WITH too much hope being invested in a single Bible Society/YouGov survey showing rising church attendance, I was relieved to hear Radio 4’s statistics programme More or Less (Wednesday) interrogate the data.
The series producer, Tom Colls, made the point that this was an increase in people saying that they go to church; mobile phone geolocation data in the United States shows that half as many people there claim they regularly attend church than actually do. Some of the claims strain credibility: does anyone really believe that there has been a fivefold increase in young men worshipping regularly since 2018? In fact, the British Social Attitudes Survey and major denominations’ own statistics show that churchgoing, while rebounding from post-pandemic lows, is still well below late 2010s levels.
Mr Colls noted that the Bible Society’s comparator survey in 2018 had recorded a lower level of churchgoing than other contemporaneous datasets; so, what looks like an increase may actually be an artefact of a dodgy result six years ago. But he also noted international evidence that the long run of rising secularisation in the West may have flattened out.
For my part, I think that the increase in young people saying that they attend church reflects a real shift in interest and curiosity, but the virtual generation still needs to be enticed through the church doors in meaningful numbers.
Sunday (Radio 4) interviewed Rachel Maskell, the Labour MP for York Central, an Evangelical who led the backbench revolt against proposed disability benefit cuts. She told Emily Buchanan that “Whatever you did for the least of these” came immediately to mind when heard the proposals, and she referred to Labour’s deep Christian roots.
Although Ms Maskell was initially asked how she reconciled her faith with politics, I was disappointed that the line of questioning then segued into a secular querying of the public-finance implications of the government climbdown. I would also have appreciated an exploration of why two successive, very different, governments with large majorities have repeatedly failed to get key policies past backbenchers.
In Our Time (Radio 4, Thursday) explored how “civility” came to matter in European culture, with particular reference to Reformation-era conflicts. While Erasmus promoted training children in civility as essential to social harmony in a hierarchical society, it was Luther, who loved a good scatological insult, who set the tone for the brusque 16th century.
A century later, Hobbes found this combative rudeness corrosive to civil peace. Contemporaries found his manufactured civility to be dissimulating hypocrisy, and, worse still, foppish, pseudo-Catholic, and rather French. Yet circumspect language in religious debate became a key strand of the latitudinarian 18th century, and Puritans eventually adapted civility as a means of self-protection as a minority. Crucially for the advent of democracy, they exported this civil attitude to North America.
