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We need your views, however critical, to improve and develop the site.
We can be contacted at:
British Religion in Numbers
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Siobhan McAndrew
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Tel: 0117 3317536
E-mail: siobhan.mcandrew at bristol.ac.uk
Eddie You can email them to c.d.field@bham.ac.uk Best wishes. Clive
Hi. Who do we email data reports to?
Dear Deborah BRIN has not looked into this, but I am hopeful that you may be able to find this…
Hello, Do you happen to have a breakdown of the Religious affiliation of the Roma/Gypsy population in the UK? For…
Thanks for your query. There are no recent British data on these topics which spring to mind, at least so…
What a fantastic resource which I’m sure will only grow in significance. I’m really interested by the focus of your work and how it informs one issue in particular.
The requirement on all ‘community’ schools to hold a daily act of collective worship of a wholly or broadly christian nature is, to some degree, dependent on that practice being appropriate for the pupils of the school (having regard for their family backgrounds).
It is for SACREs to decide at what point (usually when a certain % of families dissent from Christianity) it becomes inappropriate but those % figures will appear very different if a School refers to the 2011 census or surveys by the BSA or similar.
Ideally one would have a way of ‘moderating’ (?) the 2011 national census to establish better understanding of the actual local situation. The test seems to relate to beliefs rather than practice – apparently a vanishingly small percentage of adults take part worship 5 days a week as the law expects of children.
My inclination is to ignore the 2011 census and work on the basis of your latest published data – WAVE 8 UKHLS
I’d be very interested to hear any advice or caution on using (or extrapolating) your stats, in this particular situation.
The UKHLS is certainly a very large dataset but the Annual Population Survey (APS) from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) is an even larger one. The ONS has recently been experimenting with the APS to generate more dynamic estimates of religious affiliation but seems to have concluded that the data are not robust enough at very low levels of geography. You will find coverage of the ONS research on the BRIN website.
Hello Siobhan,
I’m a freelance journalist and wondered if you could help. Does the BRIN have a record of the number of godparents in the UK? I’m looking to write a feature on godparenting and would love to find a godparent who actually took in their godchild – let me know if you know of anyone! But the stats on UK godparenting would be really helpful too.
Many thanks
Peter Knight
0781 408 7140
Hello there,
I am pursuing my master’s degree in Christian Leadership and right now I am working on a thesis about the problem of consumerism among Slavic immigrants in the USA. Your article “Consumerist Christians” Posted on August 25, 2011, by Clive D. Field
sounds very interesting and I would like to ask you if you know where I could actually find this research in a full version.
Thank you!
Kind regards,
Alisa.
Dear Sirs,
I am unable to find data and information on the Paganism religion in the UK on your website. There appears to be little empirical evidence and reliable sources on the religion and its representation in the UK. Are you able to help me please?
Dear Kayla,
Thanks for your enquiry. There are few statistics about Paganism in the UK, the write-in answers to the religion question in the 2001 and 2011 censuses being the best source. I am pasting herewith an extract from my recent book ‘Counting Religion in Britain, 1970-2020’ (Oxford University Press), which you may find helpful.
“The other major non-Christian group recorded in the 2001 and 2011 censuses was that of ‘other religion’, details of which can mostly be obtained by the write in answers that respondents were prompted to give. Many of these were subsequently reassigned to other religious categories, not least Jedi Knight, which was reclassified to ‘no religion’. Among the most numerous were Spiritualists (discussed above) and persons who identified as Pagans or with one of the various paths of modern Paganism (such as Druidry, Heathenry, Shamanism, and Wicca or witchcraft). In 2011, there were 84,661 Pagans of all varieties recorded at the census (74,631 in England, 4,836 in Wales, and 5,194 in Scotland), four-fifths more than in 2001 but still thought by one insider to be an underestimate (on account of the reluctance of some Pagans to make their affiliation known and of others to regard Paganism as a religion at all) [V. Crowley, ‘Standing Up to Be Counted: Understanding Pagan Responses to the 2011 British Censuses’, Religion 44 (2014): 483–501]. The number was certainly lower than the unverifiable figures proposed by sources before the millennium: 250,000 according to one occultist in 1989 [The Occult Census, 1989: The First Ever Statistical Analyses of the Population, Involvements, Interests, and Opinions of Occultists in the United Kingdom (Leeds: Sorcerer’s Apprentice Press, 1989), 3] and between 110,000 and 120,000 in 1996 [R. Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 401. There is an extensive literature on modern (or neo) Paganism. For a brief introduction, see Hunt, Alternative Religions, 147–64. Recent specialized monographs include: Hutton, Triumph of the Moon, second edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); H. A. Berger, Solitary Pagans: Contemporary Witches, Wiccans, and Others Who Practice Alone (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2019); and S. Feraro, Women and Gender Issues in British Paganism, 1945–1990 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)].”
Best wishes, Clive D. Field
Dear Peter
Terribly sorry, but we know of no published statistics on numbers of godparents in the UK.
Best wishes, Clive D. Field
The post about “Consumerist Christians” is still online on our website at http://www.brin.ac.uk/consumerist-christians/ – whether the Bath link still works or not, I cannot say! CDF
Please may I join your mailing list. Thanks,
Many thanks for your interest in BRIN. If you are on Twitter, the simplest way of keeping in touch is to follow British Religion in Numbers there. We tweet whenever there is substantive new content.
Hello,
Do you happen to have a breakdown of the Religious affiliation of the Roma/Gypsy population in the UK? For example, I know that Roma Gypsies are mainly Christian or Muslim, but I cannot find any information online about what percentage of the Roma population in the UK are Christian and what percentage are Muslim. Can you help me?
With my best wishes,
Deborah
Dear Deborah
BRIN has not looked into this, but I am hopeful that you may be able to find this information from the 2021 census of population in England and Wales. You may be able to generate this break by using the online census data tool yourself; failing that, you would be advised to contact the Office for National Statistics.
Best wishes. Clive Field
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