Abstract
This chapter reports on two items in the Church Times surveys related to the issue of homosexuality. The issue has been one of the most contentious in the Church of England for some years, and the first decade of the century saw a steadily mounting number of Church Times articles related to it. The chapter first outlines the changes in legislation and attitudes in Britain that came before and during the survey period, and then looks at the debate within the Church of England. The data showed similar differences by gender, age and education to national surveys. Evangelicals had markedly more conservative opinions on the matter than the other two traditions, and Anglo-catholics were slightly more liberal than the Broad church. The most obvious trends were for the liberalizing of opinion over time, partly because of more accepting attitudes among younger cohorts, but also because opinion shifted in older cohorts.
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Notes
- 1.
Searches of the Church Times archive used the following terms: ‘homosexual*’; ‘gay’; LGB*; ‘same sex’.
- 2.
These figures are from the British Social Attitudes Surveys for 2000 and 2012, where 46 and 28% respectively said ‘homosexuality is always/mostly wrong’ (Park & Rhead, 2013, Table A.4).
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Village, A. (2018). Sexual Orientation. In: The Church of England in the First Decade of the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04528-9_6
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