What the World Thinks of God
Five months ago I found myself in a cramped, windowless room in BBC Broadcasting House with ten other religious 'representatives'. We were gathered together to help develop the questionnaire for the international survey used for the BBC TV programme, 'What the World Thinks of God'.
Tiptoeing across what must have seemed like a politically correct minefield, half a dozen BBC executives asked for our thoughts on researching God. Participants broadly agreed and the meeting turned into one great, inter-faith love-in. In particular we all felt that unless we were very careful, a programme about God would turn into one about religion, prayer and morality.
Sure enough, when broadcast this February, the programme had rather more to say about belief than about God, though strangely it did not suffer for missing its target.
For one, it showed how difficult it is to say anything meaningful about God when you stray outside faith traditions. Conversation inevitably degenerates into a debate about words and concepts that bear little resemblance to any recognisable deity. We soon find ourselves, like Paul in Athens, talking about the 'unknown God'.
More helpfully, the programme's research showed how unusual the UK is. With the exception of South Korea, it has the smallest proportion of lifelong theistic believers, the highest proportion of people who have come to faith and the highest proportion of people who have lost it. It also has more 'spiritual agnostics' - believers in a 'higher power' and self-confessed 'spiritual' people - than any other nation.
Britons pray infrequently, attend few religious services but do not think that 'religion is a crutch for the weak minded'. We are more likely to blame 'people of other religions' for the world's troubles than any other country (including Israel, Indonesia and Nigeria!) yet most of us claim we are 'not against God but against the misuse of God'.
UK respondents also have a bigger problem with suffering than any other nation (including Nigeria, Lebanon and India) yet tend not to believe that God could prevent suffering.
Such statistics must be read with caution (particularly when they claim that 42 per cent of the UK 'have studied religious texts'!). Had other western European nations been surveyed, the UK may not have seemed so anomalous.
Yet, at the very least, they remind us that UK Christians are working in a unique religious and cultural environment, one that we must understand carefully if we hope to touch meaningfully.
Nick Spencer
Links
Survey results can be found on: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/programmes/wtwtgod/pdf/wtwtogod.pdf
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