Greg Daly
Greg Daly meets the head of London’s new Catholic research institute
“If we’re serious about the New Evangelisation, questions about the transmission of religious faith, or disaffiliation or lapsation – which is the book I’m working on at the minute – then we have to pay very serious attention to sociology,” says Dr Stephen Bullivant, director of the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society.
The centre, based at St Mary’s University in Twickenham, was formally launched in February, “founded upon the conviction that interdisciplinary research, in which the sciences are brought into direct engagement with theology and ethics, is central to the life of a Catholic university”, according to the university website.
“The vision for the centre has been building for several years,” Dr Bullivant explains, “both out of my own research which is becoming increasingly focused on the interface between theology and the social sciences – so a lot of my own work, for example, is on things like the Christian engagement with secularity, non-religiosity and atheism – and obviously the New Evangelisation.”
Scentific study
In Britain, he says, there has never really been any serious sociological or more broadly social scientific study of even quite basic pastoral matters, citing as an example how “the bishops’ conference would struggle to give you any up to date statistics on the proportion of people in Britain who identify as Catholic, or were brought up Catholic, or what kind of age or sex breakdown of the people in church on a Sunday would look like”.
It’s crucial to get reliable figures, he explains. “The key issue for the New Evangelisation is understanding and finding a way to stop why so many born-and-raised Catholics, many of whom have had years of Catholic schooling and sacramental preparation, then leave the Church and either don’t practice or no longer think of themselves as Catholic.”
Explaining that almost half of those raised Catholic in Britain no longer even notionally identify as Catholic, he says the “hardest sell” for those engaged in the New Evangelisation is to bring lapsed Catholics back into the fold, citing the old shampoo advertising slogan, “you never get a second chance to make a first impression”.
“It’s much more difficult to re-attract people who’ve been there and done that, who’ve had 15 years of the Church and left and can cite all sorts of reasons why they don’t want anything more to do with the Church,” he says, “so the key issue, and this is very clear from the data, is keeping the people who we have to begin with.”
Establishing this from solid data is something that’s not always been a priority for the Church, Dr Bullivant explains, citing how research institutes asking questions pastorally relevant to the Church can be found in the US and Australia, but pointing out that Britain has never before had such an institution, “so part of the reason why I’ve been getting more and more involved in this kind of work is because no one else is doing it for me to use”.
The centre’s remit includes “rigorous, pastorally relevant work focused on the Catholic community in Britain and beyond”, Dr Bullivant says, adding that beyond that, several of his colleagues are working on issues related to Catholic Social Teaching: “questions of economics, questions of politics, issues around sexuality and the family and marriage, bioethics and all sorts of things”.
The hope, he says, is partly that the centre will show the Church and wider society what kind of useful research can be done by applying serious social scientific methods to the study of the Church, and also that it can “build links with research institutions in other countries, some Catholic and some not, to do all sorts of projects relating to religion and the social sciences”.
He cites a study being conducted with a centre in the US looking at the global crisis in marriage and another conducted with University College London and a few other institutions examining atheism across the world.
Methods
It might seem odd that the Church should need to be shown how usefully social scientific methods can be applied to the Church, but Dr Bullivant explains that since the 1940s statisticians and sociologists have complained that figures released by the Church can be unsystematic and unreliable.
Whether the weaknesses of the figures can be attributed to conscious antagonism or simple indifference, Dr Bullivant says what is clear is that beyond financial matters, to some degree vocations, and more recently safeguarding and abuse allegations, the Church has never had very good numbers.
“I think that there’s a culture of not thinking seriously – or having hunches about what the pastoral issues are – but never really putting up the money, or the time and the effort, as frankly, it’s not that expensive, to really find out,” he says, “But also, I guess there’s a kind of a nervousness about what we’d find.”
In Ireland census figures give a good indication of the number of people who will at least self-identify as Catholic, but the UK census has only had a religion-related question in recent years, that allows people to tick a box more generally as ‘Christian’.
“We’ve only had that since 2001 and there was a big controversy over that – all sociologists of religion in the country think it’s a terribly-worded question,” Dr Bullivant says, explaining that to calculate how many Catholics there are in Britain one must turn to a rather different source of information.
Questions
“We’ve got the British Social Attitudes survey every year, and one of the things I’ve discovered is that it’s not that the data isn’t there, it’s that no one with the right training has ever thought to ask Catholic questions of the data,” he says.
“So the British social attitudes survey asks a representative sample and gets used a lot by governments; it’s about as well done as you can do these things. It asks about religious affiliation, it asks about what religion you were brought up as, and it asks about things like church attendance every year.”
These are good numbers, he says, but they have limited use for pastoral practice and are, in any case, a blunt tool. “Asking someone ‘are you Catholic?’ or even ‘do you attend Church?’”, he says, doesn’t “get to the heart and the complexity of religion, but without those kind of blunt big-picture numbers, then you don’t realise the more finely tuned issues”.
Still, it is possible to grind through the numbers as a report due from the centre in May will do, asking Catholic-specific questions of the British Social Attitudes data. “We know, for example, based on this, that in England and Wales at least, something like 8.7% of the population tick the Catholic box, and about 13% say that they were brought up Catholic,” he says, continuing, “It’s something like 56% of cradle Catholics in Britain still tick the box – approaching half no longer consider themselves to be Catholic.”
It might seem odd for a one-time atheist-turned-Catholic theologian to demonstrate such facility with numbers, but Dr Bullivant’s story is an interesting one.
Raised in Lancashire, in the rare English Catholic stronghold of Preston, Dr Bullivant says that he was brought up, like so many other British children, in a secular home. “Religion wasn’t really a topic,” he says, continuing, “it wasn’t an antagonism, it just wasn’t really a thing. We weren’t baptised, and indeed, there are plenty of families who’d be equally areligious where they do get baptised for cultural reasons, but we didn’t. By the time I got to high school I considered myself an atheist.”
Philosophy
He attended a Catholic sixth form college, despite it being a Catholic one, as it was the only place nearby which offered philosophy as a subject, and while there overcame a prejudice against what he had thought of as “idiot Christianity”. He went to Oxford to study history and archaeology, but found he didn’t enjoy it, and deciding he wanted to study philosophy he ended up doing philosophy with theology.
“I was happy to do the minimum of theology,” he says, “as I thought while it was nonsense, it was interesting nonsense. I’d do the maximum of philosophy, and then do a postgraduate doctorate in philosophy and go off and become a philosopher.”
Life, as so often, had other plans, and he became fascinated by theology, particularly the Church Fathers, but also such modern Catholic theologians as Karl Rahner and the then Cardinal Ratzinger. He has always intended to do a Master’s degree, and so started work on Vatican II and the salvation of atheists which eventually became his doctorate.
Parallel to this intellectual journey, he made Catholic friends, notably the friars of the local Dominican community, and eventually, at a solemn profession in Blackfriars, their Oxford base, he admitted to an Australian Benedictine that he could see himself becoming a Catholic at some point. He was intellectually on board with the idea of Catholicism at that point, he says, and had even prayed.
“I’d probably have called myself a logical positivist in sixth form, so once I realised that Catholicism wasn’t nonsense – literal nonsense – there was an attraction to it, and then studying the philosophy of religion, alongside the Gospels and Church history, and being attracted to it,” he says. “I think I was probably attracted to the saints, and the Church and to Jesus. I thought the existence of God was probable.”
Mentioning that he was due to visit Rome for research, the Benedictine said that he would be there at the time, and that if all was ready then they could receive Dr Bullivant into the Church at the end of his time there. Being confronted with that decision made it seem real, he says, and in 2008 he was received into the Church at Rome’s Church of St Paul outside the Walls, his wife joining the Church two years later after following the Rite of Catholic Initiation for Adults (RCIA) course.
Doctorate
“My doctorate was in dogmatic theology,” he explains, “and I got into the social scientific study of atheism kind of as a sideline, and have kind of grown into it. A couple of years back I got a British Academy grant for a quantitative skills acquisition scheme, where you get placed in a different institution, are mentored in quantitative methods, and then take them back to your own discipline and do stuff with it.
“I spent a semester as a visiting researcher at the Institute of Social Change, which is where the British Religion in Numbers thing is based, being trained up in these methods,” one of his mentors being David Voas, Britain’s leading sociologist of religion.
Facility with statistical methods has made it all too obvious to him that the number of Catholics in Britain has only been kept buoyant at about 8% through immigration, once Irish and now notably Filipino and Polish, given the high numbers of people who leave the Catholic fold.
“One of the statistics that comes out of the British Social Attitudes data is that for every one person who comes through the RCIA – one person brought up not Catholic who now considers himself Catholic – 10 cradle Catholics no longer regard themselves as Catholic,” he says. “That’s not even that they don’t go to Mass – they no longer tick the box.”
Our perceptions can be deeply misleading, he says. “We see the converts because we see them at the Vigil. We don’t see the 10 people who were baptised and don’t even regard themselves as Catholics, and without that kind of big-picture, nationally representative blunt tool stuff, we’d just have no way of realising there’s even a problem there.
“You can only count the people who are there,” he continues. “Mass count numbers are one thing, but you don’t tend to be able to break those down by age and sex and all sorts of stuff, so one of the things that comes out with the kind of blunt tool that I can work with is that we can see, for example as a hypothetical thing, that men in the 35 to 44 bracket are particularly unlikely to be at Mass.
“We’re constantly fretting about young people and why they’re not in Mass,” he says, “and to be fair, considering the number who have been baptised and who we might hope are there – they’re not there, but actually as a proportion of the cradle Catholic population, young people are there as much as any group apart from the oldest group. The people who are least there are ‘baby boomer’ men.
Wonder
“There are just a lot of them, because they’re the baby boomers, and you see enough of them there that you don’t wonder where are all the 50-60 year old men –you don’t have a sense of how many there could be there. But also, who notices men in their forties and fifties? You notice the young people!”
To establish the problem with missing men requires a familiarity with Church and national demographics in general, of course, and once the fact that men are missing becomes clear, other issues appear in sharp relief.
“We know that men are less religious than women more or less across the board in all cultures and all religions,” he says, continuing, “We know that men are far less likely to consider themselves Catholic because they were brought up Catholic, far less likely to practice and young men all the more.
“The data confirms what most people would already guess, but we also know that on the flip side the most important factor of whether a person retains their Catholic practice into adulthood is parental practice and family practice growing up, but particularly the father’s practice. If you’ve got both parents practicing that’s great, if you’ve only got one then the father is more important, so the focus on the men isn’t just that it’d be nice to have the men. The focus on the men is also that practicing men have a catalytic effect on everyone else.”
Data
Crunching the data can reveal all sorts of things – that most people who abandon their religion seem to do so when they leave communities where it’s the norm, or that most who change or abandon religions do so by their late 20s, but there’s much more research that could be done.
Obvious things to do, he says, would include “just asking people trying out a vocation what influences have led them to that. Or people going through the RCIA more generally – we don’t ask people how they’ve come to join the Catholic Church, let alone asking people who’ve left how they came to leave!”
photo: free pix