A ComRes poll
for the Church of England-supported group Theos was mainly aimed at
finding out who visits cathedrals and why (54% said they would visit a
CofE cathedral more for historical and architectural reasons than
spiritual ones, only 15% said otherwise).
But the survey threw up some
other interesting statistics that Theos was not so anxious to emphasise.
It
showed 42% of people identified themselves as atheists or agnostics. In
a 1963 Gallup poll, only 14% described themselves as atheist or
agnostic.
The other statistics tend to suffer from a well-known tendency of respondents to overstate religious beliefs and practices.
For
instance, in this poll, 15% of people claimed to attend a religious
service once a month.
This is certainly an overstatement if compared to
the Church's own statistics, based on the count of bums on pews rather
than what people claim.
The number of adults claiming
to 'belong' to a religion was 64% – 39% being Anglicans (two-thirds of
them over 45), 16% other Christians, and 9% non-Christians; this left
34% professing no religion (rising to 46% of the 18-24s).
Firm
belief in God ('I know God exists and I have no doubts about it') stood
at just 19%, with 42% classified as atheists or agnostics; the
remaining 39% fell into three categories in the 'middle ground'
(including those believing in a higher power but not God).
Belief in God
as a universal life force was 40%, compared with belief in a human soul
(60%), life after death (41%), angels (35%), the Resurrection of Jesus
(31%), and reincarnation (26%).
The number holding all six beliefs was
just 12%, peaking at 20% in London.
France: French Catholicism on the verge of collapse
The results of two identical opinion polls carried out more than 50 years apart were published in the French Catholic daily La Croix
last week.
Asking the same questions this September as in a survey for
the newspaper in 1961, the Ifop polling institute said the most obvious
marker – weekly attendance at Mass, or as often as possible – was
already down to 38 per cent in 1961 (although as high as 70% in some
regions of western France). Now it is down to just 7%.
The
overall number of Catholics who never go to Mass has more than doubled
from 26% to 58%, with 71% of baptised Catholics under 35 years old
shunning church completely.
One-third of those polled said they went
occasionally.
The total number of baptised Catholics
seems to have held up better, dropping from 92% of the population then
to 80% now. This decline is partly attributable to the growth of
non-Catholic minorities, especially Muslims, who make up about 8% of the
population.
But it is also due to a rising number of Catholics who do
not have their children baptised.
The number of those who said they had not or would not have their children baptised jumped from 4% in 1961 to 25% now.
The
effect of the policy of laïcité (the strict Church-State divide) showed
when Ifop asked if the Church should intervene in politics.
In 1961,
76% of respondents – a category including the small non-Catholic
minority – said "no". That figure has risen to 83%, a third of whom are
weekly Mass-goers.
Ireland: More Catholics in Ireland than ever – but proportion drops
A
new Irish Census 2011 report on Religion, Ethnicity and Irish
Travellers shows that there are more people than ever in Ireland who
identify as Catholic, but ironically, the proportion of Catholics in the
population has dropped.
This is due to a rise in the number of
adherents to other religions and none.
There has been
a fourfold increase in people with no religion since 1991 and they now
number 277,237, which includes the children of non-affiliated.
There has
been a sharp rise in the number of Muslims which has more than doubled
in a decade to over 49,000, and they now account for over 1% of the
population.
The Church of Ireland has seen a 6% increase since 2006 and
now has 129,036 members, the report from the Central Statistics Office shows.
The
number of Orthodox Christians has doubled since 2002 to 45,223, while
the Apostolic and Pentecostal churches saw a major surge to over 14,000
adherents.
USA: Many Catholics in the USA don't share their leaders' opinions
A
new poll by the Public Religious Research Institute confirms what has
been found before – Catholic leaders do not represent the views of the
people in their churches. And the number of Catholics abandoning the
religion of their upbringing is continuing to rise.
Although
nearly one-third of Americans were raised Catholic, only 22% currently
identify with Catholicism. As has been shown in previous surveys, the
number of Catholics who have abandoned the Church remains substantial at
12%.
Another significant rise is among those who do
not identify with any religion. Although only 7% of the 3,000 survey
respondents were raised in a religiously unaffiliated family, 19% of
respondents now identify as religiously unaffiliated.
Among
the American Catholics surveyed, 60% believe the Church should focus
more on social justice issues and their obligation to the poor, even if
it means focusing less on social issues like abortion and right to life.
31% say the opposite – they favour social issues over social justice
issues.
Even among Catholics who attend church weekly
or more, 51% say the Church should stress social justice issues over
strictly social issues. 36% said the opposite.
"The
survey confirms that there is no such thing as 'the Catholic vote',"
said Robert P. Jones, CEO of the polling group. "There are a number of
critical divisions among Catholics, including an important divide
between 'social justice' and 'right to life' Catholics."
As
for voting intentions, among those Catholics who support more "social
justice" teachings, 60% support Obama while 37% support Romney.
Likewise, 67% of "right to life" Catholics support Romney while 27%
support the president.
Overall, Catholics slightly
favour Romney over Obama, with 49% supporting the Republican challenger
and 47% supporting the president.
Catholics' top
issues are also largely in line with Americans as a whole: 61% of
Americans say the economy is the top issue in this election, followed by
health care, national security, abortion and immigration. "There are
few differences by religious affiliation in terms of voters' issue
priorities," says the report.
The reasons for
quitting religion given by those who are unaffiliated vary. 23% cited
rejection of their childhood faith, 16% cited overall antipathy toward
organized religion and 11% cited negative personal experiences with
religion as their reasons for leaving.
5% of overall
respondents cited the Catholic Church's child sex abuse scandal – the
entirety of that group was made up of former Catholics.