1. Clive D. Field University of Birmingham 30 October 2016
Somerville College Chapel Sunday Talk Measuring Secularization in Britain
Clive D. Field
University of Birmingham
30 October 2016

2. About Me
My disciplinary background is modern history rather than religion or social sciences but I work at the interface between all three
My published research has been in the social history and sociology of religion in Britain from 1689 to the present day
My particular interest is in the application of statistics to the study and measurement of religion
I have been co-director of British Religion in Numbers since 2008, now a British Academy Research Project
While recognizing the value of qualitative research, caution is needed regarding its representativeness (the greater availability of digitized texts and corpus linguistic techniques should now enable this to be tested)

3. Defining Secularization
The word has a long history, being initially used in a technical sense to denote the transfer of Church assets to lay ownership or temporal use
Since the 18th century its principal meaning and use has been to denote the process of societies and individuals becoming less religious
The concept came to the fore in Britain in the long 1960s, since when it has tended to be defined in one of two ways:
Descriptively: ‘the process whereby religious thinking, practice, and institutions lose social significance’ (Bryan Wilson, 1966) or ‘the displacement of religion from the centre of human life’ (Steve Bruce, 2011)
Prescriptively: classic secularization theory (with roots in the 19th century) sees it as an inevitable (but unintended) consequence of modernity, and associated with the rise of individualism and rationalism (and, in some versions, industrialization)
In Britain, secularization has mostly been applied to Christianity, including as ‘the end of Christendom’ or the advent of ‘a post-Christian society’

4. Debating Secularization
Validity of the construct
Largely theoretical debates about alternative master-narratives of religious change, including rational choice theory (supply-side) or desecularization
Causation
External causes – intellectual (loss of faith), economic, social, politico- constitutional, war, etc.
Internal causes – extent to which the Churches have ‘accommodated’ secularization
Chronology
Starting-point
Pace (gradualist or revolutionary)

5. Dissecting Religion Belonging Behaving Believing Institutional
Religious profession, self-assessed religiosity, religious membership, religious community
Behaving
Religious service attendance, rites of passage, religious broadcasting, private prayer, reading of scriptures, observance of religious festivals
Believing
Orthodox beliefs, alternative beliefs, religious experience, attitudes to religious issues, religious attitudes to secular issues
Institutional
Places of worship, religious personnel, religious finance

6. Data Sources State Religious bodies Opinion pollsters
Has played a limited role, mainly through the provision of marriage statistics, registration of chapels, and censuses in 1851 (attendance) and 2001 and 2011 (profession)
Religious bodies
Data are only available for Christianity and Judaism, and measures (especially membership) are rarely comparable across bodies
Opinion pollsters
Outputs are poorly archived and polls often raise significant methodological and interpretative challenges, including aspirational replies
Academic social scientists
Empirical research has been biased toward community studies and sects and new religious movements and has often not been especially quantitative
All sources
Need to be expressed relative to population, not just absolutely

7. Research Findings
Secularization has been progressive, not sudden, but there have been ‘accelerants’ at particular times
It has been especially marked in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, although this partly reflects greater availability of evidence
It has not been uniform, individual indicators moving at different speeds and from different bases
Nevertheless, of 25 key performance indicators, all bar one has moved downwards (relative to population) in the past half-century
People are not necessarily logical, nor consistent, in their religious beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours, taking a ‘pick-and-mix’ approach
Organized irreligion has not benefited from secularization, and the much larger constituency of religious nones is not homogeneous
There has been no single cause of secularization but a combination of causes
Notwithstanding, diminished religious socialization and respect for religious authority have been recurring themes since the mid-20th century
Britain has become one of the most secularized countries in the world

8. Contemporary Statistics
Measure
Source
% of adult population
Profess religion
Census of population
73.2 (GB, 2011, excl. not stated)
Integrated Household Survey
67.6 (GB, 2014, excl. not stated)
Profess membership of religion
Lord Ashcroft
59.3 (GB, 2016)
Profess to belong to religion
British Social Attitudes
50.0 (GB, )
Describe self as religious
YouGov
46.7 (GB, 2015)
Claim to believe in God/power
55 (GB, 2015)
Claim to pray weekly or more
18.7 (GB, 2015)
Claim to attend church weekly
7 (GB, 2016)
Actually attend church weekly
Peter Brierley
5.7 (England, 2012, estimate)
Actually church members
10.3 (UK, 2013)
Religious marriage
ONS/NRS
29.4 (GB, 2013)

9. Countering Secularization
In Britain, secularization has been qualified or countered in four ways, all subsumed under the ‘change, not decline’ umbrella, but none is so convincing as to affect the big picture
Examples of church growth have not offset decline elsewhere, so the net movement is still downwards
Growth among non-Christians has not replaced the losses suffered by Christianity, and the religious population overall is thus declining
Some people see themselves as spiritual rather than religious, but there has been no ‘spiritual revolution’ and spirituality is a ‘zero-sum gain’
Substitutions for religion have negligible religious content, such as ‘diffused religion’, ‘implicit religion’, and ‘vicarious religion’

10. Ongoing Secularization?
It is probably best to avoid quasi-actuarial projections of numbers, but underlying trends suggest ongoing secularization in Britain
Embracing religion is mostly no longer a matter of legislation or societal expectation but of personal choice, the ‘prestige effect’ of being seen to be religious is wearing off, and respect for religious authority is declining
Diminished religious socialization has led to a marked inter-generational effect, each generation being less religious than the previous
In reflection, recruitment to organized or individual religion (through birth or conversion) is hugely exceeded by losses (adult disaffiliations and deaths)
Areas of religious or spiritual growth are currently numerically insufficient to offset decline in more traditional forms of religion
However, complete secularization of Britain still seems too far off to call

11. Further Reading
Alan Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain (Longman, 1980)
Callum Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Pearson, 2006)
Rob Warner, Secularization and its Discontents (Continuum, 2010)
Steve Bruce, Secularization (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Linda Woodhead and Rebecca Catto, eds, Religion and Change in Modern Britain (Routledge, 2012)
Peter Brierley, UK Church Statistics 2, 2010 to 2020 (ADBC Publishers, 2014)
Ben Clements, Religion and Public Opinion in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)
Clive Field, Britain’s Last Religious Revival? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)
Bryan Wilson, Religion in Secular Society, new edition, ed. Steve Bruce (Oxford University Press, 2016)
Clive Field, Secularization in the Long 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2017)

12. Contact Information
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