Church attendance won’t be enough to stop antisemitism among Christians

Last month, a report claimed one third of British Christians had endorsed anti-semitic tropes. After looking at the available data, our editor suggested the problem may be confined to more nominal believers. In this response, researchers Motti Inabari and Kirill Bumin unveil more aspects of their work, which they say paints a more worrying picture 

“Was Jesus Jewish?” We recently asked this question in a large survey among 2,000 British respondents who identified themselves either as practicing Christians or as having a Christian upbringing.

It would be reasonable to assume that such a basic question about the origin of their Messiah would receive an almost-universal consensus among Christians, but the actual results show a great deal of ignorance among the respondents: 52.5% agreed that Jesus was Jewish, 15.9% said “no,” and 31.6% said they don’t know how to respond.

Among a multitude of questions, we asked the survey respondents to rate their church attendance on a six-step scale, from “never” to “daily.” Only around 30% of those identifying as Christians attend church “at least once a week” or more frequently. When we observe how people who are engaged Christians and attend church every week respond to the question of whether Jesus was Jewish, the numbers improve: 65.4% agreed.

Our data seems to confirm that…