There is an old Belfast joke about the man stopped at a
roadblock and asked his religion. When he replies that he is an atheist he is
asked, “Protestant or Catholic atheist?”
Christopher
Hitchens, God is Not Great, 2007
The census reveals 48% of the
resident population are either Protestant or brought up Protestant, a drop of
5% from the 2001 census. 45% of the resident population are either Catholic or
brought up Catholic, an increase of 1%.
7% say they either belong to
another religion or none.
And from the UTV website:
The figures published on Tuesday
also show 45% of people say they are Catholic - a slight rise since the 2001
census. But the numbers who say they are or were brought up Protestant has
fallen by 5% to 48%.
Just over 5% of people in Northern Ireland
said they do not belong to any religion.
A look at the real statistics however reveals these reports
to be misleading and inaccurate, a situation aggravated by the wording of the
NI census which differs in significant ways from the census of England and Wales .
While respondents in England
and Wales
were asked a straightforward question, “What is your religion?” and given a
choice of various options including “No religion” their counterparts in NI were
presented with a more complex query.
Question 17 asked “What religion, religious denomination or
body do you belong to?” potential responses being Catholic, Presbyterian, Church of Ireland , Methodist, other (which can be
specified) or none.
Question 18 asked “What religion, religious denomination or
body were you brought up in?” potential responses being Catholic, Presbyterian,
Church of Ireland , Methodist, other (which can be
specified) or none.
So what? What’s the issue? Is it not important to establish the
demographics of religious background in Northern Ireland given the
sectarian tensions? Possibly, but that is not the point. The point which needs
to be made here is that ONLY those who responded ‘none’ in question 17 were
required to answer question 18. Those who identified with a religion in
question 17 were not queried on their religious background.
Furthermore, if you chose not to answer the second question
then the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) responded on
your behalf using EDIS (the Edit and Donor Imputation System) which essentially
‘predicts’ a response according to your response in other fields.
In other words, unless you had no religious element to your
upbringing, you have to identify with a religion for the purposes of the 2011
census.
As an atheist who had a protestant upbringing (in England , not
NI) and wanted to ensure that my identity was recorded as atheist or ‘none’,
this was extremely problematic. My major concern was that the second question
was being used to shoehorn atheists, agnostics, humanists and non-theists generally
into the Catholic/Protestant binary rather than allowing them to identify themselves
as they saw fit.
This would be less of a problem if there were two separate
data sets, one for religion and one for religious background but the data was
not recorded this way (as only non religious respondents were queried about
their religious upbringing) and is subsequently not being reported this way.
Although NISRA provides separate tables for ‘Religion’ and for ‘Religion or
Religion brought up in’ on their website, most media outlets have chosen to
report the latter, not the former.
And here is the difference:
5.59% of the population are classed as ‘none’ in the
‘Religion or Religion brought up in’ table.
10.11% of the population are classed as ‘none’ in the
‘Religion’ table.
In other words, over 10% of the NI population describe
themselves as having ‘no religion’. This is very different to the ‘just over 5%’
reported by UTV.
Why is this important?
As politicians use the census statistics to form policy and
allocate resources this type of misrepresentation is extremely significant. The
use of data conflating religion with religious background produces an image of Northern Ireland
which is significantly more religious and significantly less diverse than is
actually the case. This reinforces the Catholic/Protestant binary and justifies
the continued intrusion of religion into lawmaking in NI (see the restrictive
abortion legislation for example).
More broadly, the conflation of ‘religion’ with ‘religious
background’ perpetuates the idea that the religion of our parents defines our
own religious identity and produces religion as something essential to the
individual rather than something which can be changed, challenged and/or
rejected.
For the purposes of the NI census, it seems, atheists really
are ‘catholic atheists’ or ‘protestant atheists’.