How Christian upbringing divides the religious nones in Britain: exploring the imprints of Christian upbringing in the 2016 EU referendum

ABSTRACT

Over the last few decades, Britain has witnessed a significant decline in Christian affiliation and the corresponding growth in the number of religiously unaffiliated individuals. Relatively little attention has, however, been paid to ‘former Christians’ who were brought up in a Christian household but now identify as having no religion. This study focuses on the effects of Christian upbringing on the voting behaviour of religious nones in the EU referendum of 2016. Using data from the 2016 British Social Attitudes survey, the empirical analysis in this article examines the socio-cultural characteristics of Anglican, Catholic, and ‘Other Christian’ households as well as their role in shaping the voting turnout and the voting intentions of individuals who are religiously unaffiliated. The results suggest that Anglican upbringing and Catholic upbringing serve as salient proxies for national identities among the secular groups. Additionally, in the EU referendum, the voting behaviour of religious nones with different kinds of Christian upbringing was very distinct. This reveals that religious upbringing is a source of within-group variety among British religious nones and that Britain’s Christian heritage still has important socio-political implications despite the decrease in the country’s Christian population.

KEYWORDS:

• Religious nones
• Christianity
• religious upbringing
• Britain
• Brexit

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Contemporary Religion for their inspiring and constructive feedback. I am grateful to Annie Ou for her support and encouragement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The post-2015 British Election Study was conducted in 2016 and surveyed a random sample of the British public regarding their vote choice in May 2015. It also asked a series of questions about the respondents’ attitudes to the EU and their voting intentions in a future EU referendum.

2. An important point to note in the classification of different forms of religious identity is that such labels as ‘consistent’ and ‘former’ are only indicative of the contrast between an individual’s Christian upbringing and current affiliation in the data and should not be interpreted as an indication of the dynamics of religious faith and identity across the life span. It is also worth mentioning that the reliability of self-reported religious affiliation is perhaps to some extent low for nominal Christians and the irreligious, as the presence of such religious identities may well be situational and tends to be strong in particular circumstances, for example, when they are perceived as cultural symbols or proxies for national feelings (Storm 2011).

3. Unfortunately, the 2016 BSA survey did not include a question differentiating white respondents’ ethnic backgrounds. Nevertheless, this issue has been highlighted in other national representative social surveys in Britain. For example, data from the largest national representative panel data in the UK—Understanding Society—show that over 96% of the respondents who were brought up as Anglicans self-identified as white British. By contrast, only 75% of those who reported Catholic upbringing identified themselves as white British, whereas 15% identified themselves as Irish (4%) or white Others (11%).

4. In this analysis, an extra explanatory variable, reflecting the dichotomy between whites (including white British and all other whites) and non-white ethnic minorities, was added to the model in Table 2. Due to the restriction of sample size, Models 2 (Catholics) and 3 (Other Christians) were combined into a single model representing non-Anglican Christians. While the effect sizes for other control variables were similar to results displayed in Table 2, non-white ethnic minorities appeared to be significantly more likely than whites to be consistent Anglicans (p=0.021) and consistent non-Anglican Christians (p=0.003) in contrast to former Anglicans and former non-Anglican Christians. The differences between whites and non-white ethnic minorities were much weaker in the contrasts between former Christians and consistent nones.

5. Accordingly, one may reasonably speculate that frequent churchgoers are more likely than former and nominal Christians to have turned out in the EU referendum. Religious teaching from the pulpit may also play a pivotal role here. For example, notwithstanding Anglicanism’s association with stronger British identities, the choice of ‘Remain’ was ‘personally endorsed’ by many prominent Anglican clerics, including the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby (Gomes 2016). For frequent attenders at Anglican churches, it became plausible that ecumenism and friendly attitudes towards the EU were key ingredients in the messages they received from sermons and in informal settings (Nelsen and Guth 2016). Consequently, church attendance is perhaps associated with greater likelihood to vote ‘Remain’ among individuals from an Anglican background, which deserves further investigation.

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Yinxuan Huang

Yinxuan Huang is research associate at the Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research at the University of Manchester, UK. His main research interests are in religion in China and Britain, social capital, ethnic minorities, and Chinese political society. He is currently working on the InGRID-2 project funded by the European Commission and imitating research on the impact of COVID-19 on Britain’s Higher Education and religious market. CORRESPONDENCE: Cathie Marsh Institute, Humanities Bridgeford Street, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, M13 9PL, Manchester, UK.