A very private belief: reincarnation in contemporary England

Sociology of Religion, Summer, 1999 by Tony Walter, Helen Waterhouse

The numbers of westerners interested in reincarnation greatly exceed the numbers of westerners attached to Eastern or New Age religions. The doctrine of reincarnation belongs to neither of western society's two major belief systems, namely Christianity and secularism, which makes it particularly interesting to sociologists: it is a deviant belief which people "ought" not to hold. This article explores what reincarnation means to some of those who believe in it, why they find it attractive, and how it relates to other aspects of their life - not least the religious organizations to which they belong but which do not teach it. In particular, the article asks whether the twentieth century privatization of belief makes it easier to hold beliefs not taught by one's church. After a brief review of the survey data on belief in reincarnation, we summarize the findings of an intensive interview study of a small number of English people who entertain the idea. We conclude that reincarnation is indeed for them a very private belief, detached from religious and other affiliations, from the New Age, from popular literature on the subject, and from everyday life.

SURVEY DATA

Belief in reincarnation - returning to this world in a series of bodily lives appears to be on the increase in the West. A survey in 1947 was surprised to find 4 percent of a random sample of a London suburb spontaneously mentioning belief in reincarnation (Mass Observation 1947: 29-32); Geoffrey Gorer found 5 percent of the English he interviewed in the early 1950s saying they believed in reincarnation and only 2 percent a decade later (Gorer 1965: 167). More recent surveys - notably the European Values Surveys (EVSs) of 1981 and 1990, show the figures to have risen to around a fifth to a quarter in several European countries, a proportion that now appears to be rather stable, and paralleled in the USA (Gallup and Proctor 1982: 137-8). The 1990 EVS figure for Great Britain is 24 percent (Ashford and Timms 1992). Some recent surveys, however, have produced rather lower figures, 12 percent, for example, in one English study (Davies and Shaw: 1995: 92; Davies 1997).

Reincarnation (or re-birth) is a belief that is taught in several Eastern religions and is part of many tribal belief systems, but is not formally part of either Christianity or secularism. Given that the figures for belief in reincarnation in Europe and North America far exceed the number of Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists (in the UK these amount to no more than 2 percent of the total population), one might be tempted to suppose that reincarnation is an alternative to Christianity and secularism, or might be broadly categorized as part of the New Age, that is to say, held by those who have a sense of inner spirituality but who do not wish to confine this to Christianity.

The 1990 EVS data do not confirm this supposition, at least for the UK. They consistently show that belief in reincarnation is associated with conventional Christian beliefs. One smaller North American study found little belief in reincarnation, from 3-11 percent, in a representative sample of congregations belonging to six Protestant denominations (Donahue 1993), but so far this is the only study to contradict the statistical association between conventional Christian believing and belonging on the one hand, and belief in reincarnation on the other.

Interview Data

Because the survey data pose intriguing questions, we conducted a small-scale interview study in order to elicit the meaning of reincarnation to those who believe in it.(1) In the first half of 1997, Helen Waterhouse conducted thirty taped interviews with adults, in their own homes, who had expressed interest in being interviewed on the subject, and three group interviews were conducted with 21 schoolchildren aged 11, 14-15, and 17-18 respectively. Most of the interviews took place in and around Bristol, Bath, and Taunton in the South West of England, and interviewees were recruited from a number of sources, including personal contacts, a call for volunteers on local radio, and a certain amount of snowballing as one interviewee led to another.

Two-thirds of the adult respondents were female; a third were practicing Christians, including a number of Quakers. Our sample is reasonably typical of reincarnationists (as identified by the European Values Survey) in respect to gender and conventional religiosity, but considerably over-represents the older age groups and the higher social classes. Of the adult interviewees, the age distribution was: under 40 (3); 40-49 (7); 50-59 (3); 60-69 (7); 70-79 (8); and 80 (2). Occupational distribution was: senior professionals, senior/middle management (11); other professionals (including several nurses), junior management, clerical and administrative (13); skilled manual (3); semi- and unskilled manual (2). The intention was not to assemble a representative sample, but to discover the range of meanings given to the idea of reincarnation; to this end, the interviews were very open-ended, care was taken to let interviewees speak in their own terms, and interviewers were careful not to ask leading questions. The data were analysed by both authors, Waterhouse coming from a religious studies perspective, Walter from sociology.