<http://www.mori.com/digest/c000623.htm>
Market & Opinion Research International - poll digest - June 23, 2000
commentary column - Voting & the Influence of Religion
It is reported in the press this week that Conservative leader William Hague's latest initiative to win votes from the government is a meeting with a leader of the American religious Right, exploring the possibility of making a religion-based appeal for votes at the next election.
As is well known, religion can be a potent force in American politics; but the positions are not really comparable. A poll at the end of April by the Opinion Research Business found that 62% of Britons say that they believe in God (a decline from 76% in a poll in 1980); only 32% believe in the Devil and 28% believe in Hell.
Compare this with the USA. The current (May-June) issue of The Public Perspective, the Roper Center's indispensable review of public opinion and polling in America, features a comprehensive round-up of polls over the last couple of years on America's religious beliefs. A 1998 Louis Harris poll is the nearest to ORB's poll in question wording, and found that 94% of Americans say they believe in God; and a 1999 Opinion Dynamics/Fox News survey found that of registered voters, 50% say they believe the biblical account of creation, compared to 15% who prefer the theory of evolution and 26% who say both are true. Hardly surprising that in American society the voice of the preacher can sometimes swing votes; yet even there, most polls find half or fewer of voters think elected officials or presidential candidates should be guided by religious principle in their decisions or discuss their religious beliefs in public.
Over here, we have no constitutional guarantees to separate the Church from the State - quite the contrary - but the declining belief in God reflects an increasing secularisation of society and attitudes in other ways, which make it improbable that any overtly religious appeal will succeed. Only 62% even claim to believe in God, and active participation is much lower. In our poll for the Mail on Sunday at Easter, for example, only 14% of the public said they would be going to Church on Easter Sunday, even though it is the single most important festival in the Christian year; indeed, only 55% could correctly say what Easter Day commemorates.
That is not to say that issues of morality cannot cause controversy, or to deny that many voters derive their values from their religious beliefs. The recent argument over the repeal of Clause 28 is a good example of this. The polls have shown that public opinion in both England and Scotland is opposed to repeal, and the campaign against it has been led by, among others, the head of the Catholic Church in Scotland, Cardinal Winning. Yet the public has rejected his leadership: although 60% of Scots said in the MORI Scotland/Sunday Herald poll that they were opposed to repeal, 60% also, told that Cardinal Winning had described homosexual relationships as a perversion, said that they disagreed with him. Furthermore, voting patterns in the Ayr by-election, as well as all the subsequent Scottish opinion polls, suggest that the Conservatives have gained no support whatever from being the only party to oppose repeal of the clause. Hardly evidence to encourage Mr Hague in his latest scheme.
But in any case, Mr Hague is unlikely to make an explicitly Christian, let alone an explicitly Church of England, appeal to the electorate. Probably, in the interests of being seen to be multi-ethnic and multi-cultural, he will seek to emphasise common strands of moral teaching between Christianity, Islam and Judaism - probably futile in purely electoral terms, since Muslims make up only between 1% and 2% of the adult population and practising Jews less than that.
But he needs to make the appeal as wide as possible. The Church of England is no longer, as it was once described, the Conservative Party at prayer. MORI asked respondents in our Omnibus sample about their religion in November last year, and we can compare it with their voting behaviour.
Church of Roman
All England Catholic None
Conservative 25 33 21 14 Labour 55 53 62 57 Liberal Democrat 14 12 13 19 Nationalist 4 1 2 5 Others 2 1 2 5
Source: MORI Base: 2,003 British adults 15+, 19-22 November 1999
The only religious groups big enough in our sample to consider separately were Church of England (47% of the sample), Roman Catholics (11%), and those who said they had no religion (20%). The Tories certainly do very much better among Anglicans and worse among Catholics and atheists than average. Much of this simply reflects the demographic characteristics of religious belief. Christians, especially Anglicans and above all active Anglicans, are on average older and more middle-class than the population as a whole. Furthermore, for these same reasons, they are considerably more likely to vote. The scale of religious belief in Britain is gradually declining not because believers are losing their faith but because fewer of the youngest generations than in the past are setting out in life as believers in the first place. The change is generational, and short of a significant social upheaval looks set to continue in the future.
The consequence of this is that, like most of Mr Hague's recent policy initiatives, this seems one more calculated to appeal to the Conservative core vote than to floating voters. That is not necessarily a mistake, although it might indicate that Mr Hague has already abandoned hope of winning the election and is instead concentrating on ensuring that his existing support turns out - which will deliver gains in seats, and perhaps a sufficient appearance of progress since 1997 to secure Mr Hague's position, if there is the low turnout of Labour supporters that almost everyone now expects. Concentrating on the moral perspective won't help the Tories much, but probably won't do any harm either, so long as they are not expecting to attract new young voters. But in the long term, that appeal - and the Tory core vote - may be literally dying out.
Roger Mortimore 23rd June 2000