Clive D. Field

Islamophobia in Contemporary Britain: The Evidence of the Opinion Polls, 1988–2006

Abstract British attitudes towards Islam and Muslims are examined on the basis of 104 public opinion polls conducted between 1988 and 2006, 90 of them since 2001. Many of these surveys were undertaken at national crisis points of one sort or another for which Islam and Muslims could not avoid being seen as causal factors. Nine high-level conclusions are drawn from this evidence. There has been increasing Islamophobia, not least since 2001. A stereotypical picture of British Muslims in the eyes of the majority population has emerged, Muslims being seen as slow to integrate into mainstream society, feeling only a qualified sense of patriotism, and prone to espouse anti-Western values that lead many to condone so-called Islamic terrorism. To an extent, these stereotypes reflect the reality of Muslim views, as displayed in 29 polls conducted among the British Muslim community, mainly since 2001.

Adam and Eve: gender in the English free church constituency

The vital contribution of women to the early development of English dissent, especially during the era of the Civil War and Interregnum, has received considerable scholarly attention since the appearance of Keith Thomass seminal study in 1958. However, the focus of interest has chiefly been on the roles played by individual women as preachers or church founders, and no concerted attempt has yet been made to replicate analyses of New England Puritanism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which have highlighted the disproportionate numbers of women in church membership. There has been a similar lack of effort to document the effects of gender in determining English religious practice in the period after 1700, despite the beginnings of academic preoccupation with womens experience of Christianity in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, and despite an abundance of evidence from sociologists and statisticians since the Second World War about womens greater performance on most indicators of religious belief and behaviour. This brief article therefore hopes to break new ground in assembling evidence about the strength of female support for Protestant Nonconformity in England from 1650 to the present day, using three distinct assessment criteria: membership, attendance, and profession.

Counting Religion in England and Wales: The Long Eighteenth Century, c. 1680– c. 1840

The statistical analysis of religion in England and Wales usually commences with the mid-nineteenth century. This article synthesises relevant primary and secondary sources to produce initial quantitative estimates of the religious composition of the population in 1680, 1720, 1760, 1800 and 1840. The Church of England is shown to have lost almost one-fifth of its affiliation market share during this period, with an ever increasing number of nominal Anglicans also ceasing to practise. Nonconformity more than quadrupled, mainly from 1760 and especially after 1800. Roman Catholicism kept pace with demographic growth, but, even reinforced by Irish immigration, remained a limited force in 1840. Judaism and overt irreligion were both negligible.

Is the Bible Becoming a Closed Book? British Opinion Poll Evidence

Abstract Opinion poll data from 123 national sample surveys of the adult general population and 35 national and local sample surveys of adult religious populations are used to study changes in the status and influence of the Bible in Britain since the Second World War. The principal measures of ‘Bible-centricism’ comprise Bible ownership, readership, knowledge, literalism, beliefs, and attitudes. The analysis proceeds both at top-line level and by breaks for gender, age, social class, religious denomination, and churchgoing. Twelve broad conclusions are drawn, with declining allegiance to the Bible visible on various fronts, even among regular churchgoers. In an everyday sense, one interpretation could be that Christianity is becoming de-coupled from the holy book on which it is founded. This process, mirroring declines in other religious indicators, is attributed to the waning influence of three principal agencies of religious socialisation (church/Sunday school, state school, parents) which formerly underpinned the Bible’s role in faith and society.

Gradualist or Revolutionary Secularization? A Case Study of Religious Belonging in Inter-War Britain, 1918–1939

The timing of secularization in Britain remains a contested topic among historians and sociologists, some regarding it largely as a post-Second World War phenomenon (with the 1960s a critical decade), others viewing it as a more gradual process commencing in the Victorian era. The inter-war years (1918–1939) have been little studied in this context, notwithstanding a coincidence of social, economic, and political circumstances which might have been expected to trigger religious change. The extent of religious belonging during this period is reviewed, with reference to quantitative evidence, from two perspectives: churchgoing, and church membership and affiliation. Trends in church attendance are documented, including the demographic variables which shaped it and the effect of innovations such as Sunday cinema and Sunday radio broadcasts of religious services. A conjectural religious profile of the adult population of Britain, c. 1939 reveals that, while, relative to population, there was only marginal growth in professed irreligion and non-Christian faiths since c. 1914, there was accelerated decline in religious worship (notably in terms of regularity) and active affiliation to Protestant denominations. This shift to nominalism particularly impacted the historic Free Churches (the phenomenon had long existed in the Church of England). Examination of these two religious indicators for the inter-war years thus lends further support to the view that secularization in Britain is best seen as a progressive and protracted process.

NON-RECURRENT CHRISTIAN DATA

This chapter describes nonrecurrent, primary sources of Christian religious statistics, both of a personal and institutional nature, gathered within the constituent parts of the United Kingdom, mainly in the period since the Second World War, by the Government, the Churches, commercial market research agencies, and by other independent investigators. Nonrecurrent data are defined as those that are compiled on an entirely ad-hoc basis, offering little or no potential for the construction of time series, or those that have a frequency of collection of less than once in 10 years. While, organizationally, the main emphasis has been upon denominations that are either in full or associate membership of the British Council of Churches (BCC) or that have obvious theological affinities to BCC member bodies, some reference is occasionally made to fringe sects and cults whose claims to be Christian can be thought to be less clear-cut.

No Popery's Ghost Does Popular Anti-Catholicism Survive in Contemporary Britain?

Anti-Catholicism has been a feature of British history from the Reformation, but it has been little studied for the period since the Second World War, and rarely using quantitative methods. A thematically-arranged aggregate analysis of around 180 opinion polls among representative samples of adults since the 1950s offers insights into developing attitudes of the British public to Catholics and the Catholic Church. Anti-Catholicism against individual Catholics is found to have diminished. Negativity toward the Catholic Church and its leadership has increased, especially since the Millennium. Generic and specific explanations are offered for these trends, within the context of other manifestations of religious prejudice and other religious changes.

CURL and resource description and discovery

This paper reviews the contribution which CURL has made to resource description and discovery since its formation in 1983. After an initial summary of CURLs current commitment in this area, as reflected in its strategic and operational plans, an overview is given of CURL database and catalogue services. This traces the early years of the record retrieval database and, from 1995, its funding by JISC for development into an online catalogue (COPAC), as well as CURLs more recent participation in the United Kingdom Higher Education Archives Hub. CURLs activities in retrospective conversion are also surveyed, including an audit of outstanding needs in CURL libraries and CURL‐related projects for the Research Support Libraries Programme. A conclusion attempts to draw up a balance‐sheet of CURL involvement in resource description and discovery, summarising what has been achieved and what remains to be done.

‘It's All Chicks and Going Out’ The Observance of Easter in Post-War Britain

the basic accounts of the Gospels, but also they need to be meditated upon in the light of the long tradition of their interpretation in the Church, so that people can see the implications of giving allegiance to the faith to which they witness. I hope that readers of Theology, whether students of theology, teachers, clergy and lay ministers, or members of congregations, will be stimulated and encouraged by these articles to promote a wider and deeper understanding of Christian theology and its relationship to their contexts and to other faiths, whether among their friends, their students or their congregations.

‘A Tempest in the Teapot’: London Churchgoing in 1913 — The Census That Never Was

Late Victorian and Edwardian London had a reputation for relatively low levels of religious practice, as evidenced in the census of church attendance conducted in the capital by the Daily News in 1902–03. In 1912–13 its successor, the Daily News and Leader, attempted to replicate this census but was forced to abandon it at an early stage in the face of concerted opposition from both Anglicans and Nonconformists. In its place was substituted a survey of the religious and social work of the metropolitan churches, which was published in 1914. The story of ‘the census that never was’ is here pieced together for the first time, and the reasons for its significance explained, within the context of the broader scholarly debate about whether Edwardian Britain was a ‘faith society’.