YouGov’s Advent Calendar

Posted on December 2, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Last Sunday, 28 November, marked the start of Advent and thus the beginning of the ecclesiastical year in Western Christianity. Derived from the Latin Adventus, meaning coming, Advent has for Christians traditionally been a penitential season leading up to the birth of Jesus Christ on Christmas Day.

Perhaps one of the best-known manifestations of Advent today is the Advent calendar, in which doors, windows or drawers, often with a sweet (or even a toy) behind them, are opened day by day to build up the anticipation for Christmas. You might think this is a quintessentially British invention but, like many of our Christmas traditions, this practice originated in German-speaking Europe in the nineteenth century.

Initially, German Lutherans physically counted off the days until Christmas by drawing lines in chalk on their doors, lighting a candle or hanging religious images on the walls of their homes. Then came the public Advent wreath, hung for the first time in Hamburg in 1839, followed by the first hand-made Advent calendar in 1851 and by printed calendars from the 1900s. Advent calendars seem to have become common in Britain only since the Second World War.

According to today’s Daily Telegraph, ‘sales of Advent calendars have surged this year as parents try to inject a bit of tradition into Christmas’. John Lewis, one of Britain’s major retailers, reports that purchases of calendars in its stores have jumped by 150%. While some have religious themes, many are overtly secular, with a focus on excitement and pleasure.

However, the Advent calendar is being increasingly used (some might say hijacked) for other ends, including in the shape of virtual calendars on the internet. The Labour Party, for example, has just launched an Advent calendar in which each window opens to reveal what it calls a Coalition Government ‘broken promise’. Similarly, Scotland’s Violence Reduction Unit has produced a calendar in which each door leads to a fact relating to domestic abuse, which increases markedly over the festive period.

Appropriately for an online opinion polling company, YouGov has now initiated its own virtual Advent calendar for 2010, in which each daily Christmas stocking clicks through to a new piece of YouGov research into some aspect or other of Christmas. The first two stockings are now officially ‘opened’. The calendar can be found at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/advent-calendar

The research for day 1 (fieldwork on 30 November and 1 December among 1,686 adult Britons) asked respondents whether they planned to have an Advent calendar this year. 34% said they did, 60% that they did not, with 6% uncertain. Calendars are more popular with women (41%) than men (27%). Peak interest by age is with the 25-39s (46%), perhaps because many will be parents of young children, with the over-60s (20%) being least inclined to have a calendar. For more detail, see:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-YouGov-Life-Christmas-Day1AdventCalendar-011210.pdf

Day 2’s question (1,934 adults interviewed on 1 and 2 December) enquired about favourite Christmas songs. Preferences were greatly influenced by age. Thus, while Fairytale of New York by Pogues topped the list with 20%, it was most popular with the 18-24s (30%) and least with the over-60s (9%). The latter were bigger fans of Bing Crosby’s White Christmas (16%), which was in second place, with 9%, overall. Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody came third, with 8%. Cliff Richard was the best-known religious artiste, scoring 2% each with Saviour’s Day and Mistletoe and Wine. For the full list of songs, see:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-YouGov-Life-Christmas-Day2ChristmasSong-021210.pdf

Although we will not be covering each day’s question(s), we will try to post about any which are particularly pertinent to the religious aspects of Christmas.

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Dunfermline Presbytery Community Survey

Posted on December 1, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Other than statistics regularly collected by the various Christian denominations, there is only limited national data about religion in Scotland in very recent years. One has to go back to sources such as the 2001 civil census, the religion module in the 2001 Scottish Social Attitudes Survey, and the census of churchgoing by Christian Research in 2002.

It is, therefore, good to note some more contemporaneous, albeit more localized, evidence in the shape of a 37-page report on the Church of Scotland Dunfermline Presbytery Community Survey, undertaken earlier this year by Rev Allan Vint, the Presbytery’s Mission Development Officer. This is available to download at:

http://www.dunfermlinepresbytery.org.uk/documents/surveyreportjuly2010.pdf

The survey was primarily designed for internal Kirk purposes, to give the Dunfermline Presbytery ‘insight’ into the factors which underlie the seemingly relentless decline in Church of Scotland membership and attendance, and ‘discernment and wisdom’ to help develop future missiological strategy. Vint has previously carried out two censuses of attendance in the Presbytery.

The community survey was conducted on a limited budget and through a hybrid methodology, which will raise some doubts about the representativeness of the three achieved samples of adults, primary school pupils and young people who completed an online or paper questionnaire.

The questions asked covered: spare-time activities, religious affiliation, attributes of a Christian, level of Christian commitment, belief in God, image of God, perception of Jesus Christ, idea of heaven, religious experience, churchgoing and reasons for it, attitudes to church services, and previous Sunday school attendance.

Particular difficulties were encountered by the researcher in reaching teenagers (who constitute a mere 3% of the Presbytery’s worshippers). Only 131 young people replied to the survey. Anybody requiring information about the attitudes to religion and the Church of Scots aged 12-17 would be advised to gain access to the Ipsos MORI study conducted for the Church of Scotland in 2008 (see http://www.brin.ac.uk/sources/1011).    

Perhaps the most interesting section of the Dunfermline report relates to the replies from 358 adults. This highlights some notable differences between sub-samples of regular (monthly or more) and irregular or non-attenders at church (of whom 69% identified as Christian, although only 11% regarded themselves as strongly committed to the faith and no more than 50% believed in God).

Especially striking differences emerged with regard to the definition of a Christian. Whereas 89% of regular churchgoers prioritized knowing Jesus as personal saviour, just 31% of irregular or non-attenders attached importance to this. The latter were far more likely than the former (63% versus 34%) to see faith in terms of leading a good life. They also attached much less significance to belief in God, belief in the truth of the Bible, being baptized and attending services. This – in effect – interchangeability of religion with ethics has been a long-standing feature of popular beliefs.

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Church and (Big) Society

Posted on November 30, 2010 by Clive D. Field

We hear a lot about David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ proposal these days. Not unnaturally, faith organizations are keen to engage with it and to demonstrate the ways in which they are already involved with local communities.

In September 2010, over forty leaders of various Christian bodies and charities met with policy advisers for the Big Society to start a conversation about Big Society and the Church. This grouping has since expanded and is now known as the Cinnamon Network. Members include the Church of England and the Salvation Army.

One early outcome of the network’s deliberations was to commission some research into the Church’s current involvement in local social action, to enhance Government and public understanding of its extent and importance. In late October and early November church leaders were asked to complete a questionnaire on the subject.

Several thousand Christian places of worship in the UK were approached, of which 284 filled in the survey. The low response rate, the bias towards larger churches (51% of those making returns had fewer than 100 worshippers compared with 70% in the 2005 English church census) and the probable disproportionately evangelical character of the sample should incline us to caution in interpreting the survey data.

Nevertheless, the results are not without interest in providing an indicative picture of the Church as provider of social capital. A 16-page analysis of the findings, apparently prepared by Geoff Knott, can be found at:

http://www.churchinsight.com/Groups/149033/ChurchandCommunity.aspx

The churches which responded estimated that they had delivered 439,000 hours of volunteer service during the past twelve months, an average of 1,925 hours each. Unsurprisingly, the larger the church, the more time and resources were devoted to social initiatives. The total went up markedly (to 8,582 hours) for churches with over 500 adults in the congregation.

A projection of the hours volunteered per annum against the England base of churches by size was 55 million for England alone. A projection against population and churchgoing for the whole UK was 72 million hours. Both figures exclude voluntary work by Christians in the community that is not initiated by a church, for instance for a charity.

The churches in the sample estimated that they directly contributed £1,234,000 to finance social action projects, an average of £7,568 per church spent on an average of 3.3 initiatives. This was scaled up to £224 million a year for all English churches and, on a full economic costing, to between £1.5 and £2 billion per annum.

68% of responding places of worship planned to increase their social initiatives in the next twelve months and only 3% to reduce them, with 29% unchanged. 81% of churches thought it essential or very important to maintain their Christian distinctiveness in social action in the face of the requirements of equality law.

The top ten social action initiatives reported by the sample churches were: youth work (apart from children’s ministry); mothers and toddlers; caring for the elderly; community improvements; marriage counselling and courses; debt counselling; parenting advice and courses; helping the homeless; street patrols; and helping with addiction.

The same list largely shaped the priorities for spending any windfall £10,000. Youth work, carried out by three-quarters of the churches which replied, represented 32% of the hours and 40% of the money expended on social initiatives. Activities with mothers and toddlers accounted for 18% of hours but just 5% of funding.

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Psychological Type and Biblical Interpretation

Posted on November 29, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Much important work in the field of religious statistics has been undertaken by psychologists of religion. In general, it is relatively little-known outside the immediate discipline of psychology, partly, perhaps, because it tends to be based upon specialized samples rather than national surveys of the whole population.

A recent example of the genre is Andrew Village, ‘Psychological Type and Biblical Interpretation among Anglican Clergy in the UK’, Journal of Empirical Theology, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2010, pp. 179-200.

Village’s research involved the completion of a questionnaire measuring psychological type preferences and biblical interpretation by 364 male and 354 female clergy ordained into the Anglican Church in the UK, mostly into the Church of England, between 2004 and 2007.

Respondents were asked to read a healing story from Mark 9:14-29 and then forced to choose between interpretative statements designed to appeal to particular psychological type preferences. Ten sensing-intuition and ten feeling-thinking pairs of statements were included.

Psychological type was measured by the Francis Psychological Type Scale. Sex was used as a control variable because of the widely reported finding that women are more likely to prefer feeling over thinking compared with men. The Village Bible Scale was also deployed to control for biblical liberalism or conservatism.

The 718 clergy showed an overall preference for introversion over extraversion, feeling over thinking, and judging over perceiving. There was no preference between sensing and intuition. The only difference between the sexes was the much stronger preference for feeling over thinking among women.

Women were found to be less biblically conservative than men. Biblical conservatism was also negatively correlated with introversion, intuition and feeling, indicating that it may have been most prevalent among clergy who preferred extraversion, sensing and thinking.

In terms of the biblical interpretative choices based on Mark 9:14-29, there were no correlations with preferences in either psychological orientation (extraversion or introversion) or attitude towards the outer world (judging or perceiving).

After allowing for sex and Bible beliefs, the number of intuitive (versus sensing) interpretative items chosen was positively correlated with a psychological preference for intuition over sensing but not with preference in the judging process. 

Similarly, the number of feeling (versus thinking) interpretative items chosen was positively correlated with a psychological preference for feeling over thinking, but not correlated with preference in the perceiving process.

The study both confirms and expands a similar project conducted in 1999-2001 by Village among a sample of 404 Anglican laity, the majority of whom had little or no theological education. This investigation is most extensively written up in his The Bible and Lay People: An Empirical Approach to Ordinary Hermeneutics (Ashgate, 2007).

While such research demonstrating a linkage between psychological type and biblical interpretation clearly has an academic purpose, it is also designed to have a practical application in the pulpit, by suggesting ways in which preaching might be shaped to allow listeners of different psychological profiles to access biblical material in their preferred styles.

The book Preaching with all our Souls, by Leslie Francis and Village (Continuum, 2008), explores this dimension further. A good general introduction to the psychology of religion is provided by Francis, Faith and Psychology: Personality, Religion and the Individual (Darton, Longman & Todd, 2005).

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Religious Crisis of the 1960s: The Debate Continues

Posted on November 29, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Hard on the heels of Love Now, Pay Later? (SPCK, 2010), a major reappraisal by Nigel Yates of religion and morality in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s (see our earlier post at http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=701), in which the author both explicitly and implicitly qualifies Callum Brown’s claims for the importance of the 1960s in Britain’s transition to a secular society, Brown himself has returned to the fray.

However, Brown’s ‘What was the Religious Crisis of the 1960s?’, Journal of Religious History, Vol. 34, No. 4, December 2010, pp. 468-79 is less a riposte to the book by Yates (which, presumably, he had not seen at the time of writing) than to Hugh McLeod’s The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2007), which Brown concedes is ‘sophisticated and cogently-argued’ and, in many respects, ‘highly persuasive’.

Using McLeod’s book as his starting-point, Brown ‘explores the issues that divide scholars’ in debating the religious crisis of the 1960s: ‘the origin and length of the crisis (was it revolution or evolution?); was it generated more by developments within the Christian churches or by developments without them; and what was the relative importance of liberal Christianity versus conservative Christianity in the development and legacy of the crisis?’

In each of these three respects, Brown puts clear water between himself and McLeod to restate his earlier argument (to be found in such works as The Death of Christian Britain, second edition, Routledge, 2009 and Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain, Pearson, 2006) that ‘secularisation of the period should be regarded as mostly a sudden and shocking event, based on external threats, and reflected in the churches dividing between liberals and conservatives in ways that were to become ever more militant as the century wore on.’

Brown’s case is partly, yet selectively, supported by the use of statistics, about church membership, churchgoing and the rites of passage in particular (especially pp. 471-2). But his evidence base is overwhelmingly qualitative, although Brown does nod towards the fact that ‘demography is an underdeveloped area for historians examining dechristianisation in the 1950-1975 period’. We are still lacking any kind of systematic analysis of the quantitative sources of religious change in Britain during the 1960s, including national sample surveys which became plentiful at that time.

Another new book, to be published by Cambridge University Press in December, will take issue with Brown’s suggestion of a religious revival in the 1950s, which further accentuated his claims for a religious crisis in the following decade. Simon Green’s The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change, c. 1920–1960 partly comprises the author’s reworked collected essays. They include chapter 7, ‘Was there an English Religious Revival in the 1950s?’, which first appeared in Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society in 2006, and which dismissed as ‘brief delusions’ and ‘false hopes’ any such revival in the 1950s.

In addition to their respective books, Brown and McLeod have also written several essays and articles on the religious crisis of the 1960s. Another contributor to the debate is Gerald Parsons, ‘How the Times they were a-Changing: Exploring the Context of Religious Transformation in Britain in the 1960s’, Religion in History, ed. John Wolffe (Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 161-89. For an account of one seemingly trend-bucking denomination, see Ian Randall, ‘Baptist Revival and Renewal in the 1960s’, Studies in Church History, Vol. 44, 2008, pp. 341-53.

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Christmas Cards

Posted on November 26, 2010 by Clive D. Field

More than one in three (36%) of us Brits will be sending fewer Christmas cards this year than we did five years ago, new online research from Oxfam reveals today. This equates to 141 million fewer cards in 2010 than in 2005 (882 million, down from 1.02 billion in 2005).

Only 12% of Britons expect to send more Christmas cards this year than five years ago, with 43% sending about the same number. Moreover, while 91% of those aged 55 and over plan to send Christmas cards this year, just 72% of 18-24-year-olds intend to do so. Rather more women (42%) than men (30%) will be sending fewer cards this Christmas.

Saving money (22%), environmental concerns (22%) and postal costs (21%) are cited as the main reasons for sending fewer or no cards this season. But almost one in five (18%) think Christmas cards are no longer an important part of the festival, and 13% of those respondents will send online and email greetings instead.

The survey was conducted by YouGov among a representative online sample of 2,328 Britons aged 18 and over between 29 October and 1 November 2010.

Meanwhile, Oxfam itself reports that sales of its own Christmas cards in its 700 shops and online store are down 14% so far this year. The charity is dependent upon revenue from its cards to the tune of £1 million annually, with 42p in every £1 of sales going to its humanitarian work around the world.

For further detail, see Oxfam’s press release at:

http://www.oxfam.org.uk/applications/blogs/pressoffice/2010/11/26/oxfam-reveals-141-million-fewer-christmas-cards-will-be-sent-this-year/?v=media

Forty years ago, in 1970, according to Gallup, 91% of adults sent Christmas cards to friends and relatives and 9% not. The standard history of the Christmas card is by George Buday, originally published in 1954. Although there were forerunners, the first British card is credited to Henry Cole in 1843.

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Religious Archives

Posted on November 25, 2010 by Clive D. Field

The origins of record-keeping in this country are primarily religious, rather than secular. The state was a remarkably late entrant on the scene. Thus, until well into the nineteenth century, the registration of births, marriages and deaths and the proving of wills was undertaken by Churches, while the earliest population censuses (in England in 1563, 1603 and 1676, and in Scotland in 1755) were all undertaken under ecclesiastical aegis.

Religious archives are, therefore, a rich source of information for the study of all aspects of British history, and not simply those which relate to religion, narrowly defined. Although there have been several partial efforts during the twentieth century to map the religious archival scene, there has never been a holistic survey.

In an attempt to begin to fill the gap, and to improve the coverage of religious archives in the online National Register of Archives (NRA), The National Archives (TNA), the Archives and Records Association and the Religious Archives Group have come together to carry out the Religious Archives Survey, 2010, with principal funding from the Pilgrim Trust.

The survey covered the United Kingdom but deliberately did not extend to the full spectrum of religious archives. There seemed little point in duplicating information which is already held in the NRA, nor in investigating the central, diocesan and parish records of the four branches of the Anglican Communion in the British Isles (and the equivalents in the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of Scotland), whose archiving procedures are well-codified and places of deposit predictable.

By design, the survey concentrated on Christian and non-Christian traditions which have become established during the past half-century, and on other archives which are held privately. Inter-faith and non-faith bodies were also included. Data collection was largely by means of a structured questionnaire posted to 2,689 religious bodies, both official and unofficial, of which 414 (or 15%) were returned completed – a characteristically low response for postal enquiries.

The response rate varied by religious tradition. It was highest for those religious communities which have the longest histories in Britain – Anglican, Catholic, Free Church and Jewish. It was poorest for faiths which have only relatively recently taken root in any statistically significant extent, including Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, of whose organizations only 2% responded. In part, this probably reflects a weaker archival consciousness among these communities and lesser engagement with the public network of national and local archives.  

Thus, from a quantitative perspective, the results of the survey are double-skewed, both by deliberate principles of sample selection and by differential rates of return. However, the numerical data generated by the survey continue to have indicative value in describing the arrangements which religious bodies make for their archives. The statistics are summarized in chapter 4 of the main report on the survey and set out in more detail in Appendix III. These documents may be found at:

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/religiousarchives/

The report was formally launched yesterday evening at an event held at the Westminster Archives Centre, at which the Bishop of London, Dr Richard Chartres, was the guest speaker. A detailed national action plan for religious archives is in the process of development, informed by the results of the survey and by stakeholder responses which are being sought to it. The plan will necessarily have to be incremental and realistic, given current economic circumstances.

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Archbishop of Canterbury and the Coalition Government

Posted on November 22, 2010 by Clive D. Field

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, recently publicly criticized the Coalition Government’s plans to make the long-term unemployed take part in compulsory work placements, with those who refused at risk of having their jobseeker’s allowance stopped.

The Archbishop said that it would be wrong to put further pressure on the unemployed, thereby pushing them into a ‘downward spiral of uncertainty, even despair’. His intervention prompted memories of the Church of England’s conflicts with the Thatcher government in the 1980s.

On behalf of The Sun, which appears not to have reported the findings, YouGov asked a representative sample of 1,936 adult Britons aged 18 and over whether they agreed with the Archbishop’s remarks. Interviews were conducted online on 8 and 9 November.

Only 23% of the sample sided with Williams, against 64% who disagreed with him and 13% who expressed no opinion. Those who agreed were somewhat more likely to be men, aged 40-59, manual workers (C2DEs), Londoners and Scots.

However, the widest variation was by voting intention. Just 5% of Conservatives and 14% of Liberal Democrats (the two parties in government) shared the Archbishop’s opinion, compared with 47% of Labour supporters. 88% of Conservatives and 76% of Liberal Democrats disagreed with him.

Regardless of their views on this particular issue, respondents were also asked whether it was right or wrong for senior clergy to comment on political matters. A slight majority (54%) wanted the Church to keep out of the political arena, including two-thirds of Conservatives.

By contrast, 34% of the whole sample (45% of Labourites and 41% of Londoners) considered that the Church has an important moral contribution to make in the political world, with 12% undecided (including 23% of those aged 18-24).   

The full data table may be consulted at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Pol-Sun-CompulsoryWork-091110.pdf

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Jewish Women’s Aid

Posted on November 21, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Jewish Women’s Aid (JWA), the only UK national charity for Jewish women and their children affected by domestic violence, has launched the first ever survey into the incidence and perceptions of domestic abuse against women in the Jewish community. It is being led by Dr Sarah Abramson of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and the results are expected to be published next February.

The survey will comprise: a) face-to-face interviews with up to 300 of JWA’s own service users; b) anonymous online interviews with a self-selecting sample of other Jewish women; c) questionnaires sent to other domestic violence charities, asking about Jewish women who have used their services; and d) comparative international research in the United States, Canada and Israel.  

The online questionnaire, which is being advertised in the Jewish press with a request for completion by 1 January, can be found at:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/JWASurvey_PubLink

Emma Bell, executive director of JWA (which began in Leeds in the 1980s but has been headquartered in London since 1992), has explained that the survey is ‘partly inspired by the fact that in the last financial year the number of women we supported in the community increased by over 50 per cent and the numbers who sought counselling through us also doubled.’

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Evolution Versus Creation

Posted on November 19, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Next week will see the 151st anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species. The debate between evolutionists and creationists in explaining the beginnings of the human race has been raging ever since, especially as regards what should be taught in schools.

A new YouGov poll, released today and commissioned by Prospect magazine, affords insight into the current state of public opinion on the subject. It was conducted online on 25-26 October 2010 among a representative sample of 2,651 Britons aged 18 and over.

65% of adults now consider that Darwin’s theory of evolution is the most likely explanation for the origin of humans. The proportion is higher among men than women and the ABC1 than the C2DE social group. It is especially large among Liberal Democrat voters (74%).

This majority of two-thirds in favour of evolution was also reported in other recent studies, by Angus Reid Public Opinion in July 2010 (68%) and Populus in August 2010 (67%).

By contrast, only 9% of YouGov respondents hold to the account of creation as given in the Bible, ranging from 7% to 13% according to demographic sub-groups. A further 12% consider there has been some process of intelligent design, while 13% are unsure what to think.

These results represent a doubling in the number of believers in evolution since January 1973, when they amounted to 32% in a Gallup Poll. Creationists seem to have been expressly measured for the first time in August 1995, again by Gallup, when they stood at 29%. Later surveys can be traced through the BRIN database, but watch out for variants in question-wording.

The data table for the YouGov/Prospect question is available at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Pol-Prospect-Evolution-181110.pdf

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