If you did might well have shared a general and growing frustration that Dawkins keeps getting away with writing bad books and making quite a bit of money from it in the process (including another £10 from me for this new book).

In one sense, Dawkins is a great help in the Christian cause because he helps to ensure that ‘God’ and ‘religion’ are centre-stage.  Having said that I did enjoy this review in the Independent which does a good demolition job of the weak arguments presented in the book.

So concludes The Independent newspaper in an article today.

It’s hardly surprising when a newspaper features another article on the tragic decline in church attendance in the UK. This time it’s the turn of The Independent to question whether there is a future for the church. The author of the article is certainly no friend of evangelicals (inside or outside the C of E) and prefers to use the disparaging language of ‘sects’ and ‘fundamentalism’ when referring to Christians who hold to the faith and beliefs of the 39 articles of the Church of England. The author recognises that evangelical Christianity is growing at a time when liberal, ‘doubting’, Christianity is emptying churches but chooses not to focus on that fact nor does he devote any time to the many evangelical parishes in the Church of England where the building is full on a Sunday.

Some of the stats are certainly questionable. The report claims that only 1.7 million, or 3 percent of the population, attend church once a month. In reality the figure is much higher. A 2007 study has the figure at 15 percent.

It’s clear that the sympathies of the author lie with a vague liberal Christianity when he writes

‘Having an established religion on the side not just of moderation, but tentativeness, gives this strand some extra strength. But it’s not the way faith is going at the moment.’

What he doesn’t seem to understand is that what he calls ‘moderation’ and precisely what the public recognise as a gospel devoid of any real substance and a spirituality that mirrors the world. If that is what people are seeking then they also recognise that there are plenty of other places able to offer it without the need to ever set foot through the doors of a church building. In the end Liberal Christianity kills everything it has ever touched.

True friendship consists not in the multitude of friends, but in their worth and value – Ben Johnson

A man of many companions may come to ruin,but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother - Proverbs 18:24

Where God gives us opportunity let us be true friends today.

Couples who avoid sex before marriage end up having happier, more stable relationships and a better time in bed, according to psychologists. An American study backs the straitlaced view that sex should wait until one’s wedding night.

Compared with those having sex early, couples who waited until they were married rated the stability of their relationships 22 per cent higher. They also claimed 20 per cent increased levels of relationship satisfaction, 12 per cent better communication and 15 per cent improved “sexual quality”. The findings appear in the Journal of Family Psychology.

One of the co-authors Dean Busby commented in businessweek  ‘the take-home message is that sex is a powerful experience. It really bonds us to one another and so it may be important before we go down that road to take the time to see if you can talk to this other person — see if you have similar personalities and similar directions in life — to see whether or not this is a relationship that can last.’

The warnings of God in the Song of Solomon seems to find its confirmation in this research

Chapter 8v4.

Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you:
Do not arouse or awaken love
until it so desires.

The context for sexual love is in the bonds of a permanent relationship – that of marriage;

Chapter 8:6

⁶ Place me like a seal over your heart,
like a seal on your arm;
for love is as strong as death,
its jealousy unyielding as the grave.
It burns like blazing fire,
like a mighty flame.

What makes it funny is the lengths that Daffyd has to go to in refusing to recognize the gay community around him. The fact that it is a gay man revelling in his status as ‘victim’ makes it particularly powerful. But the sketches also challenge the assumptions and thought-processes behind all those, gay or straight, who wish to ignore the sizable gay community in their own town or city in a desire to keep homosexuality on the margin of society.

But clever as the big idea is that makes the sketch work new research suggests that perhaps the voice of the gay community, in our media in particular, is out of proportion to it’s size.

How many people are gay in the UK?

The most common statistic is still the 1 in 10 figure associated with the Kinsey Report. The study reported that 10% of American males surveyed were “more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55“.

More recently, during the debate over civil partnerships, the then government accepted a figure of somewhere between 6 and 7 percent.

However it now appears that such figures are hugely inflated. The most recent and comprehensive survey conducted by the Office of National Statistics demonstrates that in this country we have consistently overestimated the size of the homosexual population.

In a vast survey of 450,000 people the figure for men is just 1.3% exclusively homosexual with a further 0.3% bi-sexual.  For women the survey is even more revealing with just 1 in 200 women, or 0.6%, identifying themselves as gay.

How accurate is the survey?

Speaking on the BBC’s More or Less programme Stephen Hicks, of the Office for National Statistics, commented;

“The estimate we’ve produced and published last week is in line with other surveys that ask similar questions in the UK and also in line with the pilot surveys that we carried out between 2006 and 2008.”

“So we’re quite confident that the estimate we have is an accurate estimate of self perceived sexual identity.”

Media coverage of the report

The Independent reported ‘Just 1.5 per cent of Britons are gay, says pioneering survey’

The Express headline ran ‘UK’s gay population is ‘smaller than thought”

The BBC went with ‘UK Gay, lesbian and bi-sexual population revealed.’

Why does any of this matter?

Personal relationships

In one sense it shouldn’t matter to us whether the number of homosexual people in the UK is 1 in 10, 100 or 1,000.  As Christians we are not to judge people on the basis of their sexual orientation rather we relate to people on their God-orientation. We love and serve and point people (gay, straight or bi-sexual) to the one who can give them their true identity – Jesus Christ. We then urge all (gay, straight or bi-sexual) to live out their new identity in Christ. A great book to help you think this though is Walking with gay friends by Alex Tylee.

Public policy

But clearly it raises questions about which statistics are the most reliable when it comes to understanding how people live and whether all organisations are willing to accept them including those who had previously argued for a figure of between 6-7%.

If the figure really is so low it also invites the question as to whether a disproportionate amount of public money spent promoting homosexuality? One MP commented “An awful lot of focus in diversity issues is given to people’s sexual preference and this difference is not quite as widespread as believed.”

Finally Christians need to engage and respond to, for example, the BBC report on the need to promote homosexuality more widely.

Andrea Minichiello-Williams from Christian Concern comments:

Serious questions now need to be asked about why the media and government have given such extensive attention to such a small group and spending huge sums of public money in the process.