An English atheist friend once tried to explain to me why she thought it was a good thing that British schools incorporated religious education (RE)—that is, Anglican religious education. She explained RE was so boring that it acted as a kind of “vaccination” against religious belief later in life.
It’s certainly true that outside of Northern Ireland religion is much less of a factor in the United Kingdom than in the United States, even though the United Kingdom has an established religion, and Church of England bishops occupy twenty-six of the House of Lords’ 790 seats. Northern Ireland is a completely different story, best left for another time. Inevitably, the political tone is different if your opponent is merely wrong in their beliefs; if instead you believe they’re going to hell, defeating them becomes a righteous crusade.
One consequence is that where “culture war” divisions exist they tend to center on secular topics such as Brexit (still) and the right approach to COVID-19. About ten years ago, a research report concluded the religious Right was not emerging in Britain, although the investigators did detect changes in the overall political landscape. The report was published by Theos, a fifteen-year-old Christian thinktank focused on religion and society. Senior Fellow Nick Spencer explains that Theos has no political alignment. It is broadly Christian and publishes two primary kinds of reports: 1) research into the state of religion in public life and 2) the religious perspective on public life.
“In the second, we will draw our perspective from Christian theology and a range of sources within the Christian tradition,” he says. Most who work at Theos are Christians, and he says the organization is there to put forward the Christian perspective.
This column has noted before that despite a couple of periods when it seemed to be rising, belief in creationism has not become well-established in the United Kingdom. In 2009, for Darwin’s 200th birthday, Theos studied evolution and creationism, and as part of that work conducted a large public opinion poll investigating the “non-evolutionary perspective in the UK.” The survey found that about a quarter of people were committed evolutionists, another quarter were equally committed to rejecting it, and the middle 50 percent gave contradictory answers. Of those who rejected evolution, about half were creationists and the other half were believers in intelligent design. Also interesting: church attendance was lower than 25 percent at the time (it has continued to fall).
Accepting Spencer’s request for an interview for Theos’s latest three-year project was one of my last in-person meetings before the pandemic locked us down in March 2020. The project aims to understand how people think about science and religion. “We joke that it’s a very long, very expensive way to understand how two words are used,” Spencer says.
Other interviewees include academics, scientists, and communicators. Over the year and a half since, while scientists conducted one of the most concerted worldwide efforts in history to save potentially billions of lives by developing the knowledge and vaccines we need to get out of the pandemic, Spencer has developed some preliminary findings. Among them: 60 to 70 percent of the active scientists interviewed volunteered that they see a difference between science in theory and the actual practice of science. The differences are both good and bad: practicing science requires creativity to generate hypotheses, design experiments, and analyze results, but there is also a great deal of trial and error and human ambition, competitiveness, and politics around research grants.
“None of them went so far as to say that invalidates what they’re doing or the scientific method, but they have an acute sense of science as a practiced human activity, which invariably brings with it the foibles of being human,” Spencer says.
Spencer suggests that the heart of the issue, one that interviewees frequently raised, is the question of trust and public authority. Spencer has not yet started to analyze that aspect but notes that while scientists have unquestioned authority on some topics, expertise in one area of science doesn’t naturally translate into expertise in another. Some respondents expressed discomfort with the way people look to them for clarity and certainty with respect to some of the more contentious public issues.
Social media also plays a role by opening up the channels for communication; the fewer, narrower channels of the pre-internet era were naturally more authoritative.
“When you’re taking part in the maelstrom of social media, where facts and misinformation fly about with so much abandonment and there are fewer people to check, it becomes messier and the question of what is authority and how should we trust them becomes a much more vexed issue.”
Echoing my friend, Spencer believes that the established church is one reason the religious Right is not emerging in Britain; as he points out in a 2013 article, the Anglican church dominates Christianity in the United Kingdom, leaving little room for independent evangelicals like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who have spearheaded movements in the United States.
“In many ways the Church of England feels left of center,” he says, “but the religious Right in the U.S. managed to get worked up by generating a sense of exclusion in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s hard to do that when the Archbishop of Canterbury crowns the monarch.”