Digital Domesday Book

Posted on March 23, 2010 by Clive D. Field

The National Archives issued the following press release on 22 March 2010. Obviously, it is too soon to say how valuable a resource this will be for those of us interested in British religion in numbers.

THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES TO PRODUCE ONLINE DIGITAL DOMESDAY LISTING PUBLIC DATASETS

The Prime Minister announced today that The National Archives will lead a programme to create an online Digital Domesday book, which will list non-personal and re-usable central government datasets, by autumn this year. The plan formed part of an announcement on ‘Building Britain’s Digital Future’.

The online book will provide an inventory of non-personal datasets held by departments and ‘arms-length’ bodies. For the first time, the public will be able to access information on each set of data including its size, source, format, content, timeliness, cost and quality. 

Businesses and individuals will be free to embed this public data in their own websites, and to use it in creative ways within web and mobile applications.

Oliver Morley, Acting Chief Executive of The National Archives, said: ‘The National Archives cares about preserving and making accessible public information, but this is not limited to its paper records. We are at the forefront of government information management. We have already led and developed significant ongoing programmes ensuring the continuity of digital information so it is preserved for posterity and accessible even after technology moves on.

‘Much public information is now only accessible online: we automatically archive government websites so that even after a website has become defunct, these important sources of public information remain accessible and re-usable. This practice, along with our experience working across government and our knowledge of information management, means that we are well equipped to lead this exciting programme.’

Following the first edition of the new Domesday Book, the government will produce a proposal on how to extend this work to the wider public sector.

The National Archives’ Digital Continuity project works with government to ensure the public sector is still able to use essential digital information for as long as it needs. Complementing this project, the Web Continuity programme aims to eliminate the ‘page not found’ error message by archiving key government sites and redirecting traffic to the UK Government Web Archive.

Further to this work, government datasets made available through data.gov.uk will be archived to protect the investment developers make in building applications and re-using government data.

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Lutheran Membership

Posted on March 23, 2010 by Clive D. Field

The Lutheran World Federation has recently released statistics of Lutheran membership in 2009. You will find them at:

http://www.lutheranworld.org/LWF_Documents/LWF-Statistics-2009.pdf

The global Lutheran community numbered 73,758,000 in 2009, compared with 71,974,000 in 2008, an increase of 2.5 per cent.

Of this total a fraction over one half are to be found in Europe, and (more surprising, perhaps) one quarter in Africa.

The number of Lutherans in the UK in 2009 was 178,545, a rise of almost one third on the 2008 figure of 134,845.

This continues a pattern of growth among UK Lutherans in recent years, arising from the opening of borders within the European Union, as well as the arrival of many Africans, particularly from East Africa and the Horn.

Most of the Lutherans (174,300) belong to the Lutheran Council of Britain, with only small numbers in membership of the Lutheran Church in Great Britain (2,745) and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of England (1,500).

The Lutheran Council was established in 1948 as an umbrella body for the culturally and linguistically diverse Lutheran community in Britain.

It represents Amharic, Chinese, Danish, English, Eritrean, Estonian, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latvian, Norwegian, Oromo, Polish, Swahili and Swedish traditions. However, most British Lutherans still come from Nordic countries.

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Scottish Jewry in Decline

Posted on March 19, 2010 by Clive D. Field

The current issue (19 March 2010, pp. 4-5) of the Jewish Chronicle includes a two-page feature by its political editor, Martin Bright, on the decline of the Scottish Jewish community, from 18,000 in the 1950s to 10,000 today. The overwhelming majority of these Jews are concentrated in the Greater Glasgow area.

The article announces that, following a meeting earlier this month with the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities, the Scottish Government (through its Community Safety Unit) has committed to launch an enquiry into the causes of this decline, amid growing concern about anti-Semitism north of the border. Scottish ministers have yet to make any online public statement on the matter and to decide on the exact form of this investigation.

The anxiety about growing anti-Semitism is voiced in a recent online essay by Kenneth Collins and Ephraim Borowski on ‘Scotland’s Jews: Community and Political Challenges’, published on the website of the Institute for Global Jewish Affairs. The authors claim that much Scottish anti-Semitism is associated with events in the Middle East (specifically hostility to Israel and support for the Palestinians).

Some confirmation of this comes from the number of anti-Semitic incidents reported to the Community Security Trust (CST). There were just 10 of these in Scotland in 2008 but 30 in 2009, including 16 in January alone when the Israelis were mounting Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. One of the most serious incidents was the desecration of Jewish graves at Glenduffhill Cemetery in Glasgow, pictures of which have only just been released to the media.

Another potential indicator is prejudice against Jews and/or Israel expressed in public opinion polls. Unfortunately, although there is no shortage of such polls on a Britain-wide basis (see Clive Field, ‘John Bull’s Judeophobia’, Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung, Vol. 15, 2006, pp. 259-300), the Scottish sub-samples (where analysed) are typically too small to be meaningful.

In any case, no causal link between anti-Semitism and the decline of Scottish Jewry is yet proven. Indeed, the Jewish Chronicle quotes spokespersons from the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre and the CST who appear rather dismissive of any such link.

For an overview of Scotland’s Jewish community, see Kenneth Collins with Ephraim Borowski and Leah Granat, Scotland’s Jews: A Guide to the History and Community of the Jews in Scotland, second edition, Glasgow: Scottish Council of Jewish Communities, 2008. The same publisher also issued in the same year Marlena Schmool, Scotland’s Jews, a study of Scottish Jews in the 2001 census.

Also of interest is Nathan Abrams, Caledonian Jews: A Study of Seven Small Communities in Scotland, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2009. This focuses on the Jews of Aberdeen, Ayr, Dundee, Dunfermline, Falkirk, Greenock, Inverness, the Highlands and Islands.

POSTSCRIPT [11 June 2010]: Recent reports in the Jewish Chronicle qualify Martin Bright’s original feature article in three important respects:

a) Alex Salmond, Scotland’s First Minister, does not accept that anti-Semitism is a growing problem in Scotland;

b) the Scottish Government has not agreed to conduct an investigation into the causes of Jewish decline in Scotland; and

c) the Glasgow Jewish Educational Forum is critical of the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities for exaggerating the threat of anti-Semitism in Scotland

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UFOs

Posted on March 17, 2010 by Clive D. Field

UFOs (unidentified flying objects) have been in the news a lot over the past few weeks. This is partly because of the recent revelations that the Ministry of Defence is closing its UFO desk, staffed by a single case officer, and is ceasing to keep files of UFO sightings reported by the public.

This will do nothing to reassure the large number of British adults (30% in an Ipsos-MORI poll for the BBC in January 2008 and 49% in a YouGov survey for The Sun in July 2008) who think that evidence of UFOs is definitely or possibly being hidden from the populace.

However, another reason for the topicality of UFOs is the online release by The National Archives (TNA), on 18 February 2010, of a fifth batch of British Government UFO-related documents.

The 24 files involved spanned the years 1994-2000 and comprised 6,000 pages. They were available for free download for a month from a special TNA UFO micro site, after which downloading is charged for from TNA’s Documents Online service.

TNA statistics, specially provided to the British Religion in Numbers team, show that, on the first day of the release of these documents, there were over 96,000 visits to the UFO micro site and that three terabytes of PDFs were downloaded from it.

Moreover, the UFO news boosted demand for TNA’s services more generally. On that same first day of release, TNA’s main homepage saw an increase in traffic of 127%, with downloads from Documents Online up by 22%.

Much of this interest in the micro site was global, with (for example) Hungarian, Dutch, Finnish and Brazilian news sites between them referring over 20,000 visitors.

The popularity of the release of these Government documents is, perhaps, unsurprising. According to the YouGov poll in July 2008, 9% of adults think that they have seen a UFO and a further 43% believe UFOs exist even if they have never seen one.

Just 36% actually disbelieve in UFOs, with 12% don’t knows. Readers of The Sun are above-average believers in UFOs (60% against 52%). Details of the poll, which also covered aliens and extra-terrestrial life, may be found in The Sun for 28 July 2008 and on the YouGov website.

In case you are wondering, the British Religion in Numbers website has not been taken over by aliens! We deliberately aim to cover a range of ‘alternative’ as well as ‘conventional’ belief systems and will continue to do so, wherever data are available.

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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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Jewish Schools in Redbridge

Posted on March 15, 2010 by Clive D. Field

The current issue (12 March 2010) of the Jewish Chronicle includes an article by Simon Rocker on the results of a survey of parents of Jewish pupils attending the three Jewish schools (two primary, one high) in the London borough of Redbridge. It will be found at:

http://www.thejc.com/node/29309

According to the survey, commissioned by the Jewish Leadership Council, the overwhelming majority of Jewish parents are willing to accept the admission of non-Jewish children to Jewish schools.

Roughly one-half approve the admission of non-Jewish pupils up to 10% of the school roll, with one-quarter up to 25%. The remaining one-quarter deem it unacceptable to admit non-Jewish children.

In general, there is strong support for Jewish schools among Jewish parents, although fewer than two-fifths make voluntary contributions to support Jewish studies, in line with the recommendation of the Jewish Leadership Council’s Commission on Jewish Schools in 2008.

The survey (the full report on which is not yet online) is of particular interest from two perspectives.

First, there has been a recent test legal case, which went to the Supreme Court, concerning admissions policies at JFS, a Jewish school in another London borough (Brent).

Second, Redbridge is an area where there is a diminishing Jewish population, meaning that there will be insufficient Jewish children to fill an increasing number of Jewish school places, as warned by the Jewish Leadership Council’s 2008 Commission.

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Cyber Warfare Breaks Out Over the Papal Visit to Britain

Posted on March 15, 2010 by Clive D. Field

As anticipated in our post of 26 February on ‘What do we think of the Pope?’, the planned papal visit to Great Britain in September is already causing controversy. The internet has become one of the battlegrounds for the expression of rival views.

The campaign opened with an online petition on the National Secular Society’s website to ‘Make the Pope pay’. It called on the Prime Minister to ask the Roman Catholic Church to bear the estimated £20 million cost of the visit, to avoid any fiscal burden falling on the taxpayer. This petition attracted over 25,000 signatories in three weeks.

The National Secular Society has now closed this petition and joined forces with a petition started on the No. 10 website by Peter Tatchell of OutRage! This is open until 2 October 2010 and has to date (15 March) been signed by 7,771 people.

The Tatchell petition calls upon the Prime Minister to disassociate the British Government from ‘the Pope’s intolerant views’ ahead of the papal visit. Especially condemned is the ‘Pope’s opposition to women’s reproductive rights, gay equality, embryonic stem cell research and the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV.’

This petition will be found at:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/ProtestthePope/

Supporters of the papal visit have now opened a counter-petition at:

http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?PopeinUK

Roman Catholics are being encouraged to sign up to this. A letter in the Catholic Herald of 12 March urged its readers to sign the petition and to get their parish priests to mention it in their parochial newsletters. As of 15 March, there are 24,454 signatories, probably not all of whom are from the United Kingdom.

Short comments are also allowed on this pro-visit website, of which the following are specimen examples:

  • ‘I’m disgusted that we even have to do this to welcome a man of the Church into our Christian country. What is this country coming to?’
  • ‘I fully support the Pope’s visit to this country and consider any opposition to be bigoted and against the principles of democracy’
  • ‘If it were a Muslim prelate there would be no opposition – they wouldn’t dare!’
  • ‘In a multi-faith, multi-cultural democracy we should welcome the leaders of all faiths and be prepared to accept that not all of their views will accord with our own’
  • ‘The Pope is a head of state. His visit is a matter between the Vatican and the UK Governments and does not depend on “yes” or “no” campaign of UK citizens or residents’

Of course, while of illustrative value, none of this expression of opinion has any kind of statistical significance. Like phone-in polls run by the media, these online surveys of self-selecting respondents fall into the realm of what Sir Robert Worcester of Ipsos-MORI has labelled ‘voodoo polls’.

Hopefully, in time, we will get a more scientific measurement of British attitudes to the papal visit, much like the series of polls run by Gordon Heald of Gallup in 1982 when Pope John Paul II visited Britain. These may be traced through the British Religion in Numbers sources database.

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Reform of the House of Lords – Whither the Bishops?

Posted on March 15, 2010 by Clive D. Field

According to media reports, the Government is once again contemplating radical reform of the House of Lords, bringing in a fully-elected chamber. Such a move would inevitably spell the end to the presence there of the 26 Church of England bishops sitting as the lords spiritual.

Would such a move be welcomed in the court of public opinion? The most recent survey of a representative sample of British adults on the subject was conducted by ComRes for the BBC’s ‘Heaven and earth’ programme in July 2007.

Views were then fairly evenly divided on the continued presence of the bishops in the House of Lords, 48% agreeing and 43% disagreeing. In the event that the episcopal presence was to be maintained, 65% thought that the entitlement to sit in the upper chamber should also be extended to non-Anglican religious leaders.

But what of Parliamentarians? Would they support any legislative measure to unseat the bishops? Unfortunately, no recent survey of the attitudes of MPs appears to have been carried out. However, there have been two ComRes peers’ panel surveys.

The first, in November-December 2008, revealed 45% of peers in favour of the status quo for the lords spiritual and 44% desiring change. Tory peers were overwhelmingly in favour of keeping the current arrangements, Labour and Liberal Democrat ones most enthusiastic for reform. 22% of peers argued that there should be absolutely no representation in the House of Lords on the basis of faith, Christian or otherwise, the proportion rising to one in two among Labour and Liberal Democrat peers.

The second peers’ panel, in June-July 2009, found 54% agreeing that religious representation in the House of Lords should reflect the faith composition of the country as a whole, with 33% disagreeing. There were no major differences in response by political allegiance. The number wanting to see religious representation phased out had risen to 28% and was again especially high among Labour and Liberal Democrat peers.

As for the Church of England itself, according to a questionnaire completed by readers of the Church Times in March-April 2001, 82% of the churchgoing laity and 76% of the clergy support the continued presence of Anglican bishops in the House of Lords.

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Christianity in Cyberspace

Posted on March 12, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Many places of worship now have their own websites, but how effective are they in getting their message across? To answer this question, ChurchInsight (a leading church management web application service from Endis Ltd) conducted an online survey among 120 evangelical churches of various denominations in the UK in February 2010. ChurchInsight’s analysis of the results of the survey, disaggregated by church size, is available at:

http://www.churchinsight.com/Groups/120985/Digimission.aspx

The study is also featured in an article by Mark Woods on the front page of the Baptist Times for 12 March 2010, under the downbeat headline: ‘Church websites aren’t working, says survey’. The underlying message of this report is that ‘churches have still not entered the digital age when it comes to evangelism – but those who have are reaping huge rewards’. Many websites were found to focus on the internal life of the church and to lack interactivity, thereby reducing their effectiveness as a tool for mission.

Among the statistical findings of the survey for the 120 churches are the following:

  • The commonest features of websites are online contacts (95%), calendars (75%) and audio resources (65%), but only 50% of churches have a clear explanation of the gospel available on their website and only 25% have testimonies of faith
  • There were 752 non-Christian visitors to events or services in the past year coming through the web and with no previous contact, together with another 588 with previous contact – an average of 11 per church
  • There were 1,050 Christian visitors to events or services in the past year coming through the web and with no previous contact, plus another 574 with previous contact – an average of 14 per church
  • Churches with an above-average number of non-Christian visitors are more likely to rate their website as being good at communicating to non-Christians, to have the gospel on their site, to provide online mechanisms for booking into events and to have audio resources
  • Although the number of visitors naturally correlates fairly closely with church size, churches with 51-100 adult attenders seem, proportionately, to be the most effective in reaching non-Christians through the web
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