RELIGION AND BELIEF – the latter term now denoting a range of life-stances and philosophies, both religious and non-religious – has been foundational to the story of both ancient and modern Scotland, for both good and ill. Yet, as part of what might be termed as ‘the national conversation’ they feature very little outside the guild of specialists dedicated to such matters, or to the shrinking but increasingly diverse group of people who are active adherents. Throughout this book, for example, there are fewer than a dozen explicit references to religion in public life, most in passing. Yet globally, the use and misuse of religion, broadly defined as cultural systems of behaviours, beliefs, practices, ethics, texts, sanctified places and organisations (Holloway, 2016), has direct relevance for billions of people – the great majority of the world’s population.
This can be hard to recognise and understand for people reared in those parts of Europe, including Scotland, most impacted by secularization – the historical processes in which religion loses social and cultural significance (see Davie, 2015; Brown, 2009, and Bruce, 2002). It is perhaps most difficult for the increasing number of younger people whose upbringing includes little or no contact with organised religion, a significant percentage of whom have been entering the worlds of commentary (Barrow, 2012) and scholarship over the past couple of decades.
So, one of the important developments we recognised in our conversations is that the proportion of people in Scotland who describe themselves as having no religion at all has reached its highest ever level over the past few years, according to ScotCen’s latest Scottish Social Attitudes survey (ScotCen, 2017). These research findings indicate that nearly six in ten (58 per cent) now say that they have no religion, up 18 percentage points on 1999, when the figure stood at four in ten (40 per cent). There has been a fall in religious identity across all age groups, although it has been slowest among those over 65 years. Even so, there has been an 11 per cent increase in the proportion of over-65s who said they had no religion between 1999 and 2016 (from 23 per cent to 34 per cent). The increase among those aged 50 to 64 has been 24 percentage points (from 33 per cent to 57 per cent). Young people are, perhaps unsurprisingly, the least likely to be religious. Three-quarters of young people (74 per cent of 18 to 34) now say they have no religion, compared with 34 per cent of those over 65. There is no sign that these trends are abating.
At the same time, Scotland over the last twenty years has seen a parallel shift among those for whom religious affiliation or association is important. This is one away from Christianity and towards other religious and philosophical traditions. Christianity remains the largest faith in Scotland. In the Scottish section of the last official UK census (GROS/ONS, 2011), 53.8 per cent of the population identified as Christian (declining from 65.1 per cent in 2001). The largest religious grouping in Scotland, engaged with 32.4 per cent of the population, is the Church of Scotland (Presbyterian), which remains the recognised national church, though not an established one. The Catholic Church accounts for 15.9 per cent of the population and is especially important in west Central Scotland and parts of the Highlands.
In recent years other religions have established themselves solidly in Scotland, both through migration and differential birth rates. Those with most adherents in the 2011 census were Islam (1.4 per cent), Hinduism (0.3 per cent), Buddhism (0.2 per cent) and Sikhism (0.2 per cent). Other minority traditions include the Bahá’í Faith and various Neopagan groups. Organisations actively promoting Humanism and non-religious secularism, included within the 36.7 per cent who indicated no religion in the 2011 census, have been growing notably. Since 2016, Humanists have conducted more weddings in Scotland each year than either the Church of Scotland, the Catholic Church or any other religion (HSS, 2016).
The story of my lifetime has been accompanied by the decline of religion in the secular sociological paradigm, observes Richard (Holloway, 2013).
This was set out starkly by Callum Brown in The Death of Christian Britain (Brown, 2nd edition, 2009). But then the strange thing was that the 70s onwards saw the bucking of that trend.
He refers here to the growth of evangelical and fundamentalist beliefs, the link between religion and some of the major global news stories of the last decade and more (from 9/11 to abuse scandals) and to the mutation of faith in institutional religion towards more amorphous, eclectic and syncretic forms of belief – part of a much wider Western trend (Smith and Barrow, 2001).
Nevertheless, the combined and sometimes competing influences of the Scottish Enlightenment, the Kirk, and the change connected to immigration continue to exert themselves. Healthy scepticism, moral rigour and growing diversity are weaved in and out of the recent story of Scotland in some important ways. In terms of diversity, for example, Islam has long been a prominent part of society in Glasgow. Scotland’s first mosque was opened there in Oxford Street in 1944 and Sandymount Cemetery became the first burial site for Muslims during the same era. Since then, some 70,000 Muslims with roots or connections in Pakistan, the Middle East and elsewhere have called Scotland home. They have struggled with prejudice and misunderstanding, experienced welcome and undergone significant social upheavals (Sunday Herald, 2018).
One of the trends we all recognised early in our conversations was the demise of the Kirk as a major force in public discourse. Both Richard Holloway and Lesley Orr see the emergence of the Scottish Parliament as perhaps a decisive moment here. The General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland hosted the Parliament until the completion of its permanent home at Holyrood (Seiwert-Fauti, 1999). Suddenly it was Scotland’s restored national assembly, bestowed with devolved powers, which became the centre of attention and national conversation. ‘Reporting of Kirk statements and activities in the media declined at that time,’ observes Richard. ‘There was a recognisably secularising trend in reporting and commentary’.
Other attitudes changed over time, too. Lesley identifies hostility to religion as more noticeable over the past twenty years, but also notes that
faith plays an important role or background influence in the lives of many women I know active on gender, justice and peace issues.
She is a member of the Iona Community, the radical, communally oriented, peace-and-justice outgrowth of the Church of Scotland, which has since diversified significantly – but also aged and failed to attract younger people.
Religion is just not part of the routine thinking or culture of many people nowadays.
The anger and disillusion brought about by abuse crises in the Christian churches (though far from restricted to them) has added to the ‘bad taste’ that religion can leave for a growing number of people, both Lesley and Richard acknowledge.
But many thousands of people are still inspired by the likes of Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King and Desmond Tutu,
Orr adds:
Faith has been vibrating way outside the churches and hierarchies, and indeed has been shaking them. Prophetic faith can still be a major force for transformation (see Orr et al., 2020).
The sheer scale of the crisis of affiliation, recognition, confidence and resources that faces the institutional churches in Scotland is, however, something that they still fail fully to comprehend, all three of us feel. The culture and language of a body like the Kirk is increasingly impenetrable to those outside its confines, despite some efforts to modernise and widen its appeal. At the same time, those inbred cultural and ideological features can act as a barrier to a deeper understanding of what is happening in the surrounding and suffusing cultures across the regions of Scotland, urban and rural. All this ought to, perhaps, have been expected to produce a more substantial ecumenism (collaboration and coming together) among the churches, more active co-operation across faiths, and more exchange between religious and non-religious people on ethics, value and life-stances. Yet the institutional structures for Christian ecumenism, in particular, have been receding. One response to decline or the threat posed by loss of perceived and actual centrality in national life is a retreat into zones of safety, some of which (like ‘messy church’ for kids and families) may be far less accessible to a wider public than they like to think.
Another shadow side linked to religion is the persistence of sectarian attitudes and behaviours in Scotland – seen in marches and football matches, but not simply attributable or blameable on one set of social institutions or manifestations. The extent to which communal tribalism wears religious language or clothing significantly is a hotly debated issue. Anti-Catholic prejudice is strongly felt by those it impacts, alongside Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. Many within Scotland’s committed faith communities recognise the potency and danger of religiously aggravated intolerance, discrimination, hatred and violence, and seek deep resources within their own traditions which can address and combat these positively.
Even so, the religious bodies remain deeply divided on issues where prejudice and bigotry play a notable role – most especially on issues of sexuality and the inclusion or exclusion of LGBTQI+ people within their societies and in the wider culture. There is deep conservatism and fear within Christian and other circles on such questions, but also a surge of acceptance and change. The speed with which same-sex partnerships and marriage have emerged and been widely accepted over the past twenty years is breath-taking, given the centuries of rejection preceding this. Religious voices have been strong in movements for liberation and reform, but they have also been a major obstacle, as churches run to catch up with an ethical tide that challenges their claim on moral precedence. Sharp debates exist on the place and role (or otherwise) of religion in public education, too. Painfully but unavoidably, we need to be able to recognise church as a conducive context for abuse, and link action in the future to address this more directly to the long history of ecclesiastical patriarchy and misogyny.
A key challenge in describing Scotland today and tomorrow in its continuing relationship with religion and belief (that ‘and’ being used by equalities bodies to denote the non- and a-religious character of belief) is one of language. All three of us favour a secular Scotland, by which we mean a plural culture where beliefs coexist and contend without privilege in the public sphere, and where the state neither prescribes nor proscribes religion per se. But that word ‘secularism’ can also be used to advocate a strictly eliminative approach. More dialogue is needed here.
What we are looking at in Scotland is a ‘mixed belief society’, rather than one that can simply be labelled secular or religious. The era of Christendom (where a certain kind of religion conveyed blessing on rulers in exchange for protection and privilege) has come to an end. What will take its place is still up for grabs. None of us wish to see a return to any kind of imperial religion, in Scotland or elsewhere – though we note disturbing signs of this in the US right now. But we also recognise that spirituality is important in grounding life in human (and for many, transcendent) values and practices. We recognise that the loss of religious institutions can also mean the loss of centres of gravity or specific taxonomy for some kinds of conversation – on ethical concerns, for instance – as well as the loss of actual local communities of engagement. How to construct diverse, rooted moral communities for sustaining the good life is one question that these brief reflections on religion and (beyond) belief in Scotland, and the wider world, leaves tantalisingly hanging.
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These reflections on the current religious and secular situation of Scotland arise from two separate recorded conversations involving the three of us – a thinktank director with a background in ecumenical relations and theological education (the principal author), a former church leader engaging in an open and critical way with the societal impact of belief, and a feminist scholar and activist engaged with religion. We sought to be conscious in our exchanges of both the scope and limits of our experience, research and understanding.
Barrow, S. (2012), ‘Religion and New Media: Changing the Story’, in Mitchell, J. and Gower, O. (eds.), Religion and the News, Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.
BBC (1999), ‘Kirk’s home hosts moment of history’, 1 July 1999, available online at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1999/06/99/scottish_parliament_opening/378263.stm
Brown, C.G. (2009), The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000, Abingdon: Routledge.
Bruce, S. (2002), God is Dead: Secularization in the West, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Davie, G. (2015), Religion in Britain: A Persistent Paradox, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
General Register Office for Scotland (2011), ‘The Office of National Statistics – 2011 Census in Scotland’, Edinburgh: GROS (now National Records of Scotland).
Holloway, R. (2016), A Little History of Religion, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Holloway, R. (2013), Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt, Edinburgh: Canongate Books.
Humanist Society Scotland (2016), ‘More than 4,200 Humanist weddings took place in Scotland last year’, Edinburgh: HSS.
Mitchell, J., Orr, L., Percy, M. and Po, F. (2020), Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Peace, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming.
ScotCen Social Research (2017), ‘Scottish Social Attitudes Survey’, Edinburgh: ScotCen.
Seiwert-Fauti, U. (2019), ‘How the Scottish Parliament has changed the nation’s identity’, The National, 11 February 2019.
Smith, G. and Barrow, S. (2001), Christian Mission in Western Society, London: CTBI.
Sunday Herald (2018), ‘Just how welcome are Muslims in Scotland?’, 26 August 2018, available online at: www.heraldscotland.com/news/16599716.just-how-welcome-are-muslims-in-scotland/