Nick Spencer and Ben Clements from Theos examine the true relationship between religious and political commitments in Britain in a new report

The second point to make is that this data doesn't immediately allow you to explore the 'why' question - so they can show in a sense what happened but to get a very clear idea on the 'why' question you need to drill down into what's called qualitative research, which is more face-to-face in-depth interview research and that's when you are likely to get a closer idea of why certain preponderances exist. But again I come back to this point that voting is a very blunt measure, that doesn't happen very often and you don't get much choice, so there will be lots of different reasons according to people's individual circumstances why they vote for a certain party.

Tina: I think you have already touched on this, but what do you think are the main values that stand out for religious voters and how is it different to non-believers?

Nick: You can look at that through whether someone is a frequent attendee, an infrequent attendee or a non-attendee and analyse political values according to those criteria. As I mentioned with the welfarist-individualist scale, you tend to find that frequent attendees were more on the welfarist end than the individualist end.

On the second scale we looked at, which is the scale from libertarian to authoritarian, you tend to find that frequent religious attendees are more authoritarian than they are libertarian - as it happens the population as a whole is more authoritarian than libertarian, but committed religious believers are likely as a rule to be more towards the authoritarian end. There's less of a clear distinction on the final scale, which is the left-right scale, by level of attendance, but you do find that, for example, Roman Catholics, if we are switching back to denomination, tend to be more left of centre on that scale, whereas Anglicans tend to be slightly more right of centre - but that's self-defined Anglicans and self-defined Roman Catholics.

Tina: You had different religions who sometimes sided with a specific political party and I was wondering does that suggest, if Muslims and Christians, say, supported Labour, does that suggest that Christians and Muslims have similar beliefs and values?

Nick: I wouldn't want to make that generalisation just from voting behaviour. As I said voting behaviour only allows you to get a certain amount of measure - it's a very blunt measure - and so just because people vote for the same party, it doesn't mean their values are entirely coincident: it certainly means, or you'd expect that it means, they share certain values - but any political party at Westminster is to some extent a coalition of different values that different parliamentarians share - and even more so at the ballot box, people who vote, say, Conservative aren't necessarily going to be voting Conservative for the same reason. And so if, for example, as is the case, self-described Roman Catholics and self-described Muslims, the preponderance of them vote Labour, they're likely to share certain views - in this particular instance, probably left-of-centre economic views - but it doesn't mean they'll share all their views.

Tina: Finally, Christians on the Left responded to your report saying other recent reports such as Demos found that people of faith tend to hold more left-centre views - what do you make of this?

Nick: Well, one of the problems of this debate is there's a lot of confusion about terms. People confuse left-wing, welfarist, individualist, authoritarian, and libertarian and use them all in different ways, partly because in some senses they're interchangeable. The research showed that frequent attendees tended to be more welfarist than individualist, although again I emphasise that's not an absolute block indication but more just a general indication, and a lot of them were more left of centre, particularly those Roman Catholics, particularly Muslims, to a lesser extent nonconformists seem to be more left of centre. So there is definitely some truth in the way that people of faith are, you could say, more left or more welfarist - but that is still quite a generalised view and there is a great more detail that you could equally make the point that a large number of people of faith are more right-wing, or more economically right-wing perhaps, in some of their views. So there's some truth in it but it's certainly not the whole truth.