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 PrintableVersion Fragmented faith?Professor Dubious strikes again!FRAGMENTED FAITH? Fragmented Faith is a disappointing book of statistical analysis, whose conclusions are a mixture of the obvious and the dubious. The book constitutes an analysis of a survey conducted among readers of The Church Times in 2001. A total of 9,000 replies were received, but analysis was limited to Anglicans in England who attend their church at least twice a month, bringing the working figure down to 7,611 (5762 laity and 1849 clergy). 15 key themes from the survey are covered in the book. The opening chapter describes the survey and the process of analysis, while chapter two analyses the type of people who responded. Chapter three is, perhaps, the most useful, summing up the responses as a whole in the 15 subject areas (patterns of belief, paths of truth, paths of spirituality, public worship, local church life, ordained ministry, church leadership, churches and cathedrals, money and policy, Anglican identity, confidence and the future, sex and family life, social concerns, social conscience, and education. The following five chapters then go over the same statistics — but comparing the responses of different people-groups (clergy and laity, men and women, young and old, Catholics and evangelicals, and charismatics and non-charismatics). This makes for repetitive reading. Given that these comparisons are produced in graph form at the end, a more succinct method of writing would have been preferable. Furthermore, the last of these distinctions — ‘charismatic and non-charismatic’ is confusing, as non-charismatic could, presumably, include everyone from a conservative evangelical to a raving liberal. Some of the results are hardly surprising: for example, that evangelicals are more ‘orthodox’ on belief, more conservative on ‘sex’ issues, clearer on the inerrancy of Scripture, and more decisive on the exclusiveness of Christianity than Anglo-Catholics. Other results are just plain confusing. ‘Young’ Anglicans, for example, are reckoned to be more orthodox in their belief about Jesus — and yet more liberal on the exclusiveness of the Christian faith! The book is not without its merits. Statistics on the preferred time for Sunday worship, for example, may colour the way churches (and particular multi-church groupings in rural areas) structure their meeting times. The fact that only 46% of those surveyed believe that hell really exists (p.31) may go some way to suggesting why the church’s message lacks something of a cutting edge! As far as this newspaper’s readers go, this book is likely to be of interest only to Anglican evangelicals — and even they may consider it to be of very limited value. Andrew Wilson,
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