Religion and Public Opinion in Britain

Continuity and Change

B. Clements

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780230293892
• eBook ISBN: 9781137313591
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Based on extensive analysis of surveys from recent decades, this book provides a detailed study of the attitudes of religious groups in Britain. It looks at continuity and change in relation to party support, ideology, abortion, homosexuality and gay rights, foreign policy, and public opinion towards religion in public life.

1

Introduction

A substantial body of scholarly research has examined in detail the interactions and interconnections between religion and politics in Britain in recent decades, in particular relations between the major Christian denominations and political parties during the era of Conservative government between 1979 and 1997 (Gover 2011; Filby 2010; Durham 1997; Martin 1989; Baker 1991; Clarke 1993; Moyser 1989; Medhurst and Moyser 1988; Machin 1998). More recent scholarly research has examined the role of religious institutions within public debate and the legislative process during the period of the Labour governments, 1997–2010, as well as the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition which entered office in May 2010 (Kettell 2009, 2013).

There have also been broader book-length assessments of the contemporary and historical linkages between religion and politics in Britain (Bruce 2012; Steven 2011a). The topics covered in this book and the associated empirical analyses of continuity and change in religious groups’ attitudes should serve to complement some of the specific areas of religion and British politics given detailed historical and contemporary treatments in the works of Bruce (2012) and Steven (2011a), both published as part of the Routledge Studies in Religion and Politics. Steven argues that religion has been a ‘neglected dimension’ on the part of scholars of British politics (2011a).

While it is clear that more recent research has made an important contribution to elucidating the nature and extent of the engagement of religious actors within the political process, there is clearly a need for a broader assessment of the historical and contemporary links between religion and public opinion in Britain. In short, a more ‘bottom-up’ perspective is required to complement this existing body of scholarship. The detailed single-country focus of this research also complements studies with a broader cross-country focus on religion and politics, using comparative survey data, most notably that conducted by Norris and Inglehart (2012).

The research undertaken in this book provides this assessment and contributes to scholarship examining the complex and changing relationship between religion and the political process in Britain. It examines the social and political attitudes of religious groups across time, focusing on the overarching themes of change and continuity in public opinion. This book’s central aim is to provide an in-depth and wide-ranging assessment – both historical and contemporary – of religion and public opinion in Britain. More specifically, in the area of public opinion, the book analyses the linkages between: religion and political party support, religion and ideological beliefs, religion and homosexuality and gay rights, religion and abortion, and religion and foreign policy. Some of the topics pursued in this book, moreover, concern two of the key ways – as identified by Heath et al. (1993a: 50) – in which religion can be important for politics. First, contemporary political issues, which although they may not be overtly religious, can engage to the core beliefs or teachings of particular religious traditions. The archetypal issues here include debates over human sexuality or abortion. Second, there can be historical and contemporary linkages between particular religious groups and specific political parties. This may be reflected in patterns of voting behaviour or through broader party affiliation. These long-standing denominational linkages are underpinned by particular social cleavages which became ‘frozen’ in European party systems (Heath et al. 1993a: 50; Lipset and Rokkan 1967). In analysing these topics the focus is on areas of continuity and change, divergence and convergence, in the opinions of religious groups across recent decades. Before these topics are analysed in depth and in order to address the broader theme of secularisation, however, the book assesses the nature and extent of religious change and declining religious authority in British society. How this is to be done, and with what scholarly materials, is set out in the next section.

Methodological approach and source material

This book examines and interprets changes and patterns in the attitudes of religious groups based on available recurrent social survey data. Its approach is to use multiple surveys rather than relying exclusively on one survey series as the source of attitudinal data. This evidence base available typically means that data on religious groups’ attitudes are examined from the 1960s or 1970s onwards, with supplementary sources – commercial opinion polling and one-off surveys – used to provide other relevant data. The book takes the assessment of religious groups’ attitudes up to the present day, using the most recently-released survey sources. It needs to be stated at the outset that this is an extensive exercise in secondary data analysis, in that much of the evidence used here comes from well-established, long-running social surveys which make datasets available in the public domain for wider usage by scholars and other interested parties. These generally constitute national sample surveys of the adult population, conducted from the 1950s onwards, which collectively represent a ‘tremendous potential research resource for scholars of religious studies, modern history, and social science’ (Field forthcoming: 12). By undertaking this, the book therefore makes a major contribution to the ‘repurposing’ of religious data using British social surveys and opinion polls (Field, forthcoming). Of course, while this book uses the best evidence available, it should be recognised that there are also challenges to using surveys to study religion, as discussed in existing research (Voas 2003, 2007; Field forthcoming). This study proceeds with such caveats in mind and thus avoids over-reliance on a single survey source. In sum, it uses a plurality of recurrent social surveys to more robustly establish patterns and trends, discern areas of divergence and convergence, and to map change and continuity in the social and political attitudes of religious groups.

The book is therefore deliberately data rich for three reasons. First, each chapter focuses in detail on a particular aspect of public opinion. Secondly, each chapter examines the historical evidence, often stretching back over several decades. Third, as already indicated, to provide a more robust and comprehensive treatment, it uses multiple survey sources – where data permit – to assess patterns and trends in the attitudes of religious groups in Britain.

Data sources

Two areas of omission should be noted here. First, the parameters of the book exclude consideration of public opinion in Northern Ireland, so the focus is on attitudes in Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales), hereafter referred to as ‘Britain’. Secondly, given the centrality of the over-time focus here and because many of the earlier surveys used here featured very few respondents who reported that they belonged to non-Christian minority faiths, reflecting their incidence within wider society, they have not been included in the classification of affiliation for the analysis of historical survey data. They are included in the samples when focusing on attitudes on the basis of religious attendance and belief; and when undertaking more detailed multivariate analysis of recent or contemporary data, when they are more numerous in the samples and in order to provide a wider base for assessing the impact of religion on attitudes. Moreover, a growing literature from political science and sociology has provided more in-depth analysis of the political attitudes, social beliefs and electoral behaviour of religious and ethnic minorities in recent years (see, for example, Clements 2013; Heath et al. 2013; Lewis and Kashyap 2013).

In terms of the data used in this book, five main survey series provide the major sources of nationally-representative, public opinion data (a full bibliographic list of the survey datasets used from each of these series, and any supplementary surveys, is provided). The surveys and the periods of time covered (relevant to the analyses in the book) are as follows:

• British Election Study (BES), 1963–2010

• British Social Attitudes (BSA), 1983–2012

• European Values Study (EVS), 1981–2008

• European Social Survey (EVS), 2002–2012

• Eurobarometer (EB), 1970–2006

Both because of the range of questions asked in various topic areas and their longevity, the BES, BSA and EVS surveys are used most extensively for the analyses undertaken in this book. The EB and ESS surveys are used less extensively: the EB because it is of greatest utility for its long-running coverage of questions on member state relations with the European integration process; and the ESS because it is a relative ‘latecomer’ to the survey world, beginning on a biennial basis in 2002.

Measurement of religion

As recent scholarship has observed, religion is a ‘multifaceted phenomenon’ (Smidt et al. 2009: 4–5) and it is important to examine how these different dimensions are consequential for politics – more specifically for this book, how these dimensions are associated with social and political attitudes concerning the aforementioned topics. The treatment of religion within this book therefore includes the three main areas commonly used for analysing religion: belonging, behaving and believing (Smidt et al. 2009; Leege and Kellstedt 1993). Each of these areas is generally analysed independently from the others, in that they are examined separately when looking at changes in attitudes over time and when assessing the contemporary social and religious factors shaping public opinion. More broadly, in classifying and applying the different aspects of religion to social and political attitudes, the book – an extensive exercise in secondary data analysis – has attempted to ‘make the best use of available data’ (Smidt et al. 2009: 9).

The questions used from the social surveys to operationalise these three areas of religion are listed in Appendix 1. This also shows where question wording has changed across surveys within a particular series (as, for example, has been the case with the measures of affiliation and attendance in the BES surveys). It should be noted that while the surveys have generally nearly always or always included measures of affiliation (belonging) and attendance (behaving), there has been less extensive coverage of religious beliefs. However, each EVS survey has included questions on traditional religious beliefs, while three BSA surveys have included sets of religious belief questions as part of specialist modules on religion (in 1991, 1998 and 2008). The BES and ESS surveys have not, however, administered any questions on religious belief. In the chapters that follow, the coverage of religious beliefs is necessarily less extensive than that for belonging and behaviour. To keep the analyses of the survey data more manageable where religious belief is concerned, only questions focusing on beliefs in and about and personal engagement with God are used. As far as the data allow, this enables an assessment of the nature and extent of any ‘God gap’ in popular attitudes in the areas of religious authority, ideological beliefs and social-morality issues in Britain. Other traditional beliefs asked about on the BSA and EVS surveys – such as belief in life after death, heaven and hell – are not analysed in the book.

The main measures used for belonging is that of respondents’ current self-declared affiliation and, for behaving, that of attendance at religious services (normally treated as an indicator of group or communal practice – there has generally been less extensive coverage across time of private religious practices in the recurrent social surveys). Religious affiliation focuses on those with a Christian affiliation or no affiliation and is generally based on the following four categories:

• Anglican

• Catholic

• Other Christian (including all other Protestant denominations and those Christians with no denominational affiliation)

• No affiliation

The principal exception to this standard classification of religious affiliation is in the analysis of religion and party choice, where the classification is based on five categories in accordance with the traditional associations examined between denominations and political parties (Anglican, Catholic, Church of Scotland/Presbyterian, Nonconformist, no religion).

Measures of religious affiliation in the recurrent social surveys are generally divided into three categories:

• Frequent-attenders: those who attend once a month or more often

• Infrequent attenders: those who attend less often than once a month

• Non-attenders: those who never attend.

Other measures of religious belonging and behaving from the EVS and ESS surveys – which have been included over time – are also utilised for the purposes of analysis and further information on classification is provided in the relevant chapters. One limitation of the recurrent surveys is that the earliest of them dates to 1963 (the first survey in the BES series) and the two containing the most detailed range of questions about social-morality attitudes – the BSA and EVS surveys – did not start until the early 1980s. Therefore, those interested in looking at change and continuity in the attitudes of religious groups in the 1950s and 1960s are somewhat disadvantaged by the comparative lack of recurrent social survey data, which is a notable lacuna given the scholarly debate over the nature and extent of religious change in Britain in these decades (Yates 2010; McLeod 2007; Brown 2006; Machin 1996, 1998). In fact, the first BES questions on social-moral issues – such as abortion and homosexuality – did not feature until the 1974 surveys, with the exception of the issue of capital punishment (where questions were fielded from the outset – the 1963 survey). Moreover, while polling was often undertaken on these sorts of issues by organisations such as Gallup and NOP, data breakdowns for religious groups are generally not in the public domain and the published sources for these data (Gallup 1976a, 1976b) only tend to provide figures for the British public as a whole. Where they provide relevant measures of religion, one-off surveys and published data from major polling organisations are used to provide useful supplementary evidence, in particular to shed further light on the attitudes of particular religious groups and to furnish relevant data for years not covered by the recurrent social surveys. Where data are analysed from historical opinion polls, these tend to be limited to religious affiliation and, in particular, to those belonging to the main Christian traditions. Now that the methodological approach and source material has been introduced, the final section discusses the substantive topic addressed in each chapter.

Outline of chapters

There are six substantive chapters, all of which undertake extensive analysis of recurrent social surveys and supplementary polling sources. Each chapter focuses on a specific area of public opinion and makes liberal use of tables and figures in order to present data, whether charting religious groups’ attitudes across time or analysing the religious basis of contemporary public opinion in greater depth. Taken together they cover the following topics: religious authority; party choice, ideology, abortion, homosexuality and gay rights, and foreign policy issues. In more detail, the aims and scope of each chapter are as follows:

Chapter 2 (‘Religious Authority’) looks at broader attitudes towards the role of religion (institutions and leaders) in public life. It provides a detailed assessment of whether there has been a ‘decline in religious authority’ in British public life (Chaves 1994), which provides a means of examining the extent of secularisation in public life, looking over time at public confidence in religious institutions. It looks at public perceptions of religious institutions in general as well as specific evaluations of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches. It also looks at public attitudes on the appropriate role for religious leaders in the political process, examining which social groups are more or less receptive to the exercise of religious authority – towards governments and voters – and assesses whether views have changed over time.

Chapter 3 (‘Religion and Party Choice’) looks in detail at the survey data pertaining to the traditional denominational links between religious groups and political parties, particularly Catholics and Labour and Anglicans and the Conservatives. It looks at the voting behaviour of religious groups at general elections for the period 1959–2010, as well as general party support – expressed in inter-election periods – in recent decades. There is also consideration of how party support based on reli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter: 1 Introduction
• Chapter: 2 Religious Authority
• Chapter: 3 Religion and Party Choice
• Chapter: 4 Religion and Ideology
• Chapter: 5 Religion and Abortion
• Chapter: 6 Religion, Homosexuality and Gay Rights
• Chapter: 7 Religion and Foreign Policy
• Chapter: 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Appendix 1 Measures of Religion in the Recurrent Social Surveys
• Appendix 2 Measurement of Independent Variables Used in the Multivariate Analyses
• Appendix 3 Attitudes Based on Additional Questions Asking about God, BSA 2008
• List of Survey Datasets
• Bibliography
• Index