Scottish Religious Adherence

r IKE OTHER nations, Scotland has had applied to it a number of cliches of description and conventional attributes. Of these, one of . the most firmly entrenched is that Scotland is a church-minded nation. Even those Scots who would to-dawr hesitate to echo this sentiment will be found reflecting} ' Still, if there is anything to what our fathers and grandfathers assert} it would appear that we once were ' church-minded'. What in fact is the position in Scotland to-day, and how does it compare with the situation, say, fifty and eighty years ago ? And how does Scotland compare in this respect with its neighbours, England and Wales ? In this article we shall discuss these questions mainly in a statistical frame of reference: that of the numerical strengths of the various Chnstian denominations in the country. Let it be said at once that we are far from imagining that strength in numbers is the most important thing that can be said about a religious association: this is, indeed, in some ways the least important, as the record of, for example, the Society of Friends sufficiently testifies. The quantitative measure is, nevertheless, by no means irrelerrant or valueless, even if it says nothing about the intensity of the religious feeling or the quality of the Christian witness of those enumerated. The data used in this inquiry are in most cases the official exact figures published by denominations, in some the official estimates supplied by church olcficials, and in a few others unolcficial estimates which are nevertheless based on such relevant information as is available (see Appendix

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• The Haemorrhage of Faith?' Opinion Polls as Sources for Religious Practices, Beliefs and Attitudes in Scotland since the 1970s

  Clive D Field•Journal of Contemporary Religion•2001

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