Inter-Faith Adoption

Posted on February 8, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Inter-faith adoption of children is acceptable to two-thirds of Britons, according to a YouGov poll released today. 2,051 adults aged 18 and over were interviewed online on 2-3 February 2011. The results are available at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Life-YouGov-Adoption-080211.pdf

Asked whether, assuming they were well-qualified in all other ways, adoption by a couple of a different religion to the child being adopted should be allowed, 65% of respondents said yes and 14% no, with 21% unsure.

The proportion in favour of adoption under such circumstances was especially high (73%) in the case of those aged 18-24 and Scottish residents. It was lowest among the over-60s (59%), 17% of whom were opposed, the same figure as for those who voted Conservative at the 2010 general election.

Interviewees were more comfortable about adoption by a couple of a different religion to the child than by people over the age of 60 (16%), smokers (44%), people over the age of 50 (46%), gays and lesbians (53%), single persons (53%), and those on very low incomes (53%). But support was less than for adoption by unmarried couples (73%) and couples from a different racial background to the child being adopted (77%).

The number negative about inter-faith adoption was the smallest for the nine adoption scenarios apart from adoption by a couple of a child from a different racial background, which was only 11%. Opposition was strongest (64%) to adoption by people over the age of 60.

The results partly serve as a proxy for a fair degree of racial and religious tolerance in Britain but to the persistence of some other social prejudices. However, one suspects that the findings may have differed somewhat had questioning been about adoption by members of specific religious groups.

It should be noted that the poll did not directly touch upon one of the adoption issues which has been making serious running in recent years, the sensitivities of some persons of faith about adoption by homosexual couples, and about the expectation on other adopting couples to lack bias against homosexuality, in the face of the requirements of equality legislation.

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CofE Annual Church Statistics

Posted on February 7, 2011 by Siobhan McAndrew

We have recently heard from the Revd. Preb. Lynda Barley, who is Head of Research and Statistics at the Church of England (for those of you with a subscription, Church Times interviewed her in 2008 about her dual career as statistician and cleric).

The annual Church Statistics have in recent years been available to view online. The Church of England website is currently being revamped, so that only the current edition is readily viewable, although the press releases remain for earlier years.

However, there is a programme underway to update and enhance the materials that were previously available. The Research and Statistics area of the website is now available at http://www.churchofengland.org/about-us/facts-stats/research-statistics.aspx.

Over the next few months the Research and Statistics team anticipate not only replacing the information previously available, with improved tables and charts, but also adding additional related material.

In particular, they are planning to enhance the mapping of Church of England data that has been incorporated to a limited extent in the past.

Feedback on the website as it improves will be welcome, via statistics [dot] unit [at] churchofengland [dot] org.

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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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Church of England Statistics for Mission, 2009

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Clive D. Field

The provisional Church of England statistics for mission for 2009, released yesterday in the form of five tables and eight maps, ‘paint a mixed picture’, according to Revd Lynda Barley, the Church’s Head of Research and Statistics, quoted in an accompanying press release.

‘Alongside some encouraging signs, such as the number of under 16s in church holding steady and growth in church attendance in 16 out of 44 dioceses, there are continued challenges, with further small declines in traditional attendance measures.’

‘Excluded from these figures’, Barley adds, ‘are Fresh Expressions, chapel services in hospitals, education and other establishments, some international congregations and the projects funded by the Youth Evangelism Fund.’

However, looking at the statistics in more detail, it will be seen that 36 of the 41 key indicators registered a decrease between 2008 and 2009, albeit the fall was 1% or less in 16 instances, especially for the measures of churchgoing.

The sole double-digit drop was in communicants on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, 11% down on the year, attributed to widespread snow and ice and the consequent cancellation of services.

All-age attendance at Christmas was also 9% lower, for the same reason. Congregations at Christingle and carol services during Advent were not enumerated.

Other significant decreases in 2008-09 were in confirmations (7% fewer) and funerals (6%). The latter figure cannot be entirely explained by lessening mortality, since it was still 2.5% above the fall in the number of UK deaths in 2008-09.

Moreover, the fact that funerals in crematoria dropped by 9% and funerals in church by only 4% is clear evidence of secularizing tendencies and is in line with Co-operative Funeralcare’s recent research, which we have covered at:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=840

The five Anglican increases for 2008-09 were for child baptisms (up by 3%), adult baptisms (6%), child thanksgivings (2%), Easter Eve and Easter Day communicants (0.4%), and electoral roll members (1%).

Too much should probably not be made of short-term changes, year on year, but it is perhaps instructive to look at comparisons between 2002 and 2009.

On this basis, it is hard to escape the conclusion that, overall and even allowing for special circumstances, the Church of England continues to decline, but at an uneven pace.

Over these seven years baptisms and thanksgivings were down by 9%, confirmations by 25%, marriages and blessings by 7%, funerals by 21%, and electoral roll members by 1%.

Average Sunday attendances over a four-week period in October fell by 6% between 2002 and 2009 and usual Sunday attendances by 10%. The latter measure is said to be ‘interpreted differently across the dioceses and is therefore not regarded as statistically accurate as a comparison’.

Yet even the newer all-age average weekly attendance figure, designed to capture churchgoing other than on Sundays, dipped by 3% over the seven years, with the weekly highest attendance also down by 2%. 

On the festival attendance front, the decrease between 2002 and 2009 was 4% for both communicants and all-age attendants on Easter Eve and Easter Day, 21% for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day communicants, and 7% for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day all-age attendants.

The only positive figures for 2002-09 were for child baptisms (+10%), adult baptisms (+31%), child thanksgivings (+13%), and weekly highest attendance by children and young people under 16 years (+3%).

Also a source of encouragement is that a further 375,000 children and young people attend church-based activities other than services.

Barley glosses these data thus: ‘It remains important to see these trends in the context of wider changes in a society where fewer people join and take part in membership organizations.’

‘Even in a General Election year, almost double the number of members of the three main political parties taken together will attend a Church of England parish church on a Sunday.’

Interviewed about the statistics for today’s Church of England Newspaper, Ven Bob Jackson, an Anglican church growth expert, said that ‘the Church of England is in a much better place than in the 90s’, with a slackening pace of decline and a renewed commitment to evangelism.

As well as pointing to the need to factor in Fresh Expressions, with Messy Church alone accounting for 100,000, Jackson added: ‘I think that the recent reduction in numbers is the result of people coming less often rather than fewer people.’

The provisional Church of England statistics for mission for 2009, both national and disaggregated to diocesan level, are available at:

http://www.churchofengland.org/media/1179117/2009provisionalattendance.pdf

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Churches and New Media Use

Posted on February 4, 2011 by sarabatts

Sara Batts, a PhD student at Loughborough University, introduces her findings on churches and new media use.

I am just beginning my fourth year of what I hope will be a five-year project. I’m based at Loughborough, but work in London with a full-time day job as a researcher for a City law firm. It’s the way information is handled online by churches that is of interest to me, and this sparked enough of a curiosity to embark on a research degree.

The key questions that I am addressing in the project are:

  • Are English churches establishing their own individual web presence, and then using online tools?
  • Is this having any influence on, or being influenced by, traditional hierarchies within church organisations?

The first major work was to establish a baseline of how many churches have a findable website. I then followed my sample through over two years to see how the numbers changed.

I took a sample of English churches from four major denominations – Church of England, Baptist, Methodist and Roman Catholic. I used the website Findachurch.co.uk and with permission polled its database using random numbers to represent the database index entries. In this way I could create a list that was not biased by geography – other online church-finding websites depended on using a postcode as an index. Given the vastly different proportions of church denominations in England, having 100 of each allowed for relatively straightforward comparisons. It means that Church of England churches are under-sampled and the others are over-represented, but this is preferable to having wildly varying numbers that would be needed for a proportional sample.

I either followed links from the findachurch.co.uk site or I used Google to search, and looked at the first two pages of results. Other studies have shown that that is consistent with most people’s real search techniques. Over two years, the percentage of churches I found websites for are as follows.

So the number of church sites I could find has been increasing, but increasing at different rates for different denominations. I have not yet established why.

The other key piece of desk research from last year was a content analysis of 147 church websites, from the area roughly equivalent to the Diocese of Chelmsford. I classified over 1,000 external hyperlinks and found that there were clear patterns of links. Christian Aid, Rejesus.co.uk and the Alpha Course were the three most linked-to independent organisations.

There were many more categories and types of information and the analysis is ongoing. It’s worth noting that although I collected data on photographs and some basic design elements (was navigation on the site straightforward?) this project is definitely not concerned with overall design choices, rather the information content on the sites.

I am moving into the next – and final – phase of data collection now and away from my desk. I will be interviewing leaders about their choices of online media, about their websites and the thinking behind them. From my desk I have been able to answer some of the ‘what’ questions in my research, now I hope to tackle the ‘why’ questions.

I blog about the PhD at http://phdinprogress.wordpress.com and aim to be posting content analysis results in late spring. 

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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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Anti-Semitic Incidents in 2010

Posted on February 3, 2011 by Clive D. Field

There were 31% fewer anti-Semitic incidents in the UK in 2010 than in 2009, according to the latest annual report from the Community Security Trust (CST). It runs to 36 pages and is available at:

http://www.thecst.org.uk/docs/Incidents%20Report%202010.pdf

The CST is a registered charity which provides physical security, training and advice for the protection of British Jews; represents Jewry to Government and police in respect of matters affecting security and anti-Semitism; and assists victims of anti-Semitism.

The decline in anti-Semitic incidents might have been anticipated. 2009 had been an exceptional year, largely on account of hostility to Israel’s substantial military operations in Gaza at the start of 2009, described by CST as a significant ‘trigger event’. 

Nevertheless, the 639 incidents recorded in 2010 was still the second-highest number since CST began collecting data in 1984 and a rise of 17% on the 2008 total.

This reflects a generally upward trend, which CST attributes in part to better reporting of incidents, although it considers that many instances of verbal abuse are not yet notified.

The 639 incidents were categorized as: abusive behaviour (60%), assaults (18%), damage and desecration of property (13%), threats (5%), and anti-Semitic literature (4%). No examples of extreme violence were recorded in 2010, of which there are a handful in most years.

Incidents were not evenly distributed throughout 2010. The largest monthly figure (82) was in September, believed to be linked to the presence of visibly Jewish people in public during the High Holy Day period.

81 incidents were logged in June, many of them related to negative reactions to the Israeli boarding on 31 May of a flotilla of ships trying to break the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza, as a result of which nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed.  

Not unexpectedly, the largest number of incidents was reported from areas of Jewish concentration, with 34% each in Greater London and Greater Manchester, although the Jewish population of the latter is just one-seventh of the former (21,700 against 149,800).

6% of incidents occurred in Hertfordshire (where 16,900 Jews live) and 26% elsewhere in the UK (with 78,300 Jewish residents).   

The victims of these incidents came from the whole spectrum of the Jewish community. The most frequent were: random Jewish individuals in public (48%), synagogues and their congregants (17%), Jewish organizations (12%), and private homes and schools/schoolchildren/teachers (9% each).

In cases where the demographics of victims could be identified, 65% were male, 27% female and 8% mixed groups. 66% of victims were adults, 25% minors and 9% a combination of both.

Physical descriptions of the incident perpetrator were received in some cases, of whom 47% were white, 6% East European, 7% black, 29% Asian, and 10% of Arab appearance. 83% of perpetrators were men, 12% women, and 5% of both sexes. 68% were adults and 31% minors.

In one-quarter of incidents the perpetrators employed discourse based upon the Nazi period, including swastikas and references to the Holocaust. Discourse related to Israel or the Middle East was used in 12% of incidents and Islamist discourse in 4%. Evidence of political motivation was found in 37% of instances and of premeditation in 65%.

In addition to the 639 anti-Semitic incidents, CST investigated 372 other cases which it eventually concluded were not anti-Semitic in terms of motivation, targeting or content. Two-fifths of these concerned potential information collection and suspicious behaviour at Jewish locations.

CST includes in its tally of incidents some which are not crimes. The CST statistics will therefore exceed the number of anti-Semitic hate crimes tabulated by the police, on which we have previously reported at:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=746

A further measure of anti-Semitism is found in sample survey data. The BRIN source database contains descriptions of 72 such surveys undertaken between 1938 and 2010. Go to:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/sources/

and key ‘anti-Semitism’ in the search box.

One of the most recent and extensive (as regards the number of questions) surveys was conducted in December 2008-January 2009 on behalf of the US-based Anti-Defamation League, with fieldwork in Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Spain, as well as Great Britain. The report on this study is at:

http://www.adl.org/Public%20ADL%20Anti-Semitism%20Presentation%20February%202009%20_3_.pdf

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Social Trends 41

Posted on January 28, 2011 by Clive D. Field

As previously noted (http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=365), Social Trends, the compilation by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) of social data from governmental and other sources, is now only published online, and in serialized form.

The latest version of the chapter on lifestyles and social participation was released on 27 January, as part of Social Trends, 41. It is written by Carla Seddon and can be downloaded from:

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/articles/social_trends/ST41-Lifestyles.pdf

Included at the end (pp. 28-30) is a short section on religion, derived from the Department for Communities and Local Government’s Citizenship Survey, 2008/09, specifically from the topic report on race, religion and equalities, already covered on BRIN (http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=564).

Social Trends, 41 focuses on the questions in the Citizenship Survey relating to religious affiliation, religious practice and the influence of religion on everyday life (in terms of where respondents lived and worked, who their friends were and their choice of school for their children). Much fuller detail is available in the original topic report at:

http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/corporate/statistics/citizenshipsurvey200809equality

The new Social Trends, 41 chapter has been picked up by the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph (the latter erroneously suggesting in today’s printed edition that the data are from the 2009/10 rather than the 2008/09 Citizenship Survey). To read this coverage, go to:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1351251/Number-British-Muslims-double-5-5m-20-years.html [a short article on ‘Christians “are less devout”’ appears at the bottom of this piece, which is otherwise about the Pew report on Muslim population]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/8286168/Christians-less-devout-than-Muslims-in-Britain.html

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Christmas Churchgoing in the Diocese of London

Posted on January 28, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Anglican churches in the Diocese of London (which serves 17 boroughs in Greater London north of the River Thames) saw Christmas Eve and Christmas Day attendance levels rise by one-fifth between 2009 and 2010, according to returns from a cross-section of 22 churches from the 480 parishes in the diocese and summarized in a press release on 24 January. See:

http://www.london.anglican.org/NewsShow_14110

Two in every three London churches in the sample recorded an increase in their Christmas congregants. Grossed up, there would have been 130,000 worshippers at Christmas in 2010, compared with 110,000 in 2009, thus (assuming we are comparing like with like) more than reversing the decline from 116,000 in the Diocese of London on Christmas Eve/Day 2008 (the latest year for which national Anglican statistics are available at present).

According to a report in the Church of England Newspaper for 28 January (‘Christmas Attendance Soars in London Diocese’), the increase in 2010 is partly attributed to the use of radio advertisements for its Christmas services, the first time the Diocese of London has used them. London was possibly also helped by the fact that it generally suffered less from the adverse weather than many other parts of the country in the run-up to last Christmas.

It is sometimes said that Christmas attendances are affected by the days of the week on which Christmas Eve and Christmas Day fall. In 2010 they were Friday and Saturday. Nationally, some of the largest attendances at Anglican Christmas Eve and Christmas Day services (2,786,000) were recorded in 2005, the only occasion in the past decade when Christmas Day has been on a Sunday, the traditional day for Christian worship. However, they were surpassed by 2,994,000 in 2006, when Christmas Day was a Monday, followed by a decline in 2007 and 2008.

None of these figures include congregations at carol and other Christmas-related services during Advent.

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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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