Reports of the death of Christianity, like those of Mark Twain’s death, have been greatly exaggerated. Reports of the death of “Christian Britain” are not so much exaggerated as misconceived, given that the adjective “Christian” is usually so emptied of its meaning that it provides no useful description of the noun “Britain”. But you would be forgiven for thinking that something seismic is going on if you had been reading the Times of late. Last year it went to town when the UK Office of National Statistics published its analysis of the latest census figures for England and Wales, reporting that less that 50% of the population (actually 46.2%) self identified as Christian. This prompted headlines such as “End of an era for Christian Britain” (The Times, Nov 30th, 2022). At the time I commented on similar reports in the Guardian, which has the great virtue of not being behind a paywall.
As an aside, it is worth pointing out that between then and now we have had the SNP leadership election. That is relevant because one of the candidates had made clear publicly that she was a Christian (in the Biblical as opposed to popular sense) and that this motivated and affected her politics, resulting in Christianity and politics grabbing the headlines for a time. This led to quite a furore in Scottish politics which revealed, among other things, the complete inability of the media, as well as a fair proportion of the political class, to report such matters and discuss the issues raised with any great accuracy (let alone consistency). I discussed this at the time. There were honourable exceptions of course including, in the Times, Matthew Parris (see his column “In politics, there’s no such thing as private faith”, March 4th, 2023). Mind you I was surprised to read in that particular column that “Most of our Prime Ministers have been practising Christians”. Church goers, probably. Intelligent, educated people from a time and of a class who obtained a bit of Bible knowledge and could conjure up the odd quote when necessary; some of them, certainly. Decent human beings trying to do an almost impossible and complex job in always tricky circumstances, fair enough. But using “Christian” in this context would again require some definitional work to be undertaken (although not now – this is an aside).
For it is necessary to return to the Times, and some of its output this last week. It has been reporting on the results of a survey that it conducted into the views of Church of England clergy (starting with “Britain is no longer a Christian country, say frontline clergy”, published Tuesday, 29th August). Such an exercise is not without merit. After all, the Church of England is a large, wealthy and culturally important English institution. It is in the midst of debating and seeking to come to a mind on important and divisive issues. The particular issues, let it be noted, are of wide, political and cultural significance. From the data returned in the survey various conclusion were drawn and boldly asserted. “Two thirds of Anglican clergy think that..”, “A majority of priests want…” (apparently what the culture wants). Others have commented on the survey and its reporting, and a highly readable critique of it can be found on Ian Paul’s “Psephizo” blog. Unlike me, he was actually sent the survey, and has interesting things to say about some of the questions asked.
As is common in our newspapers today (and the media more widely), the conclusions come well before the methodology and the raw numbers, although to be fair both are eventually provided. This is the opposite of how things are presented in (most) scientific papers. If you are going to draw sound conclusions from such an exercise, then how you go about obtaining the data is critical. But newspapers (and even Times) appear to think that such information is a tiresome detail. It has to be included for form’s sake, but who is going to read that far into the article? In this instance (as ever) how they obtained their numbers is revealing, as is the fuller picture of their numbers that the methodology provides.
According to last Tuesday’s article: “The Times selected 5,000 priests at random from among those with English addresses in Crockford’s Clerical Directory of Anglican Clergy and received 1,436 responses, analysing data from the 1,185 respondents still serving.” According to the Church of England there are about 20 000 active clergy (although exactly what “active clergy” means is complicated). So the Times started with a potential sample of 25% of the population it was interested in. Not entirely unreasonable. But while it sounds sensible to pick addresses at random, this doesn’t mean that the resulting sample will be able to provide anything like a snapshot of the clergy as a whole. In fact, as a population the Church of England clergy is highly structured, breaking into clearly defined sub-populations, often along lines related to some of the issues the Times was interested in, and there’s no way to control for this, although it might have been possible to account for it in the analysis. It doesn’t appear that a weighted analysis was done, even if they had the numbers to do it. In any case, 28.7% of their initial sample responded (actually not bad for a survey of this kind); of which 82.5% provided analysable data (we’re not told the problem with the other 17.5%). So the reporting is based on the views of 5.9% (approximately; 1185/20000) of the Church of England's active clergy.
One can understand why this number is, if not obscured, not particularly prominent. On the basis of this rather thin sliver of opinion, we are told there has been an “historic shift on gay marriage and questions of sex” – suspiciously in exactly the direction favoured by the culture at large. One proponent of such views, now no longer himself ministering within within the C of E, was happy to proclaim that “This is absolutely huge”. But it really isn’t. I assume the gentleman concerned was unaware of the methodology that had been used, only of the conclusions that had been reached. Do the results of this survey indicate any real change of view within the Church of England? We have no way of knowing. But clearly there is a constituency who would dearly love the Times’ reporting to contribute momentum to a drift in a particular direction.
To jump from either the results of the last census, or the results of the Times’ survey of clergy in one particular Christian grouping, to conclusions about those who make up the body of Christ (i.e. the Church in England), is to jump to unwarranted conclusions. And it is a tad parochial (no pun intended). It is to confuse the visible church in one part of the world, always a mixed and often an apparently weak body, with the invisible church, a graced and glorious body of saints worldwide known certainly only to Jesus Himself. The latter group is in rude good health, although I wouldn’t expect this to be reported any time soon in a newspaper any of us have heard of.
To sightly misquote an anonymous funeral poem “Do not weep for [us] for [we] have not gone. Not yet that is. But one day, perhaps soon.
