November marked seven months of IIFL’s tracking of religious attitudes in the UK. To mark the occasion, we explored the data over this period to check for broader trends that might help us develop a picture of religious thinking within the UK over time. This blog summarises the key findings of data collected between May and November 2024. While there is much to say, we have limited this review to the data on those variables that had the strongest influence on responses to the survey questions – age and faith. Put another way, the participant’s age and faith group were more likely to influence their responses to the survey questions than other variables such as their gender, social grade or region of residence. The data was from surveys of UK adults conducted by Whitestone Insight, a member of the British Polling Council.
Age and religious attitudes
Over the last seven months, age was a consistent and important factor in survey responses. To this end, the already well-documented trends identified by the monthly tracker attributing higher interest in faith and higher levels of practising faith to younger populations over older hold firm. However, there were a few patterns that are worth noting.
Reported levels of finding purpose in life through faith have steadily increased in populations under the age of 45 while remaining somewhat consistent in those from age 45 upwards. A similar pattern was found for responses to the question of whether people believed their faith to be the one true faith, with the data showing a slight yet consistent increase across all age groups over the last seven months. There was also a general agreement on the importance of politicians consulting with faith leaders, which was marginally more pronounced in the 18-24 group. The data further reflected a slight decline across all age groups in openness to changing their faith.
Faith group and religious attitudes
Patterns were more pronounced in faith group responses. Over the last seven months, Muslims were typically more likely than Christians and Hindus to report their faith had significantly influenced their lives. Yet Christians were most likely to have found purpose in their lives through their faith, and this appears to have consistently if only marginally increased over this period, while levels among Hindus remained somewhat consistent and among Muslims showed a slight decline.
While agreement amongst Muslims that religion is a force for good in society appears to have steadily decreased over this period, it was higher overall across the seven months than Christian groups. Christians were consistently less likely than both Muslims and Hindus to agree that religion is a force for good. Over the last seven months, Christians were frequently more likely to agree on the importance of Christian heritage to British culture, while Muslims were typically more likely to support politicians’ consultation with faith leaders.
Muslims were also frequently in higher agreement on the prevalence of media bias in its reporting on religion than Christians and Hindus. They were also more likely than Christians to want to see less religious media coverage.
Summary
The overall trends over the last six to seven months appear to support some of the key findings from the monthly attitudes tracker. Notably, the review supports the increased openness of the UK’s youngest populations to religion in general and their higher levels of faith practice. Data on the faith groups reflected some key trends, most significantly for Christian and Muslim groups. At the most general level, it appears that UK Christians showed the most consistency in religious attitudes over this period, while Muslims showed the greatest fluctuations.