Radical Islam in the Middle East

Posted on February 6, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Recent events in Egypt, with pro-democracy protesters trying to dislodge President Hosni Mubarak from power, have made almost three in five Britons worry that more countries in the Middle East will fall under the influence of radical Islam.

That is the headline finding from a YouGov poll for today’s Sunday Times in which 2,283 adults aged 18 and over were interviewed online on 3 and 4 February. The full results can be viewed at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Pol-ST-results-04-060211.pdf

17% of respondents said that they were very and 42% fairly worried about the rise of radical Islam in the Middle East. 21% were not very worried and just 7% not worried at all.

12% expressed no opinion, increasing to 17% among women and the under-40s, the groups traditionally least likely to follow this sort of news coverage.

The proportion anxious about radical Islam climbed steadily with age, from 41% among the 18-24s to 75% among the over-60s. It was a fair bit higher among Conservative voters (67%) than Labourites or Liberal Democrats. It was marginally more among men than women, manual than non-manual workers, and outside London.

This pattern of demographics tracks British attitudes to Islam and Muslims more generally, suggesting that the replies to this poll about Egyptian developments were being firmly set within a framework of domestic Islamophobia.

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Transatlantic Trends Immigration Report

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Britons emerge as one of the most sceptical of western nations when it comes to immigration, according to the third annual Transatlantic Trends: Immigration report, which was published in Washington DC on 3 February.

65% of us see immigration as more of a problem than an opportunity, 70% think the government is doing a poor job at managing the issue, and 63% say that immigration policy may affect the way we vote.

Transatlantic Trends: Immigration is a project of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Compagnia di San Paolo, and the Barrow Cadbury Trust, with additional support from the Fundacion BBVA.

The key findings and topline data for the 2010 study will be found at, respectively:

http://www.gmfus.org/trends/immigration/doc/TTI2010_English_Key.pdf

http://www.gmfus.org/trends/immigration/doc/TTI2010_English_Top.pdf

Fieldwork was conducted in Great Britain (by ICM between 27 August and 9 September 2010) and in France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, the United States and Canada. 1,003 Britons aged 18 and over were interviewed by telephone.

The principal interest of the 2010 survey to BRIN users lies in two questions on attitudes to the integration of Muslim immigrants. These were only posed to a half-sample (n = 496 in Britain).

A slight majority (53%) of Britons considered that Muslim immigrants were integrating poorly into British society, 16% more than believed them to be integrating well. 10% could not say one way or the other.

The other half-sample was asked about the integration of immigrants in general. 52% of Britons said that they were integrating badly and 43% well, perhaps suggesting that Muslims were likewise to the front of mind in their replies.

Those holding that Muslim immigrants were poorly integrated were more numerous in Britain than in the United States (40%), Canada (44%), Italy (49%) and France (51%) but less than in The Netherlands (56%), Germany (67%) and Spain (70%).

Views were more favourable about the integration of the children of Muslim immigrants who had been born in Britain. 59% of Britons thought they had integrated well, 30% badly, with 11% uncertain.

Canada (66%) was most positive about the integration of the Muslim second generation, followed by the United States (62%) and Italy (60%). The other four European countries had lower figures than Britain, with 57% of Germans actually stating that the children of Muslim immigrants had integrated poorly.

A more extensive, but different, set of questions about Muslim immigrants was asked in the first Transatlantic Trends: Immigration survey in 2008, the topline data for which are available at:

http://www.gmfus.org/trends/immigration/doc/TTI_2008_Topline.pdf

The 2010 study also enquired into self-assessed religiosity. This question was put to the full sample. In reply, 10% of Britons described themselves as very religious, 42% as somewhat religious and 47% as not religious at all.

The proportion claiming not to be religious was higher in Britain than in any of the other countries surveyed. In descending order, the statistics were: The Netherlands (46%), France (43%), Germany (40%), Spain (35%), Canada (34%), and the United States and Italy (16% each).

This echoes the finding of a recent Gallup Poll which placed the United Kingdom 109th in a list of 114 countries in the importance attached by its citizens to religion in their daily lives. See further:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=520

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Hereafter Report

Posted on January 28, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Today marks the UK release of Warner Brothers’ supernatural thriller film Hereafter, based on the screenplay by Peter Morgan and directed by Clint Eastwood. It stars Matt Damon as George, a seemingly ordinary guy who has a special gift allowing him to commune with the dead.

In conjunction with the launch, a survey into the supernatural has been commissioned in consultation with Dr Penny Sartori, a former intensive care nurse and expert on near-death experiences. She is the author of The Near-Death Experiences of Hospitalized Intensive Care Patients: a Five Year Clinical Study (Edwin Mellen Press, 2008).

To judge from accounts in the print media, 3,000 adult Britons were interviewed online for the Hereafter Report, but precise details of fieldwork dates and methodology are as yet unavailable, so judgment has to be reserved on just how representative the sample and the findings might be.

66% of respondents believed in some form of afterlife and 65% that our actions in this life could affect the fate of our soul in the hereafter.

Specifically, 35% believed in heaven, a lower proportion than in other surveys (http://www.brin.ac.uk/figures/documents/heaven_000.xls), and 22% in reincarnation, similar to other studies (http://www.brin.ac.uk/figures/documents/reincarbelchart.xls).

58% thought that their late loved-ones were with them in spirit, and 40% expressed the desire to speak with them. There was also some wish to talk to dead historical figures, foremost among them being Princess Diana (19%), followed by Albert Einstein (10%), Marilyn Monroe and Freddie Mercury (8% each), Adolf Hitler (7%), and Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley and Winston Churchill (6% each).

53% were convinced that psychics can communicate with the dead, and 19% that somebody in their own family possessed such powers. 22% had actually visited a medium or psychic, consistent with earlier research (http://www.brin.ac.uk/figures/documents/psycmediumcons.xls), spending an average of £31 on each visit. 54% knew someone who had made such a visit.

22% claimed to have seen a ghost or to have felt the presence of a spirit, slightly higher than in other polls (http://www.brin.ac.uk/figures/documents/ghostsreportedsighting_000.xls), of whom 13% were sure that it was a deceased relative or friend. However, most would have been too embarrassed to own up to the fact.

40% believed in guardian angels, although 18% would feel awkward about saying they had been visited by one. The proportion of two-fifths is higher than in a recent ICM study but broadly consistent with previous Ipsos MORI polls (http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=809).

Overall, 32% described themselves as ‘spiritual’ and 25% as ‘religious’, a result which touches the wider academic debate about the extent to which traditional religion is giving way to spirituality (see, especially, Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution, Blackwell, 2005).

Summing up, but without any obvious access to comparative data, Dr Sartori was quoted as saying that ‘the nation is becoming more open-minded in accepting that consciousness may exist independently of the body and is not created by the brain’.

The above is a composite write-up, largely derived from reports in today’s Daily Express, Daily Mail and The Sun newspapers, which are the principal sources about the poll which I can find at the moment. You can read these articles at:

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/225702/It-s-spooky-how-much-we-miss-Princess-Diana

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1351249/Half-believe-Hereafter–1-5-want-talk-Diana.html

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/3375920/Seen-a-ghost-Its-Para-Normal.html

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The Ways We Say Goodbye

Posted on January 24, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Even for those not overtly religious in their everyday lives, the three rites of passage (birth/baptism, marriage and death – or, colloquially put, hatching, matching and dispatching) have traditionally been a point of contact with institutional religion.

Church of England and other religious statistics have long charted a decline in infant baptisms, while Government data (separately recorded for England and Wales and Scotland) have shown a decrease in weddings solemnized according to religious rites.

Now there are signs that the most long-standing ecclesiastical near-monopoly, over death, may also be eroding, partly in the face of a shift of focus in funerals away from an act of mourning mediated by a religious professional to a more participatory time of celebration and commemoration.

The established Church of England has experienced a fall of 19% in eight years in the number of funerals its clergy conduct, from 232,550 in 2000 to 188,100 in 2008. Expressed in terms of total deaths, the 2008 figure translated into a 39% market share.

The latest evidence about funeral customs and practices comes in a report today from Co-operative Funeralcare, the UK’s largest provider (100,000 funerals a year).

Entitled The Ways We Say Goodbye: a Study of 21st Century Funeral Customs in the UK, the document is mostly based on data gathered from funeral directors at 559 of Co-operative Funeralcare’s network of 850 funeral homes.

67% of Co-operative’s funerals still take a traditional form, in accordance with the rites of a particular religion, and generally including a service led by a recognized minister, followed by burial or cremation.

However, 21% are characterized as contemporary, where the emphasis is on celebration of an individual’s life and personalization of the funeral service, albeit an element of religion (such as a hymn or prayer) may still be retained.

12% of funerals arranged by Co-operative Funeralcare are classified by them as ‘humanist’, entirely without a religious component. They may be led by a humanist official, or by family and friends of the deceased.

In the words of one funeral director: ‘People don’t just want religion spoken about – they want the person spoken about. They’re making more of a day of it … more of an occasion.’

But the report highlighted that, such is the pace of personalization of ceremonies, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain these somewhat arbitrary distinctions between funeral types.

Following this trend, only 36% of funerals now have purely religious music, the remaining 64% using contemporary music, classical music or a mixture of styles. So, in this and other respects, even religious ceremonies are being modernized and ‘secularized’.  

The top three funeral songs in 2009, according to a separate Co-operative study, were My Way (Frank Sinatra, Shirley Bassey), Wind Beneath My Wings (Bette Midler, Celine Dion) and Time to Say Goodbye (Sarah Brightman, Andrea Bocelli).

Additional information came from an online poll conducted by ICM Research on behalf of Co-operative Funeralcare among a representative sample of 2,002 Britons aged 18 and over interviewed on 22-24 September 2010.

This revealed that 54% of respondents would prefer their funeral to be a personalized celebration of their life, with just 27% opting for a traditional funeral such as a church service with hymns. The latter figure ranged from 20% in the case of the 18-24s to 40% of the over-65s.

In a separate question, 49% wanted their funeral to be individualized in a specific way, most commonly in terms of their favourite music but, for some, even to reflect their favourite hobby, colour or football team.

The Ways We Say Goodbye can be downloaded from:

http://www.co-operative.coop/Funeralcare/PDFs/Ways%20We%20Say%20Goodbye%20Brochure.pdf

There is also a Co-operative press release, containing topline findings from the ICM poll, at:

http://www.co-operative.coop/funeralcare/about-us/News/First-ever-report-into-UK-funeral-customs-highlights-major-change/

This is by no means the first piece of research by Co-operative Funeralcare in this area. For instance, in October 2001 its forerunner produced a report Taking Fear out of Funerals, informed by a survey from BMRB the preceding March.

This showed that, even at that point, Britons sought funerals which were more cheerful, colourful and personal, with seven-tenths saying that non-religious ceremonies were perfectly acceptable.

One of the last major studies of attitudes to death more generally was by ComRes for Theos in April 2009 in the wake of the early death from cancer of Jade Goody, the ex-Big Brother contestant. The tables from this study are still available at:

http://www.comres.co.uk/resources/7/Social%20Polls/Theos%20Death%20Poll%20results%20Apr09.pdf

37% then expressed a wish for a Christian funeral, 4% for another form of religious funeral, 17% for a non-religious funeral, with the remaining 43% having no clear preference.

30% of the ComRes sample agreed that their religious faith helped them to deal with the death of a loved-one or to prepare for their own death, but 38% disagreed, with 32% undecided or refusing to answer.

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Perceptions of Discrimination

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Today’s news includes a report that two devout Christians running a private hotel in Cornwall have been found to be in breach of the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2007 for refusing to allow a gay couple to share a double room on their premises. The couple has been awarded damages against the hotel owners.

The fact that a Christian husband and wife seeking to uphold, as they saw it, a traditional Christian view of marriage have committed an act of direct discrimination against two homosexuals in a civil partnership will doubtless be seized upon by some Christians as further proof that the legal odds are stacked against Christians.

But does the general public agree with this reading of events? Before Christmas we reported on a ComRes poll for Christian Concern on the topic (http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=804). This probed attitudes to the rights of Christians, but largely in isolation from those of other sections of society.

Now YouGov has undertaken another poll for The Sun which provides a broader, more comparative context. The 1,884 respondents, adult Britons aged 18 and over interviewed online on 17 and 18 January, were asked to say how far they felt each of sixteen groups (four of them religious) was unfairly discriminated against in Britain.

10% said that Christians suffered a lot of discrimination, rising to 12% among men, the over-60s and Conservative voters. A further 18% thought they suffered some discrimination (including 24% of Conservatives and 22% of over-60s), 29 per cent a little, 34% not at all, while 10% had no clear opinion.

The proportion holding that Christians suffered a lot of discrimination was higher than those saying the same about Jews (5%) and atheists (2%), although it was less than for Muslims (18% saying that they experienced a lot of discrimination, peaking at 29% among the 18-24s).

Only 17% of the sample claimed that Muslims were not discriminated against at all, which was 7% less than in the case of Jews, 17% less than for Christians and 38% less than for atheists.

In fact, 55% were of the view that atheists suffered absolutely no discrimination, the only one of the sixteen groups for which an absolute majority took this line. This figure rose to 62% with Conservatives and 60% with over-60s and Scots.

If we combine the categories of groups perceived to suffer a lot of discrimination and to suffer some discrimination, then the following rank order emerges:

  1. Gypsies and travellers  –  60%
  2. Immigrants  –  54%
  3. Transsexuals  –  53%
  4. Muslims  –  50%
  5. Elderly people  –  45%
  6. Asian people  –  44%
  7. Gays and lesbians  –  43%
  8. Black people  –  41%
  9. White people  –  32%
  10. Working class people  –  31%
  11. Women  –  29%
  12. Christians  –  28%
  13. Jews  –  26%
  14. People with ginger hair  –  25%
  15. People with regional accents  –  17%
  16. Atheists  –  10%

The survey therefore appears to confirm the findings from other research that Muslims are the religious group suffering greatest discrimination. Despite a millennium of British anti-Semitism, and contrary to the impression of some Jewish commentators, Jews seem to fare better than expected and better even than Christians.

It should be remembered, of course, that this was a survey about people’s perceptions of groups which suffer discrimination, and that Christians would have been the largest single religious category of people doing the perceiving. The study was thus analogous to some of the questions in the Government Citizenship Surveys.

It is therefore possible that a different league table might have emerged had the questioning been about either personal experiences of being discriminated against and/or prejudices which individuals hold against particular groups. It would be especially interesting to know how atheists would come out of such an exercise, given that they seem the least disadvantaged of all the groups in this study.

The data tables for this YouGov poll will be found at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Life-Sun-Discrimination-190111.pdf

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School League Tables

Posted on January 14, 2011 by Clive D. Field

The Government has caused a stir this week with the appearance of school league tables which incorporate its new performance measure of the English Baccalaureate, comprising grade A*-C GCSEs or equivalent passes in five core subjects: English, mathematics, a science, a language and a humanity. Government’s definition of a humanity excludes religious education and other disciplines which are deemed to be ‘easier’.

On behalf of The Sun, YouGov polled online a representative sample of 1,518 Britons aged 18 and over on 11-12 January, asking them which GCSE subjects should count towards a school’s league table position. The results have been published at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Pol-Sun-LeagueTables-130111.pdf

Religious studies came fifteenth out of twentieth in the list of subjects offered by YouGov, attracting 22% support. This was well behind the front-runners: mathematics (86%), English language (85%), science (79%), English literature (67%), history (66%), geography (64%), modern languages (61%), and information and communication technology (55%). Dance came bottom (with 8%).

Backing for religious studies was lower among men than women, the under-40s than the over-40s, non-manual than manual workers, and Liberal Democrat than Conservative or Labour voters. There was no major regional variation.

Another recent survey, by ComRes for Premier Media on 15-16 December 2010, reported that 30% of the general public wanted religious education to be a core GCSE subject, with 56% opposed and 14% undecided. See http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=817

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Introverts in the Cathedral

Posted on January 13, 2011 by Clive D. Field

A press release from Glyndwr University just before Christmas drew attention to the publication of some results of a Glyndwr research team into the application of Jungian psychological type theory to profile the visitors to two Anglican cathedrals.

Psychological type theory offers a fourfold psychographic segmentation of a sample, distinguishing between introversion and extraversion, sensing and intuition, thinking and feeling, and judging and perceiving.

The research is reported in full in Leslie Francis, Simon Mansfield, Emyr Williams and Andrew Village, ‘Applying Psychological Type Theory to Cathedral Visitors: A Case Study of Two Cathedrals in England and Wales’, Visitor Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2010, pp. 175-86. This is a subscription only journal published by Routledge.

157 visitors to Chester Cathedral and 381 to St Davids Cathedral were asked a series of questions about their personality profiles and how those profiles related to their visitor experiences. In particular, the research team measured how active, private or sociable the visitors were, and to what extent they were energized by other people.

The principal conclusion was that, relative to population norms, extraverts and perceivers were significantly under-represented among visitors to these two cathedrals. The venues also appealed more to sensers than intuitives but drew equal proportions of thinkers and feelers.

The researchers hope their findings will help tourism managers at both cathedrals to maximize the visitor experiences of those already drawn to these heritage sites and to discover ways of attracting more extraverts and more perceivers to explore them.

The foregoing summary derives from Glyndwr’s press release and the abstract which accompanies the article in Visitor Studies. These are available at, respectively:

http://www.glyndwr.ac.uk/en/Contactus/PressOffice/Pressreleases2010/Cathedralvisitorslikelytobeshyresearchfinds/

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a927854195~frm=abslink

Other aspects of the same research among visitors to St Davids Cathedral have been previously reported in two further articles: Emyr Williams, Leslie Francis, Mandy Robbins and Jennie Annis, ‘Visitor Experiences of St Davids Cathedral: The Two Worlds of Pilgrims and Secular Tourists’, Rural Theology, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2007, pp. 111-23; and Leslie Francis, Emyr Williams, Jennie Annis and Mandy Robbins, ‘Understanding Cathedral Visitors: Psychological Type and Individual Differences in Experience and Appreciation’, Tourism Analysis, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2008, pp. 71-80.

An even more detailed investigation of the visitor experience at St Davids is Jennie Brice-Annis, ‘The Soul of St Davids: Mapping the Spiritual Quest of Visitors to St Davids Cathedral’, Bangor University Ph.D. thesis, 2009, 361pp. This considered four aspects of spirituality: spiritual awareness, spiritual experience, participation in the spiritual revolution, and spiritual health.

Her evidence base was both quantitative and qualitative, including a questionnaire survey (which yielded around 2,700 responses), interviews, and case studies. Analysis of the data suggested visitors to St Davids Cathedral were very much spiritually aware and underwent various spiritual experiences.

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21st Century Evangelicals

Posted on January 12, 2011 by Clive D. Field

According to a large-scale survey of churchgoing published by Tearfund in 2007, there are approximately two million evangelical Christians in the UK. Hitherto, we have had only limited insights into their profile and attitudes.

We now know a great deal more about them, thanks to a study undertaken by Christian Research for the Evangelical Alliance in 2010, and published on 11 January under the title 21st Century Evangelicals: A Snapshot of the Beliefs and Habits of Evangelical Christians in the UK.

17,298 Christians aged 16 and over completed the Christian Research questionnaire. These mostly divided between two samples: 14,511 attenders at seven Christian festivals in the UK and known to be popular with evangelicals, and 1,159 attenders at 35 churches randomly selected from the 3,222 in membership of the Evangelical Alliance.

Interestingly, 6% of both samples could not say for certain that they were Christians, while fully one-quarter of the professing Christians failed to designate themselves as evangelicals.

A third sample was also drawn, of black majority churches and conferences. Only a few agreed to participate. Although 1,239 questionnaires were completed by attenders at these churches, Christian Research clearly has reservations about the typicality of this sample, and limited use has been made of the findings from it.

Two reports on the research have been issued at present, although more are promised. The first (described as the ‘initial report’) is a ‘popular’ 24-page summary. This is fully-illustrated, selective in its use of statistics, and has an emphasis on headlines and brief commentaries. Such data as are quoted in it mainly relate to the festival sample. It can be found at:

http://eauk.org/snapshot/upload/21st-Century-Evangelicals-PDF.pdf

The second 47-page report (the so-called ‘data report’) is likely to be of special interest to BRIN users. This contains detailed information about the research methodology and the all-important weighting procedures, which require careful review (see the discussion and weighting factors on pp. 6-7).

The second document mainly comprises tables of results (pp. 8-45), routinely disaggregated for the festival and church samples and, more occasionally, for non-evangelical festival-goers. There are some minor inconsistencies between some of the tables when replies to certain questions are duplicated. This report can be accessed at:

http://www.eauk.org/snapshot/upload/21st-Century-Evangelicals-Data-Report.pdf

There were fewer differences in the profiles, beliefs and behaviours of the festival and church samples than might have been expected. However, for simplicity, and because they instinctively feel more ‘representative’ of grass-roots evangelicals, all the figures quoted below derive from the church sample only.

DEMOGRAPHICS: 60% of evangelical churchgoers are women and 38% men. 36% are under 45 years of age, 39% 45-64, and 21% 65 and over (an age profile far less skewed than for churchgoers in general). 24% are single, 1% cohabiting, 61% married, 6% separated or divorced, and 7% widowed.

BELIEFS: 98% agree that their faith is the most important thing in life and 96% that it is the key factor in their decision-making. 96% believe that Jesus is the only way to God. 96% consider the Bible to be the inspired word of God and 82% say that, in its original manuscript, it is without error. 92% believe in miraculous gifts of the Spirit. 59% believe in a physical hell, but 27% are unsure and 14% disbelieve. 39% think evolution and Christianity are incompatible, 43% that they are not.

PRACTICES: 95% claim to attend church once a week or more. 76% attend a small group meeting at least once a fortnight. 55% read the Bible daily and a further 36% during the course of a week. 78% pray daily and a further 20% during the course of a week.

EVANGELISM VERSUS SOCIAL ACTION: 91% deem it the Christian’s duty to be actively engaged in evangelism, and 58% talk about their faith with a non-Christian once a month or more. 82% regard evangelism and social action as equally important and 80% as complementary, but 39% think many churches place too much emphasis on social action. 88% consider it a Christian’s duty to volunteer in the service of the local community. 78% volunteer at least once a month. 98% voted in the 2010 general election.

MORALITY: 82% agree that sexual intercourse outside marriage is always wrong. 62% say that assisted suicide is always wrong (and 15% not). 49% agree and 33% disagree that abortion can never be justified. 36% feel it is wrong to have homosexual feelings, with 22% unsure and 42% not seeing it as problematical. However, 80% condemn homosexual actions. 84% oppose the blessing of civil partnerships in churches.

GIVING: 97% have given money to their church in the past year, 77% to Christian charities, 48% to other charities, 47% to individual missionaries, and 22% to individual homeless people. 62% claim to have given at least one-tenth of their household income during the past month to their church and charities. 73% agree that it is a Christian’s duty to give 10% of their income to their church, but only 40% tithed to their church during the past month.

ECUMENICAL AND INTER-FAITH WORK: 95% consider it important for Christians to be united in truth and 93% in mission. 88% say that their church works with other places of worship. 63% want Christians to collaborate with people of other faiths on community projects.

Also worth a glance is the Evangelical Alliance’s press release about both strands of the research, issued on 10 January. This focused on the themes of distinctiveness and diversity in the evangelical constituency, and highlighted the vital role of evangelicals in volunteering in the community. See:

http://eauk.org/media/uk-evangelical-christians-distinct-yet-diverse.cfm

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Reflecting on the Papal Visit

Posted on January 7, 2011 by Clive D. Field

More than three months afterwards, the state and pastoral visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Scotland and England last September continues to engender mixed views. That is the core finding of two recent online surveys released by ComRes on 1 January and conducted on behalf of Premier Media.

One poll was undertaken among a representative sample of 2,017 adults aged 18 and over throughout Great Britain on 15 and 16 December 2010. The detailed computer tabulations are located at:

http://www.comres.co.uk/page165705613.aspx

31% of this sample of Britons thought that the papal visit had been successful, 29% disagreed and 39% could not make up their minds on the matter. The over-65s (37%) and Scots (48%) were most likely to rate the visit a success, with men (35%) more disposed to disagree than women (24%).

A smaller proportion (21%) considered that the Pope had correctly addressed serious problems facing society during the course of his visit, the highest figures again being recorded among the over-65s (30%) and Scots (31%). 39% disagreed with the statement (with a range of 30-45% across the various demographic sub-groups) and 40% expressed no opinion.

Notwithstanding their answers to the previous question, a majority (53%) agreed with the Pope’s assessment that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, is being marginalized in Britain. The proportion taking this position was especially high among the over-55s and the AB social group, which might have been anticipated. More surprisingly, it was also greater among men (59%) than women (48%). Just 17% of the whole sample took issue with the Pope’s verdict, with 30% uncertain.

A final question to the general public sought reactions to the Government’s plans to exclude religious education (RE) from the list of core GCSE humanities subjects for the new English Baccalaureate. 30% of respondents wanted RE to be a core subject, but 56% were opposed, the remaining 14% not knowing what to think.

The greatest support for RE (36%) was among the youngest cohort, aged 18-24. This is in line with another recent poll of young adults (http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=790) and perhaps reflects the growing popularity of RE as a GCSE subject in recent years. The figure also stood at 36% for the over-65s. The strongest opposition to RE came from the 25-44s, skilled manual workers, and Scots.

The second ComRes/Premier Media survey was carried out among 600 UK churchgoing Christians between 17 November and 10 December 2010 via the ComRes CPanel. The unweighted sample included only 37 practising Roman Catholics, so too much should not be made of variations by denomination or churchmanship. Tables are available at:  

http://www.comres.co.uk/page165715812.aspx

As might have been expected, this religiously committed sample took a more positive view than the general public of the success of the papal visit (63%) and of the Pope’s handling of serious problems facing society (64%), with dissentients numbering 9% and 18% respectively.

But there was a little less consensus on two other issues. 57% deemed the visit relevant to them personally (with 38% saying it had been irrelevant). 53% disputed that the Pope had represented all Christians, not just Catholics, when he came to Britain, with 39% agreeing.

Churchgoing Christians overwhelmingly (93%) endorsed the Pope’s comments about the marginalization of religion in contemporary Britain. This was 40% more than among adult Britons as a whole. Moreover, 81% believed that such marginalization of Christians was increasing in the media, 77% in public (meaning not defined), 66% in the workplace, and 59% in Government. 

A final question to churchgoing Christians enquired into the use of new media by their local church in order to communicate its message. The most pervasive technology was a website (82%), followed by worship song projection (64%), videos during services (36%), podcasts/online sermons (33%), email newsletters (26%), and social media such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs (20%). One in ten churches were said to make no use of any of these media.

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