{"id":329,"date":"2009-12-18T21:25:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-18T20:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2009\/12\/religion-continues-to-decline-in-the-uk.html"},"modified":"2014-11-14T23:22:29","modified_gmt":"2014-11-14T22:22:29","slug":"religion-continues-to-decline-in-uk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2009\/12\/religion-continues-to-decline-in-uk.html","title":{"rendered":"Religion continues to decline in the UK"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Quick post tonight, with news from the British Social Attitudes Survey. The 26th report is due out in January, but they\u2019ve slipped out a yuletide press release<\/a> on religion.<\/p>\n

The press release points out that religious belief has dropped sharply, and that Britain is much less religious than the USA. No surprises there! You can a quick heads up from Irish Sun<\/a>. The NSS<\/a> has some interesting figures on differences in social attitudes (homosexuality, euthanasia, etc).<\/p>\n

But in this post I wanted to pull out some interesting facts in the survey not reported in the press release (you can browse the full report at the publishers website<\/a>).<\/p>\n

First off, some interesting data on the \u2018fuzzy\u2019 middle ground. Everyone always talks about the religious and the non-religious, but David Voas (who wrote the report and who also was a presenter at the NSRN conference<\/a> last week) points out that many people don\u2019t fit into either category.<\/p>\n

The idea is that religious people are those who believe, identify with a religion, and go to services at least occasionally. The non-religious are people who don\u2019t believe and never attend. And the \u2018fuzzy\u2019 group is everyone else (they either identify, believe, or occasionally attend \u2013 but not all three). Here\u2019s the data for the UK and USA:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nThe \u2018fuzzy middle\u2019 is quite large in the USA. The main difference versus the UK is decline of religious at the expense of the non-religious. Presumably what\u2019s happening here is that the \u2018fuzzy\u2019 middle is a group that people transition through on their way to being non-religious.<\/p>\n

Some other data from the report:<\/p>\n

\"British_Social_Attitudes_belief_Jan10\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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I find the last line really amazing! Here\u2019s just one more, to show how the decline of religion is spread among denominations:<\/p>\n

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\nLastly, it turns out that although the level of belief is very different in the USA and UK, attitudes to religion seem to be pretty similar in the two countries:<\/p>\n

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