Church of Ireland's population rises by 46%

lostexpectation

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2009/0214/1233867937744.html

THE CHURCH of Ireland population in the Republic has increased by over 46 per cent in recent years, according to a new book by social statistician Malcolm Macourt.

The author said an understanding of the “new Irish” among the Church of Ireland, as well as the detail of census returns, was crucial to understanding the extent of the reversal.

In responding to the first ethnicity question in the Republic in 2006, one in 20 of those who ticked the “Church of Ireland” box, or were allocated to the Church of Ireland by the Central Statistics Office, indicated they were not “white”.

1 of 20 does not a 40% rise make?


lots of catholics going protestant, fed up with the church and the hocus pocus

mikemac

What does "new Irish" mean?
Are thousands of people applying for citizenship?

Not trying to go offtopic, it's a relevant question since it's in the article

PDN

mikemac wrote: »

What does "new Irish" mean?
Are thousands of people applying for citizenship?

Not trying to go offtopic, it's a relevant question since it's in the article

I don't know what the actual figures are, but I get asked to sign one of those naturalisation forms as a referee at the rate of about 1 a week. So, if that is just the people I know, I would guess that there must be thousands of applications nationwide.

(Moderator's Note)
If anyone has any actual statistics on this then please answer mikemac's question. Anyone trying to turn the thread into a debate on immigration, ethnic identity, or nationalism will see their posts deleted double quick.

PDN

lostexpectation wrote: »

1 of 20 does not a 40% rise make?


lots of catholics going protestant, fed up with the church and the hocus pocus

You're right that the figures cannot be explained purely by non-white immigration. One factor would be people from the North who moved south of the border during the Celtic Tiger years.

But the other factor is the complex nature of secularisation (something that has confounded and perplexed sociologists over the last few decades). Secularisation is often misunderstood as a decline in religious belief and church going, with a consequent falling off of religiosity in all denominations.

However, what actually happens is that people abandon culturally dominant forms of religion - ones that they previously adopted unthinkingly. So, for example, in previous decades most Irish people were Catholic by default, rather than conviction. The same applied in England where most people were Church of England, even if they never darkened the door of a church from one year to the next. But, during secularisation, forms of religion that are seen as counter-cultural often grow numerically. This is because religious minorities benefit from secularisation by seeing subtle forms of discrimination removed, and also because people now tend to choose their religion for themselves. Overall there are less religious people - but more of them are religious by choice rather than by default.

This helps explain why Anglicanism is increasing in Ireland (where it is counter-cultural) yet is declining in England (where it is still the established church).

Phototoxin

what happens when it balances it out and is not counter cultural ? Do people then stop going because its not cool ?

(I'm being serious.. what happens when/if a religion becomes over saturated?)

also I agree..in the UK catholicsm is very different to over here.

PDN

Phototoxin wrote: »

what happens when it balances it out and is not counter cultural ? Do people then stop going because its not cool ?

(I'm being serious.. what happens when/if a religion becomes over saturated?)

Sadly, history would indicate that when a religion reaches a certain tipping point it tends to prove the old adage about power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely. Then it is necessary for new, counter-cultural, reform movements to emerge.

The dominant religion continues to command support, but that becomes more of a cultural thing than a matter of faith. It crosses from contextualisation (where the religion adapts to the culture) to inculturation (where the religion is the culture). I believe it was Dean Inge of St. Paul's Cathedral who said, "The Church that gets married to the spirit of the age will be a widow in the next age." So the dominant religion reaches a second tipping point - where it has become so closely tied to a previous culture that it is seen as increasingly relevant.

I would hold that the first tipping point (when the counter-cultural movement becomes dominant) is where spiritual decline begins. The second tipping point (when the church is left behind by rapid cultural change) is where the numerical decline begins.

hivizman

There are more details about Malcolm Macourt's study of the size of the Church of Ireland here. He has compared the census number of 89,187 in 1991 with the number of 125,585 in 2006, adjusted these figures slightly to allow for the fact that the census possibly over-represents the actual CoI numbers by including respondents who simply describe themselves as "protestant", to get a growth rate which my arithmetic tells me is actually 35%. This needs to be compared with the overall population growth during the period of around 20%.

We had a discussion of the 2006 census and the data on religions on the Islam forum recently, and the growth in the CoI wasn't something that anyone particularly noted.

About 119,000 respondents classified as CoI stated their place of birth in the census. 82,000 were born in the Republic of Ireland, 3,000 in Northern Ireland, 23,500 in England, Wales and Scotland, 4,000 in other European countries, 500 in the USA, 3,000 in Africa and the rest elsewhere. The data on ethnicity is in a different volume of the Census reports, and I'd need to check up on how this ties in with religion. However, Macourt's "1 in 20 non-white" figure doesn't seem unreasonable (it may understate things slightly).

MrPudding

PDN wrote: »

Sadly, history would indicate that when a religion reaches a certain tipping point it tends to prove the old adage about power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely. Then it is necessary for new, counter-cultural, reform movements to emerge.

Pardon my ignorance, but is this where the Evangelical movement (movement may not be the correct term, but I hope you know what I mean,) got its start from?

MrP

PDN

MrPudding wrote: »

Pardon my ignorance, but is this where the Evangelical movement (movement may not be the correct term, but I hope you know what I mean,) got its start from?

Pretty well, yes.

The Reformation occurred because people like Luther & Calvin saw what they perceived as spritual and material corruption in Catholicism.

Non-conformist churches like the Baptist and Methodist movements were a reaction against formalism in the Church of England.

The Brethren, Church of the Nazarene, and Salvation Army were formed because the non-conformist churches had themselves become formal and, in places, ineffective.

In turn, many of the leaders and members of the Pentecostal movement came from the Brethren, Nazarenes and Salvation Army.

Today there is an emerging church that has found Pentecostal denominations too rigid for evangelising the postmodern world and has set out in a new direction.

Some may find this continual sociological cycle quite depressing, but that is human nature. I believe that there needs to be continuous revivals, or moves of God's Spirit, to overcome the corrosive effect of human sin and inertia.

The 'evangelical movement' actually includes people from all the above denominations (including those who call themselves Evangelical Catholics) who hold a common set of beliefs concerning the authority of the Bible and the need for the Church to witness to its faith.

hivizman

I've located the census data providing an analysis of religious groups by ethnicity, in Volume 5 of the census reports.

Of the 119,000 people reporting themselves as Church of Ireland (or Protestant) analysed in the relevant table, 110,000 described themselves as "White", of whom 85,000 are "Irish" and the other 25,000 are not Irish (this seems to tie in with the numbers from the UK and other European countries given in my earlier post). About 3,000 are "Black or Black Irish", mostly "African", about 1,000 are "Asian or Asian Irish", and the rest are "Other or Mixed Background", or did not report ethnicity. This is consistent with Malcolm Macourt's "1 in 20" statistic.

In response to mikemac's question about the number of people applying for Irish citizenship, I've not been able to track down details of the number of applications, but one source suggests that, between 1997 and 2004, roughly 1-2% of the "foreign population" in Ireland were naturalised as Irish citizens each year. The 2006 census provides a split between those with and those without Irish nationality, roughly 3,650,000 with and 460,000 without. That implies, assuming that the numbers currently obtaining Irish nationality are at the upper end of the range, that around 8,000-10,000 people per year are currently being granted Irish nationality. However, the source for some of these statistics points out that the Irish statistics are by no means ideal, and of course they deal only with successful applications for Irish nationality, not those that are unsuccessful.

lostexpectation

how many of the eastern europeans would be anglicans/protestants, how about south america, maybe its step to atheism fr some and step to evangicalism for others

philologos

Well in the UK many are moving to Catholicism, funny the way the world works but I wouldn't read too much into it. We are all Christians at the end of the day.

PDN

lostexpectation wrote: »

how many of the eastern europeans would be anglicans/protestants, how about south america, maybe its step to atheism fr some and step to evangicalism for others

Anglicans would be pretty non-existent in Eastern Europe. Poles & Lithuanians are predominantly Catholics, while many other Eastern Europeans are traditionally orthodox or atheist. Czechs have the lowest religiosity of any nationality I've ever encountered. Quite a few Romanians are evangelical - my own denomination has 5 Romanian churches in Dublin & I've preached at 2 Romanian Baptist Churches.

Latin America was traditionally Catholic territory but has seen a large swing to evangelicalism (mainly Pentecostals) so that evangelicals now outnumber Catholics in countries like Guatemala, Nicaragua and Brazil.

The Anglican Church is quite strong in some black African countries, but I'm at a loss to understand where 25,000 white non-Irish Anglicans have come from. A few would be Brits, South Africans and Australians, I suppose, but most must be converts to the Anglican Church rather than importing existing Anglicans.

philologos

PDN, many come from Pakistan also, if I am judging from the composition of my own church population it would be Africans, some English, Pakistanis and Irish. There does seem to be some who shift from Catholicism but I'm doubtful it's as dramatic as people make it out to be.

hivizman

PDN wrote: »

The Anglican Church is quite strong in some black African countries, but I'm at a loss to understand where 25,000 white non-Irish Anglicans have come from. A few would be Brits, South Africans and Australians, I suppose, but most must be converts to the Anglican Church rather than importing existing Anglicans.

According to the census data, 23,500 of the people classified by the 2006 census as CofI were born in England, Wales and Scotland, while 25,000 were "White non-Irish". Obviously, not everyone in the first category will be ethnically/culturally "White non-Irish" (some won't consider themselves as "White", and others may be of Irish ethnicity/culture even though born in Britain), but there will be a big overlap between the groups. Yes, there will be some CofI members in the "White non-Irish" category from South Africa, Australia, Canada, the USA and similar countries, but most will be Anglicans from Britain who are now living in Ireland.

Bduffman

PDN wrote: »

But the other factor is the complex nature of secularisation (something that has confounded and perplexed sociologists over the last few decades). Secularisation is often misunderstood as a decline in religious belief and church going, with a consequent falling off of religiosity in all denominations.

However, what actually happens is that people abandon culturally dominant forms of religion - ones that they previously adopted unthinkingly. So, for example, in previous decades most Irish people were Catholic by default, rather than conviction. The same applied in England where most people were Church of England, even if they never darkened the door of a church from one year to the next. But, during secularisation, forms of religion that are seen as counter-cultural often grow numerically. This is because religious minorities benefit from secularisation by seeing subtle forms of discrimination removed, and also because people now tend to choose their religion for themselves. Overall there are less religious people - but more of them are religious by choice rather than by default.

This helps explain why Anglicanism is increasing in Ireland (where it is counter-cultural) yet is declining in England (where it is still the established church).

Are you actually suggesting that 'secularisation' & figures showing a decline in religious belief can actually be explained by people moving from a dominant denomination to another denomination? Do you not think it might actually be caused by a decline in religious belief? After all, a 46% increase in a small number in the first place is still a small number. Are there actual numbers in this percentage increase?