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Political Participation and Attitudes in the Church of England*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

George Moyser  and
Kenneth Medhurst
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Extract

It seems to be part of the conventional wisdom of British political science that English religious institutions and values do not demand much attention from the discipline's practitioners. It appears to be tacitly assumed that the process of secularization, and the relative absence of serious religious cleavages, have left such phenomena with minimal political significance. Nevertheless, Churches, and above all the Church of England, have traditionally occupied a position in English society that must leave some question marks against such assumptions. Mass politics, in an age of widespread indifference to institutional religion, no doubt has left Churches with considerably diminished scope for the exercize of political influence. On the other hand, these bodies still dispose of resources that, potentially at least, make them pressure groups of some weight. The politicization of moral issues, of particular interest to the Churches, may add credence to such a view.

Type
Case Study
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , 01 January 1978 , pp. 81 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1978

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References

1 For evidence against the wholesale secularization of English society see Martin, D., A Sociology of English Religion, Heinemann, London, 1967.Google ScholarPubMed

2 Details of membership and income are available in The Church of England Year Book, 92nd Ed., Church Information Office, London, 1976, pp. 157–186.

3 For indications of such influence, see E. R. Norman, Church and Society in England, 1770–1970, Oxford University Press, 1976, esp. chs 9–10.

4 See D. H. J. Morgan, The Social and Educational Backgrounds of English Diocesan Bishops of the Church of England, 1860–1960, Ph. D thesis, University of Manchester.

5 See Church and State, Report of the Archbishops’ Commisson, London, 1970.

6 Much of this literature is referred to in Church and State, op. cit.

7 F. Parkin, Middle Class Radicalism: The Social Bases of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Manchester University Press, 1968.

8 See esp. F. Parkin, op. cit., p. 22.

9 Ibid., Ch 4.

10 E. R. Norman, op. cit.

11 This phrase is used in G. Lenski, The Religious Factor, Doubleday, New York, 1961.

12 See The Church of England Year Book, op. cit., pp. 6–12.

13 It should be emphasized that our present sample excludes the House of Bishops. But unlike most members of the other two Houses, their biographies and views are generally well-known matters of public record. See E. R. Norman, op. cit., for further details. Our findings indicate that our sample’s characteristics, in many important respects, are shared by the Episcopate.

14 The data referred to are national samples of the British electorate. They are fully described in Study of Political Change in Britain 1963–70, 2 Vols., Inter- University Consortium for Political Research, Ann Arbor, Mich:, 1972, principal investigators, D. Butler and D. Stokes.

15 These measures only cover individual and not corporate political participation.

16 Evidence suggests that between 0.05% and 0.1% of the electorate stood as candidates in local elections. See The Registrar-General’s Annual Statistical Review of England and Wales, HMSO, London, 1968, Part II, pp. 88–101, and R. Rose, Politics in England Today, Faber and Faber, London, 1974, p. 179.

17 The 1963 and 1964 British electorate samples were specifically selected to maximize Comparability with the General Synod data. However, slight differences of wording, format and coding exist although the substantive differences reported are so large as to make this of negligible importance.

18 These figures are for the entire samples, not just for those attached to a political party.

19 The General Synod and 1964 data have been weighted slightly to adjust the representativeness of the two samples. The unweighted figures are 681 and 1,769 respectively. The 1963 data are self-weighted.

20 This deviant finding will be discussed later in the paper.

21 See, for citation of the many sources documenting this relationship, Milbraith, L. W. and Goel, M. L., Political Participation, Rand McNally, Chicago, 2nd Ed., 1977, pp. 98–102.Google Scholar

22 These factors must at this point be a matter of conjecture as many possibilities offer themselves. It may be, however, that the explanation lies in their distinctive values and/or socialization.

23 See Niemi, R. G. and Weisberg, H. F., Controversies in American Voting Behaviour, Freeman, Reading, 1976, p. 428,Google Scholar and Campbell, A. et al., Elections and the Political Order, Wiley, London, 1966, pp. 251–2,Google Scholar for American evidence. But, the tenuous nature of our evidence on this point leaves open the possibility of alternative explanations, which may, for example, lie in the realm of the distinctive religious values of our sample.

24 For a discussion of these contacts based on our survey evidence, see G. H. Moyser, ‘The Political Organisation of the Middle Class; The Case of the Church of England’, Papers in Religion and Politics, No. 3, Faculty of Theology, University of Manchester, 1977. esp. pp. 27–30.

25 Support for monarchism was measured by the percentage who thought that ‘the Queen and Royal Family were very important to Britain’. Inclusion of more lukewarm supporters would have raised the figures by about 25% for the 1966 data and 9% for the candidates. The figures for nomimal members in all tables subsume the category of active, and similarly England includes all nominals. The latter are defined through self-identification. Active membership is taken to mean at least monthly church attendance. The educated middle class category embraces, in all four cases, those whose head of household had (or previously had) a non-manual occupation and left secondary school after the minimum school-leaving age. A more stringent definition would have been desirable insofar as the candidates are approximately 75% upper-middle class and many have university education. However, if such restrictions had been applied to the Butler and Stokes data, too few cases would have been left to allow proper analysis.

26 It is possibly significant in this context that the Anglican leadership has a very strong commitment to the perpetuation of the Church’s formal position as the Established Church of England.

27 Figures are percentages of respondents who feel that ‘big business has not too much power in this country, and that ‘trade unions have too much power’. As mixed views were not allowed for in the Butler and Stokes coding scheme, those with such views among General Synod candidates have been deleted from the computations for these two measures to maximize comparability.

28 This may be because trade unions are more salient than big business thus generating stronger views. Certainly fewer of our respondents had mixed views about the former than the latter.

29 For further supportive evidence, see G. H. Moyser, op. cit., pp. 20–22.

30 In fact the two measures produce very similar results.

31 It should be emphasized that in recent years this view has been considerably modified. See, for example, the excellent study of historical trends in religion and voting by Miller, W. L. and Roab, G., ‘The Religious Alignment at English Elections between 1918 and 1970’. Political Studies, Vol. XXV, No. 2, 06 1977, pp. 227–51.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., esp. pp. 235, 247, for some further evidence on this point.

33 It may also well be that attitudes to immigration are bound up with the whole question of national identity as raised by Parkin in his discussion of ‘dominant values’.

34 Figures are percentages of respondents who feel that ‘too many immigrants have been let into the country’ and that ‘the death penalty should be abolished (1966)/should not be reintroduced (1975)’.

35 For a useful discussion of the concept of secularization and a review of relevant literature see Hill, M., A Sociology of Religion, Heinemann, London, 1973, Ch. II.Google Scholar