Alasdair Crockett

Religion in Britain: Neither Believing nor Belonging.

‘Believing without belonging’ has become the catchphrase of much European work on religion in the past decade. The thesis that religious belief is fairly robust even if churchgoing is declining is examined using data from the British Household Panel Survey and the British Social Attitudes surveys. The evidence suggests that belief has in fact eroded in Britain at the same rate as two key aspects of belonging: religious affiliation and attendance. Levels of belief are lower than those of nominal belonging. The roles of period, cohort and age effects on religious change are considered; the conclusion is that decline is generational. In relation to the rates at which religion is transmitted from parents to children, the results suggest that only about half of parental religiosity is successfully transmitted, while absence of religion is almost always passed on. Transmission is just as weak for believing as for belonging.

Religious pluralism and participation: Why previous research is wrong

Does religious pluralism undermine or promote religious involvement?. Some secularization theories contend that diversity breeds loss of belief and lower participation. The religious economies model counters that involvement is boosted by the availability of alternative religious suppliers and the competition that results, with each group working harder to gain adherents. The issue is sufficiently important that a recent review found 193 tests of this question in 26 published articles. Almost all of these findings (both positive arid negative) should be abandoned. The associations reported do not reflect the effects of pluralism but a previously overlooked mathematical relationship between measures of religious participation and the index of pluralism. Even when pluralism has no effect on participation, the correlation between these two variables is likely to be non zero. The sign and magnitude of this expected correlation depends on the nature of the size distributions of the religious groups across the areas studied. Results from several frequently cited studies closely atch what would be expected from chance alone. Various alternative methods for studying pluralism in future research are examined, but currently there is no compelling evidence that religious pluralism has any effect on religious involvement.

‘A Divergence of Views: Attitude change and the religious crisis over homosexuality’:

British attitudes towards homosexuality have changed with astonishing rapidity over recent decades. Society has managed to assimilate these shifts with relative ease. The Christian churches, however, as repositories of tradition and defenders of inherited values, have been finding it increasingly difficult to adjust to the new environment. The Church of England is internally divided in the face of an external crisis: the Archbishop of Canterbury acknowledges that the global Anglican Communion could split over the issue, and the church faces similar pressures domestically. These events raise important questions about how religious institutions come to terms with modernity. The rapidity of social change, the decline in deference to authority, the increase in tolerance of anything that seems a private matter, and the sense that sexuality is fundamental to the free expression of personal identity, all make it difficult for a church to declare that sexual orientation might disqualify one from ministry or even membership. This paper analyses empirical evidence covering two decades from the British Social Attitudes and British Household Panel surveys. It is apparent that no real consensus yet exists on basic issues of sexual morality. Society as a whole is highly polarised over the question of whether same-sex unions are wrong, with significant and increasing divisions between young and old, women and men, and religious and non-religious. Far from being better placed than others to avoid disputes, Christian churches suffer from compounded problems. The attitudes of lay Christians are starkly and increasingly polarised along the dimensions of ideology and religious practice. This gulf presents a particular problem for churches with both liberal and evangelical wings, notably the Church of England.

From the 1676 Compton Census to the 1851 Census of Religious Worship: Religious Continuity or Discontinuity?

This paper was published as Rural History: Economy, Society, Culture, 1997, 8 (1), pp. 55-89. It is available from http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=2487564. Doi: 10.1017/S0956793300001138

Rural-Urban Churchgoing in Victorian England

The rich data provided by the 1851 Census of Religious Worship make clear that very different processes were governing churchgoing rates in rural parts of England compared with the more urban parts. The clear rural-urban differences provide important clues that help to explain the rise and fall of English churchgoing rates over the modern historical period, and are relevant to a major and ongoing sociological dispute. My conclusion is that, in rural areas, the additional ‘supply’ recently introduced by the dissenting denominations had boosted attendance rates. This was largely because distance between home and worship was a key check on regular observance and new chapels tended to reduce this distance. In urban parts of England a very different pattern emerges: the greater the degree of urbanisation, the lower the churchgoing rate, despite the great choice of religious alternatives on offer. These rural-urban differences offer some important observations regarding the sociological theorisation of religion and modernity. In the economic language increasingly employed by sociologists of religion, both ‘supply-side’ and ‘demand-side’ processes were influencing English churchgoing rates. However, the former were much more limited and transient in their effect, being restricted to geographically isolated rural areas, while in the more urban places, where most people lived, and to which many more were migrating, urbanisation was eroding demand as predicted by secularisation theory.

Neural Network Analysis of Estimation of Data

A set of data may be ‘coarsened’ as a result of enumerators’ or compilers’ efforts to estimate (or falsify) observations. This type of coarsening typically results in excesses of ‘convenient’ numbers in the data sets, such as multiples of 5 or 10 in decimal number systems, apparent as patterns of periodic unit-width spikes in the frequency distributions.