Ethnic nominalism and civic religiosity:

Christianity and national identity

in Britain

Ingrid Storm

Abstract

The relationship between religion and national identity is a contested topic in public
debates about cultural diversity and immigration. In sample surveys only a minority
the British population identify themselves as belonging to a Christian religion, and
far fewer practise their faith. Nevertheless, nearly a quarter of the population think
it is important to be Christian to be truly British. This study explores the complex
relationships between religious and national identities in Britain, using data from
the 2008 British Social Attitudes Survey. Three different forms of national identity
were identified through factor analysis: civic-symbolic, cultural-aesthetic and ethnic
national identity. Ethnic national identity is the only dimension of national identity
that is positively associated with thinking it is important to be Christian to be
British. While churchgoing Christians are more likely to feel national in response
to secular cultural symbols, they are less likely to associate religion with nationality
than those with a nominal Christian affiliation. The results indicate that Christianity
has cultural significance for national identity primarily as a proxy for ethnic identity.

Introduction

Despite an abundance of existing literature describing the many connections

and similarities between religious and national identification, few empirical
studies have investigated the relationship between them (Kunovich, 2006:
437). The shortage of studies of religion and national identity in countries with
high levels of secularization is particularly notable considering the reassertion
of religious issues in public debates about immigration and multiculturalism
in Western Europe. As a country with low levels of religious involvement as
well as relatively high degrees of ethnic and religious pluralism, Britain is an
interesting country in which to explore the salience of Christianity for national
identity.
A theoretical distinction is often made between ‘civic’ and ‘cultural’ nation-
alism (Smith, 2001: 36). While this dichotomy is a simplification, it points to an
important conceptual difference between different definitions of ‘the nation’.
The Sociological Review, 59:4 (2011)
© 2011 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2011 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review. Published
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 Ethnic nominalism and civic religiosity

In its ideal form civic nationalism is associated with the modern state and
French enlightenment (Brubaker, 1992). The civic concept of the nation
emphasizes citizenship, residence and political culture as criteria for national-
ity. Cultural understandings of nationalism on the other hand are primarily
associated with German Romantic tradition of Herder and others, who
celebrated the nation (or ‘Volk’) as a community of people with a common
cultural and genealogical heritage (Barnard, 2003). Religious identity can also
take many forms, including active participation in a religious community,
private faith and purely nominal affiliation. Since the multidimensional nature
of concepts like ‘nationality’ and ‘religiosity’ makes it unlikely that one can
find a clear and uniform relationship between them, the purpose of this article
is to explore how different forms of national identity relate to religion, and to
what extent religion is a salient part of national identity in Britain today.
To describe Britain as ‘religious’ or ‘secular’ is not meaningful without
specifying whether this refers to institutions or individual beliefs and practices.
While England has an established Church, and there is a national Church in
Scotland, this formal institutional religiosity has very little bearing on the life
of British citizens (Voas and Day, 2007: 95). The Church of England is still
represented by bishops in the House of Lords and its formal ecclesiastical
structure is still in place, but the influence of the Church has gradually waned
in what Hastings (1997: 51) calls ‘a quietly secularising process’. The 2008
British Social Attitudes Survey shows that less than half of the British popu-
lation identify themselves as Christian,1 43 percent regard themselves as
having no religion, and 6.7 percent belong to non-Christian religions. More-
over, Britain is not religiously homogenous, nor has it been so for any part of
modern history. Methodism, Baptism, Quakerism and other Christian groups
emerged and grew independently of the established Churches throughout the
period after the Reformation until at least the late 18th century (Beckford,
1991: 179). Catholicism represents another significant minority faith, and since
the 1970s, immigration from non-western countries has made Britain more
diverse both ethnically and religiously. In particular, immigration from Com-
monwealth countries in South Asia and the West Indies has increased the
number of Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and Buddhists as well as transforming the
Christian population of Britain (Beckford, 1991: 182). As non-Christian reli-
gions become more visible, the divisions between Christian denominations
seem to have become less salient. Instead, concerns about the cultural and
political influence of minority religions may cause some people in Britain to
emphasise their Christian identity as a way of distancing themselves from
other religious traditions (Day, 2006).
The relationship between religious and national identity is also compli-
cated by the multinationality of Great Britain. Concerning institutional reli-
giosity one could distinguish between British nationalism, which, according to
Hastings (1997: 65) is an essentially secular product of the Enlightenment,
and English or Scottish nationalism which have historically been closely asso-
ciated with Protestantism. Nevertheless, Colley (1992: 314) cautions against

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Ingrid Storm

regarding English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish identities as more fundamental

than British identity. ‘Britishness was never just imposed from the center’ she
argues. Protestantism was an important forger of British identity from the
start because it distinguished Britons from their Catholic neighbours in
Ireland and continental Europe (Colley, 1992: 316). A more accurate descrip-
tion should thus acknowledge the inherently ambiguous relationship with
religion in all the national identities of Great Britain. While there are impor-
tant distinctions between English, Scottish and Welsh national identities,
the purpose of this paper is to analyse the association between religion
and national identities in Great Britain in general, rather than distinguish
between the different nationalities.

Three hypothetical relationships between religion and nationality

While this study of religion and national identity in Britain is situated in a

particular national context, it must also be grounded in more general theories
about the relationship between religiosity and national identity. The historian
Adrian Hastings argues that ‘while the role of religion has been far from
single-faceted in its relationship to ethnicity and the construction of nations, it
has been integral to this wider history, perhaps even determinative’ (Hastings,
1997: 2). We can identify three main ways in which religious and national
identities can be seen to intersect and overlap. First, there are structural and
ideological similarities between religiosity and national identities. Secondly,
religion can be seen as one of several factors supporting a cultural nationalism.
Thirdly, religious and national identities can be positioned in a dialectic rather
than complementary relationship.
The first point to note is that both the nation and religion are ‘imagined
communities’ (Anderson, 1991: 16) in the sense that most of the members
will never meet each other, and yet the community is ‘conceived as a deep
horizontal comradeship’ (Anderson, 1991: 7) to the point where members are
often willing to die for one another.According to Durkheim’s (1971 [1915]: 45)
classic definition, a fundamental attribute of religion is its capacity to unite the
members into a system of mutual obligation, loyalty and social control. The
symbols used to represent the nation and religion also have many common-
alities. Cultural nationalists often make use of myths to legitimize their cause,
typically including a myth of common descent and the memory of a ‘Golden
Age’ coupled with a ‘destiny’ to restore former glory (Hall, 1992: 294–5). Use
of ritual is also a way of establishing continuity and tradition and of reaffirming
these myths of common descent in both religions and nations. Such rituals
often make extensive use of symbols connected with family and kinship, for
example in ancestor worship and royal weddings. In his seminal essay from
1967, ‘Civil religion in America’, Robert Bellah (2005) argues that American
public culture has a number of religious elements such as symbols, myths and
rituals, warranting the label ‘civil religion’. The ideological similarities between

830 © 2011 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2011 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review
 Ethnic nominalism and civic religiosity

religious and national identities are supported by studies in social psychology.

Both religiosity and nationalism have been found to correlate strongly with
certain personality measures, attitudes and values such as conservatism, tradi-
tionalism, obedience, intolerance of ambiguity and authoritarianism (see for
example Altemeyer, 1981; Jost et al., 2003, Schwartz, 1992). Feeling one’s
collective identity to be threatened by diversity can result in a religious or
nationalistic response. As Kinnvall (2004: 759) points out, ‘religion, like nation-
alism, supplies existential answers to individuals’ quest for security by essen-
tializing the product and providing a picture of totality, unity and wholeness’.
The second view one might take of the relationship between national
identity and religion is to recognize the use of religious symbols and myths
for the promotion of cultural nationalism and national tradition. Demerath
(2000: 127) uses the term ‘cultural religion’ to describe those situations in
which ‘religion affords a sense of personal identity and continuity with the
past even after participation in ritual and belief has lapsed’. A related
concept, ‘ethnic religion’, is used by Hervieu-Léger (2000: 157) in reference
to situations where religious identities (as well as artefacts, buildings etc.)
become symbols of national and ethnic heritage rather than faith. Religion
may thus be regarded as one of many components of nationality, along with
the language, territory and ethnicity (Hastings, 1997: 25; Kunovich, 2009: 579–
60). An example can be found in the Scandinavian countries where, despite
the populations being among the most secular in the world in terms of church
attendance and religious belief, membership in the state church is considered
a tradition and part of the national identity (Bruce, 2000; Hervieu-Léger,
2000: 161). However, ‘ethnic religion’ may also be a reaction against particu-
lar circumstances. An example of how religion can become deeply connected
with ethnic identity can be found in Northern Ireland, where Catholic resis-
tance to Protestant domination has resulted in a divided society where reli-
gious identity is of utmost importance, despite secularisation in the rest of
Western Europe (Bruce, 2002: 32). Recent public debates in Europe about
the Mohammed cartoon controversy (Cohen, 2009), the building of minarets
(Foulkes, 2009) and wearing of religious dress and symbols (Ramdani, 2010),
has reintroduced religion as an important field of contention. One way of
expressing opposition to minority religious expressions may be to assert
one’s own Christian heritage.
Thirdly, one could regard nationalism and religion as being in a dialectic
rather than symbiotic relationship. Benedict Anderson (1991: 11) argues that
nationalism has taken over from religion in modernity. As nationalism and
religion are both concerned with collective memory and tradition (Hervieu-
Léger, 2000), they both share the function of legitimising unity and power by
establishing continuity between the past and the present. Religion is often
imagined as ‘the other’ because it is ‘viewed as the opposite of the Enlighten-
ment’s principles of rationalism, universalism, secularism, and materialism’
(Kinnvall, 2004: 758). As Özyürek (2005: 510) points out, hostility towards
Islam in Europe arises not so much because Muslims are non-Christian, but

© 2011 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2011 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 831
Ingrid Storm

because in the eyes of the Islamophobes ‘they represent a culture that pro-
motes extreme submission to religion and, hence, does not allow individuals to
subscribe to secularist values’.
It should be noted that these hypothetical propositions are not necessarily
mutually exclusive, and all three will be considered in the following analysis of
the relationship between religion and national identity in Britain.

Data and method

The British Social Attitudes survey (BSA) is conducted annually in Great

Britain by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen). In 2008 the
survey included a questionnaire on religion from the International Social
Survey Programme (ISSP), which covers the topic of religion extensively and
in depth. Moreover, this section was expanded to include questions funded by
NORFACE on specific aspects of religion, among them the perceived rela-
tionship between religion and national identity.
Another survey module on national identity covers questions on both the
civic and ethno-cultural components of national identity, identified in the
literature as the most important dimensions of nationalism (Brubaker, 1992;
Smith, 2001: 36). The inclusion of both these detailed sets of questions for a
sample of 2247 respondents makes the BSA 2008 ideal for the study of reli-
gious and national identity in Britain. About half of the items are covered in
personal interviews (CAPI) and the other half via a self-completion question-
naire. Those respondents who did not complete the self-completion question-
naire were excluded from the factor and multivariate analyses, leaving a valid
sample of 1485 respondents. The sample weight was applied throughout the
analysis.
Factor analysis is a statistical technique which investigates whether different
observed variables are related to a small number of unobserved latent vari-
ables, or ‘factors’. Here it was used in order to identify different dimensions of
national identity and to strengthen the reliability of measurement as compared
with the observed variables. Because the primary aim was to identify latent
variables, factors were extracted by the Principal Axis factoring method
(Preacher and MacCallum, 2003: 20). Previous research by Kunovich (2009)
into dimensions of national identity in 31 countries included the importance of
religion in the factor analysis and found that it was best included in the ‘ethnic’
(as opposed to civic) dimension. As the purpose of this study is to measure
specifically the predictors of the importance of Christianity for national iden-
tity, the importance of religion is not included in the factor analysis, but rather
treated as the dependent variable in a subsequent regression analysis where
the extracted factors were included as independent variables This multivariate
logistic regression model was used to analyse which forms national identity
influence the idea that Christianity is important for being British when con-
trolling for religious, sociodemographic and attitudinal variables.

832 © 2011 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2011 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review
 Ethnic nominalism and civic religiosity

A Christian nation?

In the context of plural and secular Britain, to what extent do people consider
Christianity an important part of British identity? The questionnaire item
‘Some people say that being Christian is important for being truly British.
Others say it is not important. How important do you think it is?’ gives an
indication of the prevalence of this view. As Table 1 shows, more than 23
percent think it is either very important or fairly important to be Christian to
be truly British. In other words, the majority does not think religion is a very
important part of national identity, but then this is hardly surprising. Consid-
ering that less than half of the British population regard themselves as belong-
ing to a Christian religion,1 23 percent seems a remarkably large figure. How
is it that in spite of secularization and the growth of religious diversity, the
association between religious and national identity is not yet dead in Britain?
It is first important to note that the word ‘belonging’ in the context of
religious affiliation is interpreted individually by the respondents and can
mean anything from regular practice to a very loose sense of identification
with a religious tradition through family or local community. For example
56.2 percent of those ‘belonging’ to the Church of England make an appear-
ance there less often than once a year, which says something about the level
of commitment. Less than half of the Anglicans consistently believe in a
personal God and 20 percent of them are either agnostics or atheists (the
remaining 30 percent either sometimes believe that there is a God or they
believe in a ‘Higher power’ or impersonal life force instead). Considering the
British population as a whole, 35 percent respond that they consistently
believe in God but only 10 percent claim to attend church weekly or more
often. It is widely recognized that survey respondents tend to exaggerate
their frequency of attendance (Voas, 2009: 419), so the true figures are likely
to be somewhat lower than those reported here. It is interesting to note

Table 1 ‘Important to be Christian to be British’ by Christian

involvement (%)

Non- Nominal Observant Total

Christian Christian Christian

Very important 2.2 7.3 15.4 6.2

Fairly important 10.3 26.5 18.1 17.4
Not very important 37.3 41.9 34.7 37.3
Not important at all 50.2 24.2 31.9 37.7

Total 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0

N 926 722 254 2246

BSA 2008 (N = 2246), c2 = 294.8, P ⱕ 0.000

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Ingrid Storm

that a sense of belonging is relatively widespread despite the low levels of

religious practice. It suggests that nominal adherence to a religion may be a
way of identifying with a culture, a set of values or a family tradition, more
than it is about actual belonging to a religious community (Voas and Day,
2007; Demerath, 2000).
In order to make the distinction between nominal and active adherents,
a composite variable measuring involvement in Christianity was created by
combining the variables for religious affiliation and frequency of church atten-
dance. Christian affiliation was measured by combining the responses for
‘Church of England / Anglican’, ‘Roman Catholic’ and ‘Other Christian’. The
original variable measuring church attendance which had a range of responses
from ‘Never or practically never’ to ‘Once a week or more’, was reduced to a
binary variable separating those who attend ‘at least once a month’ from those
who attend less often. Church attendance is considered an appropriate measure
of religious commitment as it is more costly and time consuming than merely
professing personal beliefs. Moreover there are high correlations between
church attendance and most other measures of religious practice and belief.
Three categories were created: The ‘non-Christians’ who neither belong to
nor attend a Christian Church make up 47 percent of the sample. In other
words, about half of the British population identify as Christian. However,
among the Christian half of the population, the majority are only ‘nominal
Christians’ (36.7 percent), that is they say they belong to a Christian religion
but they also report going to church less often than once a month. Less than 13
percent of the population are ‘observant Christians’ who attend church
monthly or more often. The proportions of churchgoers are particularly low
for those belonging to the Church of England (16%) and Church of Scotland
(12%), and higher for smaller Christian denominations. Finally, 3.5 percent of
the population responded that they went to Church at least once a month
without considering themselves Christians. Because this group is so small and
too varied to permit generalization these cases have been included in the
analysis but excluded from Table 1 and Figure 1.
Cross tabulating these categories with thinking that ‘being Christian is
important for being truly British’ shows that the main difference in the preva-
lence of this attitude is between the Christians and the non-Christian respon-
dents (see Table 1). Even if a surprisingly high percentage (12.5 percent) of the
non-Christians think it is fairly or very important to be Christian to be truly
British, this is still much lower than the comparable figure for those who
identify themselves as Christians. Nevertheless there is very little difference
between churchgoers (33.5 percent) and merely nominal Christians (33.8
percent), although a higher proportion of the observant Christians answered
‘very important’. A problem with the question about whether it is important to
be Christian to be truly British is its ambiguity. The result thus suggests that a
common interpretation of the question is that it asks whether it is important to
‘identify with Christianity’ rather than whether it is important to be an active
participant.

834 © 2011 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2011 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review
 Ethnic nominalism and civic religiosity

Dimensions of national identity

Factor analysis (Principal Axis factoring) was used to identify latent variables
from the module on national identity. Eleven variables were included in the
analysis. Seven of these were questions about feeling more or less ‘British’ or
‘English/Welsh/Scottish’2 in different situations, such as when hearing the
national anthem or when the national sports team is competing.3 Other items
that were included in the factor analysis were the importance of national
politics and culture to the respondent, as well as two items on immigration and
race that were thought to indicate an ethnic sense of nationality.4
Three factors were retained on the basis of the ‘Kaiser-Guttman criterion’
of retaining all factors with initial eigenvalues above 1. In order to find a
simple and interpretable structure, these factors were then rotated. As it is
considered likely that different forms of national identity are related to one
another, this was done by an oblique rotation method (direct oblimin) which
allows the factors to be correlated with one another. The factor loadings after
the rotation are shown in Table 2, the pattern matrix shows the unique con-
tribution of each variable to the factors, that is the regression coefficients,
while the structure matrix includes the common variance and shows the cor-
relation coefficients. The highest loadings on each factor and by each variable
are shown in bold.
The first factor seems to represent receptivity to national public symbols
such as the national anthem, sports teams and ceremonial occasions. These
symbols all have in common that they represent a collective vision of the
nation, and the public celebration of and fascination for sports (Hervieu-
Léger, 2000: 102–5) and royalty (Nairn, 1988: 9) may represent forms of
civil religion that inspire feelings of belonging to something larger than
oneself. Feeling more British when abroad also suggests a feeling of the
nation as a collective unit that the individual remains part of even when
geographically absent. Since many of these are symbols of the nation-state,
this factor can be labelled ‘civic-symbolic national identity’. The second
factor is largely independent of the other two. The two items with high
loadings – thinking that immigrants are a threat to the national identity and
that non-whites cannot be English, Scottish or Welsh – appear to represent
an ethnic or racial understanding of national identity.5 This factor can be
labelled ‘ethnic national identity’. The third factor has high loadings on
feeling more national when being in or seeing the countryside or experienc-
ing national art, music or poetry. In contrast to the civic-symbolic national
identity, this dimension seems to represent individual lived experiences of
the nation that go beyond collective representations to reflect a more per-
sonal understanding of nationhood. The relationship between art and nature
seems to reflect a kind of national romanticism associated with the early
cultural nationalists (Leerssen, 2006: 565). This factor is labelled ‘cultural-
aesthetic national identity’.

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Ingrid Storm

Table 2 Factor loadings

National identity factors Pattern Matrix Structure Matrix

1 2 3 1 2 3

Feel more national when -0.030 0.109 0.851 0.526 0.149 0.837
countryside
Feel more national when music, -0.038 0.017 0.820 0.497 0.056 0.796
poetry or paintings
Feel more British when hear 0.790 0.228 0.000 0.790 0.225 0.527
national anthem

Feel more national/British on 0.624 0.046 0.076 0.673 0.048 0.485

sporting occasion when national
team is competing?15
Feel more national when in own 0.178 -0.088 0.350 0.406 -0.072 0.461
country?
Feel more British when abroad? 0.472 0.015 0.133 0.559 0.020 0.442
Feel more British on ceremonial 0.641 0.143 0.095 0.702 0.145 0.520
occasions (Royal/Parliament)
National culture important to you? 0.182 -0.153 0.210 0.319 -0.143 0.321
National politics important to you? 0.240 -0.195 -0.014 0.232 -0.196 0.133
Immigration threat to national 0.121 0.471 0.027 0.137 0.472 0.128
identity
Non-white person (born+resident) – 0.042 0.460 0.006 0.045 0.460 0.055
English/Scottish/Welsh?

Initial eigenvalues 3.695 1.326 1.097 3.695 1.326 1.097

Eigenvalues after rotation 2.747 0.599 2.666 2.747 0.599 2.666

BSA 2008 (N = 1485)

There is a relatively high correlation (r = 0.653) between civic-symbolic and

cultural-aesthetic national identity, which can be attributed to the fact that
most of these variables measured feeling more national in various situations.
In contrast there is virtually no correlation between ethnic national identity
and either civic-symbolic (r = -0.003) or cultural-aesthetic (r = 0.047) national
identity. Each form of national identity increases with age and the correlation
with age is strongest for ethnic national identity (r = 0.207). This is consistent
with Ford’s (2008) and Heath and Tilley’s (2005) findings that racial and ethnic
prejudice is on the decline but one cannot rule out the possibility that it is an
age rather than a cohort effect in this instance. There are no significant overall
gender differences in type of national identity. Civic-symbolic and ethnic
national identity are considerably more prevalent among those identifying as
either British or English, whereas the average score on cultural-aesthetic
national identity is higher for those identifying as Scottish.

836 © 2011 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2011 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review
 Ethnic nominalism and civic religiosity

National identity and religious involvement

Controlling for religion reveals a clear contrast between these forms of

national identity. Figure 1 shows the mean values of each national identity
factor by category of Christian. Civic-symbolic national identity and cultural-
aesthetic national identity increase sharply with both Christian affiliation and
attendance, and further analysis shows that these dimensions of national iden-
tity are positively associated with most variables measuring religiosity, includ-
ing beliefs in God, importance of religion in daily life and prayer frequency.
In contrast to the other two factors, ethnic national identity is highest among
those who are only nominally or passively religious and decreases with
increased religious involvement. These relationships held when controlling for
sociodemographic variables such as age, gender and education.6
One interpretation of the relationship between nominal Christianity and
ethnic national identity is that it is a symptom of ‘ethnic religion’ (Hervieu-
Legér, 2000: 157) where religious identities rather than faith become symbols
of national and ethnic heritage. Many of the nominal Christians do appear to
be what Abby Day (2006) calls ‘ethnic nominalists’, that is they identify with
the church or Christianity in order to signal their identity as ‘white British’,
and to distance themselves from minority faiths. Churchgoing Christians in
contrast have obvious reasons to claim belonging to a religion without it being
associated with any other form of identity. When religiosity nevertheless is

0.3

0.25

0.2

0.15
Civic-symbolic
0.1
national id.
Cultural-aesthetic
0.05
national id.
Ethnic national id.
0

-0.05

-0.1

-0.15

-0.2
Non-christian Nominal christian Observant christian

Figure 1 National identity by Religious involvement (Mean values)

BSA 2008 (N = 1485)

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Ingrid Storm

associated with civic-symbolic national identity this may be partly explained

by the similarities between the church and the state. Like the nation-state,
religion can be seen as an imagined community of tradition, symbol and ritual.
An underlying factor such as conservatism or authoritarian values could be
predicting both.

Multivariate analysis

In order to see what effect these different forms of national and religious
identity have on the salience of Christianity for British national identity when
controlling for background variables, a binary logistic regression model was
fitted with ‘Christianity important for being truly British’ as the dependent
variable. Logistic regression estimates the probability of an outcome taking
place, for each unit increase in the independent variables when all the others
are held constant. In this case the outcome is agreeing that Christianity is
important for being British. The variable was thus first recoded as a binary
variable with ‘fairly important and very important’ as 1 and ‘not very impor-
tant’ and ‘not at all important’ as 0. The results are shown in Table 3.7
The first model controlled for the sociodemographic variables, which
included age, gender, education (A-levels, equivalent or higher qualifica-
tions),8 two dummy variables for social class based on the Registrar General’s
classification: class 1–2 (professional and managerial) and class 3 (non-manual
and manual skilled occupations) respectively, using class 4–5 (partly skilled
and unskilled occupations) as the reference category 9 and finally a binary
ethnicity variable (white / non-white). The first model also included dummy
variables for the nationalities English, Scottish and Welsh.The reference group
consists of those primarily identifying as British, European, Irish or other.
Model 2 introduces the following religiosity variables: an eight-point scale
measuring church attendance, a five point scale measuring belief in God, and
a binary variable indicating whether the respondent had a religious upbring-
ing. Dummy variables for Anglican and Catholic affiliation were also included
as independent variables. The reference group includes those identifying as
non-religious, non-Christian and other Christian. The third model introduces
the three national identity factor scores as well as other social attitudes. One
of these was disagreement with the statement ‘Nearly all Muslims living in
Britain really want to fit in’, which gives an indication of attitudes towards
Muslim integration in Britain. The Libertarian-Authoritarian scale, which is a
continuous measure made up of six items about the punishment of crime, the
authority of various political, educational and legal institutions10 was included
in order to test whether it could be an underlying factor explaining both
religiosity and national identity as suggested by the psychological literature on
conservatism (Altemeyer’s, 1981; Jost et al., 2003). A similar five item scale
measuring leftwing political opinions was also included to control for ideo-
logical or partisan effects.11,12

838 © 2011 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2011 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review
 Table 3 Logistic Regression: ‘Christianity important for being truly British’

1 2 3

B Exp(B) S.E. B Exp(B) S.E. B Exp(B) S.E.

(Constant) -1.844** 0.158 0.266 -3.073** 0.046 0.367 -4.536** 0.011 0.719
Age 0.019** 1.019 0.004 0.006 1.006 0.004 0.004 1.004 0.004
Sex (F) 0.150 1.162 0.130 -0.079 0.924 0.137 -0.049 0.952 0.141
Education A-levels + -0.550** 0.577 0.161 -0.628** 0.534 0.171 -0.457** 0.633 0.178
Social class I–II -0.436* 0.646 0.198 -0.482* 0.618 0.209 -0.503* 0.605 0.215
Social class III i–ii -0.291 0.748 0.163 -0.261 0.771 0.170 -0.312 0.732 0.175
Non-white 0.218 1.243 0.449 -0.024 0.976 0.472 -0.016 0.984 0.474
English identity 0.153 1.165 0.142 0.195 1.215 0.149 0.092 1.097 0.152
Scottish identity -0.160 0.852 0.247 0.003 1.003 0.261 -0.007 0.993 0.275
Welsh identity 0.525 1.690 0.312 0.548 1.730 0.329 0.577 1.781 0.342
Church attendance 0.056 1.057 0.039 0.068 1.071 0.040
Belief in God 0.389** 1.476 0.065 0.417** 1.518 0.067
Religious upbringing 0.609* 1.839 0.283 0.589* 1.802 0.287
Anglican 0.451** 1.570 0.155 0.347* 1.414 0.158
Roman Catholic -0.114 0.893 0.266 -0.146 0.864 0.272
Civic-symbolic national id factor 0.009 1.009 0.117
Ethnic national id factor 0.364** 1.439 0.125
Cultural-aesthetic national id factor 0.191 1.210 0.115
Muslims in Britain do not want to fit in 0.414** 1.513 0.146
Libertarian-authoritarian scale 0.257* 1.294 0.131
Left-right scale 0.109 1.115 0.094

-2 Log likelihood 1481.961 1375.995 1334.320

Cox & Snell R Square 0.058 0.125 0.150

© 2011 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2011 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review
Nagelkerke R Square 0.088 0.188 0.226

BSA 2008 (N = 1468). * P < 0.05; ** P ⱕ 0.01

839
Ethnic nominalism and civic religiosity
Ingrid Storm

Despite its negative relationship with Christian practice, when controlling

for background variables, it appears that ethnic national identity is the only
national identity factor associated with the view that ‘Christianity important
for being British’. This finding is consistent with Kunovich’s (2009: 580) factor
analysis with ISSP 1995 data from 31 countries, where importance of religion
was found to be part of an ethnic dimension of national identity. It suggests
that thinking religion is important for nationality may be more a function of
associating religion with ethnic background than of any nostalgia for the
cultural heritage of religious symbols, morals and institutions associated with
civic-symbolic or cultural-aesthetic national identity. In other words the more
one regards immigration as a threat to national identity and thinks of race and
ethnicity as important for belonging to the nation, the more one is likely to see
Christianity as important for being British. As one would expect, people who
disagree that most Muslims in Britain try to fit in are also more likely to think
Christianity is important for being British, suggesting that concerns about
religious minority integration is associated with an increase in religious nation-
alism, although the causal relationship could go either way.
It is interesting to note that while belief in God has a positive association
with the statement ‘Christianity is important for being British’, church atten-
dance has no such significant association. As belief in God has strong corre-
lations with other indicators of Christian religiosity13 it is not surprising that
this variable should be positively associated with a Christian conception of the
nation. While there is clearly a difference between thinking Christianity is
important in general and thinking it is important to be Christian to be British,
it seems unlikely that anyone would hold the latter view without holding the
first. What is more curious is that the same is not true for church attendance.
This points to a distinction which could be related to the social aspects of
churchgoing, between religious practice on the one hand and religious belief
and affiliation on the other. Further, those with a religious upbringing were
considerably more likely than others to think Christianity is important for
being British. Affiliation with the Church of England also has a positive
association with thinking it is important to be Christian to be truly British,
whereas Catholics are not particularly inclined to hold this opinion. This
denominational difference is not surprising considering the historical and
current relationship between the Anglican Church and the state.
Valving obedience to authority is also weakly positively associated with
thinking Christianity is important for being British. However the introduc-
tion of authoritarianism and left-right ideology only slightly decreases the
other coefficients. In other words, while authoritarian values or traditional-
ism may account for some of the variance this is clearly not the whole story.
The negative relationship with higher level of education and social class III
(skilled occupations) explains some of the variation. The reason there is no
apparent effect for social classes I & II is that this is mediated by educa-
tion.14 The effect of education is slightly reduced in the third model, suggest-
ing that higher education makes people less likely to have an ethnic national

840 © 2011 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2011 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review
 Ethnic nominalism and civic religiosity

identity, which in turn makes them less likely to think Christianity is impor-
tant for national identity. No other sociodemographics were significant in
the model. Age, which is known to have strong positive bivariate corre-
lations both with religion (Voas and Crockett, 2005) and most ethnocentric
attitudes (Ford, 2008; Heath and Tilley, 2005) was not significant beyond the
first model. Non-white ethnicity was also not significant and repeating the
analysis excluding the 198 non-white respondents makes no difference to
the model apart from slightly increasing the coefficient for ethnic national
identity. Finally, it makes no significant difference whether one identifies as
English, Scottish, Welsh or British.

Discussion

While there are statistically significant associations between religious and

national identities in Britain, what is most striking about these associations is
not their strength but their diversity. The results lend support to all three
hypothetical relationships between religious and national identity that were
identified in the first part of this paper. First similarities between religiosity
and national identities may explain why civic-symbolic national identity
increases with religious involvement. Secondly, among some nominal Chris-
tians, religious identity appears to support or serve as a proxy for cultural or
‘ethnic’ national identity. Thirdly, there appears to be a negative relationship
between certain aspects of religious and national identity, particularly church-
going and ethnic national identity.
The two main implications of these findings seem to be first, that there is a
fundamental difference between being personally Christian and thinking of
the nation as Christian and secondly, that there is little difference between
regarding religion and ethnicity respectively as appropriate criteria for nation-
ality. Both Ford (2008) and Scheepers et al. (2002) found that while religious
affiliation is positively associated with ethnic prejudice, the more religion is
an important part of people’s lives the less prejudiced they are likely to be. It
is when religion is seen as heritage, tradition and family background that it
becomes associated with ethnicity. By implication, for most people who think
that it is important to be Christian to be truly British, ‘Christian’ is seen to
refer primarily to having a ‘Christian background’ rather than going to Church
regularly. Those who interpret the question as referring to regular Church
attendance are presumably those most likely to answer ‘no’ to the question,
considering that this criterion for Britishness would currently exclude more
than half of the population (which would seem a little harsh even for the most
fervent defender of the faith). The ambiguity of the question thus means that
all exclusive criteria about heritage, whether ethnic or religious, are associated
with each other in an ethnic concept of the nation where belonging is depen-
dent on parental or ancestral citizenship and tradition rather than territorial
residence.

© 2011 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2011 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 841
Ingrid Storm

Reaction against religious minorities is one possible reason why Christian-

ity seems to have cultural significance for national identity primarily as a
‘proxy’ for ethnic identity. Since the late 1970s many politically visible Muslims
have begun to define their identity in religious terms, often by privileging
religious loyalties to ethnic or national ones (Parekh, 2008: 103). In the West
this has been seen not only as a potential hindrance to political and cultural
integration of Muslim immigrants and minorities, but also as a profound
challenge to the secular nation-state (Parekh, 2008: 113). Anxieties about the
Muslim ‘threat’ may lie behind the self-identification as ‘Christian’ among
some non-practising Britons who are worried about the effects of immigration.
In particular, concern about the integration of Muslims was shown to be
significantly associated with viewing Christianity as important for being
British. While this could be described as ‘Cultural Religion’ (Demerath, 2000),
‘Ethnic Religion’ (Hervieu-Léger, 2000) or ‘Ethnic nominalism’ (Day, 2006)
seems more appropriate labela for a form of religious identification that is
unrelated to both religious faith and interests in national cultural traditions
more generally.
In light of ongoing debates about the processes of secularization in the
West, it is interesting to explore the consequences of such identity constructs
for the future of religion. Hervieu-Léger (2000) argues that religious identities
can survive in spite of, or even because of, secularization, but that since religion
is no longer independently relevant in a modern world where non-observance
is an accepted and plausible way of life, this may require that religion serves
some ‘non-religious’ function. According to Bruce (1996: 96) ‘modernity
undermines religion except when it finds some major social role to play other
than mediating the natural and supernatural worlds’. Abby Day (2006) found
that many British people identify with a religion based entirely on their
traditional connection with it either through their family heritage, their ethnic
group or because they identify with the moral values of the religion (Voas and
Day, 2007: 104). In other words it is not the otherworldly, transcendent or
sacred part of the religion that motivates the affiliation, but the association
between religion and other salient identities.
Not everyone identifying themselves as Christian do so for secular reasons,
however. In this study, churchgoing Christians were found to be more likely
than passive believers and nominal Christians to feel national in response to
cultural symbols, but less likely to be ethnically nationalist. They are also less
likely than others to find Christianity important for national identity. This
raises the question of whether church attendance could promote a more
tolerant attitude to religious and ethnic minorities. There is some evidence to
suggest that religion may be a way of overcoming ethnic or racial divisions, but
it is mixed. Analysing prejudice against ethnic minorities using the British
Social Attitudes Survey (1983–1996), Ford (2008: 623) showed, similarly to this
study, that affiliation with the Church of England was associated with more
prejudice. However, active churchgoers were less likely to have negative atti-
tudes to ethnic minorities. In a cross-national European study Scheepers et al.

842 © 2011 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2011 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review
 Ethnic nominalism and civic religiosity

(2002) similarly found that while overall, religious affiliation is positively asso-
ciated with ethnic prejudice, the more salient religion is in people’s lives the
less prejudiced they are likely to be. One possibility is that this association
comes from ‘internalizing the tolerant norms of Christian doctrine’ (Ford,
2008: 627). An alternative interpretation is that those who identify with a
dominant church, without being actively practising, do so as a way of identi-
fying with an ethnic or national group (Voas and Day, 2007). Supporting this
hypothesis, no effect was found for Catholic identification, which is less asso-
ciated with English national identity.
While both national identity and religion are associated with authoritarian-
ism, this variable only accounts for a fraction of the relationship between them.
Ideology measured on a left-right scale was not significant, suggesting that it is
wrong to attribute these attitudes and their relationship purely to underlying
preference for order and tradition. Nevertheless the positive association
between ethnic national identity,Christianity seen as important for being British
and authoritarianism, and the negative relationship with educational qualifica-
tion and, to an extent, social class does lend support to the proposition that this
form of identity may be a response to insecurity. One form of insecurity which
may be particularly relevant is anxiety about loss of identity and national culture
as a result of immigration and the growth of ethnic minority populations. Such
insecurities may be inspired by recent real and media-enhanced threats of
fundamentalist terrorism as well as reports of human rights violations in the
name of religious tradition. Crucially, however, those who fear that national
identity is under threat are responding to a question about collective rather than
individual identity. In other words the primary concern seems to be a loss of
values,symbols and community for the nation as a whole,rather than any threats
posed to the individual person.Thinking of Britain as a‘Christian country’ is one
way of ‘imagining the community’ which clearly excludes Islam without exclud-
ing non-religious individuals who are considered unproblematically British and
thus by definition have a ‘Christian heritage’.
In summary, Christianity does appear to have salience for the national
identity of many people in Britain, but this is not a direct consequence of their
faith. A view of Christianity as important for being British is frequently
coupled with low levels of religious belief and practice, whereas those who
regularly attend church are no more likely than others to associate national
identity with religion. Instead the attitude appears to be symptomatic of a
form of ‘ethnic religion’ (Hervieu-Léger, 2000: 157) whereby religion takes on
a symbolic function as a group label to signal cultural tradition and ethnic
belonging rather than faith. While this form of identification may be one way
in which religion can survive in the face of modernity, it is doubtful whether
insecurities about national identity can maintain or increase religious involve-
ment beyond mere nominal affiliation and traditional celebrations.

University of Manchester Received 1 October 2010

Finally accepted 9 August 2011

© 2011 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2011 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 843
Ingrid Storm

Notes

1 While the 2001 census showed that 71.8 % of the British population called themselves Chris-
tian (ONS 2001), this figure has been contested as methodologically problematic (Voas and
Bruce, 2004). In the 2001 national census the respondents were asked ‘What is your religion’
with tick box options. In the BSA 2008 the respondent was first asked ‘Do you regard yourself
as belonging to any particular religion?’ Only if they answered yes to this were they asked to
specify which religion in a follow up question.
2 Because some of these questions asked about Britishness and others about English /Scottish
/Welsh (E/S/W) identities, they were not all answered by people who identified as E/S/W but
not British or vice versa. Combining ‘British’ with E/S/W specific variables in the factor
analysis enabled the study of national identities in Great Britain as a whole.
3 Since hardly anyone felt any less national in any of the listed situations there was an extreme
skew in the distribution on these variables. Hence, the original five point scales (from,‘Feel a lot
less [British]’ to ‘Feel a lot more [British]’) were reduced to three point scales (from ‘Feel about
the same/less to ‘Feel a lot more [British]’) before the variables were entered into the analysis.
4 All the variables included had Pearson’s r correlations above 0.6, and most above 8. The
Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy was 0.819, which is excellent (Kaiser,
1974: 35).
5 One could argue that what these two items have in common is their negative phrasing.
However, as these questions were asked in different parts of the survey it is not a case of simple
response habituation. Moreover, controlling for general happiness does not alter the results.
6 In a multiple linear regression analysis with civic-symbolic national identity as the dependent
variable, a composite measure of religiosity based on factor analysis had B of 0.110 a Beta of
0.112, a standard error of 0.034 and a P-value of 0.000 when controlling for age, sex, education,
social class and ethnicity. Similar regressions were carried out for the two other forms of
national identity. For Cultural-aesthetic national identity the coefficient for religiosity was
non-significant, but for ethnic national identity it was negative when controlling for both
sociodemographic and attitudinal variables.
7 Notes for reading the logistic regression table: B are the values for predicting the dependent
variable from the independent variable expressed in log-odds units. Positive values indicate a
positive association between the independent variable and the dependent variable, and nega-
tive values indicate a negative association. The asterix * and ** indicate that the association is
statistically significant at the 95% level and 99% level respectively. Exp(B) is the exponentia-
tion of the B coefficient, which is an odds ratio. S.E is the standard error around the coefficient
for the constant.
8 This was originally coded as a 7 point scale from 0: No qualifications to 6: Postgraduate degree,
but was reduced to a dichotomy with A-levels and higher education coded as 1 and O-levels
and below as 0. Repeating the analysis with more education categories or as a continuous
variable yield similar results.
9 Social class was measured using the Registrar General’s scale of Social Class and Socio-
economic groups, from 1: V Unskilled to 6: I Professional. Repeating the analysis treating
social class as a continuous variable does not change the overall model results, but none of the
social classes were significant as individual dummy variables.
10 For each of the six items the respondent was asked to choose from five responses ranging from
agree strongly to disagree strongly: a. Young people today don’t have enough respect for
traditional British values. b. People who break the law should be given stiffer sentences. c. For
some crimes, the death penalty is the most appropriate sentence. d. Schools should teach
children to obey authority. e.The law should always be obeyed, even if a particular law is
wrong. f. Censorship of films and magazines is necessary to uphold moral standards.
11 For each of the five items the respondent was asked to choose from five responses ranging
from agree strongly to disagree strongly. The precise phrasings of the statements were as

844 © 2011 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2011 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review
 Ethnic nominalism and civic religiosity

follows: a. Government should redistribute income from the better-off to those who are less
well off. b. Big business benefits owners at the expense of workers. c. Ordinary working people
do not get their fair share of the nations’s wealth. d. There is one law for the rich and one for
the poor. e. Management will always try to get the better of employees if it gets the chance.
12 No Pearson’s R correlations among the independent variables was larger than 0.6 and hence
multicollinearity should not be a problem. The exception was the correlations between two of
the factors from the factor analysis: civic-symbolic and cultural-aesthetic national identity
which was 0.752. To control for potential multicolinearity the regression analysis was repeated
with only civic-symbolic and only cultural-aesthetic national identity respectively. In the
repeated analysis the coefficients were significant, but very small (Beta = 0.023/0.024). In other
words the association for both of these are much smaller than for ethnic national identity even
when eliminating the effect of colinearity.
13 For example, repeating the analysis with the highly correlated variable ‘importance of religion
for daily life’ instead of belief in God yields very similar results.
14 When excluding the education variable from the model, social class I and II had a negative
effect of B: -0.683, SE: 0.202, Exp (B): 0.505, significant at the 99% level in the final model
including all other variables.
15 The sports item was created by combining two observed variables: ‘Feel more national on
sporting occasion when national (English/ Scottish / Welsh) team is competing?’, and ‘Feel
more British on sporting occasion when British team is competing?’. For the purposes of this
paper these items (which were highly correlated) seemed to measure the same thing since the
interest is in national identity in general, rather than in differences between particular national
identities.

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