Religion question in Census 2016 really measures subjective feelings about religion

There has been a minor kerfuffle about the religion question in the Census everyone was supposed to do last night. The question is a simple one; ‘what is your religion?’ The kerfuffle has centred mainly on how people should answer the question, and specifically whether it would be more honest for someone who almost never goes into a church to tick the ‘no religion’ box in this question.

This is certainly the viewpoint of Atheist Ireland and I’m inclined to agree with them. I was on The Last Word last Thursday with Mick Nugent of Atheist Ireland and I said if I never went into a church except for weddings and funerals and the like, and basically did not believe in the major tenets of any religion, I would tick the ‘no religion’ box.

Mick agreed. Atheist Ireland believes the Census unrealistically magnifies the number of people in the country who are Catholic or Christian or who belong to some other religion because so many people who don’t really belong to any religion nonetheless tick one of the religion boxes.

How do we explain this? I think we got a clue from one of the emails read out by presenter Matt Cooper on the show which came from a woman who said she would be ticking the ‘Catholic’ box even though she doesn’t go to Mass and doesn’t believe everything the Church teaches on the grounds that she does pray.

In my book this would mean she belongs to the ‘spiritual but not religious’ category. However, clearly she is happy to self-identify as Catholic and obviously lots of other people are exactly like her.

For them, the religion question isn’t about neat, internally consistent definitions of what a given religion is and what it means to belong to it. Rather it is really a question that asks what religion do you feel like you belong to? In other words, the question for them is subjective, not objective.

Mind you, if the Census exaggerates the number of people who belong to this or that religion it might also exaggerate the number who appear to belong to ‘no religion’.

As the RTE exit poll conducted on the day of the General Election showed, the number of people who say they have no religion, but are ‘spiritual’ (nine percent) is far more than the number who say they are atheists (four percent) or agnostic (one percent).

So the religion question, while it’s an important one, doesn’t give the definitive and unambiguous answers either the Churches or the likes of Atheist Ireland would want.

At one level Atheist Ireland should in fact be pleased about this because it proves that many people now believe in religion in very personal, subjective terms, rather than in an institutionalised, more objective way. This means religion is less a defined community of believers intent on achieving certain goals, and more an individualised thing that is a poor basis for common, collective action of the sort Atheist Ireland might not like.

(The Last Word item is here. The discussion begins at about 21 minutes and 30 seconds)