Alcohol, Young People and Religion

Young people who profess no religion are significantly more likely to have had an alcoholic drink than those with a faith. Indeed, religion is one of the most important factors affecting the likelihood of youth’s consumption of alcohol. This is according to bivariate and multivariate analytical research published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on 17 June.

Details of the study are to be found in Pamela Bremner, Jamie Burnett, Fay Nunney, Mohammed Ravat (all of Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute) and Willm Mistral (University of Bath), Young People, Alcohol and Influences: A Study of Young People and their Relationship with Alcohol and in the associated technical document. These may be downloaded from:

http://www.jrf.org.uk/publications/young-people-alcohol-and-influences

Fieldwork was undertaken by means of self-completion questionnaire administered by Ipsos MORI, in invigilated classroom conditions, to a representative sample of 5,785 teenagers aged 13-14 (year 9) and 15-16 (year 11) attending all types of secondary schools in England (apart from special schools). The fieldwork dates were 9 February to 22 May 2009.

In year 9 30% of pupils had never had an alcoholic drink and 70% had, but the latter proportion stood at 81% for those with no religion and dropped to 62% among those with a faith. Drinkers in year 11 numbered 89%, 94% of those without religion and 84% with one.

Among believers, Christians were far more disposed to have drunk alcohol than Muslims, 71% and 13% respectively in year 9, 91% and 26% in year 11. Thus, 87% of year 9 and 74% of year 11 Muslims had not drunk. In fact, across both age groups, the odds of Muslims having had alcoholic drink were 25 times lower than for non-Muslims.

Of those who had never consumed alcohol 25% in year 9 and 34% in year 11 gave religious reasons for not drinking, and these were disproportionately Muslims. In general, however, young people mostly rationalized their abstinence in secular terms, such as lack of interest and potential damage to health, more than on religious grounds.

One-half of both years 9 and 11 identified with a religion, four-fifths of them with Christianity. The number professing no religion edged up from 44% to 48% between years 9 and 11, while those saying their religious beliefs were important to them fell from 26% to 20%. Many believers were apparently fairly nominal. Listeners to religious music were only 7%, and they were three times less likely to have drunk alcohol than non-listeners.

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Membership of Groups

6% of adult Britons claim to belong to a ‘church group or bible study’, according to a YouGov poll released today, and conducted online among a sample of 2,451 adult Britons on 16 and 17 June 2011 on behalf of The Sunday Times. The full results are available at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/yg-archives-pol-st-results-17-190611.pdf

Respondents were asked whether they were members of twenty groups or organizations, including the three main political parties. 51% said they belonged to none of them. Trade unions and gyms topped the list (at 12% each), followed by the National Trust (10%), with church groups in fourth position, just ahead of football clubs (5%).

Membership of church groups never reached double figures among any demographic sub-group. The highest (9%) was in Scotland, with public sector employees and current Liberal Democrat voters on 8%, and the 18-24s, over-60s and non-manual workers on 7% each. The smallest numbers were found among the 25-39s (3%), manual workers (4%) and private sector workers (4%).

The meaning of membership was not defined in the question, and ‘church group or bible study’ implies a Christian basis. Also, this type of enquiry tends to encourage exaggeration, with people replying aspirationally. For example, 10% of adults claiming membership of the National Trust points to the organization having 4.7 million members, whereas the reality (in the last National Trust annual report) is exactly a million less.

At the same time, claimed membership of church groups in this poll is lower than Peter Brierley’s estimates of church membership for 2010, 11% of the population aged 15 and over in the UK (9% in England and Wales and 18% in Scotland). However, his statistics incorporate mass attendance for Roman Catholics who have no concept of membership.

Brierley’s data have yet to be published in full. They will appear in his forthcoming book Church Statistics, which we will cover on BRIN when it is published. Meanwhile, there are previews of his figures in his articles in FutureFirst, No. 15, June 2011, pp. 1, 4 and Church of England Newspaper, 10 June 2011, p. 17.

The YouGov poll is naturally relevant within the context of the long-standing counter-assertion to the secularization thesis, that the undisputed decline in church membership and attendance simply mirrors a more general retreat from association and a privatization of society as a whole.

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Turbulent Priest?

The nation is split down the middle about whether senior clergy should comment on political issues, according to a new survey. This follows the Archbishop of Canterbury’s guest-editorship of last week’s issue of the left-leaning New Statesman magazine, which provided Rowan Williams with a platform to critique the Coalition Government’s policies.

The topic is one of several covered in YouGov’s latest weekly poll for The Sunday Times, in which a representative sample of 2,728 adult Britons aged 18 and over was interviewed online on 9 and 10 June 2011. The relevant data appear on page 9 of the tables at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/yg-archives-pol-st-results-10-120611.pdf

45% of respondents considered it right for senior clerics to intervene in political debates and 44% disagreed. There was a sharp split on party political lines. Whereas 69% of current Conservative voters opposed clerical intervention, 64% of Labour supporters endorsed it, with Liberal Democrats divided on 47% for each position. Age also made some difference, approval of senior clerical involvement in politics rising from 36% among the 18-24s to 49% among the over-40s.

More specifically, interviewees were asked what they thought about the Archbishop’s criticism of the Government for introducing ‘radical, long-term policies for which no one voted’ in the 2010 general election and which were instilling ‘fear’ with the public. 47% agreed with his assessment while 35% disagreed and 18% expressed no opinion.

On this question the party political gulf was even wider. 75% of current Conservative supporters disagreed with the Archbishop and 81% of Labour voters sided with him. Liberal Democrats divided 39% for and 45% against, notwithstanding that the Liberal Democrats are in coalition with the Conservatives in Government, and that the policies under criticism are (supposedly) jointly owned by them. Among those who voted Liberal Democrat in 2010 (three times as many who incline to the Liberal Democrats now) 56% agreed with Williams.

The other notable demographic was the above average support for the Archbishop’s views among residents of Northern England (56%) and Scotland (53%). This presumably manifests a perception that these parts of the nation are being particularly adversely affected by the Government policies which Williams was attacking.

For Conservatives, the Archbishop’s entry on the political stage (by no means his first – he recently voiced his discomfort about the killing by United States special forces of the unarmed Osama bin Laden) has doubtless brought back unwelcome memories of Robert Runcie’s clashes with Margaret Thatcher’s administration during the 1980s. For Labour supporters the appearance of Williams’s article in the New Statesman has provided them with an unexpected opportunity to land a punch on the Coalition Government.      

It would naturally be interesting to see how political opinion would play out were the boot to be on the other foot, an Archbishop of Canterbury criticizing the policies of a Labour Government!

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Immigrant Religiosity

First-generation immigrants to the UK are three times as likely as natives to claim to attend religious services at least weekly and to pray in private daily. They are also more religious than immigrants to most other European countries on the same two measures.

This is according to a newly-published journal article by two social scientists at Utrecht University: Frank van Tubergen and Jorunn Sindradottir, ‘The Religiosity of Immigrants in Europe: a Cross-National Study’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 50, No. 2, June 2011, pp. 272-88. See, in particular, the table on page 281.

The data are drawn from European Social Survey, Rounds 1-4 (2002-09), in which representative samples of adults aged 15 and over were interviewed. Tubergen and Sindradottir, however, have focused on a sub-sample of 10,117 first-generation immigrants living in 27 receiving countries, of whom 731 had come to the UK.

33% of immigrants to the UK said they attended religious services at least weekly, compared with 18% of all European immigrants. Indeed, immigrants to the UK came second only to their counterparts in Poland (63%) on this indicator. For UK natives reported weekly attendance was 11% against a continental mean of 17%.

48% of immigrants to the UK prayed daily outside religious services against 30% of immigrants to European countries as a whole. The UK figure was again the highest of all nations except for Poland (62%). 17% of UK natives prayed daily, less than the continental average of 22%.

Self-assessed religiosity was measured on a scale of 0 (not at all religious) to 10 (very religious). Immigrants to the UK scored 5.83 overall, better than the European immigrant mean of 5.44, although on this occasion seven countries recorded a higher figure. UK natives scored 4.04 compared with 4.82 for natives across all Europe.

The UK sub-sample of first-generation immigrants was obviously insufficiently large to permit further disaggregation, particularly by religious affiliation. It is probable that the greater propensity of immigrants to the UK to worship and pray regularly was driven by the high proportion with Roman Catholic and Muslim backgrounds.

The dataset for European Social Survey, Rounds 1-4 is available at the Economic and Social Data Service as SN 4732.

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Attitudes towards Different Religious Groups in Britain: Survey Data Sources

As well as evidence from opinion polls, data collected in social surveys allow us to explore and explain attitudes towards different religious groups in Britain. This post highlights some of the survey resources – available for general usage – which allow researchers to examine public views towards religious groups in Britain.

The three surveys used are:
the European Values Study;
the Pew Global Attitudes Project surveys; and
the British Social Attitudes surveys.

The surveys use different types of questions in order to gauge attitudes towards religious groups, and I give some summaries here. For each survey, the data are weighted so that the results are demographically representative.

1. European Values Study (EVS)
The EVS includes a British sample as part of its multi-national focus. It has undertaken surveys in 1981, 1990, 1998 and 2008. In each survey it has asked this question:

‘On this list are various groups of people. Could you please sort out any that you would not like to have as neighbours?’

It has asked about a range of social groups, not just those belonging to different religious faiths. Also, the religious categories asked about have varied across surveys. Muslims and Jews have been asked about in every survey from 1990 onwards, while other groups have been included in just a single survey. Table 1 gives the proportions (%) in each survey who mention that they would not like to have a particular religious group as neighbours.

BC1

Table 1 shows that, for the two groups asked about in nearly every survey – Muslims and Jews – the proportions who would not want them as neighbours have fallen over time. For Muslims, it has declined from 16.8 per cent to 12.2 per cent; for Jews from 7.2 per cent to 3.1 per cent. In 1981 a broader category – ‘minority religious groups’ – was used, and around a fifth expressed disapproval (21.6 per cent).

The other religious groups asked about have varied. In the latest survey (2008), just 1.6 per cent would not like to have Christians as neighbours, compared to 12 per cent for Hindus (asked about in 1990) and 12.6 per cent for Sikhs (asked about in 1998). Comparisons could be made with public attitudes in a range of other countries included in the EVS.

Further information and datasets are available at http://www.europeanvaluesstudy.eu/

2. Pew Global Attitudes Project (GAP)

The Pew GAP has since 2004 asked about attitudes towards Jews, Muslims and Christians in its cross-national surveys (with the exception of the 2007 survey). For each of these groups, respondents are asked:

‘On a different topic, please tell me if you have a very favourable, somewhat favourable, somewhat unfavourable or very unfavourable opinion of …[a particular religious group]’.

Responses to this question for the most recent survey – undertaken in 2009 – are shown below in Table 2 (for the British sample). Attitudes are most favourable towards Christians (82.2 per cent respond ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’) compared to Jews (75.4 per cent) and Muslims (64.5 per cent). Respondents are more likely to offer a ‘don’t response’ for Jews and Muslims. Again, interesting comparisons can be undertaken with other countries included in the GAP surveys.

bc2

Further information and datasets: http://pewglobal.org/category/data-sets/

3. British Social Attitudes (BSA)

The BSA 2008 survey asked about feelings towards various religiously-defined groups. It used a series of ‘thermometer’ scales – ranging from 0 through to 100 – in order to measure whether people feel warm (or cold) towards particular groups. Higher scores (i.e. above 50) represent warmer feelings.

In their recent study (American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, 2010), Putnam and Campbell argue that feeling thermometers represent an ‘effective way of gauging the gut-level feeling people have towards different groups’ (p. 503). Their analysis of attitudes in the United States using ‘thermometer’ scores found that the most unpopular religious groups were Muslims and Buddhists, along with Mormons (p. 507). The most positive assessments were of Jews, mainline Protestants and Catholics (p. 506).

In the BSA 2008 survey respondents were asked to rate their feelings towards seven groups:
– Protestant people (including Church of England, Church of Scotland, Anglican, Methodist, and others);
– Catholic people;
– Jewish people;
– Muslim people;
– Buddhist people;
– People who are deeply religious; and
– People who are not religious.

The average score for each group is shown in Figure 1 (in ascending order), revealing significant variation in feelings. Muslim people and people who are deeply religious received the lowest mean scores. Catholic people and Protestant people received the highest average scores, followed by people who are not religious. Jewish people and Buddhist people were very close to or the same as the average mean score across groups (56.1).

bc3

Further information and datasets: http://www.esds.ac.uk/government/bsa/

Further reading
– Putnam, R. D. and D. E. Campbell (2010). American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. New York: Simon & Schuster.
– Voas, D. and R. Ling (2010), ‘Religion in Britain and the United States’, A. Park et al (eds), British Social Attitudes 26th Report. London: Sage.

Dr Ben Clements
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester

bc101@leicester.ac.uk

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Mental Health of Clergy

Two-thirds of the Anglican stipendiary clergy replying to a survey by Morgan Lewis Consultants were keen to see guaranteed confidential support for the clergy for mental health problems and difficulties with emotional well-being and stress. This need came well ahead of their other health priorities such as sponsorship of a group clergy insurance scheme (15%) and an annual ‘MOT’ for clergy (10%).

The study was commissioned by St Luke’s Healthcare for the Clergy, the charity formed following the closure and sale in 2009 of St Luke’s Hospital for the Clergy (established by Canon Henry Cooper in 1892), which had run into financial difficulties. The research was designed to inform the charity’s future mission and strategy through a better understanding of the health needs of contemporary clergy.

The consultants sent 18,000 letters to active and retired Anglican clergy in November 2009 and received replies from 630 (a mere 3.5%). 510 came from stipendiary clergy and 110 from the retired. It seems probable that respondents were disproportionately former patients or otherwise aware of the hospital and thus may not constitute a statistically representative sample of all Anglican clergy.

Retired clergy had a different set of health desiderata to serving incumbents, principally financial help towards dental, optical or audiological treatment (30%), private insurance to be used in the event that the NHS could not deliver (25%), and assistance with the problems of old age such as Alzheimer’s disease (20%).

Church of England dioceses were also consulted and confirmed the challenges to the clergy of stress, anxiety and more serious mental health issues, which accounted for about one-third of all clerical sickness according to diocesan and national data. Mental health and stress-related conditions were identified by two-fifths of dioceses as the healthcare area in most demand by clergy.

A brief summary of the survey appeared on page 7 of the Church Times for 27 May 2011. Enquiries, either about the research or the charity’s future plans, should be addressed to the General Manager, St Luke’s Healthcare for the Clergy, Room 201, Church House, 27 Great Smith Street, London, SW1P 3AZ, telephone 020 7898 1700.

More generally, an extensive academic literature has emerged during the past quarter-century relating to the psychological health of the clergy. Some of the major investigations can be located through the BRIN source database by searching under key terms such as ‘stress’, ‘burnout’, ‘well-being’ and so forth.

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Naughty Vicar Syndrome

Local clergy come a close second to politicians in meriting media exposure for cheating on their spouse, according to a new survey commissioned by The Sunday Times in the wake of the controversy surrounding superinjunctions and the freedom of the press.

Fieldwork was conducted online by YouGov on 26 and 27 May 2011 among a representative sample of 2,723 Britons aged 18 and over. The detailed results from the poll are available at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/yg-archives-pol-st-results-27-290511.pdf

Asked whether it would be legitimate for the press to report on cases where ten categories of individual had been unfaithful to their spouse, affirmative replies were as follows:

  • a senior politician – 71%
  • a backbench politician – 65%
  • a local clergyman – 64%
  • a local councillor – 62%
  • a top professional footballer – 59%
  • a senior executive of a major corporation – 58%
  • a well-known actor – 56%
  • a television presenter – 55%
  • a former reality TV star – 51%
  • a normal member of the public – 30%

Nearly three times as many respondents wanted to see local clergy exposed in the media as opted to keep the matter private (23%), with 13% unsure what to think. The clamour for publicity about clergy was notably high among Conservative voters (71%) and the over-60s (70%).

Religious professionals may no longer command the sort of respect in the community which they once did, but it seems that we generally still expect them to be exemplary in their moral behaviour and feel entitled to know about their falls from grace.

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Same-Sex Relationships and the Ministry

The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland voted on Monday to continue dialogue on same-sex relationships and the ministry following consideration of the report on the subject by a Special Commission appointed in 2009.

After several hours of debate, the Kirk’s commissioners voted by 351 to 294 to adopt deliverance 7B, which means a move towards the acceptance for training, induction and ordination for the ministry of those in same-sex relationships.

The Assembly also voted, by 393 to 252, to allow ministers and deacons in same-sex relationships who had been ordained before 2009 to be inducted into pastoral charges.

Homosexuality in the ministry has been, and remains, a hugely contentious issue in the Church of Scotland (as it is, of course, in the Church of England).

The extent of division of opinion in Scotland became readily apparent from a consultation conducted by the Special Commission at two levels of the courts of the Church: Presbyteries and Kirk Sessions. Formal ballot papers were used for this purpose. It should be noted that there was no survey of rank-and-file members of the Church.

1,237 responses were received from Kirk Sessions, representing 86% of congregations. The total membership of these Sessions was 34,438, of whom 22,342 (65%) took part in the discussion meetings.

Responses were submitted by all 43 Presbyteries within Scotland and by the Presbyteries of England and Europe. The total membership of these 45 Presbyteries was 4,309, of whom 2,624 (61%) participated in the discussion meetings.

The statistical outcomes of the consultation are summarized in section 2 of the report of the Special Commission, with a four-way analysis of the answers for each of the questions on the ballot paper: by individual members of Kirk Sessions, Kirk Sessions as a whole, individual members of Presbyteries, and Presbyteries as a whole. A commentary on the findings then follows in section 3. The document is available at:

http://www.churchofscotland.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/5757/ga11_specssrm.pdf

The Special Commission has also published the full figures from the consultation for both Presbyteries and Kirk Sessions (in the latter case, anonymized within Presbytery). These Excel files will be found at:

http://www.churchofscotland.org.uk/__data/assets/excel_doc/0020/5861/ga11_speccomm_presbytery_stats.xls

http://www.churchofscotland.org.uk/__data/assets/excel_doc/0019/5860/ga11_speccomm_kirksession_stats.xls

The questions posed were generally lengthy and complex, and it is not really possible to do justice to the data here.

Suffice it to say, however, that, while only a fairly small proportion of respondents (9% of members of Kirk Sessions and 11% of Presbyteries) both regarded homosexual orientation as a disorder and homosexual behaviour as sinful, many of those who accepted homosexuality as a given disapproved of homosexual behaviour in practice.

Moreover, 56% of members of Kirk Sessions and 58% of Presbyteries opposed the ordination as minister of a person in a same-sex relationship. 45% and 48% respectively were hostile to such a person exercising some other leadership role in the Church.

About one-fifth of both groups of members of these church courts said they might leave the Church of Scotland if the General Assembly allowed people in committed same-sex relationships to be ordained. 15% in each said they would secede if such people were appointed to other leadership positions.

At the same time, the Church of Scotland really is between a rock and a hard place, since 8% of members of Kirk Sessions and 6% of Presbyteries indicated that they would leave if the General Assembly forbade the ordination of individuals in committed same-sex relationships.

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European Values Study, Wave 4

The dataset for European Values Study (EVS), Wave 4, Great Britain has recently become available at the Economic and Social Data Service as SN 6757. The data also form part of the aggregated 47-country dataset for Wave 4 as SN 6539 (which includes the separate investigation in Northern Ireland).

EVS is the most comprehensive longitudinal research project on human values in Europe, covering citizens’ views about life, family, work, religion, sex, politics, and society. It began with Wave 1 in 1981, which surveyed 16 nations. The headquarters of EVS are at the Department of Sociology, Tilburg University, The Netherlands.

British data-collection for Wave 4 was undertaken by Quality Fieldwork and Research Services between August 2009 and March 2010 on behalf of EVS, with BRIN’s Professor David Voas as the British director. Funding was provided by the Economic and Social Research Council. 1,561 adults aged 18 and over were interviewed face-to-face.

The British questionnaire for 2009-10 can be found at:

http://www.esds.ac.uk/doc/6757/mrdoc/pdf/6757questionnaire_gb.pdf

Many of the questions replicate those in the three previous waves of EVS, but some are new and/or specific to Britain. The following list summarizes the explicitly religious (as opposed to moral) topics which were covered:

  • Importance of religion and other facets of life (Q.1)
  • Belonging to religious/church and other organizations (Q.5)
  • Acceptability of Muslim, Jew, Christian and other neighbours (Q.6)
  • Belonging to religious denomination (Q.23)
  • Previous religious denomination (Q.24)
  • Attendance at religious services now (Q.25)
  • Attendance at religious services when aged 12 (Q.26)
  • Importance of holding religious services for rites of passage (Q.27)
  • Self-assessed religiosity (Q.28)
  • Adequacy of the Churches’ answers to contemporary problems (Q.29)
  • Belief in God, life after death, hell, heaven, sin (Q.30)
  • Belief in reincarnation (Q.31)
  • Beliefs about God or life force (Q.32)
  • Method of connecting with the divine (Q.33)
  • Interest in sacred or supernatural (Q.34)
  • Truths of religions (Q.35)
  • Importance of God (Q.36)
  • Comfort and strength from religion (Q.37)
  • Prayer, meditation or contemplation (Q.38)
  • Prayer to God outside religious services (Q.39)
  • Belief in lucky charms (Q.40)
  • Religion in politics (Q.41)
  • Recalled religiosity of parents (Q.G1)
  • Importance of religion in upbringing (Q.G2)
  • Involvement of God in personal affairs (Q.G3a)
  • God’s anger at human sin (Q.G3b)
  • Censorship of books and films that attack religions (Q.G4)
  • Attitudes to the wearing of religious dress in public (Q.G5)
  • Attitudes to integration of Muslims in Britain (Q.G6)
  • Importance of shared religious beliefs and other factors to a successful marriage (Q.42)
  • Importance of religious faith and other qualities for children to learn at home (Q.52)
  • Confidence in the Church and other institutions (Q.63)

To celebrate the completion of Wave 4, a major international conference on ‘The Value(s) of Europe’ is being held at Tilburg University on 23-25 November, at which David Voas will be speaking on ‘Religion in Contemporary Europe’.

A new edition of the Atlas of European Values, based on EVS data, will be published at the same time. Other publications derived from Wave 4 are under consideration, including a book on Cross-National Values in Europe, which will offer ‘theoretical-empirical analysis on domain specific values’.

For details of Waves 1-3 of EVS in Great Britain, see the descriptions in the BRIN source database, as follows:

1981 – http://www.brin.ac.uk/sources/2102

1990 – http://www.brin.ac.uk/sources/1803

1999 – http://www.brin.ac.uk/sources/1437

For more information about EVS generally, go to:

http://www.europeanvaluesstudy.eu/

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Church and State

The recent Royal Wedding, between Prince William and Catherine Middleton (now the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge), gave rise to extensive opinion polling on the subject of British attitudes to the monarchy, and a few of these surveys touched on issues of Church and State.

One such was the Harris Interactive Royal Wedding poll for the Daily Mail, undertaken among an online sample of 1,029 adults aged 16 and over in the UK on 20 and 21 April 2011.

This included two relevant questions, both omitted from the newspaper’s publication of results on 23 April but subsequently released by Harris as tables 14 and 15 of the complete data at:

http://www.harrisinteractive.com/vault/HI_UK_Corp_News-Daily-Mail-Poll-Apr11.pdf

Middleton’s confirmation into the Church of England on 10 March, in a private service conducted by the Bishop of London at St James’s Palace, was the topic of the first question.

Her decision to seek confirmation may have been prompted in part by her recognition that her husband-to-be would be a future Supreme Governor of the Church of England.

52% of respondents in this Harris study ‘mostly supported’ Middleton’s confirmation, 11% ‘mostly opposed’ it, and 37% were unsure what to think. The high proportion of ‘don’t knows’ is characteristic of surveys on Church and State.

Approval of her confirmation peaked at 66% among the over-55s and also exceeded three-fifths in the Midlands and Wales. Opposition was highest (18%) among those aged 16-24, with 42% of this same cohort supportive and 40% undecided. Women (56%) were somewhat more in favour than men (49%).

The second question explored views on the establishment of the Church of England. 41% agreed with it, almost three times the number who disagreed (15%), with 44% neutral. Northern Ireland excepted (where only 10 people were interviewed), hostility to establishment never rose above 23% in any demographic sub-group.

At the same time, the over-55s (56%) were the only sub-group which registered an absolute majority in favour. The status quo of an established church in England is thus underpinned by a combination of positive public endorsement on the one hand and acquiescence/indifference on the other.

For other recent poll data, on the continuation of the monarch’s Supreme Governorship of the Church of England and of the bar (under the Act of Settlement 1701) on Roman Catholics or persons married to a Catholic acceding to the throne, see our previous posts at:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=1131

and

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=1223

and

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=1228

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