Easter Religion and Other News

Easter religion

In what, for many, will be a welcome break from the general election coverage, YouGov has undertaken a replication for the Sunday Times of several questions about Easter and religion first asked two years ago. The latest sample comprised 1,906 adult Britons interviewed online on 3-4 April 2015. Detailed results, including breaks by standard demographics and by self-assessed religiosity, can be found on YouGov’s archive pages for 5 April 2015 at: 

https://yougov.co.uk/publicopinion/archive/

A topline comparison of the 2013 and 2015 results is tabulated below; breaks for the youngest and oldest cohorts are also shown. Obviously, because of sampling error, too much should not be made of the differences between the two surveys, but it is noticeable that, for all the indicators, the movement is in the direction of the least religious position. Easter is overwhelmingly regarded as a secular occasion, and more than three-fifths of Britons no longer describe themselves as religious, deem religion of importance in their lives, nor regard themselves as a practising member of a faith.  

Religious liberty in business

In last week’s news blog we reported on a ComRes survey for the Christian Institute in which a sample of Northern Irish adults was asked for their views about the right of business people to freedom of speech and religious liberty when providing goods or services to customers. The poll results had been released to coincide with civil court action in Belfast against a Christian bakery which had declined to ice a cake with a slogan supporting same-sex marriage. Court proceedings have concluded, but no judgment has been made. A comparable survey has also been undertaken by ComRes in Britain for the Christian Institute, among 2,020 adults interviewed online on 18-19 March 2015, and the data tables (including breaks by demographics and religious affiliation) published on 30 March at: 

http://www.comres.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Christian-Institute-_Freedom-of-Speech.pdf

Respondents were asked whether it was appropriate for court action to be taken against business people in a variety of scenarios, several of which had a religious component, as follows: 

It will be seen that the findings are reasonably consistent for all six scenarios, with around seven in ten thinking the actions of the business people did not constitute grounds for court proceedings and only one in ten believing that they did. Even among persons professing no religion never more than 18% (in the case of the Christian bakery and the cake promoting same-sex marriage) favoured court action being taken. Of course, it would have been possible to have asked the questions in reverse, with the rights of the spurned customers paramount, in which case – consistent with general public support for diversity legislation – the results for several of the scenarios would probably have been rather different.  

Future of world religions

The UK will cease to have a Christian majority by 2050, according to a report published by the Pew Research Center on 2 April 2015: The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050. It forecasts that, by the middle of this century, Christians will account for only 45% of the UK population, compared with 64% in 2010. Over the same four decades, the proportion of religiously unaffiliated is expected to rise from 28% to 39% (which seems rather modest, given the rate of increase among adults between the 2001 and 2011 censuses was running at 1% per annum), of Muslims from 5% to 11%, and of all other religions from 3% to 4%. Baseline numbers are derived from the census, which uses a particular question-wording to determine religious affiliation; other formulations produce higher figures for religious ‘nones’. Pew has used a range of sources to compute trends in fertility, life expectancy, age structure, migration, and religious switching (regarded as the five principal drivers of population growth) in the years to come. For a detailed explanation of the methodology, as well as the complete results by countries (including the Channel Islands), regions, and religious groups, consult the report at: 

http://www.pewforum.org/files/2015/03/PF_15.04.02_ProjectionsFullReport.pdf

News from Brierley Consultancy

The April 2015 membership mailing by Brierley Consultancy included a couple of items which some BRIN readers may find of interest. One is No. 38 of the bimonthly magazine FutureFirst, which contained the usual mix of longer and shorter news contributions, among them a lead article by Philip Hughes on ‘Does Faith Give You Better Health?’ The answer to the question, based on British data from the 2011 International Social Survey Programme, was generally that ‘attendance at religious services has little impact on health’, in that it was not one of the top five demographic determinants of health. However, at the level of causation, it was found that smoking and alcohol consumption were the biggest negative influences on self-reported health status, and that those who attended church monthly or more often were much more likely never to have smoked or never to have drunk alcohol than non-attenders at church, the differences being statistically significant. The article is best read in the full version, available on request from Brierley Consultancy. The second item is a 16-page report by Peter Brierley entitled Growing Churches: The Encouragements and Challenges Highlighted by the 2014 Grace Baptist Church Census. The census covered all UK Grace Baptist churches, which have a combined membership of 7,900, and revealed that there was an overall growth in worshippers of 7% between 2010 and 2014, with just 14% of congregations experiencing decline and 48% of Grace Baptists attending two services on Sunday (three times the number of all English churchgoers in 2005). For more information about these items, contact:

peter@brierleyres.com

Nonconformist historical statistics

The latest and, regrettably, final volume in Michael Watts’ history of Protestant Nonconformity in England and Wales was published on 19 March 2015: The Dissenters, Volume III: The Crisis and Conscience of Nonconformity, by Michael Watts with the assistance of Chris Wrigley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, xviii + 493p., ISBN 978-0-19-822969-8, £85.00, hardback). It covers the years 1860-1906, the previous volumes, published in 1978 and 1995, respectively dealing with the period between the Reformation and French Revolution and 1791-1859, the latter including an important statistical analysis of the results of the 1851 religious census and the pre-1837 non-parochial registers. Since the author died in 2011, his mooted fourth volume on the twentieth century will never appear.

The third volume makes good use of statistical evidence throughout and includes no fewer than 101 tables in the appendix. These are devoted to four main topics: 

• Members, adherents, and Sunday scholars by denomination (tables 1-6)
• Church and chapel attendance by denomination in London, 1851, 1886-87, and 1902-03 (tables 7-27)
• Church and chapel attendance by denomination in 50 towns and groups of villages, 1851 and 1881 (tables 28-78)
• Occupations of male Dissenters by denomination recorded in baptismal and marriage registers for 22 cities and counties, 1850-59 to 1970-79 (tables 80-101)

There is also accompanying textual analysis of the data on membership and attendance on pp. 85-91 and on occupations on pp. 101-9. This demonstrates that, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, both Nonconformist membership and attendance were beginning to decline relative to population and that the social basis of congregations was narrowing. The provision of occupational data for the twentieth century is an unexpected bonus and considerably extends current knowledge of the subject as hitherto summarized by Clive Field, ‘Zion’s People: Who Were the English Nonconformists?’ – a trilogy of articles published in the Local Historian in May, August, and November 2010. 

Anglo-Jewry database, 1851

On 23 March 2015 the UK Data Service released, as Study Number 7668, the Anglo-Jewry Database, a prosopographical resource containing details of the vital events, residences, and occupations of 29,275 Jewish inhabitants of the British Isles in 1851, representing the overwhelming majority (90%) of the Jewish community at that time. The dataset was compiled by a team of 270 contributors worldwide from the population census and a wide variety of other sources, published and unpublished. More information, including links to documentation, is available at: 

http://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=7668

It is also possible to search the database on the JewishGen website at: 

http://www.jewishgen.org/jcr-uk/1851/introduction.htm

and to order a print-on-demand index at:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/petra-laidlaw/an-index-to-the-jewish-community-of-the-british-isles-in-1851/paperback/product-21815428.html

Finally, it can be mentioned that Petra Laidlaw, principal investigator for the project, has two analytical articles on ‘Jews in the British Isles in 1851’ in Jewish Journal of Sociology, Vol. 53, No. 1, 2011, pp. 29-56 and Vol. 55, No. 1, 2013, pp. 114-57. 

European Jewish Research Archive

The Institute for Jewish Policy Research has recently soft-launched the European Jewish Research Archive, which it has set up with financial support from the Rothschild Foundation (Hanadiv) Europe. The archive is a free-to-use online repository of research on European Jewish communities that has been published in the form of books, reports, articles, or other media since 1990 and, wherever possible, includes the full text for downloading. It can be searched by author, title, topic, publication year, genre, original language, and geographic coverage. A search under UK currently results in 191 hits. To consult the archive, go to: 

http://archive.jpr.org.uk/home

Islam and British values

A majority of Britons (55%) think there is a fundamental clash between Islam and the values of British society, according to a YouGov survey for YouGov@Cambridge released on 26 March 2015 and featured in the online edition of the Daily Telegraph four days later. The sample comprised 1,641 adults interviewed online on 22-23 March. The proportion discerning a fundamental clash was highest among UKIP voters (89%), Conservatives (68%), and over-60s (67%). Only 22% deemed Islam to be compatible with British values, including 39% of both 18-24s and Liberal Democrats, while 10% disagreed with both propositions and 13% did not express an opinion. Data tables are at:   

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/03/30/majority-voters-doubt-islam-compatible-british-val/