Factors Predicting Engagement With Society Among Anglicans In England

This chapter examines five different measures of social engagement among a religiously committed sample of churchgoers in the Church of England. The five measures include a measure of civic participation, three measures of social concern and a measure of social conscience. In each case these dependent variables are compared with predictor variables that are classified into four groups: individual variables, social variables, individual religious variables, and congregational variables. Assessing theological orientation for Anglicans in the Church of England requires a combination of scales that reflect the different historical and theological traditions in the denomination. The chapter is based on analysis of lay people from the Church Times survey of 2001. The results for the analysis of the Civic Participation Index (CPI) have been reported in detail elsewhere and are given in order to compare them with the analyses of social conscience and social concern, presented here for the first time. Keywords: Anglicans; Civic Participation Index (CPI); Englan