Article

Change

Faith

14 March 2023

5 min read

Shining light on the census

Exploring census maps on religious affiliation, Jonathan Moules finds out why it is a flawed measure of a country’s faith

Jonathan Moules

Jonathan Moules is a journalist at the Financial Times.

East London, St Katherines Docks are just to behind Tower Bridge.

Benjamin Davies via Unsplash.

Faith by definition is meant to transcend reason. But the success of St Paul’s Shadwell, a 350-year-old Anglican church that regularly draws in several hundred worshippers each Sunday in an East London neighbourhood with one of the largest Muslim populations is at first glance a mystery up there with the concept of an all-seeing three-in-one god.

SPS, as the congregants call it, serves a parish where 78 per cent of those responding to the 2021 Census of England and Wales identified as Muslim. And yet the church has a membership close to 300 people. Last November, its bonfire night party in the churchyard attracted over 1,100 people, although there was undoubtedly a draw given that the hamburgers, hot chocolates and sparklers attendees could enjoy were given away for free.

The 2021 Census has been a landmark document for several reasons, including for the first time a question enabling people to identify as trans. But one of the biggest headlines it has gained has been its finding that for the first time a minority of people in England and Wales (46 per cent, down from 59 per cent in 2011) now identify as Christian, alongside a significant increase in those identifying as having no religion (37 per cent, up from a quarter decade before) and a smaller rise among other faiths.

How does this marry with the success of a church like SPS?

The first thing to say is that London provides something of an exception to the national trend of declining religious observation.

A report last year from the Church of England revealed that between 1987 and 2019, the number of people regularly attending a CofE church in England and Wales on a Sunday morning fell from around 1.2mn to 679,000. But over the same time period, the number of churchgoers in the Diocese of London increased, albeit slightly.

One of key reasons for London’s success is that it has been a significant beneficiary of a process of restoring the life of existing parishes, called church planting, where larger feeder churches send ordained leaders and up to 100 of their membership to either restart or bring new energy to an existing congregation. This happened to SPS 18 years ago, transforming a congregation of 12, at risk of having to close because of the lack of funds, first to 100 and then to its current size, all the more amazing because SPS has itself “planted” half a dozen other churches in other East End Anglican churches and parishes further afield.

There is another, more significant, reason why the Census is a flawed measure of the country’s faith. The question being asked was never meant to measure either people’s belief or their practice - the reason that so many people turn up at SPS and other churches around the country each Sunday.

What the Census organisers at the Office for National Statistics wanted to do was to measure religious affiliation. The reason they ask about affiliation rather than belief or practice is that a key point of the Census is to guide government spending on healthcare, education and social services. In this context, religious affiliation is a helpful guide to personal circumstances in a similar way to age, gender and ethnicity. In fact ethnicity and religious affiliation are often tightly linked, as is the case in Tower Hamlets’s Bangladeshi families, who make up almost the entire Muslim population of the borough.

One useful addition to the 2021 Census is an interactive map relating to the question of religious affiliation, in which you can drill down to clusters of streets to see how your nearest neighbours self identify.

My streets, in the middle of Tower Hamlets, buck the borough trend with 44 per cent of the Census respondents identifying as Christians. We have the good fortune to know a lot of our neighbours, perhaps because we live so close together in tightly knit terraced streets. From that group, I know a lot that would call themselves Christian although few attend church each week like us. We also share a street with several Muslim families, all British Bangladeshis, others who would definitely put themselves in the atheist category, a Sikh family and a former banker who is a member of a dwindling Jewish congregation in one of the last synagogues in Stepney.

Playing with the ONS Census map, the division of faith in Tower Hamlets closely resembles class divisions within the borough. The pockets of families linked to the East End’s white working class past, on the east and west side of the Isle of Dogs, or the upper middle class people who moved into the luxury flats around St Katharine Docks when Docklands was first being redeveloped in the mid 1980s, are all places where Christian affiliation bumps around the 50 per cent mark.

As well as boasting the country’s largest Muslim population, Tower Hamlets is also the fastest growing and the youngest (with an average age of 31 and a half) local authority in England and Wales. Many of these are the children of British Bangladeshi families, together accounting for about two thirds of the pupils in Tower Hamlets state schools. However, the young demographic also includes the so-called millennials, who have been attracted to the East End both for its vitality and its relatively affordable central London housing, and are the first generation to associate on a significant scale with being atheist.

What all of this shows is that while statistics are an essential part of understanding, we also need to understand what exactly is being measured as well as the limitations of that data.

One of the great unknowns about what data we have is how many people have started to think a lot harder about where they stand on the faith affiliation scale.

The question “what is your religion?” was only added to the Census in 2001, when 72 per cent of the population identified as Christian. No one then realistically thought that this figure was a true guide to the beliefs of the nation, and it seems that since then a lot of people have thought harder about the subject and perhaps been a bit more honest about where they stand in terms of living out a faith.

Not only is 23 years a blink of an eye in the long history of human belief systems, it is probably not long enough for society to come to terms with where it is with faith.

The more interesting figure is still the growth in church attendance in London - no doubt driven by people coming to the capital from around the world as well as the church planting movement. Bums on seats is still a flawed guide, but still probably the best one in terms of understanding where the British public are at when it comes to faith.

Find out what your neighbourhood believes

Column

Change

Masculinity

Psychology

26 October 2023

7 min read

The crying man and the content of sadness

In the latest in our series on men and masculinity, psychologist Roger Bretherton reflects on what he learned about being a man from his own mid-life crisis.

Roger Bretherton

Roger Bretherton is Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Lincoln. He is a UK accredited Clinical Psychologist.

A person stand looking out a wide set of windows covered in rain.

Daniil Onischenko on Unsplash.

My midlife crisis began with crying. Alone. In the car. In the study surrounded by books. Curled up on the bathroom floor. Waves of sadness crashed over me, and I couldn’t hold them back. So sudden and inexplicable was this lapse into grief that I felt the need to keep it to myself. It was shameful. It took a month before I finally told anyone and even then, my hand was forced by bursting into tears in front of them. They wondered if it was hormonal. Maybe I was eating badly or sitting still too much. But I knew the sadness had content.

I was slowly being crushed by the feeling that I had failed to be, or missed the opportunity to become, the man I was supposed to be.

It is difficult to make sense of such sadness though. It doesn’t come labelled with its own meaning. It fails to announce itself. It doesn’t ride into our consciousness on a unicycle waving a sign that reads: you are now sad about getting old and feeling like you have failed as a man. It takes a bit of detective work to find out what it all means. But in the end, I had to acknowledge that I was slowly being crushed by the feeling that I had failed to be, or missed the opportunity to become, the man I was supposed to be. In the three areas of life that mattered most to me, family, work, and church, I was a failure. I knew that’s what I thought because my tear ducts started twitching whenever I said it aloud. Of course, I couldn’t get anyone to agree with me. It’s not a fact. It is a massive unrealistic incapacitating overgeneralisation. But apparently the poor twisted neurones of my emotional brain had failed to get that memo.

Every feeling of failure implies a vaguely defined sense of the success that could have been ours but has been lost. If I had failed as a man, what kind of man was I supposed to be? I came to realise that I had unintentionally imbibed a seductive model of masculinity that was ultimately unachievable. For want of a better term I came to call it the man-at-the-centre. The man-at-the-centre game is really easy to play. It is a simple rule of thumb for what any man should be. It works in any context you can think of, and goes like this…

What should a man be at work? He should be at the centre of a team of adoring colleagues.

What should a man be at home? He should be at the centre of an adoring wife and family.

What should a man be at church? He should be at the centre of an adoring congregation.

The man-at-the-centre game requires that every situation a man enters should immediately configure itself into a picture postcard in which he holds pride of place.

Obviously, this view defines masculinity entirely in terms of power. And not even the kind of power that makes any sense. Not the power to be wise, or brave, or generous, or fair, or honest, or loyal. But the power to force other people be exactly as we would like them to be. The insistence that social life is only acceptable if made to conform to our exact specifications. The man-at-the-centre equates masculinity with being in charge, and even the tiniest lapse in control as a failure to be a man, a surrendering of one’s right to exist as a male. Kierkegaard summed up despair in precisely these binary terms, the desire to be Caesar or nothing.

A one-way ticket to Blametown

I can’t be sure if this insight is true of ALL men, some men, or just me. Maybe it has nothing to do with masculinity at all. Perhaps I’m just describing my own narcissism. But either way, it’s embarrassing to admit that I even thought this. I don’t even know where this belief came from. It goes against everything I have stood for in support of women, and in collaboration with men. It is quite frankly a ridiculous thing to believe - and yet there I was, just as surprised as anyone else to find myself believing it. It turns out the old church billboard was right:

You are not what you think you are; but what you think, you are.

And I don’t really want to chalk it up to The Patriarchy. Whenever anyone starts on about The Patriarchy, I have the ominous feeling I’m about to be blamed for something. It reminds me how I used to feel when I worked in mental health services in the NHS.

Two- or three-times a year it seems the national media are obligated to run a story about the inadequacy of care for people with mental illness. Usually based on a report about people being let down. The catastrophic failure of care for young women with eating disorders, or young men with depression, or women on the autistic spectrum. The stories are heartbreaking, and everyone agrees that something must be done. As a lowly frontline worker, nobody blamed me, but I knew that in the weeks that followed I’d be subjected to something that felt very much like blame. No one said it was my fault, but the demands, the hours, the targets, the scrutiny, the bureaucracy would proliferate. None of it would solve the problem, but those who were trying to help would not go unpunished.

So, as a one-way ticket to Blametown, I’m not keen on too much talk about The Patriarchy. But when I consider my hardwired tendency to think of masculinity as the man-at-the-centre, and the despair that accompanies the failure to definitively accomplish this, am I not describing something a little bit like patriarchy? A social system that offers men such a restricted view of what it means to be male, that almost no one can be happy confining themselves to it. An invitation to inhabit a narrow bandwidth of conversations, interests, clothing, emotions and sitting positions so as not to score an own goal for the men’s team by betraying weakness. It’s not like any of this is working for anyone but, beyond exorcism, what can we possibly do about it?

The real Man-at-the-centre

It's not a huge surprise that this midlife crisis struck when it did. Every crisis has a context. Every breakthrough starts with a breakdown. Sometimes I feel like I invited it, because for the last five years I have been practicing contemplative prayer. Twice a day – on a good day – I hole up somewhere alone. Sometimes the study or the bedroom, my office at work, a bench in the park or a seat by the window. I pray in the same places I cry. The twenty-minute timer on my smart phone begins and ends with the sound of a monastery bell. And when it is set, I close my eyes and follow the simple rule of contemplative practice: lifting my heart to God with a humble stirring of love. And for twenty minutes that is all I do. In response to every distraction or entertaining thought, I turn from the noise of my mind back to being lovingly present to the mysterious Presence in the present moment.

Among all the well-intentioned ideas, initiatives, and apps that promise a solution, this is the only answer that has truly addressed the crisis of my own masculinity.

One of the central tenets of contemplative prayer is that when we make space for God like this, we not only meet Him, but we also meet ourselves. I don’t think my insight into needing to be the man-at-the-centre would have been available to me, if I hadn’t been practicing its polar opposite several times a day. In the discipline of contemplative prayer, we decentre the ego, we step over our self-absorption, we fill our consciousness with something that is not us. My experience of it is that when I turn to God with love, I find myself held in a vast field of loving attentiveness, infinitely greater than my own. And over time, this creeps into every corner of life, infecting every moment of contact with family, friends, colleagues, and students with the supreme joy of simply being there for that unique unrepeatable moment of their existence. Whether I am the man-at-the-centre of home, work or church becomes an irrelevance. What matters is not what these situations give to me, but what I can give to them.

This speaks to the supreme paradox at the heart of Christianity. One that is in constant danger of slipping through our fingers. If we grasp it too hard it crumbles in our hands. It stems from the fact that there is a man-at-the-centre of the Christian religion. Arguably the most famous man of all time. Depicted in icons, brushed into frescoes, melted in stained glass, moulded in sculpture, and portrayed on camera. His face appears everywhere, and if we are not careful, we may mistakenly assume that we are celebrating his fame – the greatest influencer ever born. But what makes Jesus the man-at-the-centre is not the ingenuity with which his publicity machine crowned him king of the hill, but the absolute giving of self that characterised his life. The real Man-at-the-centre is the radically de-centred Man.

Personally, I find there to be a seamless continuity between the Jesus I meet in scripture, and the Spirit that animates the life of prayer. Among all the well-intentioned ideas, initiatives, and apps that promise a solution, this is the only answer that has truly addressed the crisis of my own masculinity. Not a humiliation of masculine power, but a profound transforming and redirecting of it. It is the only thing I have yet found that can truly photosynthesise the carbon-dioxide of fear, rage and self-hatred that suffocates so many men, into the liberating oxygen of joyful loving strength that is their birthright.