The anti-capitalist protesters who have been camped out in Paternoster Square next to St Paul’s Cathedral since 15 October, having been thwarted in their original plan to occupy the London Stock Exchange, continue to divide public opinion.
This is according to an online poll of 1,001 adult residents (aged 18 and over) of inner and outer London undertaken between 23 and 27 November 2011 by ComRes for the Evening Standard, ITV’s London Tonight programme and LBC.
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Churchgoers seem far more willing than the general public to vote with their feet when it comes to politicians and journalists found wanting in their personal moral behaviour.
This is according to a third tranche of results from the latest Cpanel survey by ComRes in which 544 practising UK Christians aged 18 and over were interviewed online on 25-31 October 2011. The data tables can be found at:
http://www.comres.co.uk/polls/Cpanel_Personal_moral_standards_tables_Nov11_(2).pdf
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The number of UK adults donating money to religious causes (including places of worship) on a monthly basis in 2010/11 was 3,800,000, according to a report on UK Giving, 2011 published on 2 December 2011 by the Charities Aid Foundation and the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO). See their joint press release at:
https://www.cafonline.org/media-office/press-releases/2011/dec-2011/over-a-million-more.aspx
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An extra 77,000 people attended UK places of worship on Back to Church Sunday (25 September) this year, according to a Church of England press release on 25 November 2011, with congregations increasing by nearly a quarter at participating churches as a result of personal invitations to former and potential worshippers. See:
http://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2011/11/tens-of-thousands-respond-to-invitations-to-back-to-church-sunday.aspx
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One-quarter of Britons expect to attend a church service over the Christmas period this year, according to a YouGov poll on Christmas commissioned by The Sun newspaper and published in today’s issue under the heading of ‘We’re Dreaming of a Tight Christmas’.
A representative sample of 1,723 adults aged 18 and over was interviewed online on 27-28 November 2011. The full data tables, with breaks by demographics, have been made available at:
http://cdn.yougov.com/cumulus_uploads/document/90fr0t7zbi/Sun%20Results%20111202%20Christmas.pdf
While 65% do not think they will go to a church service over Christmas, 24% do, broken down into 6% who said they might worship on Christmas Day itself (a Sunday this year), 11% on Christmas Eve, and 7% on another Day around Christmas.
The proportion of putative attenders was identical to a YouGov poll a fortnight before last Christmas. It has varied somewhat since the question was first asked in British public opinion polls in 1964, sometimes reaching two-fifths (albeit not recently).
However, these intentions will often prove aspirational, not translated into reality. Unfortunately, it is hard to know what actually happens since the Church of England is the only major body to collect Christmas attendance data, and then just since 2000.
In an article in the Church of England Newspaper for 11 November 2011, Peter Brierley estimated that the Church of England accounts for 40% of Christmas attendance, rather than its more usual share of 28%. On this basis, he forecast that 11% of the entire population of the UK could be at church this Christmas.
The highest rate of anticipated Christmas churchgoing was found by YouGov among Londoners (35%) and the lowest among manual grades (18%, against 28% for ABC1s), but otherwise there was little variation by sub-group (from 20% to 26%).
Other highlights from this YouGov poll include:
Meanwhile, a separate TNS survey, carried out online between 29 November and 1 December 2011, has revealed that 21% of a sample of 1,064 adult Britons aged 16-64 plan to go to a carol service this month.
The proportion was higher for women (25%) than men (18%), ABC1s (26%) than C2DEs (14%), parents with children resident in the household (28%) than those without (18%), and for those who were not working (25%) than in employment (19%).
It also increased with age, from 14% among the 16-24s to 27% among the over-55s. Regionally, Scots (16%) and Londoners (13%) were least likely to attend a carol service, with Wales and Western England (29%) and the North-West (25%) scoring highest.
Data tables for the TNS poll are available at:
http://www.tns-ri.co.uk/_assets/files/December_Activity_Tables.pdf
Finally, for now (there will doubtless be other religion-related Christmas polls over the next few weeks), we may note a Christmas survey published by Theos, the think-tank, on 1 December, and based upon online interviews by ComRes with 2.032 adults aged 18 and over on 7-9 October 2011.
Respondents were asked to react to six statements about the meaning of Christmas. One of these was that ‘Christmas is about celebrating that God loves humanity’. 41% agreed with the proposition, 24% disagreed, and 35% were neutral.
Agreement increased with age, from 30% of the 18-24s to 52% of the over-65s. It was greater among women (45%) than men (37%), and public sector workers (42%) than in the private sector (36%). Unsurprisingly, it was much higher among Christians (58%) than those without any religion (12%).
The level of agreement with this statement was much less than the 83% who thought Christmas was about spending time with family and friends, and the 62% who believed it was about being generous to people less fortunate than ourselves.
40% contended that Christmas is a good excuse for taking time off but does not really have any meaning today. Just 19% saw the festival as an opportunity to challenge political oppression around the world and 34% poverty and economic injustice.
The data tables for the ComRes study, undertaken in conjunction with the launch of a new Theos report on The Politics of Christmas by Stephen Holmes (ISBN 978-0-9562182-7-8, £5), can be found at:
http://campaigndirector.moodia.com/Client/Theos/Files/ChristmasPoll.pdf
Among the datasets released this month by the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) is that for the Wellcome Trust Monitor 1, 2009 (SN 6889). A suite of technical documentation can be found at:
http://www.esds.ac.uk/findingData/snDescription.asp?sn=6889&key=6889
The Monitor (expected to be repeated every three years) was a study of the knowledge of and attitudes towards medical and genetic research, and to science and science education more generally, among samples of 1,179 adults aged 18 and over and 374 young people aged 14-18 in the UK, interviewed face-to-face by the National Centre for Social Research in January-March 2009.
Although the Wellcome Trust published a report on the Monitor last year, written by Sarah Butt, Elizabeth Clery, Varunie Abeywardana and Miranda Phillips, it did not especially focus on analysing the results by the two background religious variables (religious affiliation and attendance at religious services) which were included in the questionnaire. The availability of the dataset now makes such secondary analysis possible.
The survey also included two ‘religion-related’ modules. One, asked only of adults, examined attitudes to ‘pseudoscience’, with particular reference to alternative medicine and horoscopes. The other, posed to adults and young people, concerned opinions about the commencement of human life (conception versus birth) and the origins of life on earth (creationism versus evolution), the assumption being that these would have informed views about medical research.
Topline and limited disaggregated data for both these modules were summarized on pages 31-36 of the 2010 published report, not hitherto picked up by BRIN, which is at:
45% of adults (51% of women and 39% of men) were found to have used some form of alternative medicine, the most common being herbal medicine, homeopathy and acupuncture. One-fifth claimed to read their horoscope often or fairly often, notwithstanding 89% considered them unscientific.
53% of adults took a fully evolutionist perspective on the origins of life, attributing it to natural selection, with 18% being creationists (including 71% of weekly attenders at religious services), and 27% saying that life evolved over time but in a process guided by God. The pattern of replies among young people was not substantially different.
In a separate commentary on key points arising from the investigation, the Wellcome Trust noted: ‘Although there is very strong support for medical research there is evidence of a plurality of views among the public. A significant minority believe that homeopathy is as good as, or better than, conventional medicines.’
‘Nearly a fifth of the public reject evolution, believing that living things were created by God and have always existed in their current form. This clearly demonstrates that this is no time for complacency and the need for both good-quality public engagement and science education.’
The Baptist Times, Britain’s longest-running weekly Free Church newspaper, is to cease publication of both print and digital editions at the end of this year, its directors have announced recently. Falling circulation and advertising revenue have been blamed. The paper will be ‘replaced’ by the new BT Online website which the Baptist Union of Great Britain will launch next spring.
The Baptist Times first appeared on 24 January 1855 under the name of The Freeman. Despite the abolition of newspaper stamp duty the same year, it was slow to establish itself, with an initial circulation of only 2,000 copies, perhaps due to the relative success of pan-Free Church newspapers such as The Nonconformist (established in 1841) and, later (from 1886), The British Weekly.
With effect from the issue of 24 February 1899 The Freeman changed its name to The Baptist Times and Freeman, shortened to The Baptist Times from 10 September 1925 onwards. By the latter date, it had also incorporated a rival denominational newspaper, The Baptist, published between 10 January 1873 and 29 September 1910.
Peak circulation of The Baptist Times is reported as 35,000, but numbers have fallen steadily over recent decades, in line with the declining fortunes of the newspaper industry more generally.
Circulation data in successive editions of the UK Christian Handbook reveal that sales of The Baptist Times held steady at 15,000 in the 1980s, then drifted downwards, to 13,000 in 1991, 12,000 in 1993, 11,000 in 1995, 10,000 in 1997, 9,000 in 2001, and 8,000 in 2006.
Current circulation of The Baptist Times is said to be only 5,000, albeit readership is estimated at several times this figure (although the 24,000 cited by Wikipedia is probably out of date).
The ageing of Baptist worshippers (by a mean of seven years between the 1979 and 2005 English church censuses) will partly account for the fall in circulation. Even though Baptists have held on to the younger age cohorts better than the Methodists and United Reformed Church, the young are not necessarily avid newspaper readers.
Combined subscribers and readers of The Baptist Times must clearly constitute a very small minority of the 135,000 members of the Baptist Union and of the unknown number of non-member attenders at Baptist churches.
This perhaps says something about the extent to which Baptists, and adherents of the Free Churches more generally, identify themselves as part of a national denomination, as opposed to a local place of worship.
With the demise of The Baptist Times, the mantle of the longest-running weekly Free Church newspaper passes to The Methodist Recorder, now celebrating its 150th anniversary (although it had a range of Methodist competitor titles until 1937).
The Methodist Recorder is currently claiming a weekly circulation of 22,000 copies and a readership of 100,000 (the latter equivalent to about two-fifths of the Church’s membership or rather less than one-fifth of all names on the community roll in 2010).
Another ‘Free Church’ which still publishes weekly newspapers is the Salvation Army, which boasts no fewer than three: The War Cry (with a circulation of 53,000), The Salvationist (20,000), and Kids Alive! (a comic, 20,000).
Britain Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends has published The Friend since 1843 (initially as a monthly, but weekly from 1892), but this is really a magazine. The interdenominational The British Weekly (latterly known as Christian Week) eventually closed in 1991, with its last-known circulation as 12,500.
The Church of England is covered by two weekly newspapers, Church Times (which sells 27,500 copies) and Church of England Newspaper (8,200). The Roman Catholics in England and Wales are served by The Universe (55,000), Catholic Times (26,500), The Tablet (22,100), and the Catholic Herald (22,000) with its sister title Scottish Catholic Observer (18,000).
Circulation figures in the preceding three paragraphs are taken from the table on p. 223 of the 2009/10 edition of the UK Christian Handbook, which also includes details for a range of less than weekly publications. Almost certainly, most circulations will have declined in the more than two years which have elapsed since this volume was printed.
The All Party Parliamentary Group ‘Christians in Parliament’, chaired by Conservative MP Gary Streeter, is currently conducting the ‘Clearing the Ground’ inquiry, which seeks to establish whether changes to the law and recent court decisions have adversely affected Christian freedoms in the UK.
Premier Christian Media Trust (PCMT) is one of the bodies which have been giving evidence to the inquiry. In this connection, PCMT has prepared a report on the ‘Marginalisation of Christianity in British Public Life, 2007-2011’, which draws extensively upon PCMT and other polling evidence. The document does not yet appear to be available on the internet, but its contents are outlined in an article in Christian Today, which is at:
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/christians.still.feel.marginalised.report/28872.htm
The latest in this series of PCMT polls was commissioned from ComRes and carried out on the online Cpanel on 25-31 October 2011. Questions were put to 544 practising UK Christians aged 18 and over. The detailed results can be found at:
http://www.comres.co.uk/polls/Premier_Marginalisation_data_tables_Nov11.pdf
According to this survey, a majority of churchgoing Christians felt that the marginalization of Christianity in British public life is increasing. 71% claimed that it was in the media, 68% in public, 66% in the Government, and 61% in the workplace. The remainder was fairly evenly divided between those who considered that marginalization is staying the same or is decreasing.
The figure for the Government was 7% up on a similar Cpanel poll in November-December 2010, but the other three spheres recorded a lower proportion of perceived increase than a year ago, not ‘more or less the same’ as stated in a PCMT press release on 14 November 2011. These comparative 2010 data are at:
http://www.comres.co.uk/polls/Premier_Cpanel_Tables_Nov10.pdf
Female Christians were more likely than men to believe that marginalization of Christianity is increasing. The greatest concern by age tended to be among churchgoers from 35 to 64 years, with the very youngest and the very oldest Christians recording somewhat lower figures.
Denominationally, except for the workplace, Roman Catholics seemed most preoccupied about marginalization, perhaps influenced by Benedict XVI’s observations on the matter during the course of his 2010 papal visit. However, the difference between them and other Christians was still relatively slight, especially when the smallness of the sub-samples is taken into account.
Three-quarters (74%) of respondents contended that there is greater discrimination against Christians in the UK than against people of other faiths, up from 66% in the October-November 2009 Cpanel. This view was particularly held by the over-65s (83%), Independents (85%), and Pentecostals (90%).
16% of practising Christians thought that all faiths endure discrimination equally, 7% that other religions suffer more than Christianity, and 2% that there is little or no discrimination against people of faith in the UK.
Other findings from this latest Cpanel survey, relating to attitudes to the legalization of gay marriage, have already been covered by BRIN at:
http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=1474
There are numerous sources of public opinion about religious discrimination in general and discrimination against Christians in particular. These can best be traced through keyword searching the BRIN sources and news databases.
Overall, the public seems to show less anxiety about discrimination than the churchgoing Christians in Cpanel, but some polls, especially those sponsored by Christian lobbying groups, have apparently uncovered some concern about Christianophobic behaviour.
‘People who are religious are more likely to be patriotic than are those who self-define as atheists or non-believers.’ So claims a report launched today by the think-tank Demos, and based on interviews with a representative sample of 2,086 adult Britons aged 18 and over in May 2011.
Sponsored by the Pears Foundation, A Place for Pride (ISBN 978-1-906693-88-6) is written by Max Wind-Cowie and Thomas Gregory and is available for free download at:
http://www.demos.co.uk/files/Place_for_pride_-_web.pdf?1321618230
The full data tables from the survey do not appear to have been released as yet. So all BRIN can currently offer are a few religion-related snippets extracted from the published report, as follows:
A word of warning. Unless they were deliberately oversampled, which seems unlikely, the cell sizes for some faith groups must be fairly small.
There is a consequent danger in over-egging the results, as The Sunday Times could be said to have done yesterday with its preview of the report under the headline ‘Muslims are Britain’s greatest flag wavers’.
Dear Paul Thank you very much indeed for your kind words. I shall continue to pursue my own personal research…
Thank you for all your hard work on this important service which will be greatly missed, but all the best…
Thank you for your diligence in unearthing broken links on the site. Regarding religious profession of prisoners, there were surveys…
1) FYI. There is an incorrect link to a spreadsheet on the page here: https://www.brin.ac.uk/figures/belief-in-britain-1939-2009/conventional-belief/belief-in-god-divinity-of-christ-and-the-resurrection/. The spreadsheet is for "Belief…
Dear Colin I am sorry that you have experienced difficulties in getting data from the site. Please go to www.brin.ac.uk/figures/churches-and-churchgoers/…
Data tables, extending to 164 pages, have now been posted on the internet by YouGov (the company which undertook the online fieldwork for the survey) at:
The good news is that replies to all the questions on pride and patriotism are broken down by religious affiliation (pp. 83-123). The bad news is that the categorization has been collapsed to: ‘none’ (unweighted base 355), ‘Christian/Jewish’ (992), and ‘Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, others’ (174). This is not entirely satisfactory for the purpose of testing the robustness of Demos’ interpretation nor for secondary analysis more generally.
The overtly religion-related content in the questions has mostly been picked up in the original BRIN post. However, we may additionally note that 15% of respondents thought it should be a requirement for every religious building to fly the Union Jack.
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