Sources of data

A full description of religion in the United Kingdom is available on the website of national statistics.

Information and up-to-date comments on news concerning religion in Great Britain can be found on the British Religion in Numbers blog, which publishes a monthly summary of the latest available data, Counting Religion in Britain. Information concerning religious affiliation in Scotland is provided by the Scottish Government and is available here.

The think tank Theos believes that the modern world can’t be understood without understanding religion. It offers many reports which inform the debate about the place of religion in contemporary society. Ekklesia is another independent think tank which seeks to promote transformative ideas in politics, economy, society and religion. It produces a series of reports and briefings about contemporary issues religion in the UK.

Another important academic source of information about religion and current debates is The Religious Studies Project. It is an international collaborative enterprise which produces weekly podcasts with leading scholars on the social-scientific study of religion.

There is a lively debate on the rise of secularism in Great Britain, with a series of organisations providing an alternative agenda to cater for those with no religion. The National Secular Society has been campaigning for the separation of religion and politics, while Humanists UK aim at bringing together non-religious people to develop their own understanding of the world. The two websites contain information about alternative ways of understanding the world and provide an interesting collection of secular perspectives. A more scholarly approach to the study of secularism has been developed by the Non-religion and Secularity Network.

D 2 October 2018    AKatya Braginskaia

 October 2015: A new report We fear for our lives: offline and online experiences of anti-muslim hostility" shows that Muslims targeted in Islamophobic attacks are reluctant to report incidents and often receive little support from onlookers. The report by researchers, from Birmingham City University and Nottingham Trent University, was commissioned by Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks).

 June 2015: Ethnicity and Religion of the Non-UK Born Population in England and Wales, 2011 Census Analysis. A Report from the Office for National Statistics on 18 June 2015.

 March 2015: the UK Data Service released the Anglo-Jewry Database, resource containing data on 29,275 Jewish inhabitants of the British Isles in 1851 (90% of the Jewish community at that time). Information and documentation can be found online.

 February 2015: Gallup’s data on religion and the paranormal between 1939 and 1999 have now been collated for the first time by Clive Field in a new 64-page BRIN working paper: Religion in Great Britain, 1939-99.

 January 2015: the complete dataset for the 2013 Scottish Social Attitudes Survey was made available for secondary analysis by the UK Data Service as SN 7519 on 20 January 2015.

D 29 October 2015    AIngrid Storm

2014:
 Statistics for mission 2012 is the annual publication of data concerning the Church of England, and contains both affiliation and attendance statistics.

 "Religion, identity, and other issues" and "Jewish and Muslim Press and Other News" on the British Religion numbers blog.

2013: The full reports from the British Social Attitudes survey for 2012 contain data on trends in religious affiliation.

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December 2012: The first results on religion from the 2011 National Census has been released and shows that the percentage of Christians (59%) has declined since the 2001 Census while both nonreligious (25%) and Muslims (5%) have increased.

September 2012: The full reports from the British Social Attitudes survey for 2011 contain data on religiosity and attitudes to Muslims.

June 2012: Church Statistics 2010/11 is the annual publication of data concerning the Church of England, and contains both affiliation, attendance, financial and employment statistics.

April 2012: a new report – Degrees of Separation: Ethnic Minority Voters and the Conservative Party – released by Lord Ashcroft on his blog showed religion to be a powerful predictor of voting for the conservative party.

February 2012: YouGov’s religion barometer shows among other things that more respondents think religion is a force for evil than a force for good, but few think Britain is too religious.

February 2012: A survey conducted by Ipsos MORI for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science shows that people who were recorded as Christian in the 2011 census are overwhelmingly secular in their attitudes on a range of issues.

December 2011: A topic report on race, religion and equality in the 2009/2010 Citizenship Survey was released.

July 2011: The 2010 National Survey of Charities and Social Enterprises (NSCSE), conducted by Ipsos MORI for the Office for Civil Society, shows that religious and faith based activities was considered the main activity of 13% of the organisations.

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August 2009: The first two (of five) reports from the full (four quarters) Citizenship Survey for 2007-08 contain much data of religious interest.

June 2009: Susannah Clark and Justin Thacker, Young People Matter: A Report and Survey of Youth Volunteering by the Evangelical Alliance.

April/May 2009: COMRES conducted a survey of Christians using Cpanel in including items on attitudes to the proposed 2010 Papal visit; whether living as a Christian in Britain is more or less difficult than in the past; donations to charity since the recession began; political party preference.

April 2009: Funeral Music 2009 – Top Ten Listings. A survey of 242 Co-operative Funeral care funeral homes.

13 April 2009: Survey of belief in ghosts and the supernatural, conducted by ComRes on behalf of Theos, a public theology think-tank.

25 March 2009: Ipsos MORI survey of Muslim women on behalf of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. See also a summary of a survey into race and attitudes in Britain conducted by Ipsos MORI for the EHRC.

The 23 March ComRes Pollwatch reported that a recent survey of Cpanel (the ComRes panel of UK Christians) reveals that most Christians in the UK think the decision to send British forces to Iraq was unjustified.

February 2009: ComRes survey on behalf of the BBC, on attitudes to the portrayal and reporting of religion in the media.

D 11 September 2012