People often say that religious belief in Britain has declined to astonishingly low levels in the last half century or so. But where are the numbers to either back that up or disprove it? Well there is one website out there with a whole host of statistics covering all aspects of religious belief in Britain, going back (depending on the specific question) over 80 years, and that is the British Religion in Numbers website.
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I stumbled across the British Religion in Numbers (BRIN) website [1] when it was mentioned as a reference for figures about the
level of belief in various aspects of religion Britain in an article on the BBC News website magazine pages. Being curious, I followed the link and frankly forgot about the original article because the BRIN is just such a mine of fascinating raw data!BRIN is the brainchild of Dr Clive Field, a researcher into statistics about religion in Britain for many decades, now a research fellow at both the University of Birmingham and the University of Manchester. It is the University of Manchester’s Institute for Social Change which hosts the BRIN site and the raw data behind it, though it is presented as a website which anyone can access.
By clicking on the tab entitled ‘figures’ a page comes up showing graphs of the answers given in surveys about key religious questions over the decades. The graphs are rather small but one can click on the links to bring any one of them up in an Excel spreadsheet which includes both the graph and the data behind it. Each graph shows how the answers to one specific question changed over the years or decades of the surveys.
What sorts of survey questions can you find answers to? Well the questions include ones about general spirituality (whether people believe in the soul, whether they believe in an afterlife, whether they believe in god or a general life force) to ones
more specific to Christianity (whether they believe in the devil, whether they believe in the virgin birth, whether they believe in the divinity of Jesus) and questions about attendance at a place of formal worship.And what are the answers? Well there’s not room to go into them all here (I’d encourage you to visit the site and look for yourself) but generally it seems that levels of belief in at least some sort of spirituality have stayed high. The percentage of adults in Britain believing in an afterlife in at least some form has scarcely declined since 1935, from 50% to around 48% (though the numbers saying they don’t have risen steadily as fewer and fewer people hedge their bets with a don’t know answer). Belief in the existence of the soul has actually climbed, from around 50% in 1980 (the question was not asked before then) to around 65%. Given that that is higher than the number who believe in an afterlife it suggests that more and more people are believing in reincarnation or similar ideas where souls are reborn rather than going on to an afterlife. That points to belief in the strict doctrines of the Christian Church falling, which is indeed the case with fewer and fewer believing in the existence of the devil or in that the bible is the divinely inspired word of God. It would seem that we are becoming a spiritual but diverse nation, certainly not conforming to any one doctrine.
All this is fascinating, so why not pop over to the site and poke about amongst the data there for yourself, and draw your own conclusions?
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Sources, footnotes and references:
[1] British Religion in Numbers website