- JRSS
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society
- JSSL
Journal of the Statistical Society of London
- PA
Parliamentary Archives
- PH
Parliamentary History
The decennial population census of the United Kingdom demands and collects a vast amount of personal data upon the population of the realm.Footnote 1 It is one of the largest government undertakings in peacetime, involving virtually every individual. It has evolved in complexity since the initial enumeration of Great Britain in 1801, with significant changes to the questionnaire as the country underwent massive social and economic revolutions.Footnote 2 The object of the census is to supply the state bureaucracy with useful information in a comprehensible form in order to assist in the government and administration of the country.Footnote 3 Thus the initial censuses sought basic demographic information on age, sex, marital status and residence as well as occupation. In seeking a limited range of information the census takers sought to achieve a complete listing of the entire population with as little room for ambiguity as possible.Footnote 4 It is notable that this limited range of questions initially did not include any reference to personal identity including race, religion and language within the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, language questions were introduced in Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the course of the nineteenth century, indicating the possibility of extending the scope of the questionnaire in this regard.Footnote 5
Elsewhere, the enquiry into identity was a significant component of many nineteenth-century censuses. Indeed the international statistical congresses held between 1853 and 1876 recognised that religion was a significant human attribute that was widely collected in national censuses. The congress resolutions furthermore recommended that religion should be included in future questionnaires of participating states.Footnote 6 It should be noted that most states in Europe did collect census data on the religious affiliation of the population, often as a matter assisting the equitable apportionment of funds for clergy stipends or denominational educational institutions.Footnote 7 In others religion was a significant element in the organisation of society in the nineteenth century, and statistics were required to monitor the balance between the different religious communities, notably within the Russian and Ottoman empires.Footnote 8 Similarly, most British colonies, which began census sequences in the nineteenth century, collected comprehensive information on the religious affiliation of the population.Footnote 9 The practice continued as census-taking was extended, notably to India later in the century, where religion was recognised as a key personal identifier.Footnote 10 A major exception to this practice was the United States, which, as a secular state, did not interfere with personal beliefs, and did not seek to question them.Footnote 11 However, the topic was seriously considered for inclusion in the 1960 census.Footnote 12
Religion, as a question on the census questionnaire of Great Britain, only appeared in 2001, and then virtually as an adjunct to the ethnic group question, itself initially posed only in the previous decade.Footnote 13 However, this statement hides a long and unsuccessful struggle to include such an enquiry in the censuses of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Furthermore, the United Kingdom parliament, which rejected its inclusion in the censuses of England, Wales and Scotland, consistently provided for its inclusion in those held in Ireland from 1861 onwards. It is these inconsistencies in approach which will be explored. It has been observed that: ‘the decision about adding any new question to the census is a political one’.Footnote 14 Attention will therefore be primarily directed towards the Union parliament as its members debated the bills which regulated the conduct and content of the census.
The early censuses
The censuses between 1801 and 1831 were initially prompted by government concerns during wartime with manpower and production.Footnote 15 They collected limited information at the level of the household on the numbers of males and females together with broad occupational classes of working males.Footnote 16 An enquiry into age groups was introduced in the 1821 enumeration.Footnote 17 The decennial census of Ireland was initiated in the same year.Footnote 18 A select committee in 1830 merely focused upon an elaboration of the occupation question.Footnote 19 Religious affiliation was not considered. Thus the major legislative programmes of the late 1820s, which abolished the legal disabilities of those persons who were not members of the established Churches, were carried out with little idea of the numbers involved. At the first reading of the 1831 Census (Ireland) Bill, the Irish parliamentary leader, Daniel O'Connell, recognising the link between the census and politics, requested that religion be included, as it would demonstrate the weak position of the Established Church.Footnote 20 The government ignored the request.
One outcome of Roman Catholic emancipation was the provision of denominational schooling in Ireland, partly funded by the state. As a result a commission was appointed in 1834 to collect information on the relative strengths of the various religious communities in Ireland.Footnote 21 The commissioners decided to use the manuscript household returns from the 1831 census as the basis for these calculations, adding further columns for religious persuasion.Footnote 22 The same enumerators were employed, where possible, and the results were open to public scrutiny as a safeguard against error or bias. Only four options were offered, namely the Established Church, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian and Protestant Dissenter. For the purposes of classification the commissioners made the debatable observation that the Wesleyan Methodists ‘consider themselves to be in connexion with the Established Church and wished to be classed as members of that body’.Footnote 23 The results demonstrated ‘the comparative smallness of their numbers’ of the Established Church, which constituted a mere 10.7 percent of the total.Footnote 24
In preparation for the 1841 census the newly-established Statistical Society of London undertook a major investigation into census-taking and the compilation of the questionnaire.Footnote 25 It recommended that the United Kingdom should follow the majority of European countries and include ‘religious persuasion’. The 1841 census represented a significant advance in the organisation of the census as each person was listed by name and the answers to the questions on the questionnaire placed against each individual. With the increase in time required to fill in each household's forms, no extension of the scope of the enquiry was undertaken and the lists of questions were clearly specified in the bills.Footnote 26 The departmental history of the census offers no elaboration on the compilation of the questionnaire.Footnote 27 However, a hint of the registrar-general's thinking on the matter may be obtained from his advice to the Colonial Secretary concerning the conduct of colonial censuses, where he recommended the exclusion of religion, as it was ‘important not to crowd the Census with too many particulars’.Footnote 28 In parliament, an attempt to introduce a religious enquiry met with a negative response as being impossible to attain.Footnote 29 Nevertheless at the third reading in the House of Lords a specific restriction on the taking of any form of religious enquiry was inserted into the Irish bill.Footnote 30 Subsequently Sir Thomas Larcom, one of the Irish census commissioners, suggested that the enumerators would have sought to boost the numbers of their own communions, and the results would not have been accurate.Footnote 31
The 1851 census initially appeared to offer a repeat of that undertaken in 1841. Even the Statistical Society made no recommendations for changes.Footnote 32 Indeed Sir George Lewis, under-secretary of state at the Home Office, who introduced the bill to parliament, emphasised its similarity to the previous enumeration.Footnote 33 Nevertheless, the legislation provided the Home Secretary with discretionary powers to authorise enquiry into ‘further particulars’, which could be invoked without parliamentary approval. The United States census of 1850 had set a precedent by adopting an indirect approach by means of an enquiry into the size and value of the church buildings of the various denominations.Footnote 34 In Great Britain an enquiry into attendance of services of religious worship on the Sunday before census night was conducted as an adjunct to the enumeration, as the registrar-general, Major George Graham, considered this to be ‘less inquisitorial’ than the inclusion of the subject in the householder's questionnaire.Footnote 35 Thus the incumbent or minister of each church, chapel or synagogue was approached to provide details of the seating capacity and attendance at the various services. Further comment was published by the Statistical Society, which recognised that the data was fraught with problems.Footnote 36 The basic returns appeared to suggest that the Nonconformists (47.4 per cent of attendances) had almost attained parity with the Established Church (48.6 per cent) in England and Wales and this interpretation was promoted by the dissenting bodies.Footnote 37 Yet in the registrar-general's report for 1851 some 84.9 per cent of marriages in England and Wales had taken place within the Established Church, indicating a different perception of religious persuasion.Footnote 38 The returns have provided a major source of data on the state of the Churches in the mid-nineteenth century, but they remain difficult to interpret as they were not based on an orthodox religious census.Footnote 39 Furthermore, the resultant statistics were produced before the sustained revival of the Church of England's ‘quantitative position’ in the ensuing sixty years.Footnote 40
The 1861 census
The controversy raised by the religious worship census of 1851 resulted in greater attention to the subject in the preparations for the following enumeration. The Statistical Society again recommended the inclusion of a question on religious persuasion.Footnote 41 The Liberal government decided to accede to this request. Significant parliamentary opposition came from the religious Dissenters within the Liberal party, who marshalled a series of principled and practical arguments against the proposed question. The basic problem was raised at the second reading by Edward Baines, the Liberal member for Leeds, who observed that ‘It would be remembered that at the last census a very painful revelation was made of the number of persons, no less than 5,000,000, who did not attend religious worship at all. He feared that amongst this class either no answer, or even indecorous answers might be given.’Footnote 42
The various dissenting bodies proceeded to mobilise a major campaign against the bill. This took the form of petitioning parliament to remove the question on religious profession. A total of 939 petitions were sent to parliament by congregations and other interested bodies against the inclusion of religious persuasion, as opposed to only thirty-eight in favour.Footnote 43 Many of the petitioners stressed the need to recognise commitment and avoid encroachment upon religious freedom, which might jeopardise the integrity of the returns.Footnote 44 In response to this unanticipated level of opposition the government offered a concession. Sir George Lewis, now Home Secretary, conceded that the enquiry would not be compulsory, if the House thought that beneficial.Footnote 45
At the committee stage Mr Baines moved an amendment that ‘religious profession’ be removed from the questionnaire. The concession offered was claimed by opponents as rendering any returns: ‘extremely defective and entirely worthless’, rather than overcoming the objections.Footnote 46 He went on to condemn the enquiry as a matter of principle:
They objected to the clause: they did so because – with what seemed to be an instinctive feeling in the minds of Englishmen – they deemed it a duty to resist an authoritative demand on the part of the Government upon a point which they regarded as beyond the legitimate scope of civil interference. The civil governor had a right to inquire into the particulars of the civil conditions of the people, such as age, sex, occupation, birthplace &c., but he had no right to intrude into the domain of conscience. It was with Dissenters a matter of principle to maintain the freedom, independence, and purity of the Church of Christ, by keeping it free from State control.Footnote 47
The pragmatic argument in favour of the clause, citing the general conduct of a religious census in other countries, was countered with the comment that such countries were either despotic or paid all clergy of every denomination, whereas in the United States, ‘which bore the closest resemblance to England of any foreign country … a man was never asked to make a statement of his religious profession’.Footnote 48 These arguments elicited the response that ‘the real meaning of the opposition in England, besides the conscientious conviction, lay in the idea that the floating masses of people, of no particular religious persuasion, would, if there was a religious census taken, be all put down to the Established Church.’Footnote 49 This contention was supported by statistics indicating that 80 per cent of women in England were married in the Church and 78 per cent of children attended Church of England schools.Footnote 50
The registrar-general became alarmed that any general resistance on the part of the dissenting bodies might result in the census as a whole becoming inaccurate.Footnote 51 As a result the Home Secretary accepted the amendment and withdrew the clause from the questionnaire in deference to the opposition, which he felt had been raised on ‘illusory grounds’ and might be overcome at a later date.Footnote 52 The prime minister, Lord Palmerston, expressed his unease at the extent and intensity of the opposition and attempted to place the matter in perspective, stating
I quite deny that it was to be an enquiry into the shades and grounds and character of every person's religious opinion; for inquiry of each individual to what denomination he belongs would be only like asking in what denomination he was christened; in which he was brought up; if married; where he was married, and where he intended to be buried. These are questions of fact; and it was not intended to ask as to the intensity or shade of a person's belief, but simply to record the fact to what denomination of Christians he and those belonging to him professed to be attached.Footnote 53
The religious profession question was included in the Irish census, as there was no opposition, indeed ‘everyone had a religion of some kind and no one was ashamed to avow it.’Footnote 54 The religious question was retained in the Irish census bill and accepted.Footnote 55 The Irish census, complete with the enquiry into religious profession, was duly taken and encountered no difficulties.Footnote 56 As a result, at the time of the debates leading to the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869, there were accurate and agreed statistics available, while the precedent was set for future censuses.
The 1871–1901 censuses
Subsequent debates on the decennial censuses tended to follow the arguments raised in 1860. Thus in 1870 the Statistical Society again recommended the addition of religious persuasion to the questionnaire.Footnote 57 The government's response was more nuanced, recognising that the three component kingdoms had different responses: thus Ireland would include a question on religious profession again, England and Wales would not but: ‘it appeared that now there was a general desire that there should be such a Census in Scotland and it would therefore be taken’.Footnote 58 The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland had expressed ‘its strong desire’ that religious profession should be ascertained, while the Free Church of Scotland had also expressed a similar opinion.Footnote 59 Nevertheless, Henry Bruce, the Home Secretary, following this announcement, was ‘inundated’ with protests and had been forced to withdraw the clause from the Scottish census bill.Footnote 60 As a counter move he offered to take a census of both worship and profession.Footnote 61 This however was rejected as opponents could only accept a worship enquiry, as there was no use in asking the five million ‘neglecters’.Footnote 62 Subsequently, a religious census was supported by the Convocation of Canterbury.Footnote 63 However, this was opposed in parliament by the bishop of Exeter who ‘deprecated very much the adoption of any cause which would tend to draw a line of demarcation between the Church of England and the English nation’.Footnote 64 He thus drew attention to the fact that the Church of England was not monolithic, but had diverse interests which spanned both political parties, the leaders of which sought to avoid controversial proposals made by backbenchers.Footnote 65
The debate on the following census achieved no more positive outcome. Again the Statistical Society recommended that religious profession should be included in the questionnaire for the 1881 census to bring it into line with Ireland and the colonies.Footnote 66 The Society considered that only through establishing uniformity of questionnaires throughout the United Kingdom could comprehensive reports on the entire country be produced instead of three separate sets of statistics. This view was supported by the Conservative government.Footnote 67 However, at the April 1880 general election the Liberal party was returned to power and the new prime minister, W. E. Gladstone, indicated early in the parliamentary session that ‘The Government had no intention of including in its provisions one providing for the taking of a religious census, and intended to follow the course which had been pursued on previous occasions in England.’Footnote 68 The additional expense (an estimated £6,000) and the problems with the tabulation of the multiplicity of denominations were stated as the reasons for exclusion of the question.Footnote 69 The subsequent debates followed the pattern previously set and no changes were made to the 1881 questionnaires on the subject.
The preliminary discussions on the 1891 census were less supportive of a religious census. The Royal Statistical Society made no recommendation.Footnote 70 However, a subsequent debate at the society supported the inclusion of a religious question.Footnote 71 The Treasury undertook an enquiry into the census and concluded:
In other countries and in our own colonies, such information is obtained, and from a statistical point of view it is of value. But reasons of weight, mainly of a political character, have been urged against the requirement of returns under this head, and we are not in a position to make any recommendation regarding it.Footnote 72
Nonconformist influence in the House of Commons had been strengthened, ensuring that even a Conservative administration would not force the issue and thereby possibly compromise the integrity of the census.Footnote 73 Also the Liberal party was by this time committed to the disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales and was willing to accept the existing statistical confusion.Footnote 74 To counter this the Convocation of Canterbury again requested a religious census, noting the detrimental effects of the continued use of the 1851 church attendance figures on the standing of the Established Church.Footnote 75
Nevertheless, the Conservative government introduced a bill similar to that adopted ten years beforehand. The president of the Local Government Board, Charles Ritchie, responsible for the bill, did express his reservations with respect to the religious census: ‘personally, I think there is a good deal to be said in its favour. But the Government have not thought it advisable to go beyond the recommendations of the Committee, and, therefore, there will be no provision in the Bill for taking a Religious Census’.Footnote 76 This was welcomed by the opposition and linked to the issue of disestablishment as
undoubtedly there are grounds for believing that a large number of people are unwilling to declare themselves Nonconformists so long as the Established Church exists. When the Established Church ceases to exist, probably there will be no greater difficulty in taking a religious census here than in Ireland or in our colonies.Footnote 77
At the committee stage a motion was proposed to include religion in the questionnaire, using the very argument that with disestablishment under discussion there was a need for information.Footnote 78 It was even suggested that a religious census would act as ‘a kind of plébicite [sic] in favour of the Established Church’.Footnote 79 After a long debate, in which were raised many of the earlier arguments, the amendment was defeated.Footnote 80
The proponents of a religious census in Scotland took a different approach. The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland again petitioned parliament and, following the successful precedent set in England in 1860, most individual congregations and bodies did the same. All told, some 247 petitions supporting the inclusion of a religious census reached the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Public Petitions.Footnote 81 The petitions requested that ‘the different Religious Denominations should be definitely and authoritatively ascertained’.Footnote 82 At the committee stage an amendment was proposed in view of the discussion on the relationship between the Church of Scotland and the state.Footnote 83 However, the Lord Advocate, James Robertson, stated that the government could not accept it for much the same reasons as had been raised in the debates on the English bill.Footnote 84 Furthermore, it was anticipated that ‘a large number of people will not furnish these religious statistics’, and the amendment was withdrawn.Footnote 85
The preparations for the 1901 census were more cursory. The Royal Statistical Society made no recommendation for a religious census in Great Britain.Footnote 86 The Convocation of Canterbury did not raise the subject.Footnote 87 However, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland did petition parliament.Footnote 88 The Census (Great Britain) Bill omitted mention of religion and the Conservative government was generally commended for its ‘wise discretion’ in doing so, although it commanded a substantial majority in both houses of parliament.Footnote 89
The 1911 census
The 1911 census was preceded by a greater degree of controversy. The Royal Statistical Society presented a lengthy report recommending that religion should be included in all the questionnaires in the United Kingdom.Footnote 90 At the same time the census was being developed as part of a ‘Census of the British Empire’ in which a greater degree of uniformity was to be sought between the practices of the various census authorities within the empire, nearly all of which included a religious enquiry.Footnote 91 Indeed for the first time the Colonial Secretary specified that religion should be included in all colonial census questionnaires in 1911.Footnote 92 Furthermore, with the return of the Liberal party to power, the parliamentary enquiries concerning the proposed disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales resulted in the compilation of a massive set of often non-comparable statistics on the subject.Footnote 93 Moreover, the debates on the census took place within the context of the constitutional crisis of 1910, which pitted the Liberal-dominated House of Commons against a Conservative- and Unionist-controlled House of Lords. The result was the most confrontational set of debates on the census witnessed in the British parliament.
The president of the Local Government Board, John Burns, introducing the second reading of the Census (Great Britain) Bill, emphasised the need to limit the number of questions posed in order to gain reliable statistics as ‘every head of family is his own statistician, and too many questions have a tendency to puzzle some persons when they are intricate in detail and large in number’.Footnote 94 This did not satisfy a number of members who sought to introduce a religious question. The imminence of the legislation to disestablish the Church in Wales led to the demand for accurate parliamentary figures to replace the mass of unofficial censuses and church and chapel returns. At the committee stage an amendment was proposed to insert a question on ‘religious profession’.Footnote 95 This was opposed by William Jones, the member for North Carnarvonshire, who stated that ‘I object to this proposal as a Liberal and as a Nonconformist. I believe the State has no right to ask such a question.’Footnote 96 The arguments concerning the need for statistics in advance of the debate on Welsh disestablishment were countered by arguments concerning the unreliability of asking people with no apparent religious allegiance to state one, with the inevitable bias towards the Church of England.Footnote 97 This prompted one supporter of the amendment to comment that ‘We are not suggesting a rehearsal of the Day of Judgement but a religious Census.’Footnote 98 The amendment was rejected by 38 votes to 135.Footnote 99
In the House of Lords the amendment was reintroduced at the committee stage.Footnote 100 Lord Beauchamp, Lord President of the Council, responsible for the bill in the Lords, considered that it would serve no useful purpose, noting that even the Conservative governments in 1890 and 1900 had not sought to include such a question.Footnote 101 The bishop of St Davids observed that the committee of statistical experts of 1890 had made no recommendations as ‘very properly, they did not think that it would be right for them to report on questions of politics’.Footnote 102 However, he appealed to the government: ‘Let them either adopt the only fair and impartial test, or refrain from using such statistics as they have as an argument, an irrelevant and feeble argument for cutting up the historical unity of the Church of England.’Footnote 103 The archbishop of Canterbury added that the results would also be useful for social works in the large cities.Footnote 104 This prompted Lord Crewe, the Lord Privy Seal, to remark:
What the two right rev. Prelates ask for is a referendum in Wales on the question of Disestablishment. They hope to obtain it by this insertion of a question in the census, and I think it is only fair to assume that they hope thus to obtain it in a form which will be generally favourable to the views they support.Footnote 105
The Conservative leader in the Lords, Lord Lansdowne, counselled the House that although there were good arguments in favour of the amendment pressing it should not be allowed to prejudice the bill.Footnote 106 Nevertheless, the amendment was carried by 38 votes to 31.Footnote 107 At the report stage it was pointed out that the leading members, indeed the majority, of the opposition peers in the House had not taken part in the vote.Footnote 108 The proposal that the amendment be dropped was rejected by 32 votes to 29.Footnote 109 The amending bill was then sent to the House of Commons, where the government moved to disagree with the Lords.Footnote 110 The motion was carried by 130 votes to 66, thereby enforcing the Commons version of the bill.Footnote 111 The government and the Conservative leadership thus ensured that the census in Great Britain did not include a religious question in 1911.
The later twentieth century
The religious element in the political ferment of the immediate pre-First World War period subsided with the passing of the Welsh disestablishment bill and the changed priorities of the immediate post-war era.Footnote 112 Even the Royal Statistical Society recommended against the inclusion of religion in the 1921 census.Footnote 113 The conference of statistical officers of the British Empire in 1920 made no recommendations, leaving it to the individual authorities to pursue their own courses.Footnote 114 The British and Irish census bills passed through parliament with virtually no debate, and without any discussion of religion. This was particularly significant as they provided the permanent parliamentary authorisation for the taking of the 1921 and subsequent enumerations, thereby ending the series of decennial debates on the subject.Footnote 115 The act for Great Britain included a schedule of topics, which did not include religion, thereby necessitating an amendment of the act if it were to be included in a subsequent enumeration. Indeed religion was only raised in parliament once in the next seventy years, in connection with the 1961 census. It was rejected by the government on the grounds that
there is considerable resistance towards giving this kind of information and we are advised that the questions would probably be widely resented and in consequence we would not be likely to get the sort of truthful answers which we seek to obtain in the census.Footnote 116
In Northern Ireland the first enumeration after partition was delayed until 1926. Religion remained the significant indicator of community, and was retained in the questionnaire, as although Roman Catholics remained the largest denomination, the Presbyterians and the Church of Ireland combined formed a majority in the new entity.Footnote 117 The rise of secularism in the second half of the twentieth century presented problems with the basic denominational identification, nominally based on faith, while politically-motivated non-compliance reduced the accuracy of the 1971 and 1981 religious returns.Footnote 118 As a result in 2001 the questionnaire was modified to ask whether the person belonged to any particular religion. Those who did were offered a range of denominational options, while those who did not were asked in which religion the person had been brought up, in recognition of the significance of the continuing group identity.Footnote 119
The twenty-first-century censuses
Significant changes in the composition of the population took place in the second half of the twentieth century as a result of immigration from the West Indies and the Indian subcontinent. This elicited the response of the inclusion of a question on ethnic group in the 1991 census of Great Britain. During the debates and enquiries on the subject prior to the 1981 and 1991 censuses, religion had not been considered. Even in the discussion of topics for the 2001 census the Office for National Statistics had been generally negative, as was reflected in the 1999 White Paper. Although religion was recommended for inclusion in the census of England and Wales, but not Scotland, the paper drew attention to the necessity of special legislation and commented: ‘Before deciding whether to take such a step however, the Government would want to be satisfied that the inclusion of such a question in a census commanded the necessary support of the general public.’Footnote 120
Faced with a crowded legislative programme, the government showed little inclination to introduce such legislation. However, a broad alliance of faith-based organisations took up the issue as being of significance for the delivery of public services.Footnote 121 It was therefore left to Lord Weatherill to introduce a private bill into the House of Lords to amend the 1920 Census Act.Footnote 122 He stressed that the question
would supplement the output from the ethnic group question by identifying ethnic minority sub-groups, particularly those originating from the Indian subcontinent. It would help to provide baseline figures against which the Government could monitor possible racial disadvantage and social exclusion within particular minority groups.Footnote 123
Remarkably the White Paper's proposed question required no identification of denomination. Lord Newby therefore observed that: ‘for purposes of education and social welfare planning one needs to know the number of adherents to the Church of England, the Catholic Church and minority Christian religions’.Footnote 124 The change was rejected as
There are difficulties in framing questions that would identify particular Christian communities. If we are precise about the Church of England and the Catholic Church, as I am sure we can be: it is more difficult to be precise with regard to other denominations. I shall not go into the issue of the Wee Frees and the subdivisions which have been further subdivided. However, one can anticipate the difficulties. It is true that once one starts on that route one might start to distinguish between Shi'a and Sunni Muslims and between different organisations within the Jewish faith. There is a write-in question if anyone feels impelled to be more precise, but we reached the conclusion that a more detailed question would not fulfil the strict criteria for additional questions.Footnote 125
Thereafter the bill languished for lack of time in the House of Commons, leading to a focused lobbying campaign by the Muslim Council of Britain of the prime minister, Home Secretary and Leader of the House.Footnote 126 This was successful and the bill was allocated government time and progressed with cross-party support. At the second reading, Johnathan Sayeed, Conservative member for mid-Bedfordshire, who piloted the bill through the house, stressed that ‘This is necessary because, these days, many more people choose to identify themselves in respect of their religion or their culture, but there are no reliable figures for ethnic sub-groups or for religion.’Footnote 127 The Labour member for Slough, Fiona Mactaggart, elaborated: ‘We are trying to ensure that state services developed in a Christian tradition, which match the habits of the Christian faith, begin to match more fairly and accurately the beliefs and habits of other faiths’, echoing the debates in 1860 on the utility of the measure, if in a very different ethos.Footnote 128
Opposition came from those resistant to government intrusion into the private sphere, also reminiscent of the nineteenth-century debates. Douglas Hogg stated that ‘They [the government] are oppressive in character. They ask of people questions that they should not ask.’Footnote 129 Similarly Eric Forth observed that ‘The Bill is unnecessary and intrusive. It has some sinister elements, which I believe we should resist strongly.’Footnote 130 However, the measure was carried by 194 votes to 10.Footnote 131 Thus the 2001 census posed the question: ‘What is your religion?’ Owing to the computerised nature of the data processing, a series of options was offered: None, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, any other, with a space for a write-in answer where none of those listed applied.Footnote 132 Thus the denominational numerical issues raised by presence of the bishops in the proposed reform of the House of Lords remained unresolved.Footnote 133
Under the devolution of powers in 1999, legislative control of the conduct of the census of Scotland passed to the Scottish parliament. At first the Scottish government accepted the White Paper's recommendation and did not propose to include a question on religion.Footnote 134 However, as a result of numerous representations from the Churches and other bodies, the decision was reversed. Jim Wallace, deputy first minister, stated that ‘The main purpose of a religion question is to help prevent discrimination against minority religious groups as part of our wider social inclusion agenda’, noting that ‘We prefer a broad breakdown of Christianity. We also favour making a distinction between the religion to which people regard themselves as belonging today and the religion in which they were brought up.’Footnote 135 The points were emphasised by the observation that ‘the Roman Catholic community in Scotland is an example to other minority groups of what can be achieved’.Footnote 136 The necessary legislation was passed with the support of all parties, with the result that the Scottish census form in 2001 resembled that for Northern Ireland.Footnote 137
In preparation for the 2011 census of England and Wales, a further request to include denomination was made, but was rejected by the government which sought to maintain comparability between censuses:
An expanded religion question would be likely to affect comparability with the 2001 Census data due to the different way that the question may be interpreted and answered. Testing of a religion question with expanded Christian denominations showed that some people thought of the new question in terms of religious practice rather than religious affiliation (which is the concept we are trying to measure) because of the specific tick-boxes for denominations, and there was evidence that some people chose ‘No religion’ when they would otherwise have picked ‘Christian’.Footnote 138
The matter was not pursued, and the question remained unchanged.
This paper has examined the reasons for a remarkable gap in the census record of Great Britain: the absence of religious affiliation statistics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is evident that this was due to political opposition in parliament, which controlled the character of the census. The enquiry in 1851 into religious worship placed Nonconformists in an apparently advantageous statistical position, which they sought to retain. The suspicion that the established Churches would benefit statistically from the attempt to categorise the large numbers of those not attending services as their own members was a factor in Nonconformist opposition. In addition there was the rising conviction in the separation of Church and State and that the State had no right to enquire into personal beliefs. Against these arguments there was no significant body of support for the inclusion of religion on the census questionnaire. The bishops of the Church of England, who sat in the House of Lords, tended to avoid confrontation, while the advice of the professional statisticians was ignored.
Government ministers recognised that the hostility of a small but significant number of people could be highly detrimental to the conduct and reliability of a census, which depended upon the full cooperation of the entire population for its success. The level of opposition remained significant as the major social and political issues of the pre-1914 era were debated. Thus, when the Conservatives were in power there was no official attempt to include a religious question in recognition of the continuing sensitivity of the issue. The leaders of the major political parties ensured that private amendments to the census bills were defeated or withdrawn. After the First World War social welfare issues dominated the demands for new questions in the census questionnaire.
The revival of the issue in Great Britain, and its inclusion in the first two censuses of the twenty-first century, reflected a changed society where Christian inter-denominational rivalry had become less important. It was the presence of several million people of other faiths which prompted the demand for a religious question in the census for purposes of monitoring service provision. Just as skilful lobbying by the Nonconformist minority in 1860 had led to the exclusion of the question, so that by the Muslim minority in 2000 led to its inclusion. In both cases the initial government position had been the opposite of that enacted. It was parliament which made the final decision on the issue.
