New poll shows Christianity dying off in England

A few days ago I reported on a BBC article citing a poll with a surprising result: 40% of British people didn’t believe that Jesus was a historical person. I found that surprising, and thought that it reflected simple ignorance of the populace rather than pervasive mythicism based on people’s investigations, but it turns out it’s more complicated than that. A new piece in the Torygraph highlights the poll and its overall bad news for religionists. It looks as if Christianity is dying out in England (Wales and Scotland weren’t surveyed), and the poll has the English religious establishment running scared.

The poll and report were prepared for the Church of England and two other organizations, by the Barna group, a respectable organization that collects information for religious groups and churches. You can read the whole short booklet, “Talking Jesus: Perceptions of Jesus, Christians, and evanglism in England”, at this link.

Here’s the bad news for Christians as reported by the Torygraph:

. . . a third of those surveyed said they were not aware of anyone they know being a practising Christian.

The Bishop of Bristol, the Rt Rev Michael Hill, admitted the findings had been “greeted with disbelief” but warned members of the Synod not to dismiss them because they did not fit with their “preconceptions” about the public.

The Church’s most senior lay official, the Synod’s Secretary General William Fittall, added that some forms of outreach by Christians hoping to win new converts should be recognised as “counterproductive”.

The findings, which present one of the gloomiest pictures ever about the state of Christianity in Britain, were sent out to almost 470 members of the Synod, which is due to discuss how to tackle the crisis in the pews when it meets in London next month.

First, the best news for atheists and secularists: 21% of British adults are either atheist or agnostic:

Second, most Christians don’t go to church very often, so they’re not really “practicing” Christians. From the report:

Although 57% of the English population self-identity as Christian, just 9% are described for the purposes of this survey as practising Christians: those who report regularly praying, reading the Bible and attending a church service at least monthly.

Third, here’s the Jesus question with answers divided up by age. Get a load of the message in the balloon!:

Seriously, “how can we help those in relevant roles teach the historic facts about Jesus”? Which historic facts about Jesus? And what is that doing in the report? Clearly, the Church of England thinks it knows these facts, and is still trying to brainwash others about them. Sadly, the report shows that talking to non-Christians about such facts not only doesn’t work, but is counterproductive.

So you can see the question as it was asked, and that the 40% of “non-historicists” is actually an amalgam of two groups: those who don’t know whether Jesus was a real person or a mythical character (18%), and those who think he was a mythical or fictional character (22%). Now that 22% could comprise those who just don’t buy that there was a historical Jesus-man, those who mistakenly think that the Bible is seen as a work of fiction, or both.

There are other data from those over 55;

The older you are, the more likely you are to believe Jesus actually walked the earth. Fifty-seven percent of the under-35s believe Jesus was a historical person, compared to 65% of over-55s. Older people are also less likely (17%) to think Jesus was merely a fictional character from a book and not a real, historical person. Younger people are the most sceptical about Jesus’s existence, with a quarter of them believing Jesus was a mythical or fictional character. [JAC: Again, there could be two bases for this mythicism: considered rejection or simple ignorance.]

The positive correlation between age and belief suggests that, with time, Christianity will wane in the country.

Here are two more results of interest. First, only 21% believed in the divine Jesus in the Bible, while 58% accept that Jesus was either a normal human being, a non-divine prophet, or don’t have an opinion. That sums up to 79%, with the other 21% (shown as 22% above) rejecting the notion that Jesus was even a real person:

Finally, here are people’s opinions on the Resurrection. Only 17% of adults think the Biblical description is literally accurate, while another 26% think that there’s some allegory in the tale, but that Jesus really did come back to life. That’s only 43%—less than half. The other 57% don’t accept the Resurrection for one reason or another, or don’t know (2%).

The rest of the report is less interesting to me, as it deals not with beliefs per se, but with how Christians feel about evangelizing, about discussing Jesus with other people, and about why people became Christians (not surprisingly, the most common answer among practicing Christians—41% of them—was “growing up in a Christian family”).

There’s another bit there that’s heartening, though. As the Telegraph reports:

Stark new research findings being presented to members of the Church’s ruling General Synod suggest that practising Christians who talk to friends and colleagues about their beliefs are three times as likely to put them off God as to attract them.

After all this bad news for Christians, it’s somewhat funny to see the recommendations that the report gives for how the Church should deal with all this apostasy. Here are the first four of ten recommendations. You can see the desperation below the surface, especially in #1, which urges Christians to “pray for the Church”. And they’re saying they need God’s intervention to stem the tide of secularism—good luck with that! (Note that #4 conflicts with the finding that talking about one’s beliefs actually puts off others.)

h/t: Graham