Britain as a Christian Country

Posted on April 16, 2011 by Clive D. Field

The recent census question on religion sparked some debate about the persistence of cultural Christianity. That phenomenon can be defined both at the level of the individual and in terms of national character – whether Britain remains a ‘Christian country’.

One-half of the British population seemingly still regards Britain as a Christian country and wants it to remain so, according to a ComRes poll undertaken for the campaign group Christian Concern and published on 8 April.

Fieldwork was conducted by telephone between 18 and 20 March 2011 among a representative sample of 1,002 adults aged 18 and over. The data tables are available at:

http://www.comres.co.uk/christianconcernequalitiespollapr11.aspx

Asked whether it was preferable for Britain to be regarded as a Christian rather than an atheistic country, 52% agreed, 37% disagreed and 11% expressed no opinion.

Views varied considerably by age. Whereas among the 18-24s only 20% agreed and 67% disagreed, among the over-65s the figures were 72% and 19% respectively.

Social class also made a difference, the top (AB) social group recording a margin of just 8% in favour of a Christian country (49% versus 41%) while among the DEs those in agreement outnumbered dissentients by two to one (62% against 29%).

Respondents were then faced with the statement ‘It does not matter whether or not Britain remains a Christian country in terms of its legal and cultural heritage’. 48% disagreed, 43% agreed and 9% were undecided.

Demographic variations were not quite as marked as for the first statement, but there was still some age effect. Those in disagreement peaked at 55-56% among the 35-44s and over-55s, with 60% of 18-24s and 55% of 25-34s agreeing that it did not matter whether Britain remained a Christian country.

Interviewees were not asked on this occasion whether Britain could actually be described as a Christian country, but this question was put in an earlier ComRes/Christian Concern poll on 26-29 November 2010. 50% then replied in the affirmative and 47% in the negative. See our previous post at: http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=804 

The four remaining statements in this year’s survey dealt with public attitudes to equality legislation. These were informed by the recent High Court case involving Owen and Eunice Johns, Christian foster-carers from Derby who hold that homosexual activity is morally wrong.

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Burka Britain

Posted on April 15, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Two-thirds of Britons would like to see the burka banned in this country, notwithstanding the fact that the Home Secretary has indicated that the Government has no intention of moving in the same direction as France, where a law prohibiting the burka, niqab and other face-coverings being worn in public came into force this week.

This finding comes from an online poll by YouGov conducted on 11 and 12 April 2011 among a representative sample of 2,258 adults aged 18 and over. The full results have been posted at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/yg-archives-pol-yougov-burqa-130411.pdf

Following an introductory explanation of what a burka is, respondents were asked whether they thought the garment should be banned in Britain. 40% agreed strongly that it should be and a further 26% agreed. The combined percentage of 66% compared with 67% on 14-15 July 2010, when YouGov first asked the question. 27% disagreed with a ban, while 7% expressed no opinion.

Dissentients were most likely to be found among the young (42% for the 18-24s, 37% for the 25-39s) and Liberal Democrat voters (39%). Proponents of the ban were concentrated among the over-60s (79%) and Conservative voters (77%). These age and party political differentials are characteristic of most British polls measuring attitudes to Islam and Muslims.

Those opposed to the burka often see it as a barrier to integration and a coercion of women, but those resisting a ban worry that such legislative action would be an infringement of human rights.

Several surveys on the topic were conducted last year, in addition to the first YouGov study. See our posts at:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=45 (1 February 2010)

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=92 (3 March 2010)

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=378 (9 July 2010)

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=397 (22 July 2010)

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British Muslims and the Police

Posted on April 12, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Taken as a whole, Muslims in England and Wales express higher levels of trust and confidence in the police than do the general population, notwithstanding the fact that they report crime and disorder impacts more negatively upon them than society at large.

This conclusion, from secondary analysis of the British Crime Surveys (BCS), is held to challenge the oft-repeated claim that Muslims have been profoundly alienated by the workings of Prevent policing since its inception in 2003, as part of the Government’s CONTEST counter-terrorism strategy.

This research is written up in a new report commissioned and published by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) Terrorism and Allied Matters (TAM) Business Area. Assessing the Effects of Prevent Policing, by Martin Innes, Colin Roberts and Helen Innes of the Universities’ Police Science Institute at Cardiff University, is available for download from:

http://www.acpo.police.uk/documents/TAM/2011/PREVENT%20Innes%200311%20Final%20send%202.pdf

The quantitative data in the report derive from BCS studies undertaken among adults aged 16 and over in England and Wales between 2004/5 and 2008/9. The Muslim sub-samples were large: about 1,800 in 2004/5, 2005/6 and 2006/7 (when there was an ethnic minority booster), and 1,000 in 2007/8 and 2008/9. A few findings are summarized below.

In addition, there was a qualitative investigation, comprising 95 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with Muslim community members and police involved in delivering Prevent, but this evidence is not considered here.

The 2008/9 BCS showed that Muslims were more likely than the general population to give their local police a rating of excellent or good. This was true of all Muslim gender and age groups, separately considered. Although young Muslims (aged 16-34) of both sexes were less likely to give this rating than the over-34s, 59% against 66%, this was still 6% more than for young adults generally. But Muslim males aged 16-24 were an exception to this rule, a possible by-product of Prevent policing.

This mostly positive picture was largely confirmed by seven measures of local police effectiveness in the 2008/9 survey, 34% of Muslims compared with 23% of the general population agreeing with all seven. Agreement with individual measures was naturally much higher, for example 75% of Muslims against 67% of the general population having confidence in the police in their area. Only in the matter of being treated with respect when in contact with the police were Muslims slightly more negative than all adults; even so, 81% remained optimistic on this point.

Muslims were more inclined than the general population to regard a raft of criminal activities and social disorders as problematical, especially teenagers hanging around on the street, drug use and public drinking. This was true across all five BCS studies considered. Throughout the same period Muslims were also impacted more (in terms of quality of life) by the fear of crime and actual crime than were citizens generally. Muslim perceptions of the local crime rate were likewise higher than the norm.

On average over the quinquennium, Muslims were about 15% more likely than all adults to be very or fairly worried about falling victim to a crime, the 2008/9 statistics being 52% and 35%. The differential was maintained for concerns about six specific types of crime. However, Muslims were markedly less prone (by a factor of 20% in some years) to have reported to the police that they had been such a victim.

Despite these anxieties about crime, the vast majority of all adults in the 2007/8 BCS endorsed the statement that people from different backgrounds got on well together. This was particularly true of Muslims and, within this faith community, of inner city residents and women. The overall Muslim figure of 87% represented a dramatic recovery from 2006/7, when it had collapsed to 42%, almost certainly a reflection of perceived enmity towards Muslims following the London bombings in 2005.

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Group-Focused Enmity in Europe

Posted on April 11, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Fresh light on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in Britain is shed in a report published by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Berlin on 11 March 2011. Entitled Intolerance, Prejudice and Discrimination: A European Report, it is written by Andreas Zick, Beate Kupper and Andreas Hovermann. It is available to download from:

http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/do/07908-20110311.pdf

The publication is based upon the Group-Focused Enmity in Europe project which is located at the Bielefeld Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence, and which has been supported by funding from a consortium of six foundations.

Fieldwork for the underlying survey was conducted in eight European countries during autumn 2008: France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland and Portugal. A sample of 1,000 adults aged 16 and over was interviewed by telephone by TNS in each nation.

Attitudes to various groups were measured, but this particular report concentrates on a sub-set of six types of prejudice: anti-immigrant views, anti-Semitism, homophobia, Islamophobia (or anti-Muslim attitudes, as they are termed here), racism and sexism.

There continues to be evidence of anti-Semitism in Britain, with 14% of adults agreeing that Jews had too much influence, 22% that they tried to take advantage of being victims during the Nazi era, and 23% that they did not care about anything or anybody except their own kind.

However, these figures were actually the lowest for all the eight countries, with the exception of The Netherlands. Britain and The Netherlands came joint first on a fourth measure, agreeing that Jews enriched the national culture (72%). Hungary and Poland were generally most negative about the Jews.

Levels of hostility rose somewhat when the question of Israel-Palestine was put to a half-sample. 36% of Britons said that, given Israeli policy, they could understand why people did not like Jews. Still more, 42%, concurred that Israel was conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians, which was a bigger proportion than in Hungary, Italy and The Netherlands.

Negativity towards Muslims was greater still. 45% of Britons considered that there were too many Muslims in the country, 50% claimed that they were too demanding, and 47% regarded Islam as a religion of intolerance.

These three items were combined into a scale of anti-Muslim attitudes. While Hungary and Poland were about as Islamophobic as they were anti-Semitic, the mean scores for the remaining nations were much higher than for anti-Semitism, Britain included. Portugal was least Islamophobic.

Other questions did not form part of this scale but, administered to a half-sample, reinforced the evidence of enmity. Only 39% in Britain felt that the Muslim culture fitted well into the country and Europe, and 82% viewed Muslim attitudes towards women as contradicting British values. 38% believed that many Muslims perceived terrorists as heroes, and 26% that the majority of Muslims found terrorism justifiable.

Anti-Muslim sentiments were shown to have an especially strong relationship with anti-immigrant views, and this was particularly true of Britain. The correlation between anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic opinions was less marked but still observable. Anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic attitudes had a relationship of medium strength.

Correlations with self-assessed religiosity were explored in a separate report on the same survey: Beate Kupper and Andreas Zick, Religion and Prejudice in Europe: New Empirical Findings (Alliance Publishing Trust, 2010), which can be found at:

http://www.alliancemagazine.org/books/religionandprejudice.pdf

Whereas, for Europe as a whole, the researchers discovered that ‘the more religious individuals are, the more prejudiced they are’, the pattern in Britain was more complex.

For Britons greater religiosity was most associated with sexism and homophobia, and – to a lesser extent – with racism and anti-immigrant views. In the cases of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, the very religious were the least prejudiced of the four religiosity groups but the quite religious were the most prejudiced.

Overall, 5% of Britons described themselves as very religious, 29% as quite religious, 27% as not very religious, and 38% as not at all religious. A YouGov poll of 5,000 plus respondents for The Sun last month revealed that 27% saw themselves as religious and 71% not.

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Self-Supporting Ministry

Posted on April 10, 2011 by Clive D. Field

In 2009 3,100 or 27% of all the Church of England’s diocesan licensed ministers were in self-supporting ministry (SSM), sometimes described as non-stipendiary ministry. Hitherto, comparatively little has been known about these SSMs and how they are utilized by the Church.

That omission is now rectified by research published in the Church Times of 1 April 2011 (pp. 5, 22-3) and 8 April 2011 (pp. 4, 22-3, 30). These articles, together with some of the raw data in chart form, can be downloaded from:

http://www.1pf.co.uk/SSM.html

The study was undertaken by Rev Dr Teresa Morgan, Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Oriel College, Oxford and herself in the SSM, in the parish of Littlemore.

Fieldwork took place during the autumn of 2010 by means of an online questionnaire, to which 890 SSMs in the UK (but mostly from England) responded, representing 28% of the universe.

SSMs were found to contribute a significant amount of time to their ministry, with one-quarter putting in more than 30 hours a week and a further one-fifth between 20 and 30 hours. Only 15% spent fewer than 10 hours a week on their ministry.

Moreover, the overwhelming majority regarded their ministry as a privilege and a joy and had received extensive pre- and post-ordination training.

Notwithstanding, many respondents gave the clear impression that they were ‘ignored, overlooked or under-used’ in the Church, ‘parked somewhere, and left’, and ‘sidelined’. Some commented that stipendiary ministers appeared not to regard SSMs as ‘proper’ clergy and treated them badly.

Likewise, many SSMs reported a degree of stagnation in their ministry since ordination. 46% had held only one post since ordination, and 41% reported no change in their ministry during this time. Just 13% had lead responsibility for ministry in their parish or chaplaincy. 59% exercised no significant ministry beyond the Church. Almost one-quarter claimed to have received no ministerial development review.

Morgan is critical of the Church for its lack of strategy with regard to SSM and especially of the failure of dioceses to consider SSMs in their planning processes. She dismisses the raft of alleged impediments to the effective use of SSMs often cited by Church leaders, arguing that her survey has empirically disproved them.

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Libya and Radical Islam

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Among the public’s many concerns about the current crisis in Libya is a fear that it may result in the country falling under the influence of radical Islam.

That is one of the findings from a YouGov poll conducted online for The Sunday Times between 31 March and 1 April 2011 among a representative sample of 2,226 Britons aged 18 and over. The relevant data will be found on page 9 of the tables available at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/yg-archives-pol-st-results-01-030411.pdf

11% of adults said that they were very worried and a further 34% fairly worried about Libya coming under radical Islamic influence. The combined figure of 45% rose to 61% among the over-60s, 52% in northern England, 51% in Scotland, and 51% for electors who had voted Conservative at the 2010 general election.

A mere 8% were not worried at all about Libya falling under the influence of radical Islam, the highest proportion being among the under-40s (11%). 27% said that they were not very worried, while 20% expressed no opinion.

These concerns may be partly informed by the recent suggestion made by a senior NATO commander that al-Qaeda may be involved in the Libyan rebellion against Colonel Gaddafi, an assertion long made by Gaddafi himself.

The results of this latest YouGov poll have echoes in the organization’s earlier survey on 3-4 February, when the focus was on the campaign (eventually successful) to dislodge President Mubarak from power in Egypt.

At that time, 59% of Britons were very or fairly worried about the rise of radical Islam in the Middle East, with just 7% not worried at all. See our earlier post at: http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=871

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Domestic Abuse and British Jews

Posted on March 30, 2011 by Clive D. Field

We reported four months ago (http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=718) that Jewish Women’s Aid (JWA), the UK national charity for Jewish women and their children affected by domestic violence, was intending to carry out an online survey into the incidence and perceptions of domestic abuse against women in the Jewish community.

The results of that survey have just been published as chapter 3 (pp. 44-58) of Sarah Abramson and Cora Peterson, ‘You know a Jewish Woman suffering from Domestic Abuse’: Domestic Abuse and the British Jewish Community. The 96-page report, exclusively previewed in the Jewish Chronicle of 11 March 2011, is available to download from:

http://www.jwa.org.uk/documents/JewishWomensAidResearchonDomesticAbuseMarch2011.pdf

Data collection took place online, via Survey Monkey, between 15 November 2010 and 15 January 2011. The study yielded 842 complete responses, 94% of them from women and 81% from London and the Home Counties.

Recruitment of interviewees was primarily by means of emails forwarded by friends or colleagues (53%), JWA communications (19%) and synagogues (15%).

It is readily conceded by the authors that the sample was entirely self-selecting, non-random and probably not statistically representative of the national Jewish female population.

‘It may be … that people with personal experiences of DV [domestic violence], or knowledge of someone close to them experiencing DV, were more likely to fill out the survey. It is also possible that people sympathetic to JWA objectives were more inclined to take the survey.’ Awareness of JWA (84%) was certainly exceptionally high.

The profile of respondents, while covering a reasonable spread of ages and Jewish religious traditions, was also skewed towards the highly-educated. No fewer than 69% of the women had been educated to university level and 35% had postgraduate qualifications.

Although slavish reliance should not therefore be placed on the data, they are nevertheless still interesting as an indication of a social problem which, despite being hardly discussed in a public religious context, is probably just as widespread among practising members of faith communities as it is in the rest of the population.

Indeed, 68% of these Jewish respondents assessed that domestic abuse occurred at about the same rate in the Jewish community as in society at large. The proportion of Jewish women in the study claiming to have personally experienced domestic abuse (27%) was also close to the national statistic of 25%. Two-thirds of the abuse of Jewish women was at the hands of a partner and the rest by a family member.

Moreover, 55% of respondents said that they knew somebody else who had been a victim of domestic abuse. The number having either direct or indirect experience or knowledge of abuse was 60%, rising to 69% among those in their forties.

78% stated that they had never heard, or could not recall hearing, a rabbi addressing domestic abuse, and only 13% recollected a rabbi condemning such abuse. Just 7% viewed rabbis as a primary source of support in abuse cases, compared with 51% for friends, relatives and neighbours, 44% for JWA, 34% for the police, and 30% for health professionals.

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Feminism and Religion

Posted on March 27, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Women have historically scored more highly than men on most indicators of religious belief and practice, but there have been signs in recent years that the situation may be changing, as females succumb to secularization, and apparently nowhere is this truer than for feminists.

This is the inescapable conclusion from a new article by Kristin Aune, ‘Much Less Religious, a Little More Spiritual: the Religious and Spiritual Views of Third-Wave Feminists in the UK’, Feminist Review, Vol. 97, No. 1, March 2011, pp. 32-55.

Together with Catherine Redfern, Aune surveyed the religious and spiritual attitudes of 1,265 ‘third-wave feminists’ in the UK by means of online and paper questionnaires. The fieldwork date is not cited but can be inferred to be circa 2008. Details of response rates are not given.

Two-thirds of respondents were members of feminist groups and initiatives established since the new millennium, thus representing the third wave of feminism in the UK, and one-third were attenders at four feminist conferences and festivals.

91% of the sample comprised women and 7% men. Three-quarters were in their twenties or thirties, with a mean age of 31 and a median of 27. They were mostly highly educated, 90% possessing or studying for an undergraduate or postgraduate degree.

Interviewees were asked to ‘describe your religious or spiritual views (including none/atheist/agnostic)’. Over 200 different self-designations were used, making aggregation and classification of the replies somewhat problematical.

The broadest categorization employed by Aune suggested that only 11% of the feminists subscribed to a major world religion, with 39% describing themselves as atheists, 16% as agnostics, 15% as of no religion, and 9% as spiritual rather than religious.

Aune compared these figures with data about women’s religious affiliation from the 2001 census and survey evidence and concluded that, relative to the wider population, feminists ‘are significantly less supportive of traditional religion and somewhat more supportive of alternative and non-institutional spiritualities’.

This comparison is rather deceptive since these general sources mostly used closed questions with pre-set response codes, rather than Aune’s open-ended approach.

It would also have been desirable to factor in age as well as gender in analysing the census and surveys, to produce a ‘control group’ that would have been a better match in age terms with the feminist profile.

Such comparisons do appear to bear out that ‘religion and spirituality are areas of only limited interest or concern’ for feminists. Whereas in the 2008 British Social Attitudes Survey, 47% of British women aged 18-44 said they had no religion, the equivalent figure in Aune’s study seems to be around 82%.

Neither the census nor national sample surveys are especially helpful routes for quantifying alternative and non-institutional spiritualities, and Aune’s comparative comments here seem to draw mainly on the classic study of religion and spirituality in Kendal in 2000-02 by Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, whose statistical methods have been questioned (see http://www.brin.ac.uk/sources/1405 for details of this research).

Aune suggests three possible explanations for her finding that feminists are less drawn to traditional religion than the norm and rather more to alternative and non-institutional spiritualities. These are: ‘feminism’s alignment with secularism, secularization and feminism’s role within it, and feminism’s association with alternative spiritualities’.

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English Schools and Community Cohesion

Posted on March 26, 2011 by Clive D. Field

The Education and Inspections Act 2006 placed a new duty on the governing bodies of maintained schools in England to promote community cohesion.

In order to see how much progress schools had been making, the previous Labour administration commissioned Ipsos-MORI to survey a sample of them, through a combination of self-completion postal questionnaires and telephone interviews. 804 schools responded, of which 321 were primary, 348 secondary and 135 special schools. 174 were faith and 630 non-faith schools.

Although fieldwork took place between 10 February and 14 May 2010, the Ipsos-MORI final report (by Chris Phillips, Daniel Tse and Fiona Johnson) was only published by the Department for Education on 28 February 2011 (as Research Report DFE-RR085). Entitled Community Cohesion and PREVENT: How Have Schools Responded? it is available to download at:

http://www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/DFE-RR085.pdf

This post highlights only those findings which touch on religion.

82% of all schools associated the term ‘community cohesion’ with faith, which came third in a list of fifteen possible word-associations, only citizenship (87%) and multiculturalism (85%) scoring more highly. Bottom of the list came violent extremism (31%) and radicalization (27%).

In 56% of schools the senior leadership team was said to have a great deal of knowledge about the different faiths in the school and the local area. This proportion was somewhat less than for knowledge of different ethnic origins and cultures (60%) and different socio-economic groups (63%).

In 47% of schools the teaching staff was said to have a great deal of knowledge about the different faiths, but this fell to 26% in secondary schools (compared with 52% in primary schools). The topline figure was better than for awareness of different ethnic origins and cultures (43%) and different socio-economic groups (41%).

School governors were felt to be relatively uninformed about the different faiths, just 33% of schools reporting that they had a great deal of knowledge about them (a mere 2% above the level for support staff). Statistics for governors’ knowledge of different ethnic origins and cultures and different socio-economic groups were not that much better, 35% and 38% respectively.

In trying to learn more about and understand better the different religions in the community, the most frequently-cited tool was contextual or demographic data for pupils on the roll (72%), followed by consultation with or surveys of parents (62%), local authority guidance or training (55%), consultation with or surveys of pupils (50%), and guidance from Government or Teachernet (42%).

Schools were asked how much knowledge they had about the performance and experience of pupils from some different religions relative to other pupils. The proportion claiming to have a great deal of knowledge was 41% for the achievement of worse academic results, 38% for a greater likelihood of exclusion, 38% for a greater propensity to be bullied, and 23% for a reduced likelihood of applying for a place at the school.

All these percentages were lower than for the comparable questions about different ethnic origins and cultures and different socio-economic groups.

In respect of pupils from different faiths, just 10% of schools had taken any action to address academic under-performance of these groups within the past two or three years, the statistics for exclusion (3%), bullying (4%) and application for places (4%) being still smaller. In each case many more schools had conducted a review of the topic and concluded that no action was necessary, but another third had not even carried out a review.

Just 3% of schools (virtually all primary schools) reported that they used links with local faith groups and places of worship to promote community cohesion. This is somewhat difficult to reconcile with the subsequent claim by 14% of schools that they had developed such links since the introduction of the statutory duty to promote community cohesion.

Religious education topped the list of curriculum subjects used to promote community cohesion, being cited by 89% of schools. This was 2% more than for citizenship lessons and 8% above geography and English.

Differences between faith and non-faith schools in tackling community cohesion were more limited than expected. While issues of faith and religion appeared to be more of a concern for faith than non-faith schools, as reflected in their perceived knowledge of them (especially by senior leadership teams), the approaches used to promote cohesion, monitor its effectiveness and involve the broader community did not vary dramatically between faith and non-faith schools.

The survey also covered the extent of school compliance with the then Government’s agenda for preventing violent extremism (PREVENT). 7% of all schools (but 14% of secondary schools) said that they had actually obtained information and/or support from local religious leaders in this matter. Five times that number (37%) wanted local religious leaders to provide more help in building pupil resilience to violent extremism, which was only 8% less than those looking to the police for assistance.

Attitudes to PREVENT overall and approaches used were broadly similar between faith and non-faith schools, except that faith-status primary schools were more likely than their non-faith counterparts to say they knew a fair amount or more about the PREVENT-related schools policy. No similar difference emerged among secondary or special schools.

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Monarchical Religion

Posted on March 26, 2011 by Clive D. Field

The Church of England, the product of the sixteenth-century Reformation, remains the state church in England, notwithstanding successive attempts to disestablish it during the past two centuries.

These campaigns were initially led by militant Dissenters promulgating the gospel of ‘voluntaryism’, but latterly have involved secularists (doubting the official church’s compatibility with modern multi-faith, no-faith and multi-cultural society) and some Anglicans (objecting to establishment on theological and practical grounds).

Establishment is inextricably linked with the monarchy in several key respects, not least in that the reigning monarch is Supreme Governor of the Church of England and the Act of Settlement 1701 bars Roman Catholics, or persons married to a Catholic, acceding to the throne.

Both these facets of establishment were included in a recent poll undertaken by YouGov for Prospect magazine on the future of the monarchy, in the run-up to Queen Elizabeth II’s 85th birthday next month. The survey was conducted online on 1 and 2 February 2011 among a representative sample of 2,409 Britons aged 18 and over.

An article by Peter Kellner about the poll appears on p. 33 of the latest issue (No. 181, April 2011) of Prospect, as part of a wider feature (pp. 28-37) on ‘What’s the Point of the Monarchy?’ The data tabulations are available at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/yg-archives-pol-prospect-monarchy-240311.pdf

Asked whether the monarch should continue as the head of the Church of England, 56% replied in the affirmative, with 30% wanting the arrangement to cease and 13% uncertain what to think (rising to 24% among the 18-24s).

Advocates of the status quo were particularly numerous among Conservative voters (70%), reminding us of the traditional description of the Church of England as the ‘Tory Party at prayer’.

Supporters of abolition of the Supreme Governorship were found by YouGov to be strongest in Scotland (52%), even though the Church of England is obviously not established there. The next highest proportion (43%) was for Liberal Democrat voters, whose official party policy is to implement disestablishment.

The discovery that a slim majority wants to retain the monarch’s headship of the Church is in line with other recent polls on the subject, and represents an increase on the position for a good part of the 1990s when the adultery and divorce of Prince Charles led many to wonder whether he was a suitable Supreme Governor in waiting and even to query the principle of royal headship of the Church.

Yet this support for monarchical leadership of the Church did not translate into endorsement of the Act of Settlement. Indeed, 71% of YouGov’s respondents favoured repeal of the prohibition on the monarch marrying a Roman Catholic. 16% wanted the ban to stay, while 13% expressed no opinion.

Liberal Democrats (84%) and Scots (77%) led the reform lobby, with Conservatives (22%) being most resistant to changing the law.

It should be noted that the question did not enquire explicitly about whether the monarch should be allowed to be a Roman Catholic him/herself, only whether he/she should be free to marry a Roman Catholic. However, other polls during the past decade appear to demonstrate a growing public desire for ending that prohibition, also.

BRIN readers wishing to learn more about British public opinion on establishment during the past half-century may be interested in a forthcoming article in Implicit Religion by Clive Field: ‘“A Quaint and Dangerous Anachronism”? Who Supports the (Dis)Establishment of the Church of England?’ This is provisionally scheduled for publication this September in Vol. 14, No. 3 of the journal.

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