WHEN I learned that Mapping Migration, 4th Edition was available on the World Council of Churches’ website (and soon in print), I felt some misgivings. The binary nature of public debate means that facts — any facts — tend to be simultaneously embraced and shouted down, as those with the loudest voices resort to anecdotal evidence to double down on their positions.
But the withdrawal by the Bible Society of the report The Quiet Revival when the data was found to be faulty (News, 2 April) does not make surveys unreliable. It is exactly because surveys offer a measure of objectivity that we need to know that truth and objective data-gathering are real.
The three previous editions of Mapping Migration were published in 2008, 2016, and 2022. Migration statistics are collected from every European country and summarised so that comparisons can be made. Whether or not naysayers want to shout the statistics down from their small corner, statistics bear investigation, however inconvenient. I do not propose to conduct a review, but, instead, to reflect on some of the principal findings and their implications for Churches in the UK.
The first is that migration is a two-way street. There are huge movements of people in and out of European countries, and so there is a figure for net migration. Some countries have much larger migration balances than the UK has. Sometimes, more than one quarter of the resident population are working abroad, and vast numbers of migrants are entering the country, presumably to make up the shortfall.
For the UK, based on the population in mid-2024, 4.8 million UK residents (seven per cent of the population) were abroad, and 11.8 million were immigrants (17 per cent of the population). Whatever the inflammatory headlines, no one is seriously suggesting that British residents not be allowed to live, work, or holiday abroad.
The British Tourist Association issued an annual survey that regularly reported that more British people were holidaying abroad than took holidays in their own country. This is unique in Europe. We expect to move across borders. We expect to receive food and products across our borders. We expect our money to move across borders. The country is on the move. But what is at stake is whether people should be permitted to cross borders to come to this country.
MAPPING MIGRATION also measures the fertility rate. In every country in Europe, this is below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman. That is another pretext for migration: ageing populations and insufficient numbers of workers to maintain or grow the economy.
Migration has been depicted as an argument about resources: who has them and who gets them. But people of working age are themselves a resource. The value of looking at these statistics across the whole of Europe, by country, is that it shows that these significant flows of people and resources are bound to create instability. But they are doing so in different ways across the entire continent. Read all four editions, and you can watch the turbulence build.
There are also attitudinal measures from the World Values Survey which measure this stress: questions such as “What is your view of the impact of immigrants in the development of your country?”, “When jobs are scarce should employers give priority to nationals rather than immigrants?”, “Do you trust people of another religion?”
The answers to these reveal the way in which each country is coping with the reality of immigration; and the responses across Europe are different. Unsurprisingly, in the UK, there is a relatively high score for the need to prioritise nationals, at 45 per cent; but the level of trust in those of a different faith is also very high: 80 per cent.
Mapping Migration also provides a breakdown of the religious identification of immigrants. This is particularly interesting, since governments either do not collect this information or do not release it. The source for these figures is an independent Pew Research report from 2020. This is bound to be contentious. Is religious affiliation aligned to ethnic identity? Are those identified with a religious group actually practising? Do we assume that those with a religious affiliation stay within it or convert to another?
Notwithstanding, the figures for immigrants to the UK as of 2024 are instructive. Christians form the highest percentage of immigrants to the UK (57 per cent), followed by Muslims (17 per cent) and Hindus (six per cent). The unaffiliated account for 11 per cent. This pattern is broadly repeated across Europe: Turkey is the only country in which the number of Muslim migrants is in the majority (97 per cent).
WHETHER or not these truths are convenient, they have implications. First, if more than half of the 11.8 million immigrants are Christian, what should the response of the Churches be? Does it mean that the Church is growing in the UK, whether or not this is measured in weekly attendance at the churches of mainline denominations? Are these Christians nominal, or are they practising? If nominal, what mission strategies is the Church using to reach them? If they are practising their Christian faith, what strategies are being employed to make them a fully functioning part of the UK Church?
If some 40 per cent of immigrants are not Christians, and these amount to several million people, what are the Churches doing to reach those people? The most vital question raised is whether the prevailing stance of mild territorial cultural Christianity is fit for purpose any longer, not least since it is being weaponised by the political Right to defend the British against migrants. Do we reach out only to people who look like us, to invite them to become like us?
What Mapping Migration suggests is that, across Europe, migration is changing the face of European Christianity, whether or not we are willing to acknowledge it; and that the mass movement of peoples, products, and money will continue to reshape our cultures.
Mapping Migration is not an argument in favour of migration. What it shows is that migration is not going away any time in the future. So, how are Christians going to respond? International surveys give us the opportunity to root ourselves in what is happening in our country and further afield.
John Griffiths is a Reader in St Albans diocese. He is a former market researcher, and is semi-nomadic on the canals of England and Wales.
Mapping Migration: Voices from Churches in Europe, edited by Kirk Sims, is available to download at: oikoumene.org