Lesson video

Hi there, my young philosophers and theologians.

My name is Ms. Marx, and I'm going to be your Religious Education teacher today.

Today, we're going to be thinking about living as a cultural Christian or a cultural Jew, or sometimes it's called a secular Christian or a secular Jew.

And this is part of our thinking around religion and belief now on what the future might hold.

So when you're ready, let's go.

So by the end of this lesson today, you'll be able to explain how some people may feel culturally or ethnically aligned to a religion but may not participate in any or all of its beliefs and practices.

So let's start with some key terms then.

Cultural Christianity, a form of Christianity where someone identifies with Christian traditions, holidays, or values without actively believing in or practicing the religion.

Ethno-religious, where a religion is often inherited, communal, and tied to ancestry, culture, or peoplehood.

Secular Judaism, a form of Judaism where Jews identify with Jewish culture, history, or ethnicity but do not follow all Jewish religious beliefs or practices.

So watch out for those in today's lesson.

So our lesson today will have two sections, cultural Christianity in the UK and cultural or secular Judaism.

So let's start with our first section, cultural Christianity in the UK.

Can you be said to belong to a religion if you don't agree with or follow its core teachings?

What do you think?

Pause the video and have a think, and you can talk to the person next to you or talk to me.

Well, Lucas, Izzy, and Alex are thinking about this too.

I wonder if they've got any of the ideas that you came up with.

Lucas says, "No, religion is about sharing beliefs.

" So for Lucas, the belief part is the key aspect of religion.

Izzy says, "Yes, if someone identifies as that, it's up to them.

" It doesn't matter whether they agree or believe the certain core teachings.

If that's what they say they are, that's what they are.

And Alex says, "I think it might depend on which religion it is.

" Maybe for some religions it matters more than others, but you agree on the same core teachings.

I wonder if you had any of those views and which one you agree with the most.

And let's unpack that a bit more today when we're thinking about cultural Christianity.

So, there are many different views on whether England is a Christian country.

This is very debated, and you might have heard different views on this, whether England is a Christian country or not.

So one argument to support this is the role of the Church of England.

So the Church of England is the established church, which means it's involved with different parts of the establishment, different things to do with government, and that the head of state is also the head of the church.

So the monarchy, the head of state who's the monarch, is also the head of the Church of England.

Another example is in the House of Lords, there are sort of reserved seats for Church of England bishops rather than reserved seats for other denominations or other religions.

Although they can be in the House of Lords, they don't have sort of special reserved spots for them, but there is for the Church of England.

And also, Anglican or Church of England prayers are said within the Houses of Parliament.

So there is that connection.

So some people would say, yeah, it is a Christian country because of that connection.

And secondly, the census of England and Wales 2021 shows us that Christianity is the religion that most people identify with.

So here's the different religions that were sort of most said by people as a percentage of whether they were that religion or not.

The question was, "What is your religion?

" And Christianity, whilst it's not the majority of the country, it's the largest proportion of the religion, so the one that had the most people that said it followed that.

So people would say, well, it's a Christian country then because that's the religion that most people who said they were religious said they were.

The census asked, "What is your religion?

" But what does it not tell us about those who said they were Christian in England and Wales?

So people said that they were Christian, for example, with this census data, but what is it not telling us?

As social scientists, we kind of ask that question too, don't we?

Pause the video and have a think, and you can talk to the person next to you or talk to me.

Well, it doesn't necessarily tell us what those people believe, what their practices are, whether they go to church, whether they agree with those core teachings within Christianity, does it?

So it leaves us that question too around what does it mean for them to have said that they are Christian?

It doesn't tell us if people attend church services.

It doesn't tell us if people believe the core beliefs of the religion.

So we can look to other research then.

As social scientists, we're gonna look to other pieces of research to help build that picture of what it means when people say that they're Christian.

So we can look at whether people identify as being Christian without necessarily practicing the religion or holding the same core beliefs as other Christians might do.

So one place where this has been asked was from Pew Research, who do lots of research into people's views and opinions and practices.

And in 2017, they very helpfully for us surveyed 15 countries across Western Europe.

We're not gonna look at all 15 now, but one of those countries was the UK.

Now, not only did it ask them what religion they were, like the census data, but also, did they attend religious services regularly or not?

So we can start to see a better picture of whether those people who said they were Christian did go to church or not.

Not that that makes you Christian or not.

As we said, it might be that it's because that's how they self-identify, and that's enough.

But it can start to help us paint that picture.

So one of those countries was the UK.

What do you think they found out?

Pause the video and have a think.

Make a prediction, and we'll see what you've come up with in a moment.

So what they found was that the majority of people in the UK said they were Christian.

Remember, this is 2017 this was done, not 2021, so it's slightly before the census data that we had.

So the majority said they were Christian.

The purple and the green here, 18 and 55%, the two there were people who said they were Christian.

But the majority of people who said they were Christian were non-practicing Christians.

So yes, there is an amount of people who are Christians who attend church, but then we've got this 55% who said they were Christian but did not attend church.

So that can help us to think about what might it mean for them to be Christian then.

Why might someone who doesn't practice Christianity say they're Christian?

Pause the video and have a think, and you can talk to the person next to you or talk to me.

Well, we can look beyond just, like, practicing Christianity, can't we, or that idea of, like, going to church being the marker of practicing Christianity.

Some Christians might say it's to do with their prayers or it's to do with their personal relationship with God.

It's not to do with how often they go to church that they're Christian.

That was just one way that it could be marked by Pew Research.

So Pew Research also asks things about people's beliefs and certain actions that they do to get that better picture of what we mean when people say that they're practicing or non-practicing Christians or why they might have chosen that label for themselves.

So here's three of the questions that they asked people to say whether they agreed or not with this.

We had, did people believe in God as described in the Bible?

So the idea of God, this sort of omnipotent power, a Trinity, God sending Jesus to Earth, raising from the dead.

All those different things about the idea of God that's found in the Christian Bible, did they believe that?

Secondly, did they believe in a higher power or a force?

So something, something beyond perhaps what is just here in the material world, the physical universe.

Did they believe in something?

And then finally, going back to actions, were they raising their children as Christian?

Were they saying, "We're a Christian family," or, you know, doing certain Christian practices, certain Christian festivals with their children?

So let's have a look at the data here.

So those who were church-attending Christians, as we might have guessed, had a high percentage that believed in God as described in the Bible.

But we still had some who were non-practicing Christians who believed that, a quarter of them still believed that God as described in the Bible.

But what I find interesting is the second part of the graph here, believing in a higher power or force.

So we've still got, you know, 51% of people who are non-practicing Christians believing in some kind of power or force.

Maybe they don't believe exactly how God is described in the Bible, but they believe in something, and perhaps that feeds into why they are happy to describe themselves as Christian.

And then here, we've got 97% of church-attending Christians raising their children as Christian, which is probably to be expected, that they're attending church and they've been taking their children along.

Maybe there's a different Sunday school or Sunday club, and they're raising their children in the Christian faith.

But we've still got almost 90% of people who are non-practicing Christians raising their children as Christian.

So it's significant enough for them that not only they describe themselves as Christian, but they want to raise their children as Christian too.

So I think this is really interesting data for us thinking about what does it mean to say that someone's Christian or not.

Is there a different way of being Christian other than kind of practicing and regularly going to church?

Why might a non-practicing Christian want to raise their children as Christian?

Pause the video and have a think, and you can talk to the person next to you or talk to me.

Well, let's explore that a little bit more after a quick check.

Which statement is not accurate about the Pew Research findings into Christianity in the UK?

Which of these is not accurate?

A, the majority of people in the UK said they were Christian, B, the majority of Christians were not practicing, C, the majority of Christians were church-attending, and D, the majority of people in the UK were some form of religion.

Which statement is not accurate?

One of those is incorrect.

Pause the video and have a go.

See if you can find it, and we'll see what you've got in a moment.

Well done.

It was C.

The majority of Christians were not church-attending.

Fantastic, well done.

So, we've seen that there can be different aspects to someone's identity, including religion.

So it's not necessarily just their religious beliefs and their religious actions.

There are other parts that could make up someone's identity.

And one way we can think about this is the identity triangle.

So here we could have a triangle where we think about a person's identity, and in that, we could have belief, the things that they believe about the world and about themselves.

But we can also have family, the things perhaps they've been brought up with, the things that they feel connected with, things that they feel that their heritage is connected to as well.

But then also you can have your country or your situation, your place, where you are, who you are with now.

So these three things can all sort of feed into and make up what you see as your identity.

And they can be different for different people.

So this is the identity triangle, and it allows us to think about different aspects to someone's identity.

And we can use it to better understand a person's beliefs and how they're constructed.

Some people may identify as cultural Christians, not because they believe Christian beliefs, but because they feel it's their tradition of their country or their family or their community.

So they may not be believing in that idea of the God in the Bible, like we just saw from the Pew research.

They may not be going to church every week, as we also saw in the research, but they feel it is part of their identity as being from their country, their situation, or their family and their background.

So we might then put their dot in their triangle further down towards family and country rather than up towards belief.

So here's an example.

We've got Niamh.

Niamh is a cultural Christian.

And she says, "I see myself as a Christian, as a cultural Catholic.

I don't attend church very often, but I'm connected to the Catholic Church through my family and upbringing.

I've been baptized, and I attend the first communions of my cousins as important family events, along with festivals like Christmas.

" So if you looked at Niamh's identity triangle, where would you put the dot?

Would it be nearer belief, family, or country?

Have a think about where you would put it.

Pause the video, and you can talk to the person next to you or talk to me.

Well done.

I would put it down here towards family, maybe a little bit towards country, but she's really spoken a lot about her family and that kind of connection to being a cultural Catholic there, hasn't she?

Well done.

Mat is a non-practicing Anglican Christian.

So he's part of the Church of England, Anglican Christian, but he's not practicing, and let's see what he says and where we put his dot in his identity triangle.

So Mat says, "My dad is an Anglican vicar, but I don't believe in the God described in the Bible.

I do think there's a higher spiritual power that's guiding humans to be better.

I like the teachings of Christianity about caring for others that my family have showed to me.

" So where would you put Mat's dot in his identity triangle then?

Pause the video and have a think, and you can talk to the person next to you or talk to me.

Well done.

I would put it a little bit further up towards belief 'cause he has mentioned some kind of belief, like belief in a spiritual power, hasn't he?

Which, again, aligns with that Pew research that we saw earlier.

And here we have Jane, who's a cultural Christian, and Jane says, "I don't believe in a higher power.

I'm an atheist.

I appreciate the great cultural influence that Christianity has had on me as a British person.

I love choral singing and visiting chapels.

I especially like going to listen to the choirs at Christmas time.

" So where would you put Jane in the identity triangle then if she's mentioned here that she's an atheist and also that she feels that Christianity's had an influence on her as a British person?

Pause the video and have a go, and we'll see what you've done in a moment.

Well done.

I would put her further towards country here because she's mentioned the influence that Christianity's had on her as a British person.

She's quite clearly stated she's an atheist, which means she doesn't believe in God or any of those higher powers, so I wouldn't put it up towards belief.

Well done.

And then here we have Asher, who's an evangelical Christian, and Asher says, "My belief in Jesus Christ is the most important part of my religion.

I have such joy and freedom in my relationship with Jesus that I would like anyone who is a cultural Christian to become a practicing one and have their own relationship with the Lord.

" So where would you put Asher on the identity triangle then?

Pause the video and have a go.

We'll see what you've done in a moment.

Well done, so the clue here is that he's really started with belief, hasn't he?

And that is a feature of evangelical Christianity.

So for him, it's those beliefs that are key.

So for him, that's why it would be up there in his identity triangle.

Well done.

What do you think Asher would like to say to Niamh, Jane, or Mat?

So the examples we just looked at of kind of cultural Christianity, what might Asher want to say to them?

Or if they were to meet each other, what kind of conversation do you think they would have?

Pause the video and have a think, and we'll see what you've come up with in a moment.

Yeah, I think he would talk to them about the importance of beliefs for him, and he might be interested in why they don't necessarily believe some of those things or what it is about Christianity that draws them in if it's not those key beliefs that he also holds.

So let's do another check before we move on.

I've got three identity triangles here.

Which two of them do you think could reflect a cultural Christian?

So look at where the dot is and think about which two might reflect a cultural Christian.

Pause the video and have a go, and we'll see what you've done in a moment.

Well done.

B and C would be.

I wouldn't put A as a cultural Christian because belief is so significant for that person, and that would be Asher's triangle, for example, that we've just looked at.

Well done.

So now let's do a task to see what we've learned.

Niamh is a cultural Christian.

We met her earlier, didn't we?

And Asher is a committed evangelical Christian.

We've just met him.

Imagine they're both waiting at a bus stop together and they start talking about Christianity.

What might they say to each other?

Now, you can either work this on your own or in a pair.

You could write the script, or you could act it out.

What do you think they would say to each other?

Pause the video and have a go, and we'll see what you've come up with in a moment.

Well done, some great ideas.

So your conversations may look something like this.

Asher, "I think you'd really enjoy going to church more than once or twice a year.

You'd learn so much more about Jesus, the Bible, and Christianity.

Why don't you join me next Sunday for a service?

" And Niamh replies, "Thank you.

I'll have a think about it, but I don't feel the need at the moment, really, to attend on my own.

I enjoy going with my family for important events and festivals, and spending time with my family is the most important part for me.

" I wonder if Niamh and Asher would go together at Christmas time.

So now onto our second section, cultural or secular Judaism.

So there are many different ways of being Jewish.

So within Judaism, we've got Orthodox Judaism, progressive Judaism, secular Judaism, liberal Judaism, Judaism that's blended with other religions or other worldviews, and we can have mystical or Kabbalah as a form of Judaism too.

So you can have different ways of being Jewish, different denominations and understandings of what Judaism is.

So one of those is secular Judaism, which we're going to explore more in today's lesson.

And something that we need to know about Judaism is that people are Jewish through birth as well as belief, and it's considered to be an ethno-religion.

So there are a few examples of these that we have in the world and worldviews today, and Judaism's one of them, where people may identify as being Jewish through both belief and through birth, or through birth alone or through belief alone in some cases.

So it's seen as an ethno-religion.

The word ethno-religious is an adjective used to describe some religions, and it's made up of ethno and religious.

Ethno comes from ethnos in Greek, meaning nation or people.

And religious comes with to do with religion, so from religio.

So Judaism is something that can be linking people through religion but also through birth or through being a joint people.

So an ethno-religious group is where the religion is often inherited, communal, tied to ancestry, culture, or peoplehood.

So it's not just to do with, like, beliefs and core kind of religious practices.

So going back to the census 2021 data that we got for England and Wales, it shows us that actually, Jews in England and Wales identify as being Jewish through religion and ethnic group.

So we had 219,160 people who identified as Jewish just through religion.

So through the question, "What is your religion?

" that many people ticked that they were Jewish.

Then we had 16,030, so much less, but a proportion of people who said that they were Jewish by ethnic group.

So that was a separate question to do with your ethnic group.

And 16,030 people said they were Jewish by ethnicity only, not by religion.

And then we've got 52,000 people, 52,165 people, who said they were both religiously Jewish and ethnically Jewish.

So we can see that even within England and Wales, we have some diversity here as to whether people identify as Jewish through religion, ethnicity, or both.

So social scientists study carefully how data is collected as well as what the data is that is gathered, because how it is collected, what question is asked, how it's asked, even how people fill it in, can have an influence on the results we might have from something like the census or a survey.

So one example for this could be how the data was collected on those who identify as Jewish in the 2021 census.

So the data we've just looked at, great, but how was it collected?

And could that influence what data we ended up with?

So, for the "What is your religion question?

" people could select Jewish from a list for it to be recorded.

So there was a list that was suggested, people could select it, but also people could type in.

There are many, many other religions other than the ones that were just there on the list.

But Jewish was one of them.

So for "What is your religion?

" they could tick Jewish.

But for the "What is your ethnicity?

" question, people had to type the letters Jewish in for it to be recorded.

It wasn't there as a list that you could just tick it and pick it.

So could that then influence how many people picked which of those?

Would it influence someone to see something that, "Oh yes, I'm Jewish," or to not see it and have to think, "Oh yeah, I'm gonna type in that I'm Jewish," for example.

How could the way the questions were asked have impacted the data?

Pause the video and have a think, and we'll see what you come up with in a moment.

Well, some people would argue that that could lead people more to say that their religion was Jewish 'cause it was on the list than to say their ethnicity was because it wasn't on the list and people had to type it in.

Could that influence why there was a much greater number of people who said they were religiously Jewish or not?

Maybe, maybe not.

The number of people who identify as Jewish, not by religion but by ethnicity, may be larger than what we have recorded there, or maybe it wouldn't.

But we have to think about how the way the question is asked could lead people a certain way if we're being social scientists.

So I said earlier there are many different ways of being Jewish, and one way that this has been explained in the past is the way that Rabbi Noah's gonna explain it to us here.

And Rabbi Noah says, "I think that Judaism isn't a typical religion because you can be a Jew that doesn't believe in God.

I also think that Judaism isn't a race because people can convert into it.

Judaism isn't a nationality either as there's Jews of many nationalities all over the world.

For me, I view Judaism as a family.

Jews have a shared history and heritage no matter what beliefs they hold or practices they do.

" So there's this idea of it being a family and an acceptance of different types of Judaism and different ways of being Jewish, but all connected through this family history.

So let's have a quick check before we move on.

How could this graph support the idea that Judaism is ethno-religious?

Have a look at the data here.

How could it support the idea it's ethno-religious if you can remember what that key term is.

Pause the video and have a go.

We'll see what you've done in a moment.

Well done.

We've got here that over 50,000 people identify with Judaism through both religion and the ethnic group in the census.

Well done.

So we can use our identity triangles to help us understand this a little bit more too.

And here's Naomi, and she's a cultural Jew, and here's her identity triangle.

And she says, "I do not believe in God or that the stories of miracles in the Torah really happened, but it's important to me to remember my ancestors and my roots through taking part in many Jewish practices, like the Seder meal at Passover, which remembers when my ancestors were poorly treated but survived.

" So where would you put Naomi on the identity triangle then?

We've got here "I do not believe in God," but she has got some important stories that she likes to remember.

So pause the video and have a think, and we'll see what you've done in a moment.

Well done, I've put Naomi down here with, like, family and country or sort of situation and family and family history, but not put it up towards the belief because she doesn't believe in God.

She doesn't believe the miracles of the Torah really happened.

Well done.

Michael is a secular Jew, and Michael says, "I'm a secular Jew.

I don't take part in any religious activities relating to Judaism, although we have a Seder meal each year.

My Jewishness means I feel connected to others in my family and around the world, and it inspires me to want to help others facing injustice.

" So where would you put Michael on the identity triangle then?

Pause the video and have a think, and you can talk to the person next to you or talk to me.

Well done, I've put him here more to do with family and feeling connected with other people because we haven't got the idea of the beliefs up here, and he hasn't really mentioned that idea of his country or situation.

Fantastic.

So let's meet Sherri now.

She is a Jew and agnostic.

So when someone's agnostic, they say you cannot know if there's a God or not.

So you're sort of taking a position of saying we cannot know that there is or there isn't, so not taking the position of a belief in God or saying there is no God.

So she's an agnostic.

She says, "I'm a secular Jew.

I'm not sure if there's a God or not, but that isn't important to me being a Jew.

What's important to me is keeping many Jewish traditions alive through working with my local community.

Where I live, in North London, I like to take part in many Jewish festivals with my friends and the wider community.

" So where would you put Sherri on the identity triangle then?

Pause the video and have a think, and you can talk to the person next to you or talk to me.

Well done, I would put Sherri down here more to do with country, to do with the situation, the place where she is, rather than belief here.

She says she doesn't, she doesn't know whether she believes in God or not, but anyway, that's not important to her being Jewish.

And she hasn't really mentioned her family and traditions.

It's more about the wider community around her and keeping those traditions alive.

And then finally, we have Victoria, who's an Orthodox Jew.

And Victoria says, "As an Orthodox Jew, I strongly believe that the Torah is the words of God, and keeping mitzvot, the commands of the Torah, is very important to me and my family as commands from God to the Jewish people.

" So where would you put Victoria on the identity triangle then?

Pause the video and have a think, and you can talk to the person next to you or talk to me.

Fantastic, so here I would put Victoria further up towards belief because she strongly believes in the words of God and keeping those commands from the Torah as the word of God, as well as obviously family and country being important too.

But she is the one that's got the most kind of part of being up there with belief, and we wouldn't refer to her as a secular Jew.

Well done.

Let's do another check before we move on.

Which two statements are accurate about Judaism?

Someone becomes Jewish only by converting into it.

Someone is Jewish only by birth.

Someone can be Jewish and be atheist or agnostic.

Someone can be Jewish by both birth and conversion.

Which two of these are accurate?

Pause the video and have a go.

We'll see what you've done in a moment.

Well done, C and D are the most accurate because you can be an atheist or agnostic Jew.

As we've seen, you could be a secular Jew or a non-religious Jew.

And also, someone can convert into Judaism, but also, people can be born into it as an ethno-religion.

Well done.

So let's think about a case study.

We heard this mentioned a couple of times earlier from Naomi and Michael, the Seder meal.

And you might know of this as part of the Passover or Pesach festival, which commemorates the story of the Israelites leaving the captivity of slavery in Egypt.

It's a very big, important festival that's celebrated within Judaism.

And so this meal is part of that festival.

The story is retold through the meal, with food representing different parts of the story.

And many different types of Jewish groups will celebrate with a Seder.

Religious Jews may have prayers and readings and remember how God saved the Israelites, including different miracles.

You might have heard about the different plagues that happened and the different miracles that God did for the Israelite people.

So religious Jews may remember those in particular along with other parts of the story.

Whereas cultural or secular Jews might remember the story as part of their ancestral heritage and connect with other Jews who are remembering it today.

And that's what Naomi and Michael spoke about, wasn't it?

Time for another practice task to see what we've learned.

Can you identify with a religion and not believe its key teachings?

Why might people do that?

You're going to write a response to the questions above.

You can use the example of Naomi and the secular Seder meal and Jane and choral music in your answer.

So these are both examples that they gave of things that help them connect with their religion, even though they are secular and don't hold the beliefs of that religion.

So why might they identify with it and not believe its key teachings?

And can you do that anyway?

Pause the video and have a go.

You can talk to the person next to you.

You can write it down.

You can speak it in front of the class.

Have a go, and we'll see what you've done in a moment.

Well done.

Some good thinking there.

Your response might have included the following points: People may identify as a cultural Jew or cultural Christian.

People might like to take part in events and festivals connected to that religion.

People might like to remember key stories without having to believe they literally happened.

Some people identify as Jewish through ethnicity, not religion.

Some people identify as Christian as they take part in many Christian traditions without believing the core beliefs.

Some people might say that to identify as a religion, you do need to believe those core beliefs.

Well done.

So let's summarize everything we've learned today then, living as a cultural Christian or Jew.

Officially, England is a Christian country with an established church, and the head of state is the head of that church.

Many people identify as culturally Christian but not as practicing or believing Christians.

Non-practicing Christians may believe in God or a higher power and are likely to raise their children as Christian.

Judaism is ethno-religious, meaning that people can identify as Jewish through religion and ethnicity.

Cultural or secular Jews will take part in Jewish festivals such as the Passover festival and Seder meal and use it as a time to connect to stories about their ancestors and other Jews around the world.

So well done for your hard work today, my young theologians, philosophers, and social scientists.

And I'll see you again soon.

Bye-bye.