pdf

Anti-Semitism

The All-Party Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism published the Report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism on 9 February 2015 and, alongside it, a sub-report summarizing the results of a Populus poll which it had commissioned, for which 1,001 Britons aged 18 and over were interviewed between 22 and 25 January 2015. Asked to rate the seriousness of anti-Semitism in contemporary Britain on a scale of 1-10 (where 1 was low and 10 high), the mean score was 4.66, much as it was ten years ago (4.52), although 37% thought that the problem had worsened over the decade (against 16% who detected an improvement). Moreover, only 55% said that they would be able to explain what anti-Semitism was to somebody else, ranging from 37% of 18-24s to 71% of over-65s, while awareness of recent incidents which were widely regarded as anti-Semitic was relatively limited, the murder of four Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris excepted, which was known to 91%, albeit one-fifth did not classify the attack as anti-Semitic.  

Some anti-Semitic stereotypes continued to find favour, such as the 11% who agreed that Jews have too much power in UK media and politics and the identical proportion that they have too much influence over the direction of UK foreign policy; 15% believed that Jews talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust. The identification of British Jews with Israel was problematical for rather more, 32% thinking that British Jews always defend Israel, regardless of the rightness or wrongness of its actions, and 30% that their loyalties are either divided between Britain and Israel or vested in Israel alone. This is despite the fact that 89% acknowledged Israel’s right to exist. The number of Jews in Britain was vastly over-estimated by respondents, the average guess being 2.7 million, nine times the real figure in the 2011 census, whereas the Muslim population was over-estimated by just one-third. The poll summary can be found at:   

http://www.antisemitism.org.uk/wp-content/themes/PCAA/images/Polling-Anti-Semitism-Summary%202015.docx.pdf

 

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Church Buildings and Other News

Posted on February 5, 2015 by Clive D. Field

 

Church buildings

Churchgoing may be a distinctly minority activity in contemporary Britain, but as many as 45% of the population claim to have visited a church or chapel during the past year for either religious or non-religious purposes, rising to 60% of over-65s and Christians, and even including 27% of those who profess no religion. This is according to a ComRes poll for the National Churches Trust which was published on 29 January 2015, and for which 2,061 adults aged 18 and over were interviewed online between 12 and 14 December 2014. Data tables have been posted at: 

http://comres.co.uk/polls/National_Churches_Trust___Data_Tables.pdf

The heritage and community value of church buildings was also widely appreciated by respondents to the survey. In particular: 

  • 79% agreed that churches and chapels are an important part of the UK’s heritage and history (including 51% of religious nones)
  • 75% agreed that it is important for churches and chapels to have good access and modern facilities to make it easier for people to use them (66% of nones)
  • 74% agreed that church buildings play an important role for society as a venue for community activities (64% of nones)
  • 59% disagreed that repairing and restoring historic church buildings only benefits churchgoers (55% of nones)
  • 55% agreed they would be concerned if their local church or chapel building was no longer there (34% of nones)
  • 39% disagreed that their local church or chapel does not play a large role in supporting people in the community (28% of nones)

Fresh Expressions 

Church growth advocates, especially in the Church of England and the Methodist Church, are often keen to talk up the potential of Fresh Expressions (FEs) of church as a counterpoise to the more familiar narrative of church decline. However, a somewhat more sobering account of FEs, from theoretical and empirical standpoints, is offered by John Walker, Testing Fresh Expressions: Identity and Transformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, xv + 254p., ISBN 9781472411846, hardback). The book is divided into two substantive halves, the first being a contextual review of the existing British evidence and literature about the fall in churchgoing and secularization. The second half outlines the author’s mixed methods research in the Diocese of Canterbury from 2009, examining five parish churches and five FEs by means of semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, and attendance data.   

Walker concludes by rejecting, on both sociological and theological grounds, any suggestion that FEs alone constitute the future of the Church. In particular, ‘fresh expressions … do not and cannot compete with the depth and breadth of life and experience of parish churches, they are no better at attracting the non-churched than parish churches, and both fresh expressions and parish churches grow through exactly the same process.’ The author presents some interesting ideas and evidence, but his research is ultimately small-scale, and it is debatable whether it benefits from being reported at such excessive length.     

Religious authority: Pope vs Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama is more admired in Britain than Pope Francis, according to a YouGov poll released on 30 January 2015. In January publics in some 23 countries were asked online two questions about their most admired figures from a global list of 25 men and 25 women, the answers then being combined into a single score. In Britain, the list of male personalities was headed by Stephen Hawking (on a score of 14.8), with the Dalai Lama in sixth position (6.3) and Pope Francis in ninth (5.0). Both the Pope and Dalai Lama scored more highly in Britain than the global mean (4.1 and 4.0, respectively). However, the rating of the Pope was much lower in Britain than in Brazil (17.5) and the United States (9.1), albeit it exceeded that in France and Scandinavia, where the Dalai Lama was much more likely to be admired (his French score being 14.6, with 10.5 in Sweden and 10.3 in Denmark). In the United States, Pope Francis was placed second among the most admired men, followed by Billy Graham in third spot (7.2), and the Dalai Lama in seventh (4.8). A blog about the survey is at: 

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/01/30/most-admired-2015/

Religious authority: declining status of the Bible

Those who have been unable to access my article on the decline in Bible-centricism in Britain in the October 2014 issue of Journal of Contemporary Religion, because it is hidden behind a paywall, may wish to read a summary of it in the second half of a presentation which I recently gave to Bible Society staff. The first half deals with the context of the statistical measurement of religion. The presentation can be read by clicking on the following link:

Bible – Bible Society presentation

Christians and pornography

The film version of Fifty Shades of Grey hits the cinema screens next week, and in parallel Premier’s Christianity magazine has decided to publish an article in its February 2015 issue exploring the theme of Christians and pornography. To illustrate the piece, its author, Martin Saunders, ran an online survey of UK practising Christians in December 2014, to which he received over 500 anonymous replies. His sample was clearly self-selecting, and Saunders makes no claim to its statistical representativeness. Certainly, some of the results seem a little improbable (or, if true, would be seen by some as rather disturbing). For example, 55% of Christian men reported that they view internet pornography at least once a month with a further 20% accessing it less often (compared with, respectively, 15% and 20% for Christian women), 42% of Christian men acknowledging an addiction to pornography. Even 30% of church leaders admitted to viewing internet pornography at least monthly. The article can be read online at: 

http://www.premierchristianity.com/Past-Issues/2015/February-2015/Grey-Matter-50-Shades-pornography-and-the-shaping-of-our-brains

Muslims and the general election

The Muslim News is currently running an apparently open poll on its website to identify the top issues which may determine how UK Muslims vote in the general election on 7 May 2015, with the intention of using the findings to influence political parties to listen to the views of the Muslim community. This follows the newspaper’s recent research which suggested that the Muslim vote could shape the electoral result in as many as 40 parliamentary constituencies in England, 39 of them held by Labour or priority Labour targets. Of the 40, 25 were classed as marginal seats and 15 as safe seats, but all deemed to be capable of influence by Muslim voters, based upon a correlation of the proportion of the population which was Muslim at the 2011 census with the size of the majority for the successful candidate at the 2010 general election. It is unclear how far the analysis takes account of the disproportionately younger profile of Muslims, which is likely to mean that their share of voters will be rather less than that of the population as a whole. In all, there are said to be 80 constituencies where Muslims exceed 10% of the residents. For more information about the research, including the sensitivity tests which were applied, see: 

http://www.muslimnews.co.uk/newspaper/home-news/muslim-voters-may-determine-next-government/

Mosques

By far the best source of information about mosques in the UK is the database maintained by Mehmood Naqshbandi as part of the (unofficial) Muslims in Britain website. According to the latest report generated from the database, on 19 October 2014 and extending to 64 pages, there are 1,743 active mosques (including prayer rooms) in the UK, of which 1,625 are in England (an estimated 37% being registered as charities). They belong to a variety of Islamic traditions, but with Deobandi (43%) and Bareilvi (24%) being the most dominant. There are 59 mosques which accommodate more than 2,000 people, the largest being a Bareilvi mosque in Bradford, with space for 8,000. The data are also analysed by parliamentary constituencies and local authorities. The report can be downloaded from: 

http://www.muslimsinbritain.org/resources/masjid_report.pdf

An earlier (April 2013) snapshot of the database was recently summarized on pp. 6-7 of Innes Bowen, Medina in Birmingham, Najaf in Brent: Inside British Islam (London: Hurst & Company, 2014, x + 230p., ISBN 9781849043014, paperback). At that time, there were 1,664 mosques in the UK with an estimated capacity of 837,000. Bowen’s book is a useful introduction to the diversity of British Islam and its constituent ideologies and cultures.

Slaughter of animals

UK animal welfare legislation permits slaughter without pre-stunning to be carried out in accordance with religious rites. The practice is particularly important in the Jewish and Muslim communities but is increasingly controversial with veterinarians and sections of the public, and seemingly now contrary to UKIP policy. The prevalence of slaughter without pre-stunning was revealed on 29 January 2015 when the Food Standards Agency (FSA) published the results of its September 2013 survey of animal welfare in Great Britain, during the course of which assessments were made at 301 slaughterhouses. It found that 1% of cattle, sheep and goats, and poultry were slaughtered by the Shechita (Jewish) method, none of which were pre-stunned. The incidence of slaughter by the Halal (Muslim) method was 3% for cattle (25% not being pre-stunned), 41% for sheep and goats (37% not pre-stunned), and 21% for poultry (16% not pre-stunned). Overall, 2% of cattle, 3% of poultry, and 15% of sheep and goats were not stunned prior to slaughter, the last figure having risen from 10% in a 2011 survey. For all three classes of animals the proportion slaughtered by the Halal method without pre-stunning increased significantly between 2011 and 2013, supposedly because of stronger campaigning by some Muslims who believe that stunning kills animals. The FSA report is at: 

http://www.food.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2013-animal-welfare-survey.pdf

Anti-Semitic incidents

The Community Security Trust (CST), which has been monitoring anti-Semitic incidents in the UK since 1984, reported on 5 February 2015 that there was a record number in 2014, 1,168, which was more than double the total in 2013 (535) and 25% above the previous highest figure of 931 in 2009. The single biggest contributing factor to this record number was the conflict in Israel and Gaza between 8 July and 26 August 2014, during which time no fewer than 501 incidents occurred. However, even controlling for the distorting effect of this ‘trigger event’, the CST still calculated that there was an underlying increase of 29% in anti-Semitic incidents in 2014 over 2013.  More than three-quarters of all incidents in 2014 took place in Greater London and Greater Manchester, where the two largest Jewish communities in the UK are concentrated, with incidents in Greater London 137% above the 2013 level. Overall, abusive behaviour accounted for 76% of incidents, those involving extreme violence or assault being far less common (7%). For a full analysis and commentary, see the 41-page Antisemitic Incidents Report, 2014, which can be found at: 

http://www.thecst.org.uk/docs/Incidents%20Report%202014.pdf

New Religious Movements

New religious movements (NRMs) seem to get relatively less exposure in mainstream academic research and literature than they once did, so we should welcome the recent book by James Lewis, Sects & Stats: Overturning the Conventional Wisdom about Cult Members (Sheffield: Equinox Publishing, 2014, ix + 209p., ISBN 9781781791080, paperback). The volume provides a contemporary quantitative overview of NRMs from a global perspective, principally derived from questionnaire surveys (some undertaken by the author) of the membership of selective NRMs and analysis of national census data from Anglophone countries (but excluding the United States, which has no religion census, although some sample surveys are available). The book contains relatively little UK data, the principal exception (pp. 184-6) being toplines of the write-in responses to the 2001 and 2011 censuses.  

Scottish Social Attitudes Survey, 2013

The complete dataset for the June-October 2013 Scottish Social Attitudes Survey was made available for secondary analysis by the UK Data Service as SN 7519 on 20 January 2015. Fieldwork was conducted by ScotCen Social Research by means of face-to-face interview and self-completion questionnaire administered to 1,497 adult Scots. Although no religion module was included, the standard background questions about religious affiliation (current and by upbringing) and attendance at religious services (by those professing a religion) were asked. These can obviously be used as variables for analysing the replies to the other questions, which, on this occasion, disproportionately related to constitutional change, alcohol, mental health, and policing. 

Magna Carta

In 2015 we are celebrating the 800th anniversary of the sealing of Magna Carta, one of the most iconic of all historical documents, the four surviving copies of which have been briefly reunited at The British Library and the House of Lords this week. Yet, beyond knowing that it is significant, many Britons remain unaware of or hazy about its actual content, which was determined by a specific set of circumstances operating in 1215. Although it could be said to have influenced the development of some human rights, in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights sense, Magna Carta cannot be regarded as the progenitor of them all. An example is ‘freedom of religion’, which is only covered in Magna Carta to the more limited extent that chapter 1 established the freedom of the English Church (then Roman Catholic, of course) from state (royal) interference. Nevertheless, 16% of 1,630 Britons interviewed online on 1-2 February 2015 for Index on Censorship thought that Magna Carta had mentioned freedom of religion, including 25% of Liberal Democrats and 22% of over-60s. This was a somewhat lower proportion than the 25% of the public who had given a similar reply to Ipsos MORI in October 2012. The YouGov data tables are at:      

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/xysuhertyl/IndexOnCensorshipResults_150202_Magna_Carta_W.pdf

 

Posted in News from religious organisations, Religion and Politics, Survey news | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

ComRes on Religion and Other News

Posted on January 24, 2015 by Clive D. Field

 

ComRes on religion

Exactly half the whole population (and 71% of those professing no religion) now denies that religion is a force for good in the world, according to a ComRes poll for ITV News on 16-18 January 2015, for which 2,036 adults were interviewed online. Only 24% overall agreed with the proposition with 26% undecided. Christianity was viewed somewhat more positively, a plurality (39%) agreeing that it is a force for good in the world (peaking at 55% of over-65s and 63% of Christians), against 30% who disagreed (including 53% of religious nones) and 31% who did not know. However, although 44% judged that religious leaders in Britain should not get involved in political debates (compared with 34% who thought they should), in practice there was majority support for some specific recent interventions: 65% approved of the criticisms made by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York of the behaviour of shoppers in the Black Friday sales; 63% of their charge that Britain has become dominated by consumerism and selfishness; and 50% of religious leaders speaking out about economic inequality. Data tables are at:   

http://comres.co.uk/polls/ITV_News_Index_Religion_20th_January_2015.pdf

British Cohort Study

On 27 April 2014 BRIN included in one of its regular weekly round-ups of religious statistical news an item on ‘When we’re 42’. This contained a preliminary (topline) analysis of a short religion module which had formed part of the latest wave of the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS), which has been following the lives of babies born in Britain one week in 1970. Information was gathered by TNS BMRB between May 2012 and April 2013 from 9,841 members of the cohort at the age of 42, by a combination of face-to-face interview and self-completion questionnaire, the religion questions appearing on the self-completion form.  

A much fuller (27-page) analysis of the module, incorporating various cross-tabulations, was published on 21 January 2015 as Centre for Longitudinal Studies Working Paper 2015/1: David Voas, The Mysteries of Religion and the Lifecourse. It will also appear in a forthcoming issue of the journal Longitudinal and Life Course Studies but meanwhile can be accessed via the link at: 

http://www.cls.ioe.ac.uk/page.aspx?&sitesectionid=939&sitesectiontitle=Recent+working+papers

The press release for the report led on the substantial gender differences which were found in the two religious beliefs which were enquired into, an emphasis which was then reflected in the media coverage, although the phenomenon is hardly novel and, as Voas comments, still lacks a clear resolution. Perhaps of greater interest are his methodological conclusions and observations arising from the research, with a plea to avoid over-reliance on single-item measures of religiosity. This is exemplified in the sevenfold religious typology proposed by the author in table 8, based on pooling BCS data about religious identity, religious attendance, and belief in God and life after death, and which demonstrates that religiosity is far from being a black and white matter. The table is reproduced below: 

Label Description

%
Non-religious Does not have a religion and believes in neither God nor life after death

28
Nominally religious Identifies with a religion but believes in neither God nor life after death

7
Unorthodox non-religious Does not have a religion or does not attend services, believes in God or life after death but not both

21
Unorthodox religious Has a religion and attends services at least occasionally, believes in God but not life after death (or vice versa)

5
Non-identifying believers Does not have a religion but believes in God and life after death

10
Non-practising religious Has a religion and believes in God and life after death but does not attend services

14
Actively religious Has a religion and believes in God and life after death and attends services

15

Religious affiliation

Lord Ashcroft’s latest themed political opinion poll was published on 14 January 2015, this time on public attitudes to the National Health Service. Fieldwork was conducted online between 14 and 24 November 2014 among adults aged 18 and over, and, as usual, there was a background question asked about religious affiliation: ‘which of the following religious groups do you consider yourself to be a member of?’ Summary weighted findings appear below, with comparisons from previous years, from which it will be seen that Christian disaffiliation and profession of no faith are proceeding relatively rapidly. The full results (with breaks by gender, age, social grade, region, employment sector, working status, educational attainment, and voting intention) can be found in table 149 of the data tables at: 

http://lordashcroftpolls.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/NHS-poll-Full-data-tables.pdf 

% down

11/2011 All

11/2012 All

11/2013 All

11/2014 All

11/2014 18-24

11/2014 65+
Christian

56.4

55.0

52.6

53.7

32.4

72.1
Non-Christian

6.6

6.5

7.4

7.0

13.3

3.2
No religion

35.2

36.3

37.7

37.0

49.4

23.4
Refused

1.8

2.2

2.3

2.4

4.9

1.3
N =

5,000

20,066

8,053

20,011

2,402

4,201

Rating Pope Francis

Pope Francis was quick to condemn the Islamist outrages in Paris, but he subsequently raised more than a few eyebrows when he told journalists that there were limits to freedom of expression and that the faith of others should not be insulted, even cracking a joke in the process about punching anybody who foul-mouthed his own mother. The majority of Britons (51%) disagreed with the Pope’s (unguarded) statement (Londoners and UKIP voters most strongly, on 59%), against 36% who supported it, according to an online poll by YouGov among 1,747 Britons on 18-19 January 2015. Reviewing his pontificate more generally, 51% thought that the Pope is doing a good job, up by 15 points over two YouGov surveys undertaken during his first year in office in 2013, and very few (7%) suggested he is doing a bad job, as many as 42% being undecided. Almost one-quarter (23%) claimed they had a more positive view of the Catholic Church as a result of Pope Francis, albeit the plurality who hold a negative view of the Church is still as large as ever (36%, the same as in November 2013), the over-60s being most negative (48%). Nearly two-fifths (39%, 8 points up on November 2013) anticipated that the Pope would make the Church more liberal, notwithstanding there is as yet little tangible evidence that its teachings are about to be ‘modernized’ in any substantive way. A blog about the survey was published on 20 January 2015, with a link to the data tables, at: 

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/01/20/pope-francis-approval-rise/

Immigration

A plurality (47%) of the British public believes that immigration has weakened Christian values in Britain, according to an online poll by Survation for the think-tank Bright Blue, for which 1,052 adults were interviewed between 12 and 16 September 2014 (although the results were only released on 19 January 2015). The proportion holding this view soared to 81% among UKIP voters and also constituted a majority for several other demographic sub-groups, including retired people (66%), the over-55s (62%), Conservative voters (56%), the lowest (DE) social grade (55%), men (54%), and married persons (53%). Just 19% of the whole sample disagreed with the proposition that immigration had weakened Christian values in Britain, while 25% neither agreed nor disagreed and 8% registered as don’t knows. On a related matter, and referring to a recent situation in real life, 66% of Britons favoured granting asylum in the UK to a woman from a strongly Muslim country who had been threatened with execution because of her Christian beliefs. Data tables are at: 

http://survation.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/GB-Population-tables.pdf

The same questions were also posed to a separate sample of 1,307 current Conservative voters between 12 and 30 September 2014, and these data tables are at: 

http://survation.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Conservative-Voters-tables.pdf

Anti-Semitism – Jewish perspectives

Anti-Semitism was again in the media spotlight during the past week, in the wake of the recent Islamist outrages in France, in one of which four Jews were murdered in an attack on a kosher supermarket. The heightened coverage of anti-Semitism is being underpinned by original empirical research. 

The Jewish Chronicle has published the second in its new series of Jewish topical issues polls, undertaken by Survation among a representative sample of 939 UK Jews (including secular and non-practising) aged 18 and over, who were interviewed by telephone on 19-20 January 2015. Notwithstanding greater efforts being made by the authorities to protect Jews, 58% claimed not to have noticed any increased police presence in their own areas during the past fortnight (against 40% who had), with Jewish over-55s most likely to have detected no improvement (70%). Asked whether the Government was doing all it could to combat anti-Semitism, only 33% answered in the affirmative, while 55% thought it should be doing more (rising to 61% of female Jews and 64% of under-35s). However, there was majority welcome (60%) from UK Jews for the letter which the Communities Minister had written to Muslim leaders calling for renewed efforts on their part to explain how Islam can be part of British identity. Data tables, with breaks by age, gender, and region, are at:  

http://survation.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Jewish-Issues-Poll-2.pdf

As well as summarizing the results of its own poll, the current issue of The Jewish Chronicle (23 January 2015, pp. 6-7, 35) also allocated space to continued discussion about the validity of the poll of Jews conducted online by the Campaign against Antisemitism (CAA) between 23 December 2014 and 11 January 2015, whose findings were rather alarmist (as featured in our last post on 18 January 2015). In The Jewish Chronicle, CAA chair Gideon Falter had an article strongly affirming the ‘bulletproof’ nature of his organization’s research, while distinguished academic (and Holocaust survivor) Michael Pinto-Duschinsky urged the newspaper’s readers ‘don’t trust these misleading figures’, backing up previous criticisms of them by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. Meanwhile, Geoffrey Alderman, a regular columnist on The Jewish Chronicle, called for an end to ‘point-scoring’ about the CAA survey of Jews, although he was skating on somewhat thin ice himself since he had apparently made some use of the CAA data in an article he had written for The Spectator. 

Anti-Semitism – public opinion

A survey of public attitudes to Jews and the Holocaust was published by the European Jewish Congress on 21 January 2015. It was designed by 202 Strategies and undertaken by Survation among a sample of 504 UK adults aged 18-35 (48% of whom described themselves as not religious), who were interviewed online between 8 and 10 January 2015. A significant minority of respondents was found to have ambiguous, prejudiced, or ill-informed views on both topics, albeit some might consider a few of the questions to be a little leading. Although a majority (53%) acknowledged the existence of anti-Semitism in the UK, 23% denied it and 24% were undecided. Three-fifths had been taught about the Holocaust at school but fewer, 40%, regarded it as the most important event in European history over the last century, just 34% knew who Adolf Eichmann was, 31% underestimated the number of Jews who had perished in the Holocaust (with a further 21% unable to answer at all), and only 29% were aware of Holocaust Memorial Day. One in seven inclined to Holocaust denial in that they agreed ‘the evidence surrounding the Holocaust is not complete and I would need to see more proof to believe without a doubt that it occurred’. A similar proportion (15%) backed the introduction of a legal requirement for businesses owned by Jews to have a special form of identification (22% saying the same about Muslim businesses) and 15% wanted individual Jews to carry religious identification (13% wishing to see a similar obligation on Christians). One-quarter thought it very or somewhat likely that laws discriminating against Jews could be passed in Europe today, and 24% anticipated that another Holocaust might happen in Europe during their lifetime. Full data tables have not yet been released (and may not be, since 202 Strategies rather than Survation did the analysis), but a 16-page report is available at:   

http://www.eurojewcong.org/docs/UKpoll.pdf

The Conversation of 22 January 2015 contained a preliminary analysis by Tim Bale of a poll which he had commissioned from YouGov to gauge voter reactions to the prospect of a Jewish politician leading a political party and becoming Prime Minister. This is more than a distant scenario, given that Ed Miliband leads the Labour Party and might, after the May general election, become the first British Jewish Prime Minister since 1880, albeit – conceivably – at the head of a minority or coalition government. In fact, only one-third of all UK voters are aware of Miliband’s religious background, and even fewer of those intending to vote Labour than for the other parties. Even if they were aware, for the vast majority (83%) it would apparently make no difference to their electoral choice. However, 13% of UKIP voters would be less likely to vote for a party with a Jewish leader, twice the proportion of Conservative and LibDem voters who said this, and three times the number of Labour voters. UKIP voters were also least likely (48%) to see a Jewish prime minister as equally acceptable as one from another faith, compared with 62% of all voters and 72% of Labour voters. More generally, just 10% agreed that Jews have too much influence in the country, a reduction from 18% in 2004 (albeit UKIP supporters are still at 18%). Bale’s post, which is a spin-off from his forthcoming Oxford University Press book on the Labour Party under Miliband, can be read at: 

http://theconversation.com/british-voters-open-to-a-jewish-prime-minister-but-some-are-more-welcoming-than-others-36611

Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion

Among the 11 essays in the latest edition (Vol. 25, 2014) of Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion, an annual published by Brill, are a couple which might interest BRIN readers, details of which are given below: 

  • pp. 2-16, Leslie Francis and Mandy Robbins, ‘Religious Identity, Mystical Experience, and Psychopathology: A Study among Secular, Christian, and Muslim Youth in England and Wales’ – a survey of the incidence of mystical experience and its association with psychoticism and neuroticism among 203 Muslim, 477 Christian, and 378 religiously unaffiliated young people aged 14-18 attending 12 schools in England and Wales 
  • pp. 78-108, Andrew Kam-Tuck Yip and Sarah-Jane Page, ‘Religious Faith and Heterosexuality: A Multi-Faith Exploration of Young Adults’ – a survey of the sexual values, attitudes, and behaviour of 515 self-defined heterosexual religious young adults aged 18-25 living in the UK

 

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Jesus Test and Other News

Posted on November 30, 2014 by Clive D. Field

 

The Jesus test

Jesus Christ is not often dragged into the contemporary British political arena, but, when He is, people tend to ask what He would do or think about a current situation (or, in a few cases, even claim to know what His views are). In what the company describes as a ‘new thought experiment’, YouGov probed the British public on how they imagined Jesus would react to four political issues of the present day: immigration, same-sex marriage, (re)nationalization of the railways, and the reintroduction of the death penalty for murder. Interviews were conducted online on 24-25 November 2014 with 1,890 adults aged 18 and over.  

Needless to say, many respondents found the task impossible, with between 34% and 56% stating that they did not know what position Jesus would have taken on each issue (rising to 39% to 58% for those professing no religion). On railway nationalization, the views imputed to Jesus were much the same as those expressed by Britons overall in another survey, perhaps indicating that interviewees might have been simply playing back their own attitudes, not recognizing this as a moral/religious issue at all. On same-sex marriage, a plurality (35%) thought Jesus would have supported it, albeit this was a lower level of endorsement (by 19 points) than was found among the electorate at large last year. This difference presumably reflects popular knowledge of opposition to the legalization of same-sex marriage by the major Christian Churches and the assumption that this must be rooted in Christ’s teaching.  

On the remaining two questions, Jesus and the public were apparently at loggerheads. Thus, whereas 32% more believed that Jesus would oppose than approve the reintroduction of the death penalty (49% versus 17%), in August 2014 YouGov discovered a 6% margin (45% versus 39%) for the contrary position among electors. The gap was even wider when it came to immigration, with 76% of Britons quizzed by YouGov this month wanting to see tighter controls, including (for some) the cessation of all immigration. Jesus, on the other hand, was felt to favour fewer or no restrictions on immigration (39%) compared with 15% who judged Him as supporting tighter controls.  

In a blog accompanying the survey, dated 26 November, YouGov rationalized it thus: ‘Comparing the views that people hold themselves with what they imagine Jesus would think suggests interesting insights as to how virtuous, or at least Christian, they consider their own political views to be.’ The blog has sparked a lively debate, with some comments being fairly dismissive of the whole venture, such as ‘one of the most idiotic surveys of YouGov … ever!’ or ‘most ridiculous set of questions I’ve ever been asked on YouGov’. The blog, incorporating a link to the full data tables including breaks by religious affiliation as well as standard demographics, is at: 

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2014/11/26/the-jesus-test/

There is also an appraisal and analysis of the poll in a blog on the May2015 website, which concludes: ‘What would Jesus do? If we offer an opinion, it’s likely to be shaped by our own’. This can be found at: 

http://may2015.com/ideas/we-tend-to-think-jesus-would-do-what-we-would-do/

Some BRIN readers will doubtless be sceptical about the worth of such an investigation, and its value is certainly diminished by the high proportion of ‘don’t knows’. On balance, one reading of the data might be that they rather indicate people form their political opinions without much reference to religious factors. 

Pope Francis on the European Union

Talking of religion and politics, Pope Francis seems to have set the cat among the pigeons by a speech to the European Parliament on 25 November 2014 in which he made several forthright remarks about the current state of the European Union (EU), which he likened to a grandmother who was no longer fertile and vibrant. In a poll for The Times Redbox on 26-27 November 2014, YouGov asked 1,970 Britons whether they thought the Pope had spoken the truth about the EU and whether he had been right to express his opinion at all. Overall, 62% felt that what he had said about the EU was true (rising to 73% of Conservatives, 71% of UKIP voters, and 74% of over-60s), while 54% defended his right to speak out (against 22% who judged him in the wrong, with 24% undecided). Data tables are at: 

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/yebku7qamp/RedBoxResults_141127_Pope_Francis_Website.pdf

Islamic State

The autumn has seen a marked diminution of interest on the part of pollsters and their clients in surveying public attitudes to the so-called Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria. But on 25 November 2014 ICM Research released the topline findings from a new multinational poll which had been commissioned by the Russian news agency Rossiya Segodnya. Based on telephone interviews between 7 and 11 November, including 1,002 in Britain, it revealed an appreciably greater appetite for their country’s participation in military intervention against IS among Britons than the French or, more especially, Germans. The Anglo-German difference is especially striking, given that the identical proportion (two-thirds) in each nation agreed that European involvement in military action against IS would increase the threat posed by radical Islamism in Europe, whereas only 45% of the French shared this view. Results are summarized below, while data tables are at: 

http://www.icmunlimited.com/data/media/pdf/RS-Airstrikes-Comb%20-%20Nov%2014.pdf

% supporting country’s involvement in

Britain

France

Germany
Airstrikes against IS

65

49

35
Ground operations against IS

53

41

20
Both

49

37

16
Neither

18

28

55

Also pertinent to the above is another recent poll, not previously reported on BRIN, by ComRes for ITV News on 24-26 October 2014, 2,004 Britons being interviewed online. This showed that a plurality (49%) agreed that the rise of IS was probably a direct result of British and American military involvement in the Middle East, with 26% dissenting and the identical proportion undecided. At the same time, 42% believed that Afghanistan would face a similar fate to Iraq and Syria under IS unless international forces remained in the country. Data tables are at: 

http://comres.co.uk/polls/ITV_News_Index_27th_October_2014.pdf

Youth social action

Two-fifths of UK young persons aged 10-20 have participated in some meaningful form of social action (defined as ‘practical action in the service of others to create positive change’) during the past 12 months, but the proportion is slightly higher among those who profess a religion (43%) than those who do not (37%). The headline appears in Youth Social Action in the UK, 2014, which was published on 24 November 2014, and based on research undertaken by Ipsos MORI for the Cabinet Office and Step up to Serve. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with 2,038 young persons between 11 and 22 September 2014. The report is available at:   

https://www.ipsos-mori.com/Assets/Docs/Publications/sri-ecf-youth-social-action-in-the-uk-2014.pdf

Liking the Church of England

YouGov Profiles, a new interactive segmentation and media planning tool, enables profiles to be built of people who ‘like’ a particular brand, person, or thing, showing what differentiates them from their natural ‘comparison set’ in terms of demographics, lifestyle, personality, brands, favourite entertainments, online activity, and media consumption. Statistical relationships between those who ‘like’ the brand, person, or thing in question and the ‘comparison set’ are expressed as ‘Z scores’, under 1 being weak, from 1 to 2 medium, and 2 and above strong. The source database comprises information gathered from YouGov’s 200,000-strong UK survey panel. The profiler can be searched at: 

https://yougov.co.uk/profiler#/

You may well struggle to extract data about specific religious groups, either because the sub-sample is rather small (for instance, there are only 104 individuals who ‘like’ the Catholic Church) or because there is nothing directly relevant; thus, keying in ‘atheists’ generates data for panel members who ‘like’ The Ruts (music artist), The Mist (film), and The Rats (novel). Moreover, any profiles recovered should not be interpreted as an approximation of a national cross-section of the group concerned. As YouGov explains, what is revealed is ‘the quintessential, rather than the average, member of that group’. BRIN strongly recommends that you read the FAQs before starting to use the tool; these are at: 

https://yougov.co.uk/find-solutions/profiles/

By way of illustration, we can take the Church of England, whose YouGov profile features in the latest edition of the Church Times (28 November 2014, p. 4), based on the 1,187 individuals who said they ‘like’ that Church. Although certain of their attributes and behaviours are predictable, and consistent with what is known from other research, in some respects they are, as the Church Times puts it, ‘off-beam’, including an unexplained preponderance in the Midlands and North-West. Still, if you want to amuse yourself by finding out what some ‘Anglicans’ eat, where they shop, what they watch on television, which newspapers they read, and so forth – all in relation to their ‘comparison set’ – then go to: 

https://yougov.co.uk/profiler#/Church_of_England/demographics

Cathedral statistics

Cathedral Statistics, 2013 was published by the Church of England’s Research and Statistics Department on 24 November 2014, comprising 13 tables, 12 figures, explanatory notes, and commentary. It includes comparative data back to 2003, albeit methodological changes significantly impact comparisons for Holy Week and Advent. The finding headlined by the Church was the increase in midweek attendances at cathedrals since 2003 (doubling in the case of adults), although Sunday congregations have remained more stable during the past decade. Easter attendances and communicants were slightly down on 2012 levels, those for Christmas somewhat improved, but turnout at both these festivals is notoriously variable, influenced by their timing (whether Easter is early or late, the day of the week on which Christmas falls) and the state of the weather. Visitor numbers rose to 10,248,000 (but were still less than in 2003), to which Westminster Abbey added another 2,000,000. The report, which is the subject of a sober editorial in the current issue of the Church Times (‘these figures offer challenges as well as reassurance to cathedrals’, 28 November 2014, p. 14) can be read at:  

https://gallery.mailchimp.com/50eac70851c7245ce1ce00c45/files/Cathedral_Statistics.pdf

FutureFirst

The latest issue (No. 36, December 2014) of FutureFirst, the bimonthly bulletin of Brierley Consultancy, has just been published. As usual, packed into its six A4 pages are sundry news stories about recent socio-religious research, this time including a couple of pieces with BRIN connections. Research by David Voas into the factors promoting or inhibiting growth in the Church of England is summarized in ‘Anglican Growth’, on pp. 1 and 4, while Clive Field writes on p. 6 about ‘Attitudes to Church and Clergy in Britain’ (based on his recent article in Contemporary British History). Peter Brierley also has an analysis on p. 3 of the YouGov poll of Anglican clergy conducted for Linda Woodhead this summer; he especially highlights gender variations within theological positions. New subscriptions to FutureFirst cost just £20 per calendar year; contact peter@brierleyres.com for more information.   

Advent calendars

Today (30 November 2014) is the first Sunday in Advent, but research by the Church of England Newspaper (28 November 2014, p. 1) has revealed that only 31 (3%) of the 976 Advent calendars on sale in stores on London’s Oxford Street had a religious theme. The dominant images were of One Direction, Hello Kitty, Frozen, and Santa Claus. 

Religion in the First World War

The secondary literature on religion and the First World War in Britain has disproportionately focused on ‘trench religion’, the faith of the fighting men and the experiences of their chaplains. Using statistical evidence, wherever possible, Clive Field takes a look at the domestic front in a new article entitled ‘Keeping the Spiritual Home Fires Burning: Religious Belonging in Britain during the First World War’, War & Society, Vol. 33, No. 4, October 2014, pp. 244-68. He shows that church attendance rose briefly at the start of the war but fell away thereafter in the Protestant tradition, accelerating a pre-existing trend, which was not reversed after 1918. The disruption caused by the war to the everyday life of organized religion, Field suggests, probably accounted for the decrease, rather more than loss of faith. Church membership also declined during the war in the Anglican and mainstream Free Churches, albeit not for other denominations and faiths, but it temporarily revived after the war. This was not the case for non-member adherents and Sunday scholars whose reduction was more continuous. Access options for the article are outlined at: 

http://www.maneyonline.com/doi/full/10.1179/0729247314Z.00000000041

 

Posted in church attendance, Historical studies, News from religious organisations, Religion and Politics, Religion and Social Capital, Religion in public debate, Survey news, visualisation | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Religious Irreligious and Other News

Posted on May 5, 2014 by Clive D. Field

 

Religious irreligious

New research from OnePoll has found that 76% of people in the UK do not regard themselves as religious but many of them still exhibit signs of religiosity. The study was conducted online among 1,000 adults aged 18 and over and published in headline in Iona Hartshorn’s blog post of 29 April 2014, which can be found at:

http://www.onepoll.com/religious-rituals-from-non-religious-people/

Through the kindness of OnePoll, I have had access to the detailed computer tables and been given permission to draw upon them for this note. The data are obviously the copyright of OnePoll.

There are the standard breaks by age, gender, and region. Below we present a tabular summary of a slightly less usual break, by self-assessed religiosity:

%

Religious

Non-religious

Total
Believe in God

95

35

50
Ever attend religious services

82

27

41
Had a religious marriage

63

31

38
Want a religious funeral

85

32

45
Had been christened

81

68

71
Had own children christened

63

31

39
Attended a religious school

50

20

27
Own children attended a religious school

51

15

25
Ever pray

95

43

56
Ever say grace at mealtimes

40

6

14

There is also a break by belief in God, which reveals the sort of anomalies first surfaced in Mass-Observation’s classic 1947 study of Puzzled People. For example, OnePoll discovered that, of the believers in God, 53% did not consider themselves religious, 37% never went to church, 15% did not want a religious funeral, and 13% never prayed. Of disbelievers in God, 20% wanted a religious funeral, 8% prayed monthly or more, and 4% attended church monthly or more.

Doing God in politics

A high level of support for the sentiments expressed by Prime Minister David Cameron in his recent article in the Church Times is evident from the replies of almost 800 self-identifying members of the Conservative Party to a poll which went online on the Conservative Home website on 2 May 2014. Respondents were entirely self-selecting and cannot be assumed to be representative; indeed, some have already criticized the survey as a ‘voodoo poll’. Conservative members agreed overwhelmingly that Britain is a Christian country (85%) and should be a Christian country (86%). The majority (61%) also thought that politicians should ‘do God’, which seems to have been interpreted as meaning that they should speak about their faith in public, if they have one; 29% were opposed, with 10% uncertain. However, opinion was more divided about whether the role of faith-based organizations should be expanded, with 48% in favour and 42% against. Questions were also posed about the politics of the Church of England and its possible disestablishment, but results have not been reported yet. For analysis of the other questions, see Paul Goodman’s blog of 4 May 2014 at:

http://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2014/05/party-members-yes-cameron-should-do-god.html

Role models

Asked by Opinium Research to nominate the people whom they looked upon as their personal role models, relatively few UK citizens (6%) chose a religious figure, ranging by demographic sub-group between 2% in Wales and 12% in London. Overall, religious figures ranked eighth out of fourteen options, the list being headed (unsurprisingly) by parents (35%) and friends (19%). Online interviews were conducted with 2,001 adults aged 18 and over from 28 February to 3 March 2014. Data tables were published on 24 April and can be found at:

http://news.opinium.co.uk/sites/news.opinium.co.uk/files/op4269_opinium_pr_role_models_tables_wave_1.pdf

Rev

Talking of role models, the third (and final) series of the BBC2 sitcom Rev concluded on 28 April 2014. It starred Tom Hollander as Rev. Adam Smallbone, vicar of St Saviour in the Marshes in inner-city London. Among its audience were large numbers of practising Christians, according to an online survey of 1,943 adult members of Christian Research’s Resonate panel (1,188 churchgoing laity and 755 clergy) interviewed on 25 April 2014 for the upcoming Christian Resources Exhibition. Two-thirds of this sample (including 76% of clergy) had watched some of the third series, 71% of whom had seen more than three of the six episodes. Moreover, four-fifths of the viewers agreed with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who recently said of the programme that it was ‘great viewing’ and ‘doesn’t depress me quite as much as you might think’.

Seven in ten of these practising Christians who had watched Rev found Smallbone a believable character, 63% indicated they would be willing to attend a church led by him (with or without reservations), and 62% anticipated he would have a positive effect on non-churchgoers’ perceptions of ministers. Respondents who had seen Rev were also sympathetic to the plight of financially struggling churches which St Saviour’s exemplified, with 86% agreeing that wealthier places of worship should use part of their income to support poorer ones, and 53% disagreeing that churches which are unable to pay their way should be closed. Many clergy in the sample likewise empathized with Smallbone’s predicament, arguing more strongly than the laity (29% versus 22%) that their own church provided inadequate social and pastoral support, and listing a good number of sources of frustration in their work.

As a personal member of Christian Research, I have been able to see the organization’s draft report on the survey. Non-members can read the Christian Research news release at:

http://www.christian-research.org/resonate/bbc-s-rev-survey-of-viewers-attitudes/

More generally, Christian Research has published the 2014 tariff and panel demographics for Resonate, giving some idea of its profile and potential skews, at:

http://www.christian-research.org/uploads/images/CR-insert-Layout-combo.pdf

Faith schools

Attitudes to faith schools within the broader context of school choice are explored in the FirstView of an article in Journal of Social Policy which was published online on 15 April 2014: Stratos Patrikios and John Curtice, ‘Attitudes Towards School Choice and Faith Schools in the UK: A Question of Individual Preference or Collective Interest?’ Data derive from a module on perspectives on public services which was included in surveys fielded in 2007 in all four constituent territories of the UK: British Social Attitudes Survey, Scottish Social Attitudes Survey, Wales Life and Times Survey, and Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey.

Drawing on social identity theory, the authors suggest that, in general, attitudes towards faith-based schools owe more to religious identities and group interests associated with those identities rather than opinions about the merits of school choice informed by an individualistic utilitarian rationale. Although the abstract principle of school choice was very popular in these 2007 studies, and the concept of specialist schools was also backed by a majority, there was much greater public wariness about faith schools. However, the extent to which attitudes towards faith schools reflect religious identities is shown to vary between the four territories in line with the local landscapes of religion and educational provision.

The tables include breaks by religious affiliation (Catholic, Protestant, no religion) within each home nation. In all four countries support for faith schools was strongest among Catholics, and it was lowest in Scotland and Northern Ireland where the provision of faith schools is almost exclusively Catholic. It should be noted that the pattern of replies may have been influenced by a potential limitation in the question in that, while it sought views about faith schools overall, it also specifically referenced Roman Catholic schools. For access options to the article, go to:

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9239600

Anglican and Methodist church growth

Anglican and Methodist experiences of church growth and decline from the eighteenth century to today are contrasted, with special reference to case studies of Yorkshire and London, in John Wolffe, ‘Past and Present: Taking the Long View of Methodist and Anglican History’, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society, Vol. 59, No. 5, May 2014, pp. 161-77. Dipping into a range of quantitative sources, from the 1851 religious census to Peter Brierley’s contemporary church statistics, Wolffe explores the extent to which Methodism and Anglicanism have been partners or competitors at various stages of their development. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, it is argued, ‘Methodism … complemented the inherent inertia of the established Church of England by a capacity for swift and sometimes radical response to changing circumstances’. Subsequently, however, ‘the Anglican tortoise has often overtaken the Methodist hare, even as both are being pursued by the secular cheetah’. Wolffe also draws upon insights from the ‘Building on History’ project to demonstrate how history can be a resource to inform strategic thinking about present-day mission and ministry.

Violent anti-Semitism

The number of major violent incidents of anti-Semitism in the UK in 2013 was, at 95 or 17% of the global total of 554, second only to France (116), even though the UK is ranked but fifth in the world in terms of the size of its Jewish population. Outside of Israel, Jews are most numerous in the United States which recorded just 55 violent incidents of anti-Semitism in 2013, significantly fewer than the 83 in its less populous neighbour, Canada. Full details are contained in Antisemitism Worldwide, 2013, which was published by the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University on 28 April 2014. The report, which also includes (pp. 55-8) a summary by Mike White of all anti-Semitic incidents in the UK notified to the Community Security Trust in 2013, can be found at:

http://kantorcenter.tau.ac.il/sites/default/files/Doch_2013.pdf

BRIN website usage

The latest management information statistics about use of the BRIN website reveal continued steady growth in traffic. In the twelve months to 1 May 2014, 155,000 pages were viewed by 63,000 unique users in 77,000 sessions. The majority of sessions (70%) were UK-based, with 10% from the USA, and the remaining fifth from 180 different countries and territories. In the just over four years since traffic measurement began in March 2010 there have been 576,000 pageviews by 204,000 users in 263,000 sessions. We currently also have 335 followers on Twitter and would welcome more. A link to each new blog post (approximately weekly) or other substantive addition to the BRIN site is tweeted. So do join us @BritRelNumbers

 

Posted in Historical studies, News from religious organisations, Religion and Politics, Religion in public debate, Religion in the Press, Rites of Passage, Survey news | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Bible Literacy and Other News

Posted on February 7, 2014 by Clive D. Field

Bible literacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

European Quality of Life Survey

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

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

%

UK

UK

EU27

EU27
 

2007

2011

2007

2011
A lot of tension

32.5

33.7

28.8

28.0
Some tension

53.3

50.0

46.3

48.3
No tension

11.5

16.3

19.0

23.7

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

%

UK

UK

UK

EU25

EU27

EU27
 

2003

2007

2011

2003

2007

2011
Once a week or more

12.6

13.5

12.6

17.0

17.4

15.3
Less often

29.3

30.9

27.7

43.5

45.1

39.3
Never

58.0

54.9

59.7

39.5

36.6

45.4

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

Scottish Health Survey

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

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

%

2003

2012
None

39.5

38.7
Church of Scotland

33.2

35.2
Roman Catholic

14.4

15.6
Other Christian

11.3

7.2
Other religion

1.6

3.1

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

%

16-44

45-64

65+
None

52.5

33.5

15.9
Church of Scotland

20.6

40.6

59.5
Roman Catholic

17.9

14.0

13.0
Other Christian

4.8

8.7

10.2
Other religion

4.1

3.0

1.2

Justin Welby as hero

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

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

Religion and voting, 1940s/50s-style

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

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

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

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

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

1948   % across

None

Lab

Con

Lib

Other

Undecided

Uninterested
Not attend church

18

38

30

3

3

5

3
Church of England

12

23

52

4

1

5

3
Roman Catholic

17

41

25

3

1

5

3
Nonconformist

11

35

25

18

1

5

4
Church of Scotland

19

28

40

5

1

3

4
Other

23

34

27

8

1

4

3
All

15

30

40

6

1

5

3

 

1955   % across

None

Lab

Con

Lib

Other

Undecided

Uninterested
Not attend church

18

45

24

3

2

4

3
Church of England

11

30

46

5

1

4

3
Roman Catholic

19

47

24

3

1

3

3
Nonconformist

12

33

32

10

1

5

6
Church of Scotland

9

35

35

4

2

6

6
Other

17

32

29

8

2

3

7
All

13

35

37

5

1

4

4

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

 

Posted in church attendance, Historical studies, News from religious organisations, Official data, People news, Religion and Politics, Survey news | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Young Religion and Other News

Posted on January 31, 2014 by Clive D. Field

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

Youth on religion

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

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

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

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

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

Expectations of God

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

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

Same-sex marriage

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

SUPPORTIVE

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

NON-SUPPORTIVE

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

OTHER

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

ISSUES

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

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

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

Church of England health check

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

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

Lord Williams of Oystermouth’s Sharia moment

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

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

Methodists and deprivation

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

Methodists on the internet

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

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

National Jewish Community Survey

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

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

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

 

 

Posted in Attitudes towards Religion, church attendance, News from religious organisations, Official data, Religion and Ethnicity, Religion and Politics, Religion and Social Capital, Religion in the Press, Survey news | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Religious Vote and Other News

Posted on January 26, 2014 by Clive D. Field

Is there a religious vote?

A religious vote continues to exist in Britain, particularly as regards disproportionate Anglican and Jewish preferences for the Conservative Party and Catholic and Muslim preferences for the Labour Party. However, the association between religion and politics is by no means straightforward nor consistently strong (and probably weaker than yesteryear). It is also shaped by other socio-economic factors (notably class), and it is not necessarily driven by the saliency of religious or moral issues. Theo-political alignments certainly seem to be less powerful in Britain than the well-researched religious vote in the United States, albeit the latter can sometimes be exaggerated. These are some of the impressions left from a reading of the latest Theos report, published on 24 January 2014, by Ben Clements (University of Leicester) and Nick Spencer (Theos) on Voting and Values in Britain: Does Religion Count? It can be downloaded from:

http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/publications/2014/01/24/voting-and-values-in-britain-does-religion-count

This 123-page book, which packs in no fewer than 66 figures and 22 tables, is underpinned by secondary analysis of the British Election Studies from 1964 (including the special surveys of ethnic minorities in 1997 and 2010) and the British Social Attitudes Surveys since 2000. Its first two chapters map religious affiliation and attendance to voting yesterday (at 14 general elections between 1959 and 2010) and today (2010 and beyond, albeit omitting the recent large-scale polls by Lord Ashcroft, doubtless because he does not differentiate between Christian denominations). The third to fifth chapters map the same factors to three scales of political values (left versus right; libertarian versus authoritarian; and welfarist versus individualist), while an appendix presents the results of multivariate analysis of vote choice at the 2010 general election (drawing on the special internet panel of voters).

The findings and arguments of this work are (commendably) too nuanced and granular to restate here. Nobody could accuse the authors of over-simplification or of unevidenced assertions, such is the care with which the analysis and interpretation have been undertaken. They even resist a speculation about the likely effects on political behaviour and values of the progressive collapse of Anglican nominalism and rise of people of no religion. Consideration of the latter would have been especially interesting as they document a shift from libertarianism to authoritarianism among the ‘nones’ during the past decade. The book contains no overarching conclusion, although chapters 1 and 2 have separate summaries and conclusions, and the executive summary extends to 11 pages, reflecting the wide range of statistics.

Given all this complexity, by way of an appetizer, we confine ourselves to reproducing below a reformulated table 1.1 (p. 35) which shows average party vote share (in percentages) by religious group for all general elections between 1959 and 2010, calculated from the British Election Studies:

 

Conservative

Labour

Liberal/

Liberal

Democrat
Anglicans

47.8

35.5

15.4
Catholics

31.1

54.3

12.8
Nonconformists

41.5

36.9

19.3
Church of Scotland/Presbyterian

37.9

37.3

13.3
No religion

32.6

43.2

19.9

A Theos press release about the report, also issued on 24 January, offers a more bite-size overview under the heading ‘Anglicans are still “Tory Party at Prayer” but Muslims are Labour’s to Lose’. In it Spencer is quoted as saying that the report demonstrates that ‘religious block votes do not exist in Britain as many claim they do in America.’ On the other hand, he adds, ‘there are clear and significant alignments between various religious and political camps, of which politicians should be aware. At a time when mass party membership, political ideology and party tribalism are at a low ebb, we should pay attention to the big political values that shape our voting behaviour.’ The press release is at:

http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2014/01/24/anglicans-are-still-aotory-party-at-prayerao-but-muslims-are-labouraos-to-lose

Disestablishment of the Church of England

Clements and Spencer have also taken a fresh look at ‘Public Opinion in Britain towards the Disestablishment of the Church of England’ in the FirstView edition of their article for the Journal of Anglican Studies, published online on 17 January 2014, and available for non-subscribers to rent or purchase. The paper derives from responses to the question about the Church of England’s continuing establishment asked in the Alternative Vote Referendum Study in Spring 2011, the importance of which Clements has already flagged up in his BRIN post of 21 May 2012. The sample is a very large one (n = 22,124 for Britain and 18,556 for England), thereby permitting a very detailed analysis.

Overall, 56% in England agreed that the Church of England should keep its status as the official established Church, with 15% disagreeing, and 29% neutral or undecided. The figures for Britain were 54%, 16%, and 31% respectively. Respondents most supportive of disestablishment were found to be men, residents of Scotland, those with degree-level education, Liberal Democrat identifiers and others with left-wing and liberal policy preferences, and readers of The Guardian. No significant differences by age group were discovered, despite generational variations in religious belonging, beliefs, and practice evident in other surveys. A limitation of the data source is that no information was gathered about religious affiliation, so religion is the one variable which cannot be controlled for. The article can be accessed at:

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9151959&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S1740355313000399

Attitudes to the burka

Last summer and autumn we reported on a series of new polls of public attitudes to the wearing of the burka and full face-veil (niqab) by Muslim women in Britain. The issue is also live in several other Western countries, and the ethical, political, and legal dimensions of the matter are explored in a collection of French-language essays published on 16 January 2014: Quand la burqa passe à l’ouest: enjeux éthiques, politiques et juridiques, edited by David Koussens and Olivier Roy (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, ISBN 978-2-7535-2844-4, 280pp., €20). The chapters are a mixture of generic discussion and individual case studies, of France (particularly), Belgium, The Netherlands, Italy, and Quebec. The former include a digest of multinational polling about the burka and attitudes to Muslims in general by Ben Clements: ‘La burqa dans l’opinion publique des sociétés occidentales’ (pp. 39-52). It comprises 11 tables, with commentary, drawn from: Pew Global Attitudes Surveys in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011; European Values Surveys in 1990, 1999, and 2008; and Harris Interactive polls in 2006 and 2010. The discussion mostly centres on Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and the United States. A brief conclusion highlights some distinctive characteristics of French and American public opinion.

Counting blessings

The Church of England appears to be in research overdrive at the moment. Following the release on 16 January 2014 of key findings from its 18-month Church Growth Research Programme, two more studies were published last week. First, on 20 January, to coincide with ‘Blue Monday’ (often considered as the most depressing day of the entire year), the Church issued a press release encouraging people to ‘count your blessings’, informed by new YouGov online polling which the Church had commissioned among 2,084 Britons on 10-13 January. The survey revealed that only one in ten adults never ‘count their blessings’, in the sense of feeling grateful or lucky when reviewing their life situation, while a majority (51%) count them at least once a week, including 59% of women and the over-55s and 60% of the retired. Family and/or partner (53%) is deemed to be the single most important factor when counting blessings, followed by health (15%). No option was given to mention faith or religion as a blessing in its own right, nor to acknowledge that ‘blessings’ might have a supernatural origin, along the lines of Johnson Oatman’s famous hymn of 1897, which invited its hearers and singers to acknowledge ‘what the Lord hath done’. The Church’s press release, including a link to YouGov’s full data table, is at:

http://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2014/01/count-your-blessings-on-blue-monday,-says-cofe.aspx

Credit unions

Then, on 22 January 2014 the Church Urban Fund (CUF) published a preliminary research report on credit unions: Money Speaks Louder than Words: Credit Unions and the Role of the Church in Tackling Financial Exclusion. The Church has been advocating a greater role for credit unions to combat the social evils which are seen to stem from the rapid growth of the payday lending sector and is encouraging churchgoers to invest some of their savings in such unions. To test churchgoers’ experience of and attitudes to credit unions, the Church commissioned two pieces of research: a quantitative study of 385 churchgoers of all denominations aged 16-75 who worshipped at least once a year (among them 200 attending at least once a month), interviewed online by Ipsos MORI in December 2013; and six focus groups involving 54 regular Anglican churchgoers.

Among the Ipsos MORI panel past or present membership of credit unions by all churchgoers was found to be very low (5%), with only 22% feeling they knew a great deal or fair amount about such unions, and less than one-quarter willing to consider joining a credit union in future, even after they had been given a brief explanation of how the unions function. At the same time, 83% of churchgoers agreed that payday loans exploit those who cannot access other forms of credit, and around one-half that the Churches should engage with credit unions in some way. Overall conclusions drawn by CUF from the quantitative and qualitative research were that churchgoers: think there is a need to develop a more ethical financial system; are positive about credit unions in principle but have some concerns; and believe the Churches should help the credit union sector to grow. The report can be read at:

http://www.cuf.org.uk/money-speaks

Religious gypsies

On 21 January 2014 the Office for National Statistics published a report on What does the 2011 Census Tell Us about the Characteristics of Gypsy or Irish Travellers in England and Wales? The 2011 census represented the first time that the ethnic group question had included a dedicated tick box for the white ethnic sub-group of gypsy or Irish traveller (which is recognized under the Equality Act 2010), and, in the event, 58,000 people identified themselves as such in the census (albeit this figure is lower than previous estimates). The report itself makes only a couple of brief references to the religious affiliation of the gypsy or Irish traveller community, but fortunately the detail can be calculated from Table DC2201EW, showing ethnic group by religion, which has been available for some time.

Summary data (in percentages) are presented in the table below, from which it will be seen that the proportion of Christians among gypsies and Irish travellers was much the same as in the white population overall, but that 4.6% less professed no religion and 2.4% more declined to answer the question. The lower figure for ‘nones’ is especially interesting in that the median age of gypsies and Irish travellers in 2011 was 13 years less than in England and Wales (26 versus 39), and that ‘nones’ generally tend to be concentrated among younger cohorts. The predominance of Christians is unsurprising. Historically, there were quite close links between gypsies and Christian evangelism in Britain, explored in a 2003 book by David Lazell, with Gypsy Smith one of the most famous revivalists of the early twentieth century.

 

Gypsy or Irish Traveller

All white people

All persons
Christian

64.1

63.9

59.3
Buddhist

0.7

0.2

0.4
Hindu

0.2

0.0

1.5
Jewish

0.4

0.5

0.5
Muslim

0.7

0.4

4.8
Sikh

0.2

0.0

0.8
Other religion

1.4

0.4

0.4
No religion

22.7

27.3

25.1
Not stated

9.6

7.2

7.2

 

 

Posted in Historical studies, News from religious organisations, Official data, Religion and Politics, Religion in public debate, Religious Census, Survey news | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Roman Catholic and Other Statistics

Posted on January 11, 2014 by Clive D. Field

A belated Happy New Year to all readers of BRIN! It has been a slowish start to 2014 in terms of new religious statistical sources, but here is a selection of seven stories to replenish your stock of data.

Roman Catholic statistics

In our post of 1 February 2013 we reported that the editor of the Catholic Directory of England and Wales had decided to discontinue publication therein of the annual statistical supplement, which had appeared for a century, as a result of her lack of confidence in the quality of the data, especially regarding their consistency. The Tablet for 21/28 December 2013 reported that, ‘thanks to the efforts of a former banker’, the statistics would be reinstated in the 2014 edition of the Catholic Directory. This has yet to appear (it will be published later this month), but, in the meantime, Tony Spencer of the Pastoral Research Centre Trust (PRCT) has just released a preliminary table of pastoral and population statistics of the Catholic community in England and Wales for 2011 and 2012, based on a careful (but still not quite complete) editing and reconciliation of data for each of the 22 dioceses. Figures for all years between 2001 and 2012 will be available in due course. The 2011-12 picture is one of continuing decline on several performance measures, of 2.2% in the estimated Catholic population, 1.8% in Mass attendance in October (with only one-fifth of Catholics now at Mass), 3.7% in baptisms, and 18.5% in receptions of converts. There was a modest (0.5%) rise in marriages, but the figure includes mixed marriages and those celebrated in Anglican churches which were authorized by the Catholic parish priest. Deaths were 0.9% less in 2012 than 2011, with the Catholic death rate being 9.7 per 1,000. The PRCT table will be found at:

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

The data were covered by two broadsheet newspapers in their editions of 4 January 2014, The Times suggesting that the pattern of long-term decline (associated with child abuse scandals) might be reversed by the ‘Francis effect’, The Daily Telegraph concentrating on the increase in late baptisms of children (after their first birthday), which it attributed to ‘a scramble for places at the most popular Roman Catholic schools’. The Roman Catholic weekly, The Tablet, also noted the possible ‘Francis effect’ from 2013 when it ran the story a week later (11 January 2014), headlining ‘Mass Attendance Down but London Bucks the Trend’.

BRIN was contacted by the Catholic Herald for an assessment of the statistics, and we are quoted in that newspaper’s report in its edition of 10 January 2014 (p. 3 – there is also an editorial on p. 13). In more detail, the points we made were:

  • There are long-standing concerns about the quality of many Roman Catholic statistics (especially estimated Catholic population), arising from the absence of a national infrastructure for data collection and quality control, such as exists, for example, in the Church of England.
  • In many senses the decline in the Roman Catholic Church mirrors what is happening in mainstream Christian denominations in this country. However, the underlying fall would almost certainly have been much greater but for the boost given to the Church by immigration from Eastern Europe in recent years.
  • In both the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England alienation is linked to the growing gulf between official Church teaching and the views of active and nominal members. This has been demonstrated by Professor Linda Woodhead’s recent research. For her study of Catholics, see: http://faithdebates.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/WFD-Catholics-press-release.pdf
  • Optimists in the Roman Catholic Church suggest that decline may be reversed by the ‘Francis effect’. We are more sceptical about this since a similar argument was put forward for the ‘Benedict bounce’ following the 2010 papal visit. It did not materialize, as the Opinion Research Business polls commissioned by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference in 2010 and 2011 demonstrated, and as confirmed by the Church’s statistics for 2009 and 2010 summarized at: http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/2012/catholic-directory-2012/

Religion and politics

Lord Ashcroft’s latest political poll, published on 4 January 2014 and conducted online by Populus on 4-10 November 2013, included the standard background question about membership of religious groups, asked of a very large sample (n = 8,053). The proportion identifying as of no religion was, at 38%, identical to that reported in the two YouGov polls for the Westminster Faith Debates, which we covered in our last post of 30 December 2013. These ‘nones’ constituted a majority (51%) of the 18-24s in Ashcroft’s survey and a plurality (44%) of the 25-34s, with Christianity being the leading faith for other demographic sub-groups, averaging 53% and peaking at 71% of over-65s. In political terms, ‘nones’ were most likely to be found among people who had voted Liberal Democrat at the 2010 general election (44%) or the smaller number intending to vote Liberal Democrat now (41%). They were least likely to be encountered among Conservative supporters (27% in both 2010 and 2013), who were disproportionately Christian (66% in 2013). Of those who had voted Conservative in 2010 and intended to do so again, 68% were Christian, falling to 65% for voters who had defected from the Conservatives since 2010, 57% for adults who had switched to the Conservatives since 2010, and 52% for those who had not been Conservative in the past but indicated they might be in the future. UKIP supporters were 10% more likely to identify as Christian than the norm and Labour supporters 4% less. Non-Christians favoured Labour, and this was especially true of Muslims. Superficially (other factors are at work, of course), the historic connection between religion and voting is by no means extinguished. For more data, see table 69 at:

http://lordashcroftpolls.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Blueprint-4-Full-tables.pdf

Also, watch out for the forthcoming Theos report by Ben Clements and Nick Spencer on Voting and Values in Britain: Does Religion Count? BRIN will cover this as soon after publication as possible.

Religion and age

The lead story on the front page of The Times for 10 January 2014 (subscription access online) was a curiously headlined article by Dominic Kennedy, the newspaper’s investigations editor, on ‘Rise in Muslim Birthrate as Families “Feel British”: Census Figures Reveal “Startling” Shift in Demographic Trend’. Its key underlying fact, taken from the 2011 census, was that ‘almost a tenth of babies and toddlers in England and Wales are Muslim … almost twice as high as in the general population’; in stark contrast, ‘fewer than one in 200 over-85s are Muslim’. Expert comments on the findings were sought and quoted from two of the country’s leading demographers, Professors David Coleman of the University of Oxford and David Voas of the University of Essex (and BRIN). Voas apparently said that he saw no prospect of Muslims becoming a majority in Britain, although he did foresee that Muslims who worshipped might outnumber practising Christians one day (which several other pundits have also been predicting for a decade or more). The story in The Times, which has been widely reported in other print and online media in Britain and worldwide, was not actually based on any new analysis of census data by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) but on a hitherto little noticed ad hoc ONS table (CT0116, created on 18 October 2013), giving a detailed breakdown of religion in England and Wales by sex by age in 2011. This was pointed out by Ami Sedghi in her post on The Guardian’s Datablog on 10 January 2014, which helpfully includes a link to the table, rather implying that The Times was raking over ‘old news’, and additionally observing that the census actually recorded more children aged 0-4 as having no religion as those who were Muslim. The blog can be read at:

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/jan/10/rise-british-muslim-birthrate-the-times-census

Gift aid and the Church of England

Gift aid (introduced in 1990) has been an important factor in helping the Church of England to grow its real income consistently over the past two decades, according to a post on the Civil Society blog on 17 December 2013. The Church collects over £80 million of gift aid and tax refunds each year, and it accounts for 8% of all gift aid by value and 15% by volume. Although the number of adults in usual Sunday congregations of the Church of England declined by 27% between 1980 and 2010, tax-effective subscribers (using covenants and gift aid) rose by 38% over the same period, with tax-effective subscribers equivalent to 72% of usual Sunday congregations by 2010 (almost double the 38% of 1980). More information at:

http://www.civilsociety.co.uk/fundraising/blogs/content/16600/gift_aid_does_make_a_difference_to_giving_ask_the_church_of_england

Violence against the clergy

The Sunday Telegraph of 5 January and The Times of 6 January 2014 both included reports about ‘hundreds of violent attacks on the clergy’, the story subsequently being run by the Church Times on 10 January. The articles drew upon data obtained by right-of-centre think-tank Parliament Street through Freedom of Information requests submitted to police forces in England, of which 25 responded. The replies suggested that there had been more than 200 violent attacks on clergy over the past five years, a number thought to be just ‘the tip of the iceberg’ because of the inadequate and inconsistent recording of such offences. Parliament Street, which has not posted its data online, is calling upon Government to recognize attacks on clergy as constituting a religiously motivated hate crime, which would thereby attract severer penalties. The organization National Churchwatch has also been active since 2000 in documenting anti-Christian hate crime. However, so far as BRIN is aware, the best source of empirical evidence on the subject of the clergy remains the ESRC-funded research into violence against three groups of professionals (including clergy) undertaken by Royal Holloway, University of London in 1998-2001, details of which appear in the final project report at:

http://www.esrc.ac.uk/my-esrc/grants/L133251036/read

State-sanctioned surveillance

In an online Resonate poll conducted by Christian Research since the leaks emanating from former American security contractor Edward Snowden, the majority (77%) of 1,134 UK practising Christians sensed that mass intelligence-gathering by the state in the UK is increasing, but 82% agreed that it is justified in order to prevent acts of terrorism and 69% considered that the level of CCTV in operation in their area was about right. The results were disclosed by the Church Times in its issue of 3 January 2014 (p. 6). Characteristically, no further information is available on Christian Research’s website. However, the website does record that membership of the Resonate Christian omnibus panel has now reached 14,000 and that surveys will be run monthly from January 2014.

Jewish emigration to Israel

Jewish immigration to Israel in 2013 was modestly (1%) up on 2012, according to data collected by the Jewish Agency for Israel and the Israel Ministry of Immigration and Absorption. However, the number of Jews leaving the UK for Israel (making aliyah) in 2013 was, at 510, 27% down on the previous year, albeit close to the average since the beginning of the Millennium (the range being from 300 in 2002 to 800 in 2009). This decline compared with a rise of 35% in Western Europe (and 63% in France); in the United States there was a reduction of 13%. Emigrants to Israel from the UK constituted 12% of the Western European total and 3% of the world figure. The fall in UK emigrants is attributed by some to the improving economic situation and lessened anti-Semitism in the UK, and by others to a weaker focus on aliyah following a radical restructuring of the Jewish Agency two years ago. This note derives from a press release issued by the Israeli embassy in London on 30 December 2013 and from coverage in the Jewish Chronicle for 3 January 2014. The full data do not yet appear on the Jewish Agency’s website.

 

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Christmas and Other Themes

Posted on December 19, 2013 by Clive D. Field

The Christmas season always seems to inspire some light-hearted as well as serious research, and our post today includes festive examples of both genres, plus a few other statistical news stories which have come to hand in the past week or so. They clear BRIN’s decks this side of Christmas, but we shall be back again shortly afterwards.

Contemporary nativity

If Jesus was born in the UK today, it would most probably be in the Yorkshire Dales (27%) or London (24%), according to the 1,000 UK adults aged 18 and over who completed an online survey by OnePoll on 25 November 2013. Moreover, his likeliest birthplace today would be a garden shed (32%), Premier Inn or Travelodge (18%), or a squat (15%). A chocolate orange (14%) or socks (11%) topped the list of presents for this contemporary Jesus. Asked which nativity character they would prefer to be, an angel (25%, rising to 40% of females, even though every angelic name in the Bible is masculine) or a wise man (22% overall, 30% among males) were the most popular choices, with Mary and Joseph trailing well behind on 8% and 4% respectively. The University of Manchester scientist Professor Brian Cox exemplified a modern wise man for 31% of respondents, followed by newsreader Sir Trevor McDonald (16%), and entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson (12%); only 9% saw the current Archbishop of Canterbury as fitting the part of a wise man. Full data tables (with breaks by gender, age, and region) were released by the Bible Society, which commissioned the poll, on 17 December 2013 and are available at:

http://www.biblesociety.org.uk/uploads/content/news/files/December%202013/2013-Nativity—full-data-tables.pdf

Nativity plays

The overwhelming majority (83%) of 480 working fathers surveyed by officebroker.com said they found it difficult to get time off work to see their child perform in a nativity play, and only 16% were able to do so every year. Although 89% professed they would like to attend the nativity, regardless of the role played by their child, a choosier 11% of dads would only go if their child was playing the part of Mary or Joseph. The principal source of data about the survey is the online edition of the Daily Mail for 12 December 2013 at:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2522280/The-dads-wont-attend-nativity-plays.html

Christmas cards

One-third of UK businesses claim to be shying away from sending Christmas cards to customers this year for fear of offending their personal beliefs and being seen as insensitive. This is according to research conducted by Your Say Pays on behalf of Pitney Bowes in December 2013 among an online sample of 1,000 business respondents. See the Pitney Bowes press release dated 11 December 2013 at:

http://pressroom.pitneybowes.co.uk/festive-cheer-feels-the-pinch-as-consumers-cut-back-on-christmas-cards/

Christmas carols

O Holy Night, first performed in 1847, has topped Premier Christian Radio’s poll of Christmas carols, it was announced on 15 December 2013. The poll had been running on the Premier website for several weeks and was completed by a self-selecting sample. O Holy Night (Cantique de Noël, with words by Placide Clappeau and melody by Charles Adam) took 15% of the vote. It narrowly beat Hark the Herald Angels Sing (14%), with In the Bleak Midwinter in third place on 11%. Silent Night, which tends to head most other lists of favourite carols, came fourth on this particular list, with 9% support. Joy to the World was fifth (7%). The full top ten can be seen at:

http://www.christiantoday.com/article/o.holy.night.is.nations.favourite.carol/35064.htm

Christmas churchgoing

Of 3,330 readers of The Sun, 9% anticipate they will go to church this Christmas, according to a yuletide survey published in today’s edition (19 December 2013, pp. 20-1) of the newspaper. No details of methodology are given. The figure is almost certainly likely to be aspirational in large part, reflecting good intentions that will not be translated into reality. Nevertheless, the proportion is somewhat lower than in more representative polls of the adult British population conducted in recent years. The lower incidence of Christmas churchgoing among readers of The Sun probably reflects the fact that they are more likely to be men and manual workers (as revealed in the National Readership Survey), groups which are relatively poor attenders at public worship.

Bible knowledge

Although four-fifths of Britons claim to have read the Bible, they are often ignorant about its content, according to a new online poll of 2,000 adults commissioned to mark the release on 26 December 2013 of DVD and Blu-Ray editions of The Bible mini-series, recently shown on UK television (Channel 5). Even the true significance of Christmas Day was a mystery to 16%, while one-fifth had no idea that Christ died on Good Friday, and one-quarter was unfamiliar with the story of God creating the world in six days. Sadly, this is one of those media-sponsored surveys for which it is virtually impossible to lay one’s hands on the full results. The best report BRIN has seen to date, and that was very brief, appeared in The Times for 14 December 2013. We will keep searching, but we suggest that you do not build your hopes up!

Fifty-six years on

In February 1957 Social Surveys (Gallup Poll) Limited carried out a major opinion poll into religion on behalf of the News Chronicle, 2,261 Britons aged 16 and over being interviewed face-to-face. Many of these questions have just been replicated by YouGov for Prospect, among an online sample of 1,681 Britons aged 18 and over on 24-25 November 2013. The following 1957-2013 comparison has been constructed from Peter Kellner’s article, ‘Ye of Little Faith’, in Prospect, Issue 214, January 2014, pp. 40-1 (supplemented by Gallup’s 1957 documentation).

%

1957

2013
God
Personal God

41

17
Spirit/life force

37

52
Neither

6

28
Don’t know

16

23
Jesus Christ
Son of God

71

27
Just a man

9

29
Just a story

6

22
Don’t know

14

21
Devil
Is

34

22
Is not

42

49
Don’t know

24

29
Life after death
Is

54

33
Is not

17

33
Don’t know

29

34
Religion
Can answer today’s problems

46

19
Largely old-fashioned

27

58
Don’t know

27

23
World’s need
Greater economic security

48

81
More religion

36

8
Don’t know

16

11
Church and politics
Keep out

53

41
Express views

36

45
Don’t know

11

14
Church-State connection
Should continue

37

27
Should end

37

51
Don’t know

26

23

YouGov also polled its respondents about a couple of other topics not probed by Gallup in 1957, although they have been covered in subsequent surveys by other companies. Asked about the origin of life on earth, only 8% in 2013 subscribed to the biblical account, 14% opted for intelligent design, 60% believed in the theory of evolution, and 19% were uncertain. On the Resurrection of Christ, 26% believed that He had returned to life on the third day after crucifixion, 48% did not, and 26% were undecided.

Kellner’s take on these statistics is, unsurprisingly, that there has been ‘a collapse of faith in the central tenets of Christianity’ during the past half-century. Certainly, there have been substantial falls in key traditional beliefs, of 24% in a personal God, 44% in Jesus as the Son of God, and 21% in life after death. At the same time, there have been steep rises of 31% in those thinking religion an irrelevance to solving modern problems, and of 33% in the conviction that greater economic security – not religion – is what the world needs. A majority (51%) now favours the disestablishment of the Church of England.

Full data tables from this poll are now (21 December 2013) available at:

http://cdn.yougov.com/cumulus_uploads/document/3s35pyaa5c/YG-Archive-131125-Prospects.pdf

Freedom of religion

Freedom of thought, conscience, and religion (which is protected under Article 9 of the Human Rights Act 1998) is regarded as vital or important by 89% of Britons, and as useful by 6%, with only 4% viewing this right as unnecessary. This is according to the results of a telephone poll conducted by ComRes for Liberty among 1,002 adults aged 18 and over on 22-24 November 2013, and published on 10 December to mark United Nations Human Rights Day. This was a higher level of support for freedom of religion than in previous annual ComRes surveys, the first of which appears to have been undertaken in May 2009. Nevertheless, freedom of religion was somewhat less prized than some other freedoms, respect for privacy, family life, and the home being deemed vital or important by 97%, with 96% saying the same about the right to a fair trial and the protection of property. The data table, with breaks by demographics, can be found at:

http://www.comres.co.uk/polls/Liberty_Human_Rights_Tracker_Data_Tables_November_2013.pdf

Gender segregation

Gender segregation for religious reasons at meetings of university societies and groups is strongly opposed by the British public, according to a YouGov poll for The Sunday Times published on 15 December 2013, in which 1,846 adults aged 18 and over were interviewed online on 12-13 December. Only 12% thought separate seating areas for men and women should be allowed on campus, although the proportion rose to one-fifth among 18-39s. Opponents of gender segregation stood at 69%, peaking at 85% of over-60s and Liberal Democrats, with 19% uncertain what to think. The survey was triggered by Universities UK guidelines (withdrawn on 13 December following intervention by the Prime Minister and others) which suggested that segregation was permissible if no disadvantage was caused. The debate has mainly centred on segregation of audiences at university Islamic societies. Full results of the YouGov poll are available at:

http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/jljqincr91/YG-Archive-Pol-Sunday-Times-results-131213.pdf

BRIN source database update

The annual update of the BRIN source database has just taken place. New entries have been created for 129 British religious statistical sources, of which 83 date from 2013 and 46 from previous years. This brings the total of sources described in the database to 2,243. The 2013 sources include many important sample surveys, such as the three commissioned for the Westminster Faith Debates, and polls on topical issues, such as religion and same-sex marriage, the state of the Catholic Church under the two popes of 2013, Islamist terrorism (especially after the murder of Lee Rigby), and Muslim women’s dress. Moreover, 37 existing entries have been updated, mostly by additional subject keywords and/or publication references. The source database, which is searchable in multiple ways, can be found at:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/sources/

Early Christmas present

Many BRIN readers will be aware of the hard work put in by Dr Siobhan McAndrew at the University of Manchester in helping to establish BRIN when she was our full-time project officer in 2008-10, and of her various contributions to the website since that time. We now extend to her and her husband our warmest congratulations on the birth of their daughter, Ramona, on 7 December 2013 at St Mary’s Hospital, Manchester. As we are supposed to be good at statistics, we had better quote the birth weight, which was 4lb. 14oz. Siobhan and daughter are now back home, and both are fine, Siobhan tells us in a recent email.

 

Posted in church attendance, Historical studies, News from religious organisations, People news, Religion and Politics, Religion in public debate, Religion in the Press, Survey news | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment