On Defining Religion and Surveys Getting It Wrong. Apparently.
I recently posted a news release from Humanists UK. It talked about the continued recession of religion in the UK:
The latest findings of the British Social Attitudes Survey, published today, reveal 71% of 18-24 year olds say they belong to no religion, while just 3% say they are Church of England and 5% say they are Catholic. These latter two figures only increase slightly to 5% and 9%, respectively, amongst 25-34 year olds.
Overall, 53% of the population say they belong to no religion, 15% to the Church of England, 9% to the Catholic Church, 17% to other Christian denominations, and 6% to other religions.
Humanists UK has said the figures must raise fresh questions about the place of the churches in the running of state schools and their other state-funded privileges.
Humanists UK Chief Executive Andrew Copson asked, ‘How can it be right that 97% of young people today are not Anglicans, but some 20% of the state schools to which their children will go belong to the Church of England? More generally, how can the Church of England remain in any meaningful sense the national legally established church, when it caters for such a small portion of the population?’
As of last year, for the first time in history, the Church of England has more children in its state schools worshipping every weekday, than worshippers in its churches every week.
It seems pretty clear to me that religion is in decline in the UK.
Except one commenter on the piece wasn't in agreement with this:
I have stated many times, and in many places, these surveys do not measure what the researchers think they do. People do not have a solid grasp of what religion is, nor do they even have a shared lay definition, and because of that, all this is doing is measuring how individuals perceive their own religiosity. Hell, I have spoken with many devout Christian theists who say that they are not religious. They are "right" and it is the other people who are "religious."
The debate centres around the definition of "religion". There is an idea from Spiritual Anthropologist (SA) that this survey is wrong. (S)he is not clear as to whether they believe it is wrong to the point that religion is either not in decline or is, indeed, rising. There is no clarity in the comments in this regard, and they appear mainly at least to be a big attempt to muddy the waters without providing any alternative accounting.
When I was asked how I defined religiosity, I referred back to the authors of the survey as this was the source of the debate:
Well, considering we are talking about the BSA, I strongly suggest reading this, which will detail everything you want to know about that question in the context of exactly this survey. It talks about self-identified religion, attendance, and familial upbringing. Everything is shifting downwards with each generation.
http://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk...
This isn't the latest one, either.
The key is that each successive same-questioned survey leads to less and less religiosity, meaning generational shifts amongst cohorts. It is not ageing, but changes amongst generations.
In short, people are becoming less religious (and they measure this against attendance,
"Britain is becoming less religious, with the numbers who affiliate with a religion or attend religious services experiencing a long-term decline. And this trend seems set to continue; not only as older, more religious generations are replaced by younger, less religious ones, but also as the younger generations increasingly opt not to bring up their children in a religion – a factor shown to strongly link with religious affiliation and attendance later in life.What does this decline mean for society and social policy more generally? On the one hand, we can expect to see a continued increase in liberal attitudes towards a range of issues such as abortion, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and euthanasia, as the influence of considerations grounded in religion declines. Moreover, we may see an increased reluctance, particularly among the younger age groups, for matters of faith to enter the social and public spheres at all. The recently expressed sentiment of the current coalition government to “do” and “get” God (Warsi, 2011) therefore may not sit well with, and could alienate, certain sections of the population."
The reply was rather cherry-picked:
Attendance of churches does not indicate the level of religiosity. Sorry.
That's very selective reading. I mentioned three things all acting together and linked the survey chapter detailing how they derived their results. SA pulls out only one aspect. The reply to this charge?
None of which measure religiosity.
Literally none of these things are relevant to measuring religiosity? Wow. That's a massive claim. So self-identifying as having no religion, not attending religious practices and familial religious context have no bearing on one's religion? This rather beggars belief.
He hasn't replied to my next comment:
"Religiosity is difficult to define, but different scholars have seen this concept as broadly about religious orientations and involvement."
Self-defining, attendance and upbringing all fit into this. Are you Simply arguing that people who self declare no religion are simply wrong? You appear to want to be the arbiter of people's own identity.
No true Scotsman fallacy.
Here are a few more condensed comments from SA:
No. That's just the "reality" of studying religiosity. The idea that identification is consistent with religiosity is not well "established" and is contrary to a number of issues, especially personal understanding of what religion is.
Let me give you a broader example. Ask a practitioner of Shinto if he is religious, and he will likely say no. The Japanese word for religion is "shukyo." However, the view of shukyo is that it is what westerners practice. It is the belief in "god," etc. The kami are not viewed as gods in the western sense. This is actually the justification provided for state Shinto in Japan during WWII. Nobody fought it, because Shinto was not viewed as the establishing of a state religion....
No. What I am saying is that since people view "religion" to mean different things, self identification is meaningless. Additionally, if you define religiosity based on attendance of an institution, you ignore all the non-institutional religions. Furthermore, if you are going to study religion, use a concept of religion based on extensive scientific work, not a layperson's definition.
Several other comments mention Shinto and Wiccans. My point back to this is that these have little to no relevance to the above survey since the population of both is statistically negligible in this context.
As mentioned, the crux is defining religion. It appears that (S)he wants to be the arbiter of meanings of words. I think the philosophy of language is important here. SA talks about many (most?) researchers being wrong. However, language is defined by consensus. Dictionaries are merely codifications of consensus. On the other hand, SA could be a postmodernist, but in that case, we're both right.
Their position here is everybody else is wrong about religion, but they are right. SA retorts:
Definitions are not simply a matter of consensus. However, either way, there is no consensus on what religion is, especially among laypeople. It's best to start with a definition in the study, when it comes to something like religion....
What I am saying is that since people view "religion" to mean different things, self identification is meaningless. Additionally, if you define religiosity based on attendance of an institution, you ignore all the non-institutional religions. Furthermore, if you are going to study religion, use a concept of religion based on extensive scientific work, not a layperson's definition.
Self-Identification
Self-identification can in some contexts be meaningless. But here, the meaningless does not help SA at all. I could declare myself a Muslim right now. Given everything you all know about me, that self-identification does become meaningless. So, to get around the potential arbitrariness of self-identification, we set out a workable definition of Muslim, and seek to agree on this by consensus. I would fail the dictionary definition of Muslim, and rightly so. I am no postmodernist.
In the case of Islam and being a Muslim, we can arguably more easily define one in terms of the context: Muhammad, his role-modelship, his history, the Qu'ran and the Hadith. We could say that, although defining a "true Muslim" is problematic, taking these aforementioned ideas into account, we can approach a reasonable definition. I set this out here, in '“True Islam” and violent extremism – redux'.
Religiosity is admittedly harder to define because there is not the narrow doctrinal and historical source material to dip into. It is arguably more abstract.
Words, Meaning and Consensus
And...this is language. And to help us with understanding language, we have dictionaries. Dictionaries are not prescriptive but descriptive. As such, they reflect societal usage. In the case of certain words, they reflect academic usage too. For further explanation, we refer to encyclopedias.
It is true to say that defining religion is a difficult thing and academics argue over it. But there are commonalities, and the authors of the BSA survey, researchers working on the religion domain, are published researchers of religion, not just random people.
Words have no objective meaning. There isn't a prescriptive word god out there defining how things should be in some realm of ontic realism. In this way, you can just say, "I don't think X means A, but B" even if everyone else in the world thinks the opposite. Sure, you can say that, but it's not very useful. You will just go through life committing the Fallacy of Equivocation, arguing about a given word and using your own definition whilst everyone else uses another.
Now, in some domains, there might well be sizeable minorities who argue one way rather than another over a given meaning. This is the academic process.
However, one must also be careful of trying to argue a word away from a meaning towards another where a word for the second meaning already exists. I think SA is perhaps (and his name gives a little away here) arguing for a sort of spiritualism. It might be worth checking out ideas about SBNR: Spiritual But Not Religious. This is actually an important point. I don't count such spirituality as religious and nor do many others, hence there is a term to describe it. So even if such spirituality was on the rise, then this does not affect religiosity in a direct way. This 2013 BBC article is an interesting read.
Religion is a word with a composite meaning made up of various elements.
The Elements
This is where invoking Wikipedia might help:
Numerous studies have explored the different components of human religiosity (Brink, 1993; Hill & Hood 1999). What most have found is that there are multiple dimensions (they often employ factor analysis). For instance, Cornwall, Albrecht, Cunningham and Pitcher (1986) identify six dimensions of religiosity based on the understanding that there are at least three components to religious behavior: knowing (cognition in the mind), feeling (effect to the spirit), and doing (behavior of the body). For each of these components of religiosity there were two cross classifications resulting in the six dimensions:[9]Cognitiontraditional orthodoxyparticularistic orthodoxyEffectPalpableTangibleBehaviorreligious behaviorreligious participation
Other researchers have found different dimensions, ranging generally from four to twelve components. What most measures of religiosity find is that there is at least some distinction between religious doctrine, religious practice, and spirituality.
Returning to the original BSA survey, I think there is good crossover of the elements mentioned above. In short, I think that it can give us a pretty good indication of religiosity in the UK. In the BSA chapter on religion, they examine levels of religious affiliation, whether someone was brought up in a religion, and whether they regularly attend religious services. Roger Harding, Head of Public Attitudes at the National Centre for Social Research (who carried out the research), recently said:
“This increase follows the long-term trend of more and more of us not being religious. The differences by age are stark and with so many younger people not having a religion it’s hard to see this change abating any time soon. The falls in those belonging to the Church of England are the most notable, but these figures should cause all religious leaders to pause for thought."
“We know from the British Social Attitudes survey that religious people are becoming more socially liberal on issues like same sex relationships and abortion. With falling numbers some faith leaders might wonder whether they should be doing more to take their congregation’s lead on adapting to how society is changing.”
Taking this research and the survey and chapter findings, we can see that the elements mentioned in Wiki above have all been touched on here. Lucy Lee, author of the BSA chapter, wrote:
However, measuring religiosity is not a straightforward exercise. In the run up to the 2011 census, a number of journalists, bloggers and campaigners publicised the disparity between the findings of the 2001 census and the corresponding British Social Attitudes survey. While the census reported that 72 per cent of the British population were Christian and 15 per cent of no religion, in that same year we found 43 per cent to be Christian and 41 per cent to be of no religion. The difference between the two results can be partly explained by question wording, the response options offered and the context in which the questions were asked.1 In this chapter, we use a range of complementary measures of religious upbringing, affiliation and practice included in the British Social Attitudes survey to present an up-to-date and nuanced picture of religiosity in Britain, how this has changed and why.
SA might argue that the Effect dimension is the least evident aspect here, but it is worth noting that this will also come to some degree under self-identification (after all, we all know what a religious experience is), but also that:
Most dimensions of religiosity are correlated, meaning people who often attend church services (practice dimension) are also likely to score highly on the belief and spirituality dimensions. But individuals do not have to score high on all dimensions or low on all dimensions; their scores can vary by dimension.
Even if SA is heavily relying on a more spiritual definition, then this claim might well show a correlated decline, too. Where definitions might not satisfy everybody, we must look for commonalities and best fits. I am confident (not least because many organisations pragmatically use the BSA data) that the BSA has got it largely right.
Getting It Wrong over Time
I want to talk about a little about stats. SA seems to think the survey researchers and creators and much of the public have got the definition of religiosity wrong. Okay, let's grant that. The great thing about long running surveys is looking at trends and making worthy hypotheses. Let's assume that 80% of people have the wrong (W) definition of religiosity (leaving aside that on consensus, by definition, if they largely agreed, they could not be wrong and the remaining 20% would be wrong!). This leaves 20% of the population having a correct (C) definition. If levels of religiosity drastically drop as they have, there are several potential scenarios:
- Both groups drop in number, reflecting a drop in religiosity R as so defined
- W drops and C remains static or increases, meaning an overall drop in R as so defined
- W rises and C decreases, meaning an overall drop in R as s defined (discounted because the commenter seems to think religiosity as he defines it, C, has not dropped)
So what is more likely? That religiosity as defined has decreased in the UK over successive generations, but the correctly defined number of religious people has actually increased over generations or remained static? Or that we can probably guess that with such large declines over successive generations that it doesn't matter how religiosity is defined, it is going down? I think the latter is parsimoniously preferable.
Anecdote and Cultural Difference
I don't know what religion Spiritual Anthropologist has or where they are from, but I am guessing they are American from spelling conventions. This is important because the cultural difference regarding religion in the UK and the US couldn't be more marked.
I think SA really misunderstand, probably from being non-British, how irreligious most of our society is from a feet-on-the-ground level. I once worked in a Catholic school of about 30 staff. Three or four were practising Christians. The rest were openly or effectively atheist/irreligious. This might have been unusual for that establishment over the whole of the UK (there will be faith schools with many more religious practitioners), but in society at large, religion is such a minority position.
As for the young people percentage of the original survey, this really seems to be true. Being young and religious is "strange" (apart from in Muslim and some immigrant communities), as in you are out of the societal norm. The children and young people I have taught have overwhelmingly been nonreligious. Hugely so. And I look into these ideas in teaching Religious Education and Philosophy 4 Children.
Religion in the UK is really dying in the mainstream. Eastern European and Indian immigration has upped the Catholicity in certain sectors (I used to teach in a Catholic school where this was strongly the case). Not a single member of my friends from childhood is religious. One was, but he deconverted at university. My close friend whom I taught with and whom started Tippling Philosophers with me used to be a conservative Christian but has now lost almost all of his religion. I literally have no religious friends in a pretty large circle of friends. And this is not unusual. Just look at church attendance records. As above, there are more kids in religious schools than attend church in the country. Religion doesn't feature in any programming of note.
As for surveys, cultural Christianity is still given as a religious identity. An atheist friend I know was brought up in an overtly atheist household, but his parents still both put "Christian" on the last census.
As ever in these discussions, it is easy to adopt the negative argumentative stance and attack someone else's claims, but until you put up something in its stead, offer an alternative, then you can be pretty much discounted. SA needs to actually provide a supposedly more robust definition of religiosity and then show that this, too, has not been in decline in the UK.
But simply living here over successive generations is enough to show you that any conceivable definition of religiosity and religion you can sensibly argue for has declined. It really is pretty easy to see.