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First off, why are baby girls more likely to be religious than baby boys? If that question at first sounds nonsensical, it\u2019s because the UK census asks parents to state the religious affiliation of their children. The result is a small sex difference \u2013 one or two extra girls out of every hundred are labelled as being \u2018Christian\u2019 compared with boys.<\/p>\n

The reason, Voas found, is probably because dads are less likely to be religious than mums. The child is given the religious affiliation that matches their same-sex parent. And so the gender gap is the biggest for families with a non-religious dad and a religious mum.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/div>\n

For the second puzzle, just take a look at this graph. It shows the change in religious affiliation since 1915 among graduates and non-graduates.<\/p>\n

Affiliation has declined in both groups, but it\u2019s been much faster among the non-graduates. As a result, although non-graduates were more religious than graduates at the start of the last century, now they are actually less religious!<\/p>\n

It seems that this is probably because graduates are much more passionate about their beliefs \u2013 either religious or non-religious. Non-graduates are more likely to be in the fuzzy middle \u2013 nominally religious but not really devout.<\/p>\n

Now, both nominal and devout religious will put themselves down on the census as \u2018Christian\u2019. However, as society as a whole becomes less religious, those who were formally nominally religious will now be completely non-religious. Those who once would have been strongly religious (many of whom are graduates) will now more likely be nominally religious \u2013 but still list themselves as Christian.<\/p>\n

In other words, this is another artefact of the crude measure of religion used in the UK census. Because it only records broad affiliation, it misses the subtleties.<\/p>\n

The last puzzle surrounds the patchiness of religious affiliation in Britain. If you look at a very fine level (at the level of individual local council wards), the percentage of people saying that they don\u2019t identify with a religion ranges from 1.9% all the way up to a most godless 42.4% (this godless epicentre is actually a place in Brighton, just down the road from where I live).<\/p>\n

Voas found that this variation can only partly be explained by factors such as average age and professional status. An additional major factor was the number of religious people in neighbouring wards.<\/p>\n

So it seems that religion and non-religion tends to aggregate into clusters, although what causes this aggregation is hard to say, but Voas suspects that factors like social history and local economic factors probably play a large role.<\/p>\n

On top of this, some areas have a strong local culture. Brighton, for example, has a long tradition as venue for a bit of escapism from the moral straitjacket of London soceity \u2013 as a result, the place is now full of counter-cultural Bohemians of all types! (And me\u2026)<\/p>\n

$\"ResearchBlogging.org\"$ <\/a><\/span>
Voas, D., & McAndrew, S. (2012). Three Puzzles of Non-religion in Britain Journal of Contemporary Religion, 27<\/span> (1), 29-48 DOI: 10.1080\/13537903.2012.642725<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

$\"Creative$ <\/a><\/span> This article by Tom Rees<\/b> was first published on Epiphenom<\/a>. It is licensed under Creative Commons<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"