Earlier in July, the results of the most recent British Social Attitudes Survey were released. Beleaguered journalists were busy reporting on Boris Johnson’s unfailing talent at evading questions, so coverage was unusually lite. Where there was any comment, it tended to focus on the survey’s headline insight about the decline of religiosity, with the results showing that the number of British people describing themselves as religious has dropped by more than 20% in the last decade.
There was, however, very little mainstream commentary on one of the survey’s other key discoveries – that tolerance towards gay sex is falling for the first time since the Aids crisis.
One reason for this lack of coverage might be its ostensible incongruence with conventional wisdom surrounding the liberalisation of social attitudes, which is usually attributed to the growth of secularism.
