FIVE per cent of the people in Scotland attended church on Christmas Day, a new survey suggests.
Brendan Research’s Christmas 2025 report, published last week, is the first of several panel surveys due to be published over the course of this year. The research was intended to explore spiritual practice in Scotland, and to help churches to “understand people in Scotland, not just the people inside the Church”, the Revd Dr Fiona Tweedie, the company’s founder, said this week.
A former lecturer in statistics for the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, Dr Tweedie spoke of her delight on discovering that ScotPulse, Scotland’s largest online research panel — covering the entirety of the country — was large enough to deliver robust results.
Conscious that “things can go wrong with panel surveys”, she designed a survey to attract a broad base of respondents. It included questions about Christmas and planned activities rather than specifically about the Church or Christian practice. This was to ensure that people “did not feel remotely pressured to say they went to church”. It was carried out online between 27 December and 3 January.
Asked about how they spent Christmas day, 83 per cent of the 1254 respondents said that they saw family. This was also the most popular response to a question about what people did before Christmas. In this period, 12 per cent reported going to church, while 16 per cent said that they “engaged with the story of the birth of Jesus”. This was less than half the number who described themselves as Christians: 38 per cent.
Asked about when Christmas began, most people selected an answer in December. “I was wondering if, with people bombarded with Christmas adverts, churches should begin addressing Christmas earlier, even outside Advent, but it seems not,” Dr Tweedie said.
While most people said that they felt happy (68 per cent) and grateful (55 per cent) at Christmas, 43 per cent said that they felt stressed, and 29 per cent felt anxious.
The results were different for those who identified as Christian, who were happier and more grateful, but also less stressed (by eight per cent) and anxious (by ten per cent). Twenty-six per cent said that Christmas gave them “a sense of religious devotion”, compared with 11 per cent of the overall sample.
In post-Reformation Scotland, Christmas was effectively “banned”. In 1575, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland abolished “all days that hereto have been kept holy except the Sabbath day, such as Yule day, saints’ days and such others”. In 1640, this was followed by an Act of Parliament abolishing “Yule vacance”. The Act was repealed in 1712, but for centuries Hogmanay remained the main celebration. Christmas was recognised as a public holiday in Scotland only in 1971.
Dr Tweedie recalled that, for her grandparents, Christmas had been a working day. There could still be a residual sense in some parts of the country that “we don’t quite deserve Christmas,” she said.
The Church of England recorded a Christmas Day attendance of 1.858 million in 2024 — equivalent to 3.1 per cent of the population — down from 2.3 million in 2019.
