Bible Literacy and Other News

Bible literacy

Bible literacy in Britain is falling through the generations, according to research just released by the Bible Society, which has launched a ‘pass it on’ campaign to encourage parents and other family members to ‘pass on’ a Bible story to their children (including via a Bible Bedtime App), with an overarching warning of ‘use it or lose it’. The research was conducted by YouGov and involved online interviews with 1,091 parents of children and adolescents aged 3-16 on 10-14 January 2014 and 804 children aged 8-15 on 10-13 January 2014. The Bible Society has published a report on the survey, together with tabulations of raw (unpercentaged) data with breaks by demographics for each of the samples. They can be found at:

http://www.biblesociety.org.uk/uploads/content/projects/Bible-Society-Report_030214_final_.pdf

http://www.biblesociety.org.uk/uploads/content/Pass_It_On/Results-for-Portland-Communications–(Bible-Society—Parents-Omnibus)-02-14-Parents-Omni—Counts.pdf

http://www.biblesociety.org.uk/uploads/content/Pass_It_On/Pass-It-On-data-tables—children’s-survey.pdf

Children were asked to select stories that appear in the Bible from a list of popular children’s books, Greek myths, and fairy tales, and only 14% answered all correctly. Moreover, significant numbers of children indicated that they had not read, seen or heard anything about some of the most celebrated stories in the Bible, 93% saying so about Job, with 89% for the Tower of Babel, 87% for Saul on the road to Damascus, 85% for Solomon, 72% for Daniel in the lion’s den, 63% for the Creation, 61% for the Good Samaritan, 61% for the feeding of the 5,000, 57% for David and Goliath, 56% for the parting of the Red Sea, 54% for Joseph and his coat of many colours, 43% for the Crucifixion, 38% for Adam and Eve, 25% for the Nativity, and 23% for Noah’s Ark.

In like fashion, many parents found it hard to distinguish the plot-lines of Bible stories from Hollywood blockbusters, 54% thinking that the storyline in Hunger Games might have originated in the Bible, with 46% saying the same about the Da Vinci Code, 34% about Harry Potter, and 27% about Superman. On the other hand, 46% did not recognize the plot-line of Noah’s Ark as a Bible story, with 31% ignorant of the derivation of David and Goliath, 30% of Adam and Eve, and 27% of the Good Samaritan. Older parents (the over-55s) were found to be appreciably better than those aged 25-34 at differentiating between Bible stories and Hollywood films, reflecting the fact that they were more likely (79% versus 56%) to have engaged with Bible stories when at school. Parents in Wales were also more knowledgeable than those elsewhere in Britain.

Notwithstanding their own relative ignorance, many parents whose children had been exposed to Bible stories continued to recognize their importance. This was especially so for professing Christians, 59% of whom viewed Bible stories as providing values for a good life, 52% as important to our history and culture, and 41% as classic stories that stand the test of time. Even one-third of non-Christians agreed with each of these propositions, not far below the average of 43%, 40%, and 36% respectively. Among all parents, only 11% deemed it inappropriate for children to learn Bible stories, 62% believing such learning should take place at school, 58% at church or Sunday school, and 45% at home. Three-fifths of parents considered it the role of parents or guardians to read Bible stories to a child, yet only 31% of parents of children aged 3-8 claimed to read Bible stories to their child once a month or more.

These findings are in line with other research. Indeed, a systematic review of some 160 sample surveys of Bible ownership, readership, knowledge, literalism, beliefs, and attitudes since the Second World War demonstrates a progressive decrease in ‘Bible-centricism’ during the past 60 years. It could thus be said to lend support to the theory which sees secularization as declining religious authority, in this case the authority of the Bible as the foundation document of Christianity. This research, by the present author, will be published in Journal of Contemporary Religion later this year.

European Quality of Life Survey

The dataset for the third (2011-12) European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) has recently been released to the UK Data Service’s Nesstar catalogue. The Survey, previously conducted in 2003 and 2007, is commissioned by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions. UK fieldwork was undertaken by GfK NOP between 30 September 2011 and 12 February 2012 among 2,252 adults aged 18 and over. Interviews also took place in 33 other European countries, mostly in the European Union (EU).

EQLS has been light on religion-related questions. However, in the 2007 and 2011 rounds a question was included on perceived tensions between different religious groups in each survey country, with the following results for the UK and EU as a whole (EU27), having applied the cross-national weight, and omitting don’t knows and refusals:

A question on claimed frequency of attendance at religious services was included in the 2002, 2007, and 2011 EQLS. The question and reply options differed on each occasion but the weighted results can be collapsed into the threefold categorization shown below:

It will be seen that the majority of UK citizens (59.7% in 2011) claim never to attend religious services, 14.3% more than the EU average, with weekly attenders 2.7% less. At the same time, perceptions of tensions between different religious groups are greater in the UK than the EU, and more in the UK reported a lot of tension in 2011 relative to 2007, whereas in the EU somewhat fewer did.

Scottish Health Survey

The results of the 2012 Scottish Health Survey, undertaken by the Scottish Centre for Social Research on behalf of the Scottish Government Health Directorates and NHS Health Scotland, have likewise just been released to the UK Data Service’s Nesstar catalogue. A large sample (4,815 adults aged 16 and over in Scotland) was interviewed face-to-face and by self-completion questionnaire on a wide range of health topics.

A background question on religious affiliation was included on the schedule: ‘What religion, religious denomination or body do you belong to?’ Weighted figures are shown below, in percentages (excluding refusals and don’t knows), together with those for 2003, the first year for which the Scottish Health Survey appears in Nesstar (the first survey was actually conducted in 1995). Unfortunately, the question asked on that occasion was different: ‘Do you regard yourself as belonging to any particular religion?’ There were also methodological variations between the two surveys. Therefore, the two sets of data are not strictly comparable, which may explain why – counterintuitively – there has been no overall decline in religiosity between the two dates (although the ‘other Christian’ group has lost ground). Additionally, it should be remembered that the ‘belonging’ form of question tends to maximize the number of religious ‘nones’. Statistics refer to adults only, not the entire Scottish population (as in the 2011 census).

BRIN has disaggregated the 2012 data by age cohort. The results, presented below, show some striking trends: a) no religion is the religious choice of the under-45s; b) Church of Scotland support is concentrated among the over-65s, and there has been an Anglican-style collapse with younger people, undermining the Kirk’s position as a national Church; c) Catholic self-identity reduces with age, being strongest among the under-45s, and offering some hope for the Church; and d) other Protestants appear to be dying out.

Justin Welby as hero

Asked to rate 84 famous Britons as heroes or role models, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby was placed 51st by a representative sample of 4,031 adults aged 18 and over interviewed online by Vision Critical in November 2013. Welby was the only past or present religious leader to be included on the list. Top spot in the heroes index went to Falklands War veteran Simon Weston, with physicist Stephen Hawking in second position. Sportspeople did especially well, assisted by their individual prominence in the 2012 Olympics, and politicians scored consistently poorly, ranked between 55th (Boris Johnson) and 84th (Michael Gove). Under the circumstances, given that he has not been in the job that long and has less media exposure than many of the other celebrities asked about, Welby can perhaps be reasonably content with his public standing as ‘hero’. The survey was commissioned by PR agency freuds, and a headline report was published by them on 1 February 2014 at:

http://heroes.freuds.com/assets/files/FREUDS_BREWERY_JOURNAL_2014_PDF.pdf

Religion and voting, 1940s/50s-style

I am currently working on a review of statistical indicators of religious belonging in Great Britain during the ‘long’ 1950s (between 1945 and 1963), and this has led me to re-examine source material in the Mass-Observation (MO) Archive at the University of Sussex, which I first investigated back in the 1980s. Fortunately, huge quantities of the Archive are now available in a commercial digital edition from Adam Matthew Publications, Mass Observation Online, in partnership with the trustees of the Archive (who naturally retain the copyright).

MO is best known for its qualitative and participant observation techniques, but it also diversified into more conventional opinion polling after the Second World War, ultimately leading to the establishment of a market research company of the same name. Two of its largest-scale surveys, each involving interviews with representative quota samples of over 6,000 adult Britons, were undertaken for the Daily Telegraph in April-May 1948 and December 1955-January 1956, to gauge public opinion on the subject of capital punishment.

Both surveys included background questions about religion and political partisanship, and they enable us to move further back in time with the analysis of religious influences on voting which have been so well explored by Ben Clements and Nick Spencer for the era from the 1960s to the present in their recent Theos report on Voting and Values in Britain: Does Religion Count? This is a book which we covered in our post of 26 January 2014.

Unfortunately, MO’s questions were worded somewhat differently to those in the surveys used by Clements and Spencer, so we should be mindful that we are not entirely comparing like with like. MO’s religion question in both 1948 and 1955 was: ‘What Church, if any, do you usually attend?’ On this definition, 74% in 1948 and 81% in 1955 claimed a religion, so, in effect, respondents really interpreted the question as one about religious affiliation, since church attendance nationally was well below these levels at both dates. MO’s political question was: ‘Which political party, if any, do you support?’

The results for both years are presented below, omitting Jews (too few of whom were interviewed) and refusals, abstracted from the tabulation sheets in MO Archive TC 47-10-E and TC 72-2-E respectively, which are reproduced in Mass Observation Online:

The tables broadly confirm the findings of Clements and Spencer for subsequent periods, not least in showing that Anglicans were disproportionately Conservative and Roman Catholics disproportionately Labour.