The notion of a growing ‘Religious Right’ in Britain has become increasingly attractive to media commentators. An article in Christianity Today in October discussed the Christian supporters of UKIP, suggesting this could be a “new religious right in Britain”.
Our report Is there a ‘Religious Right’ Emerging in Britain? tackles this issue head on. It suggests that it is misleading to see recent developments in Britain’s religious landscape in these terms.
When it comes to political values, then, where do different religious groups sit on the Left-Right spectrum? And how different are they from those of no religious affiliation?
The graph shows the overall positions of each religious group on a ‘Left-Right’ socio-political axis, based on their responses to a series of statements in the British Social Attitudes survey from 2000 to 2012 (see below). On this scale 1 is the most left-wing possible and 5 is the most right-wing.
We can see that over the period as a whole, there was a slight shift to the right across the whole population. But this shift became less pronounced by the end of the period. A few years on we can see the outcome of this development – new research has shown that the political centre ground has shifted slightly back to the left since the last General Election in 2010.
From 2000 to 2012, those of non-Christian faiths tended to the furthest to the left of the groups, followed by Catholics. It should be noted that fluctuations in the responses of those from non-Christian faiths may have been influenced by the small sample size for the group.
Anglicans, however, tended to be the furthest to the right of the spectrum. This pattern is reflected in Anglican party allegiances – in a survey in 2013, 43% of Anglicans said they would vote Tory if an election was held the next day.
Those of no religious affiliation tended fall between these poles. In the final year, however, the non-religious respondents were overall the furthest to the left of the groups.
Ultimately, these differences were not noticeably significant and consistent. While Anglicans tended to be more to the right than the non-religious, overall it is clear that they broadly agreed on these issues.
These conclusions are drawn from the responses of different religious groups to the following Left-Right socio-political statements in the BSA survey:
• Big business benefits owners at the expense of workers
• Management will always try to get the better of employees if it gets the chance
• Government should redistribute income from the better off to those who are less well off
• Ordinary working people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth
• There is one law for the rich and one for the poor
This snippet taken from our report on Voting and Values in Britain: Does religion count? (pp. 73-74).
See the full report here and an Executive Summary here for further analysis of voting behaviour and religious identity.
Data source: British Social Attitudes 2000-2012
Individual traditions within the 'Other Christian' and 'Other religion' categories are grouped together within the BSA data due to small sample sizes.
