Papal Track-Record and Nones

In case anybody is counting, this is BRIN’s 650th blog post since 2010.

Pope Francis one year on

Pope Francis has been Bishop of Rome for a year now, and the media have been busying themselves with seeing what difference he has made, as perceived by the Catholic faithful and adults as a whole. For example, the Catholic weekly The Tablet ran a global survey on its website between 19 February and 4 March 2014, to which a self-selecting sample of over 1,400 responded, mostly weekly Massgoers (the survey is briefly noted in the edition of The Tablet for 8 March, with the full data to be released soon). The Pew Research Center’s latest study has focused on the opinions of United States Catholics about the Pope, published on 6 March. Meanwhile, Angus Reid Global polled the general publics of the United States, Canada, and Great Britain online on 4 March 2014, including 2,013 Britons, issuing a press release containing topline results only on 7 March at:

http://www.angusreidglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ARG-Pope-First-Year.pdf

Much has been written about the ‘Francis effect’, but the Angus Reid Global study reveals that it is rather less prevalent in Britain than in the United States or Canada. Whereas three-fifths of Americans and Canadians had a positive overall view of Pope Francis, the number fell to 36% in Britain, the majority (56%) being neutral and 9% negative. Practising Catholics were most positive in Britain (92%), three times the level among non-Catholics (31%). Only a plurality of Britons (48%) assessed that Pope Francis had made a positive impact on the Catholic Church, 19% less than in Canada and 15% fewer than in America, with 44% taking a neutral position.

Although two-thirds welcomed his simple lifestyle and commitment to the poor, 70% of Britons said that Pope Francis had not succeeded in changing their own views of the Catholic Church, one-quarter acknowledging he had improved them (against 37% in Canada and 44% in America). Even 77% of lapsed or non-practising British Catholics claimed that Pope Francis’s record had failed to persuade them to strengthen their relationship with the Church, and for 6% it had made it less likely. Two-fifths of all Britons criticized the Pope for failing to do enough to tackle the scandal of sexual abuse by priests.

The poll is interesting in segmenting popular Catholicism in contemporary society and highlighting just how nominal much of it is. Asked to describe their relationship with Roman Catholicism or the Catholic Church, respondents self-identified as follows:

Religious profession

Populus, formerly pollster to The Times, recommenced regular (twice weekly) voting intention surveys in July 2013, and it has just announced a new partnership with the Financial Times, whereby the aggregate political data for each month will be analysed in detail in the newspaper, as part of its pre-general election coverage. The first month’s results have now been released, based on online interviews with 14,203 adult Britons between 5 and 27 February 2014. The full data tables can be viewed at:

http://www.populus.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/OmOnline_Vote_February_2014.pdf

The classification section of the tables (pp. 146-53) includes responses to the standard Populus question on religious affiliation (‘which of the following religious groups do you consider yourself to be a member of?’), broken down by gender, age, social grade, region, employment sector, past and current voting, educational attainment, working status, and various permutations of these attributes. The following table pulls out some key findings for the principal faith groupings, Christians, non-Christians, and people of no religion (or ‘nones’):

These data broadly confirm all the other contemporary evidence, not least in terms of the effect of age. No religion is now the ‘creed’ of the majority with the 18-24s and the plurality among the 25-34s, and the over-65s are almost three times as likely to profess Christianity as the youngest cohort of adults. Gender and social grade make remarkably little difference, whereas for long periods in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they decisively shaped levels of religiosity. Region is significant, with the highest proportion of ‘nones’ to be found in South-West England (once the bastion of Methodism) and Scotland (once the stronghold of Presbyterianism). In political terms, Conservatives and ‘Kippers’ are disproportionately Christian, while Labourites and Liberal Democrats display a greater tendency to renounce religion. The better educated you are, the less likely you are to embrace Christianity.

Fuzzy nones

Speaking of ‘nones’, Professor Linda Woodhead has been undertaking further analysis of her two YouGov surveys from January and June 2013 for the Westminster Faith Debates, in which 8,455 Britons were interviewed online. This is presented in her blog on the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network website, posted on 7 March 2014, which reaffirms that, in matters of people’s religion, there are no rigid blacks and whites. Whereas David Voas has illuminated the ‘fuzziness’ of the nominally faithful, Woodhead suggests that such ‘fuzziness’ also characterizes the nones and that the majority do not conform to a Richard Dawkins style of secularism. Only 43% of the ‘nones’ in her samples described themselves as atheists, with 40% agnostics and 16% believers in God. A handful even engaged in religious or spiritual practices. They were more likely to be indifferent to religion than antagonistic to it. The blog can be read at:

http://blog.nsrn.net/2014/03/07/launch-series-the-fuzzy-nones/

Atheism

And still speaking of ‘nones’, a recent addition to the Oxford Handbook series is The Oxford Handbook of Atheism, edited by Stephen Bullivant and Michael Ruse (Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-964465-0, xvi + 763p., hardback, £95.00). Although only published in late November, it is already reprinting, a testimony to the increasing academic interest in the subject of no religion. The book is multidisciplinary and global in its approach, comprising 46 chapters written by 53 contributors. Unfortunately, relatively little consideration is given to the quantitative aspects of the subject, the principal exception being chapter 36 (pp. 553-86), by Ariela Keysar and Juhem Navarro-Rivera on ‘A World of Atheism: Global Demographics’. This mainly focuses on an analysis of data about atheists and agnostics from the 2008 International Social Survey Program, including breaks by gender, age, education, and marital status.

Callum Brown also briefly touches on the statistics for people of no religion in chapter 15 (pp. 229-44) on ‘The Twentieth Century’. However, a more comprehensive source of numbers for the English-speaking world is his 2012 book Religion and the Demographic Revolution (Boydell Press), especially on pp. 105-23, and his earlier article in Archiv für Soxialgeschichte (Vol. 51, 2011, pp. 37-61). Another recent essay by Brown, albeit more qualitative, will also be of interest: ‘Men Losing Faith: The Making of Modern No Religionism in the UK, 1939-2010’, Men, Masculinities, and Religious Change in Twentieth-Century Britain, edited by Lucy Delap and Sue Morgan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 301-25).

Dr Robert Currie (1940-2012)

On 3 November 2012, shortly after his death, BRIN carried a short appreciation of the life and work of Dr Robert Currie, who had a long association with Wadham College, Oxford as Fellow (from 1967) and Emeritus Fellow (from 2000). A much fuller obituary has now appeared in the 2013 edition (pp. 120-34) of the Wadham College Gazette, which has literally just been distributed to old members. Rather it comprises a quartet of obituaries, by Currie’s friend Professor Sir Brian Harrison, former colleague Professor Qassim Cassam, former student Ciara Fairley, and son Daniel. The ground covered includes Currie’s pioneering contributions to the study of religious statistics in the British Isles, initially those of Methodism (in his Methodism Divided, 1968) and then of all denominations (in his Churches and Churchgoers, 1977, written with Alan Gilbert and Lee Horsley).