FIVE per cent of the people in Scotland attended church on Christmas Day, a latest survey suggests.
Brendan Research’s Christmas 2025 report, published last week, is the primary of several panel surveys as a consequence of be published over the course of this 12 months. The research was intended to explore spiritual practice in Scotland, and to assist churches to “understand people in Scotland, not only the people contained in the Church”, the Revd Dr Fiona Tweedie, the corporate’s founder, said this week.
A former lecturer in statistics for the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, Dr Tweedie spoke of her delight on discovering that ScotPulse, Scotland’s largest online research panel — covering the whole thing of the country — was large enough to deliver robust results.
Conscious that “things can go incorrect with panel surveys”, she designed a survey to draw a broad base of respondents. It included questions on Christmas and planned activities relatively than specifically concerning the Church or Christian practice. This was to be sure that people “didn’t feel remotely pressured to say they went to church”. It was carried out online between 27 December and three January.
Asked about how they spent Christmas day, 83 per cent of the 1254 respondents said that they saw family. This was also the preferred response to a matter about what people did before Christmas. In this era, 12 per cent reported going to church, while 16 per cent said that they “engaged with the story of the birth of Jesus”. This was lower than half the number who described themselves as Christians: 38 per cent.
Asked about when Christmas began, most individuals chosen a solution in December. “I used to be wondering if, with people bombarded with Christmas adverts, churches should begin addressing Christmas earlier, even outside Advent, but it surely seems not,” Dr Tweedie said.
While most individuals said that they felt pleased (68 per cent) and grateful (55 per cent) at Christmas, 43 per cent said that they felt stressed, and 29 per cent felt anxious.
The results were different for individuals who identified as Christian, who were happier and more grateful, but in addition less stressed (by eight per cent) and anxious (by ten per cent). Twenty-six per cent said that Christmas gave them “a way of non secular devotion”, compared with 11 per cent of the general sample.
In post-Reformation Scotland, Christmas was effectively “banned”. In 1575, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland abolished “all days that hereto have been kept holy except the Sabbath day, comparable to Yule day, saints’ days and such others”. In 1640, this was followed by an Act of Parliament abolishing “Yule vacance”. The Act was repealed in 1712, but for hundreds of years Hogmanay remained the predominant celebration. Christmas was recognised as a public holiday in Scotland only in 1971.
Dr Tweedie recalled that, for her grandparents, Christmas had been a working day. There could still be a residual sense in some parts of the country that “we don’t quite deserve Christmas,” she said.
The Church of England recorded a Christmas Day attendance of 1.858 million in 2024 — comparable to 3.1 per cent of the population — down from 2.3 million in 2019.
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