| WHAT TO DO when one has been caught in a grotesque distortion of a story? The natural instinct of any journalist in such a situation is to tell whomsoever dares complain to go away and die, though a different verb and preposition may be used.
Later, chastened by the discovery that there are always readers who know more about any given story than we do, we try to learn from them more or less openly. I thought, until last week, that this exhausted the range of responses. Ruth Gledhill, the Times religious-affairs correspondent, has taught me better.
But before we get to her response, here is the story.
Christian Research last week published its latest report, predicting that the Churches are doomed. Perhaps this is a slightly unfair characterisation: the previous report was called Pulling Out of the Nosedive, but that was only a blip in a long series that has consistently claimed that church attendance is much lower than official Church of England statistics would lead one to suppose. And it will — without a revival — get lower and lower, until Christianity vanishes altogether.
This year, however, The Times gave it a double-page spread with a new twist: “Church attendance in Britain is declining so fast that the number of regular churchgoers will be fewer than those attending mosques within a generation, research published today suggests.”
There is a three-card trick here, which you need to watch carefully: it is the proposed equivalence between “regular churchgoers” and “those attending mosques”. These two categories sound as if they are equivalent; in fact, they are not so much comparing apples with oranges, as apples with anchovies, and this had been explained by Benita Hewitt of Christian Research to Ruth Gledhill, as well as to the BBC, who consequently ignored the story.
The other important weasel word in this paragraph is “suggests”. This sounds as if it means “predicts”, but it doesn’t. What the trend line gives is a projection, which is almost by definition not a prediction. So long as churchgoing continues to decline, you can project the line into the future until it disappears. Correspondingly, if you had taken a projection when churchgoing is rising, you can see it growing for ever.
This is exactly what the last edition of The UK Christian Handbook that I keep at home does: the preface has a touching passage on what would happen if the Toronto Blessing continued to spread until churches all over the country were full of congregations barking and howling.
The figure for “regular churchgoers” is interesting, because there are two in the report: one for Sunday attendance, drawn from the “Census Sunday” in 2005, and one for membership on the electoral roll. Both of these involve counting things accurately, whatever you may think of the wider significance of what is being contrasted. Naturally, The Times used the lower one.
In contrast to both the Christian figures, the mosque-attendance figure is plucked almost entirely from the air: it is derived from the number of Muslims self-identifying in the 2001 Census, divided by half and then extrapolated into the future. Why divide them by half? According to Ms Hewitt, this method was chosen by Peter Brierley, who actually produced the figures, as a result of two surveys which showed that about half of all Muslims claimed to go to the mosque once a year or more.
So The Times is comparing counted Anglican weekly attendance with guesstimated Muslim annual attendance. Of course, the Church of England has long complained that counting attendance on any particular Sunday does not accurately measure the number of committed churchgoers. That’s an old argument, but there is something hidden in the Christian Research statistics to stand it up. The electoral-roll figure, which they also give, is rather more than twice the average Sunday attendance.
Now, I think it is fair to assume that anyone who actually signs up for the electoral roll has made a real commitment to the organisation, and that there will be a further penumbra of less-committed fellow travellers outside that; in which case, the argument made by the Church of England over the past decade that average Sunday attendance is misleading has some real force.
So, almost all the figures in the Times story were accurate, but at the same time bogus, in the sense that they would not bear the weight of interpretation put on them.
Many people pointed this out after the story was published, as Ms Hewitt did before.
So how did Ms Gledhill react to the criticism? On her blog, she wrote: “Benita Hewitt of Christian Research has been extremely ill-advised to say my story is ‘misleading’. . . I do feel sorry for Benita and am praying for her and her organisation. I suggest we all do the same.”
I urge you all to pray for Ruth Gledhill.
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