Taking Part in England

Posted on April 12, 2010 by Siobhan McAndrew
Religious Identification from the 2007/08 Taking Part survey

Hello again: I am back in Manchester after some time away for a round of conferences. This post is just to flag up an interesting survey not yet in the database, and related tools.

The Taking Part in England survey is a large survey of cultural and leisure participation in England, sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The first was fielded in July 2005 and it has been run annually since then. The current collection agency is BMRB Social Research, which operates the survey via face-to-face interview.

Traditionally, the DCMS (or its predecessor departments) had flimsy evidence on audiences and the population at large, on which to base their bids for government funding. Data on the financial needs of arts organisations were more plentiful, but it was not always clear whether organisations which clearly needed money were having much ‘impact’. This led to the commissioning of a large continuous survey – namely Taking Part.

Surveys are expensive and the challenge for DCMS is the need to cover a wide variety of cultural practices, many of which are of minority appeal, but highly valued by those who engage in them. Acccordingly, the Taking Part surveys employ very large sample sizes: about 28,000 adults aged 16 and over. The surveys cover a wide variety of cultural and leisure forms in depth, and both personal participation (for example, whether the respondent is a singer, plays a musical instrument, practises a craft, or many other arts and crafts) and attendance as a spectator or audience-member (at dance performances, concerts, exhibitions, and many other events).

A large variety of socio-demographic information is also included, and of particular interest to researchers in religion is that a question on religious adherence has been asked each year (the question code is RELIGION):

What is your religion?

Respondents were offered the following options:

No religion; Christian (including Church of England, Catholic, Protestant, and all other Christian denominations); Buddhist; Hindu; Jewish; Muslim; Sikh; Other (specify).  

The dataset also identifies whether the respondent spontaneously identified themselves as Atheist/Agnostic, whether they refused, or whether they said that they didn’t know.

In 2007/08, a question was added on religious practice (RELPRAC):

Are you currently practising this religion?

A more expansive question relates to how participants use their free time (FreTim):

I would now like to ask you about the things you do in any free time you have. Please look at this list and tell me the number next to each of the things you do in your free time.

In 2007/08 this question offered 35 different options, of which number 34 is ‘religious activities, going to place of worship, prayer’. (Note however that this was not offered as an option in the earlier surveys.)

Another potentially useful question is TVPROG: Thinking about when you watch television, what type of programmes do you watch nowadays? This includes religious programmes as a response option.

The focus of the survey is secular recreation or leisure, and religious participation is not the main focus. However, the questions regarding lack of engagement with the arts or other leisure practices include ‘against my religion/beliefs’ as a response, which may give researchers into religion useful information. In addition, the focus of the survey is on activity with secular artistic content, so that the survey seeks to capture participation in religious festivals where ‘these may be primarily religious events, but include considerable artistic content’ (Technical Report to 2007/08 survey, p. 273).

Of particular note is that the large sample size allows researchers to look at religious identification at a fairly fine geographical area, down to about middle super-output area level (roughly equivalent to an area containing, on average, 7200 people). Ideally, the question on practice would have been included every year, but perhaps it will be included again in future.

Outside the Census and the Labour Force Survey, this may be one of the largest recurrent general social surveys which includes a religion question.

Furthermore, DCMS also provide users with the ability to look at frequencies and cross-tabulations for 2007/08 data using NETQuest, a handy online analysis tool, without having to download the dataset from the UK Data Archive and using statistical software.

This tool allows users to see with ease how identification and current practise vary with age, sex, income, geographic region, and ethnicity. Users have to register and access it by logging in, but the tool is very intuitive and visually appealing, comparing well with Nesstar.

I’m including a bar chart of religious identification here, using the NETQuest tool to look at 2007/08 data. It’s interesting to note that practically exactly two-thirds report that they are Christian (66.6%) and 24.8% report that they are of no religion. Of those who indicated that they did have a religion, 39.5% reported that they did currently practise their religion, and 60.4% reported that they did not. The remaining 0.1% refused.

For those wanting the full microdata, the following surveys are available at the UK Data Archive:

Taking Part: the National Survey of Culture, Leisure and Sport, 2005-2006, SN 5717

Taking Part: the National Survey of Culture, Leisure and Sport, 2006-2007, SN 6272

Taking Part: the National Survey of Culture, Leisure and Sport, 2007-2008, SN 6273

Additionally, here is a selection of useful links:

DCMS pages on the Taking Part survey:

http://www.culture.gov.uk/reference_library/research_and_statistics/4828.aspx

Taking Part via NetQuest: http://www.culture.gov.uk/reference_library/research_and_statistics/6762.aspx

Arts Council England research and analysis using Taking Part data:

http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/about-us/research/arts-audiences/taking-part-survey/

Good luck with your research in this area, and let us know what you find!

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Bible Reading and Bible Origins

Posted on April 12, 2010 by Clive D. Field

The Spring 2010 issue of Word in Action, the Bible Society’s magazine, contains an article by Jennie Pollock entitled ‘Positive Vibes for Bible’. This sets out the headline findings of a recent opinion poll commissioned by Theos, the public theology think tank which is part-supported by the Bible Society. You will find this article at:

http://www.biblesociety.org.uk/uploads/Products/product_1079/wia_spring2010.pdf

In fact, the research was conducted by ComRes as far back as 14 October-21 November 2008 among a telephone sample of 2,060 adults aged 18 and over in the United Kingdom. Two background questions about the Bible were included as part of the quantitative phase of the Theos ‘Rescuing Darwin’ project.

These particular questions were not reported on in the main document arising from the survey: Caroline Lawes, Faith and Darwin: Harmony, Conflict or Confusion? (London: Theos, 2009, £10). However, the full data tabulations for them were posted by Theos on its website on 18 February 2010 and will be found at: 

http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/Rescuing_Darwin_data_set.aspx?ArticleID=3838&PageID=110&RefPageID=110

The first question asked how often respondents read the Bible. 12% replied at least once a week, 27% less often and 61% never. Weekly or more frequent readers were likely to be aged 65 and over (19%), to live in Northern Ireland (20%), and to be ethnic blacks (29%) or practising Christians (88%). Non-readers were especially prevalent among those aged 18-24 (73%), those whose final level of education was GCSE or equivalent (70%), Asians (78%), non-Christians (71%) and those with no religion (82%).

The second question offered four statements about the Bible and asked which came closest to the interviewee’s opinion. 26% considered the Bible to be the divinely inspired word of God, including 39% of those aged 65 and over, 35% in Wales, 33% in Northern Ireland, 35% of the DE social group, 36% with no educational qualifications, 64% of blacks and 83% of practising Christians.

For 37% the Bible was a useful book of guidance and advice for our lives but not the word of God. 19% regarded it as beautiful literature but otherwise irrelevant to us today. 11% dismissed it as an irrelevant and dangerous collection of ancient myths, including 19% of those aged 18-24, 24% of Asians, 22% of non-Christians and 19% with no religion.

Other surveys have also covered the degree to which the Bible is considered to be of divine origin, although the question-wording is not strictly comparable with that used in this ComRes/Theos poll. For the results from these earlier studies, see:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/figures/documents/biblegeneral.xls

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Do Aliens Walk the Earth?

Posted on April 10, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Who believes that aliens live among us? Quite a lot of us, apparently, according to a Thomson Reuters News Service poll released on 8 April.

It was conducted by Ipsos, between 4 November 2009 and 13 January 2010, in 22 countries representing three-quarters of the world’s GDP. Interviewing was via the Ipsos online panel of adults aged 18-64, with 1,000+ respondents per country (and 24,077 in aggregate).

Although the poll findings have been picked up on a huge scale by print and broadcast media around the world (as will be evident from a simple Google search), most reports (including those which have appeared in the British print media) are based on a truncated press release, which does not feature the British data.

However, topline results for all 22 countries will be found at:

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/One-in-Five-20-Global-Citizens-Believe-That-Alien-Beings-Have-Com-1144745.htm

and

http://www.emediaworld.com/press_release/release_detail.php?id=878510

Overall, in these 22 countries, 20% of adults are convinced that ‘alien beings have come to earth and walk amongst us in our communities disguised as us’. In Britain the figure is 16%, placing us thirteenth in this particular league table of belief.

The top slots are filled by India (45%), China (42%), Japan (29%) and South Korea (27%), the only four Asian countries to be surveyed. Italy (25%) records the highest figure in Europe, with France, Sweden, Belgium and The Netherlands at the foot of the table (on 8 or 9%).

In general, those who believe that aliens walk the earth are most likely to be found amongst men, the under-35s and the higher educated. However, no demographic breaks are as yet available for Britain alone (at least in the public domain).

The 16% of Britons believing that aliens live among us is slightly higher than the 13% found in a YouGov poll for The Sun in July 2008 (when 37% also agreed with the statement that an alien being has visited earth).  

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National Churches Trust Survey [Updated]

Posted on April 9, 2010 by Clive D. Field

The National Churches Trust (NCT) has recently issued a press release to announce the imminent launch, on 15 April, of a questionnaire-based survey of all 47,000 Christian places of worship in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. This is intended to provide ‘a national picture of the current status of these buildings, including how they are maintained, funded and managed and how they interact with their communities’.

Each place of worship will be contacted by email in the first instance, wherever possible, and encouraged to complete the survey questionnaire online at http://survey.nationalchurchestrust.org For those who cannot be reached in this way, a paper version of the questionnaire will be sent by post. The questionnaire was piloted with 125 places of worship late in 2009.

The survey, NCT explains, has been designed in close co-operation with heritage organizations and Christian denominations. It is being guided by an advisory working group. The project officer for the survey is Charlotte Walshe, who can be contacted at nationalchurchestrust@surveylab.co.uk

The provisional timetable is for the responses to be collated in July and a report prepared by the end of September.

A news article about the survey in the Church Times for 26 March prompted Revd Ian Hill, statistician turned Anglican clergyman, to write a long letter to the newspaper’s editor. This was published in its issue of 1 April under the heading ‘National Churches Trust survey has flawed basis’. In particular, Mr Hill expressed concerns about non-response bias, with the potential result that the survey ‘may be less helpful than hoped’. Instead of the NCT’s census-style approach, he advocated ‘a properly sampled and stratified statistical survey’.

Andrew Edwards, NCT’s CEO, wrote in reply to Mr Hill, and his letter was published in today’s (9 April) issue of the Church Times under the heading ‘Churches survey: methodology defended’. Mr Edwards argued that the NCT had factored potential non-response bias into its planning from the outset. Having consulted with statisticians and heritage experts, he was confident that the NCT’s approach was robust and that it would ensure that the results will be representative. This will partly be achieved through the application of ‘sample balancing’ to ensure proper weighting of particular groupings of churches. Meanwhile, Mr Edwards urged places of worship to participate in the survey as fully as possible.

NCT, formerly the Historic Churches Preservation Trust (established in 1953), was relaunched in 2007. It is the only national, non-profit organization dedicated to preserving and supporting places of worship used by Christian denominations throughout the UK. It promotes the use of these buildings both by their congregations and the wider community.

In a parallel initiative, as part of its Heritage at Risk programme, English Heritage is surveying a representative one-tenth of the 14,500 listed places of worship in England (85% of which are Anglican) to find out how many are at serious risk of decay. It will announce its findings on 30 June.

[Note: this post updates and replaces our original post on the same subject, dated 31 March 2010]

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Religious Easter

Posted on April 8, 2010 by Clive D. Field

It is a little after the event, but there does appear to have been one opinion poll this Easter which took the pulse of religiosity. It was conducted online on 1-2 April by YouGov among a representative sample of 1,503 adult Britons aged 18 and over.

The poll was commissioned by the Sunday Times which included three religion-related questions in what was essentially a political omnibus study. The newspaper never actually reported on these particular questions in its print or online editions, but the relevant data tabulations have been posted by YouGov on its own website at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-ST-tracker-02.04_0.pdf

Interviewees were first asked whether they had a religious faith or not. 43% replied that they did, 51% that they did not, with 6% uncertain. Men (40%) were somewhat less likely to believe than women (46%), and those aged 18-34 years significantly less (33%) than those aged 55 and over (51%).

Regionally, the lowest proportion of believers was in southern England outside London (40%), the capital itself returning 47% thanks to the greater concentration of immigrants there, who often incline to be religious. One of the most interesting breaks was by voting intention, 40% of Labour supporters having a faith as against 52% of Conservatives. Does this augur that religion will be a feature of the general election campaign?

People who declared that they had a faith were then asked a supplementary question about the religion to which they belonged. Of this 43% sub-sample, 54% stated that they were Church of England, 16% Roman Catholic, 17% some other Christian denomination and 11% of some other religion. The Anglican contingent was strongest among Conservative voters (67%) and residents of the Midlands and Wales (65%).

The full sample was finally asked whether they intended to go to any kind of religious service over the Easter weekend. 13% said that they did expect to go to a place of worship and 82% that they did not. These ‘churchgoers’ were disproportionately likely to be women, older persons and non-manual workers, albeit the demographic differences were not huge.

If 13% did actually attend a religious service, this would imply a total of more than 6,000,000 adults in the pews over the Easter weekend. This seems an implausibly high number, reinforcing past opinion poll experience that the path to salvation is paved with good intentions, with respondents consistently inflating their prospective or retrospective religious observance.

More objective data are hard to come by, the Church of England being one of the few Christian bodies to count its Easter worshippers. In 2008, the last reported year, all age Anglican attendance on Easter Eve and Easter Day was 1,415,800. This figure is actually lower than the highest attendance in an ‘ordinary’ week (1,667,000).

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Sunday Trading

Posted on April 7, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Easter may have only just been and gone, but the minds of many large-scale retailers in England and Wales are already on the Christmas season. Specifically, they are focused on the fact that Boxing Day this year will fall on a Sunday, when their opening hours will be constrained to a maximum of six on what is traditionally the first day of the New Year sales.

Although, after a bitter public and parliamentary battle, the Sunday Trading Act 1994 deregulated shop opening hours for many shops, it did so only within certain limits for most retail enterprises with over 3,000 square feet of selling space (‘most’ since certain categories of large shops are exempted).

On ordinary Sundays large shops in England and Wales can only trade for six hours, while they are prohibited from serving retail customers at all on Easter Sunday, a ban which was subsequently extended to Christmas Day by the Christmas Day (Trading) Act 2004. This contrasts with Scotland, where no restrictions apply.

Sections of the retail industry periodically clamour for further liberalization, encountering the opposition of Christian groups (who are in favour of keeping Sunday special), trade unions (principally USDAW) representing the interests of shopworkers, and the owners of small (typically local and often independent) shops (who feel that their larger counterparts already have sufficient retail advantage over them).

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (in its words) ‘carried out a wide ranging and thorough review in 2006 and concluded that the current laws strike the right balance between all the interests involved.’ This review was preceded by a public consultation the year before.

In the run-up to Easter, the controversy began to flare up again. Shopping Centre ran a well-balanced article on ‘Can retail survive with the current laws on Sunday trading?’ in its issue for 17 March. The Garden Centre Group tested the law on Easter Sunday by opening many of its stores to its ‘members’ for browsing and advice, but not for purchasing.

Many retail leaders have voiced their fears about the negative impact which curtailed Boxing Day trading might have on their revenues, not least given that in 2009 footfall in UK high streets reached a record on Boxing Day, which fell on a Saturday. Topshop, New Look, House of Fraser, Selfridges, Hamleys, Boots and Burton are understood to have written to the Business Secretary to urge deregulation.

The Association of Convenience Stores (ACS), which speaks for 33,500 local shops, has now entered the fray with a new opinion poll. This it commissioned from GfK NOP among a representative sample of 1,000 adults aged 16 and over, interviewed on 26-28 March. ACS issued a press release about its findings on 6 April, which will be found at:

http://www.acs.org.uk/en/Press_Office/details/index.cfm/obj_id/24C7D54D-EFF7-43F3-ADA3A8EC9FA838CC

On the Boxing Day issue, 85% of respondents opposed any extension to trading hours for this day. Those in favour numbered 13%.

More generally, 76% of the public supported the current six-hour limit for large shops on ordinary Sundays, and of the 19% who wanted the law changed, 70% advocated stronger restrictions on Sunday opening (mostly its complete abolition). Of the total sample, only 5% wanted large shops to be allowed to open longer on Sundays.

USDAW has issued a press statement welcoming the findings of the ACS poll. Its own survey of 500 shopworkers in 2008 showed that 92% rejected any relaxation of Sunday trading law, with 56% actually wanting to work fewer hours on a Sunday. Interestingly, the British Retail Consortium is not actively campaigning on the topic since the opinions of its membership are apparently divided.

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Secular Easter

Posted on April 3, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Easter may be the holy of holies in the Christian calendar, but for most of us it is little more than a longish secular holiday, moderately ruined in many years (including 2010) by indifferent weather. International Christendom still cannot agree on a fixed date for Easter (as provided for in Britain by the as yet unimplemented Easter Act 1928, which would move the festival towards mid-April, when the weather might hopefully be better).

The secular undercurrent of Easter is clearly brought out in a survey conducted by 72Point for B&Q (the UK’s largest home improvement and garden centre retailer) in March, among a sample of 3,000 adults. The top five anticipated Easter activities are: relaxing (36%), visiting family (34%), gardening (33%), starting DIY jobs (24%) and day trips to the beach or park (24%). Seven in ten believe that the long bank holiday weekend is the best time to freshen up the home and garden, with the average person expecting to spend 15 hours this Easter doing just that. The most popular Easter jobs for women are cleaning (72%) and tidying (70%), for men fitting shelves (65%) and building furniture (55%).

This home and garden improvement bug is likely to be partially curbed in England and Wales by the provisions of the Sunday Trading Act 1994. Although this liberalized shop opening hours on ordinary Sundays, large shops (those with more than 3,000 square feet of selling space) are prohibited from serving retail customers on Easter Sunday and Christmas Day. This Easter the law is being challenged by the 73 stores in the Garden Centre Group, which will be open on Easter Sunday for browsing and advice, but not for purchasing items. When public opinion was last tested on the subject, in March 2008, by GfK NOP for the Keep Sunday Special campaign, 44% of Britons had not noticed or were unaware that large shops were closed on Easter Sunday, and 79% of the remaining 56% were not bothered by the closure.

A second secular institution of Easter is the holiday or outing. According to the Automobile Association’s membership panel, run by Populus, 56% of 17,500 UK motorists interviewed online in March anticipated that they would take to the roads this Easter. Of these 44% were planning day trips and 31% a weekend break in the UK. Of those not driving, 39% expected to go on (or return from) an overseas holiday. A similar survey, by One Poll for the RAC in March among 2,000 respondents, found that 76% of drivers planned to be on the roads over Easter, equating to more than 20 million of the country’s 31 million registered cars. 

A third Easter tradition is indulgence, epitomized by the consumption of chocolate Easter eggs. A new survey from mystery shopping company Retail Active, conducted by email among a sample of 2,000, has revealed that even 70% of dieters will suspend their regime and consume chocolate over Easter. Children aged 10-14 (the peak age for Easter egg consumption) will eat an average of 13 eggs each, containing 2.6kg of chocolate, over the Easter holiday, taking in 12,900 calories and 650 grams of fat. 77% of adults allow their children to tuck into Easter eggs first thing on Easter morning, before having breakfast or even a drink, and 70% of parents have adopted the American tradition of ‘hunt the Easter egg’. The lowest consumption rate, one egg each, was reported by those aged 40-59 and 75 and over.

Meanwhile, does religion get a look-in? Comparatively little research has been conducted into popular attitudes to and the observance of Easter as a religious festival in Britain. The principal exception to this is Clive Field, ‘It’s all chicks and going out: the observance of Easter in post-war Britain’, Theology, Vol. 101, No. 800, March/April 1998, pp. 82-90, which is now somewhat dated. The most important recent poll on the subject was conducted by ComRes for Theos in February 2008, among a sample of 1,100 adults interviewed by telephone. The data tabulations for this survey will be found at:

http://www.comres.co.uk/Theos-Easter-Poll.aspx

All that we know for 2010 so far is that, in a survey of 430 of its customers by HolidayExtras.com in March, a mere 4% said that the religious celebration is the most important aspect of Easter for them. This compares with 53% who replied that they were most looking forward to spending some quality time with their family, and 30% who were relishing the break from work.

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Spring Harvest

Posted on April 1, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Ever since its foundation in 1979, Spring Harvest has been one of the highlights of the British evangelical calendar. Its ‘Main Event’ is an interdenominational and all-age residential gathering of Bible teaching, (modern) worship, workshops, relaxation and equipping the Church for action.

This event takes place annually over Easter and is now held at the Butlins resorts in Minehead and Skegness. This year there are three weeks at the former place (3-18 April) and two at the latter (6-16 April). Delegates would ordinarily attend for one week.

The first Spring Harvest, at Prestatyn, attracted 2,700 evangelical Christians. Peak attendance appears to have been 80,000 in 1991, since when numbers have dropped, although they are still not far short of 50,000 each year.

Spring Harvest is affiliated to the Evangelical Alliance, which will be working with Christian Research in 2010 on a faith survey among people attending the principal Christian festivals in the UK, including Spring Harvest.

Meanwhile, some insight into those who attend Spring Harvest can be gleaned from an online survey undertaken by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity (LICC) in March 2009 among past and present attenders of Spring Harvest. There were 2,859 respondents.

Unsurprisingly, those who attend Spring Harvest are religiously committed. 81% have been Christians for more than ten years, against 11% who reply between three and ten years and 2% less than three years. 67% of Spring Harvesters are currently in some kind of church leadership role, mostly (60%) unpaid.

65% of those who frequent Spring Harvest are women and 35% men, similar to the gender imbalance among churchgoers as a whole. Only 7% of delegates are aged 18-25, despite the fact that Spring Harvest was started primarily as an umbrella body for young evangelicals. 10% are aged 26-35, 27% 36-45, 33% 46-55, 18% 56-65 and 5% over 65. The number of over-65s is very low in relation to their proportion in most churches.

44% of Spring Harvesters are in full-time paid employment and 29% work part-time. 7% are students and 12% retired. Denominationally, Anglicans (42%), Baptists (21%), Methodists (8%) and Free Evangelicals (8%) form the biggest contingents.

Besides demographics, most of the questions asked by LICC related to perspectives on and experiences of discipleship within the context of the Apprentice ‘09 event theme. Especially probed were the challenges to discipleship which occur in everyday life, notably at work and in the home, and the extent to which people feel equipped by their churches to deal with these challenges.

The questionnaire and results (including some breaks by gender, age, denomination, length of Christian allegiance and church leadership role) for this 2009 survey will be found at:

http://www.licc.org.uk/imagine/research/apprentice-09/

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Christians and the Irreligious Compared

Posted on March 17, 2010 by Clive D. Field

One of the interesting by-products of the ICM Research poll of 10-11 March 2010 on religion in public life is the insight which it provides into some of the differences between professing Christians and those of no religion (the sub-samples for other religious groups are too small for effective analysis).

The full data will be found in Table 8 at:

http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/content/survey_on_bishops_icm.pdf

However, here are a few of the headlines:

  • Christians are only slightly more likely to be women than are those of no religion, perhaps indicating that the gender bias toward religiosity is fading
  • Christians are more likely to be aged 45 and over and those of no religion under 45 years of age – indeed, among the 18-34s the irreligious actually outnumber Christians
  • Those with no religion are found proportionately more among non-manual than manual workers, somewhat contrary to long-standing assertions of the alienation of the working class from Christianity
  • There are proportionately more irreligious in South-East England than in any other region, underlying the collapse of Anglicanism in its traditional heartland
  • Christians are less likely to be working full-time than those of no religion, and more likely to be retired
  • Christians are more likely to be owner-occupiers than the irreligious
  • The irreligious have a somewhat above-average number of foreign holidays each year, with Christians below the norm
  • Significantly more irreligious have access to the internet at home and/or at work than do Christians
  • The irreligious are more likely to hold a first or higher university degree or equivalent than are Christians
  • The irreligious are more likely to be single and less likely to be married or cohabiting than Christians
  • The irreligious are more likely to have children under 18 in their households than Christians

Many of these differences are, of course, a reflection of the respective age profiles of Christians and those of no religion.

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Religion in Public Life – Another Poll

Posted on March 17, 2010 by Clive D. Field

You can really tell that a general election is in the offing, and possibly even that Britain is emerging from recession. Certainly, there seems a greater willingness these days for lobbyists to afford the expense of testing public opinion on a range of topics, and religion is one of the beneficiaries. We have already noted a couple of new politico-religion polls, on integrity and religion of MPs (see our post of 12 February) and religion and politics (21 February). Now comes a new survey on Parliament and public life.

This latest poll was conducted by ICM Research among a representative sample of 1,007 Britons aged 18 and over, contacted by telephone on 10-11 March 2010. It was commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust in support of the Power2010 initiative, designed to give everybody a say in how democracy works.

The poll findings were published by Ekklesia, the religion and society think tank which is one of the partners in Power2010, on 15 March. See its three news postings at:

http://ekklesia.co.uk/node/11512

http://ekklesia.co.uk/node/11513

http://ekklesia.co.uk/node/11514

The full data tabulations will be found at:

http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/content/survey_on_bishops_icm.pdf

The poll picks up some of the issues noted in the British Religion in Numbers news post of 15 March on reform of the House of Lords. Only 33% of ICM’s respondents believed it important for Church of England bishops to have a role in the Lords, against 48% who thought it unimportant. The highest proportion in favour of the episcopal presence was among those aged 65 and over (40%) and the lowest (20%) in Scotland, where the Church of Scotland rather than the Church of England is the established religion.

In a separate question, 74% of Britons said that it was wrong for some Church of England bishops to be given an automatic seat in the House of Lords, with 21% thinking it right (and no more than 25% in any demographic sub-group). Asked more generally about the role which religion should play in public life, 43% of respondents said that it was important and 41% that it was unimportant, with no major differences by demographics.  

The poll results were disaggregated by religious affiliation. Unfortunately, in a sample of this size, only the breaks by Christian and those of no religion can be considered significant (for example, only 24 Muslims were interviewed). Not unexpectedly, those with no religion were less sympathetic to the bishops and to the role of organized religion in public life than were professing Christians.

The poll supplements an online personalized letter-writing campaign launched by Power2010 on 11 March, encouraging people to contact one of the 26 bishops sitting in the current House of Lords, and seeking their support for a fundamental reform of the upper chamber. This has had a huge response, necessitating Power2010 to revise its target of letters upwards on several occasions. 31,000 email letters had been sent to the bishops by 12 March, 51,000 by 14 March and 59,655 as of the morning of 17 March.

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