Transcript Quantifying British Secularization: A Case Study of the Bible

Quantifying British
Secularization: A Case Study of
the Bible
Presentation to Bible Society, 4 February 2015
By Clive D. Field
Universities of Birmingham and Manchester
Overview
CONTEXT
• About me – 3
• British Religion in Numbers – 4
• Sources of Religious Statistics – 5
• Sample surveys – 6
• Measures of secularization – 7
• Religious authority – 8
THE BIBLE
• Scope – 9
• Ownership – 10
• Readership – 11
• Knowledge – 12
• Literalism – 13
• Beliefs – 14
• Attitudes – 15
• Demographics – 16
• Conclusions – 17
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Context – About Me
• Historian by background but working at interface between humanities and
social sciences
• Research and publishing for 40 years in social history and sociology of
religion in Britain from 1689 to the present
• Particular focus on statistical sources and measurement of religious change
• Full list of research outputs at https://clivedfield.wordpress.com/
• Contributed book section on non-recurrent Christian data to Reviews of UK
Statistical Sources: Religion (Pergamon Press for ESRC/RSS, 1987)
• Next major output Britain’s Last Religious Revival? (Palgrave Macmillan,
March 2015) investigating religious change during ‘long 1950s’
• Co-director (with David Voas, University of Essex) since 2008 of British
Religion in Numbers (BRIN)
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Context – British Religion in Numbers
• Core funded 2008-10 by AHRC/ESRC, as part of Religion and Society Programme, since 2014
also British Academy Research Project
• Hosted at Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research, University of Manchester, although
project team now virtual and voluntary
• Serves academics, faith communities, policy makers, media, and general public
• Microblogging news sub-site – over 700 posts since 2010, 51 by me in 2014 alone, featuring
307 individual stories
• Fully searchable and annually updated catalogue of sources of British religious statistics since
1603, with 2,400 entries at present
• Charts, maps, and tables (subject to copyright), including tables in Churches and Churchgoers
(Clarendon Press, 1977) and compendium of Gallup data, plus sundry other features
• Around 700,000 page views since 2010 by 250,000 unique users, principally UK and US
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Context – Sources of Religious Statistics
• Faith communities
Denominational
Ecumenical
• State
Censuses
Solemnization of marriage
Sample surveys
• Academic/social research agencies
Opinion polls
Academic-led surveys
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Context – Sample Surveys
• First systematically explored by me in 1980s through a British Academy
small grant and research for Reviews of UK Statistical Sources: Religion
• Surveys have the potential cost-effectively to fill in gaps in our knowledge
and develop a more balanced portfolio of measures of secularization
• But surveys of religion present a range of methodological and
interpretative challenges, including:
Tendency to over-claim on most measures of believing and belonging
Relatively high proportion of ‘don’t knows’
Difficulty in getting representative samples of religious minorities
Difficulty in asking ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ questions
Tendency to be influenced/driven by events
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Context – Measures of Secularization
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Saliency of religion
Religious affiliation
Church membership
Church attendance
Participation in rites of passage
Other religious practices
Religious beliefs (orthodox and heterodox)
Religious prejudice
Respect for religious authority
Institutional measures
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Context – Religious Authority
• Mark Chaves in Social Forces 72:3 (1994): ‘secularization is best
understood not as the decline of religion, but as the declining scope
of religious authority’
• Hitherto approach mainly pursued through studies of public
perceptions of religious institutions in US
• My study of changing public attitudes to Churches and clergy in
Britain since 1960s in Contemporary British History 28:2 (2014)
• My study of changing public attitudes to Bible in Britain since Second
World War in Journal of Contemporary Religion 29:3 (2014)
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The Bible - Scope
• Meta-analytical attempt to quantify ‘Bible-centricism’ using a basket of
believing and behaving measures
• 123 national sample surveys and 35 national and local sample surveys of
adult religious populations (research also available on children/young)
• Covers 1948-2013, with most data from last 30 years of the period
• Gallup apart, relatively few genuine time series, raising issues of
comparability
• Includes Bible Society research where findings had been made public or
otherwise shared with the author, but does not discuss Bible versions
• Analysis at topline and by gender, age, social class, religious denomination,
and churchgoing
• Article constrained by journal’s tight rules on length
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The Bible - Ownership
HEADLINE
• Household ownership of the Bible has slumped, while individual
ownership has been largely passive (the product of handed-down
copies or presents), despite the advent of modern translations
COMMENTS
• Household ownership has fallen from around 90% after Second World
War to 50% today
• Individual ownership has been at a lower level than household
ownership, has also fallen, but figures are more erratic
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The Bible - Readership
HEADLINE
• Readership of the Bible has declined, with only around one in ten
reading it at least weekly and three-quarters less than once a year or
never
COMMENTS
• Statistics cannot be independently validated and are probably subject
to over-claiming, arising from ‘prestige effect
• Many different frequencies of reading have been used
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The Bible - Knowledge
HEADLINE
• Knowledge of the content of the Bible is immensely variable (some
parts being better recalled than others), but, overall, it is decreasing
COMMENT
• 61% could name the four gospels in 1949, 48% in 1999, while the
number knowing none increased from 25% to 43% respectively
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The Bible - Literalism
HEADLINE
• Only a small and dwindling minority believes the Bible to be true,
word for word, the rest arguing that it needs to be ‘interpreted’ or
dismissed as a collection of fables and legends
COMMENTS
• Proportion believing Old Testament mostly a collection of stories and
fables rose from 22% in 1960 to 45% in 1993
• Proportion believing New Testament mostly a collection of stories and
fables rose from 13% in 1960 to 40% in 1993
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The Bible - Beliefs
HEADLINE
• Key storylines in the Bible – Creation, Virgin Birth, gospel miracles,
Resurrection – have been progressively rejected as historically
inaccurate and/or understood in a figurative sense or disbelieved
entirely
COMMENT
• Evolutionary beliefs have especially gained ground in past 20 years,
but many see no contradiction in believing in both scientific and
religious explanations for the origin of life on earth
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The Bible - Attitudes
HEADLINES
• The Bible has been viewed as increasingly less significant in personal
lives and less relevant to the needs of modern society
• People do not necessarily view the diminished status of the Bible as
incompatible with, or undermining, Christian faith – the latter is
consciously or sub-consciously redefined so that it becomes less
dependent upon an ‘orthodox’ use and reading of the Bible
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The Bible - Demographics
HEADLINES
• Women are somewhat more Bible-centric than men, the over-65s than the
under-25s, and the DE than the AB social group
• Christians are marginally more likely than average to be Bible-centric and
much more so than those professing no religion
• Protestants generally and Free Church affiliates particularly are more Biblecentric than Catholics (apart from some indicators of literalism)
• Regular churchgoers are significantly more Bible-centric than adults as a
whole and still more so than non-churchgoers, with evangelical
churchgoers perhaps most Bible-centric
• Notwithstanding, churchgoers have not been immune from declining Biblecentricism, and, overall, they are a diminishing sub-population
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The Bible – Conclusions
• There has been declining allegiance to the Bible on various fronts, even
among regular churchgoers
• This decline is mostly in line with falls in other religious performance
indicators, so is in part a consequence/symptom of secularization
• However, the upward slope of Bible-centricism from one cohort to the next
suggests a predominantly generational effect which may not be reversible
• This effect reflects the waning influence of the three traditional agencies of
religious socialization – church/Sunday school, state school, parents
• A debating point is whether Christianity is becoming decoupled in everyday
life from the holy book on which it is founded, and whether that matters
for the future of Christianity
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Contact Details
BRITISH RELIGION IN NUMBERS
• Website - http://www.brin.ac.uk
• Twitter - https://twitter.com/BritRelNumbers
CLIVE FIELD
• Email - [email protected] or [email protected]
• Website - https://clivedfield.wordpress.com/
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