National Secular Society Membership Figures Discovered
A couple of weeks ago I published an article in search of Membership Figures for the National Secular Society . I emailed the NSS asking for the information, and received no reply (*). Well … we have progress.
After a certain amount of rooting around, I have found some published (sort of) membership figures. The NSS seems to be making its adherent figures available in press interviews.
The President of the NSS is Terry Sanderson was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, in April 2007, and the article states
Membership has doubled in the past four years, to around 7,000, says Mr. Sanderson.
In 2004, on April 24th, Terry Sanderson said in an interview with the Independent on Sunday (review section):
“When I started [at the NSS] five years ago, we had 500 members. Now it is more like 6,000.” Source.
So we have the figuresof membership for the NSS:
- 1999: 500
- April 2004: Approximately 6,000
- April 2007: Approximately 7,000
As far as I can tell, the NSS does not publish membership figures in its Annual Reports .
There’s more digging and more work to be done here, but that will have to do for now.
I am open to correction on any of the details in the article, if you can show me the evidence.
(*) To be fair, this could have been a technical problem somewhere.
Tags: national secular society, humanism, atheism, secularism, independent on sunday, dawkins.net
[tags]national secular society, humanism, atheism, secularism, independent on sunday, dawkins.net [/tags]
Categories: Humanism / Secularism, News - Current Affairs
[...] be continuing digging into the way Britain’s secularist organisations – especially the National Secular Society – try to make their case seem more compelling than the [...]
I also have been looking for the NSS’s membership figures, and have emailed them several times without response, so I can’t blame technical problems for their apparent lack of interest in telling me.
Now we know just how small it is, I wonder why it is that the BBC seems to think it is more important than it is. Certainly, paid-up Christians seem to outnumber paid-up atheists by a very large factor.
I’ve just looked at their Accounts. They seem to have about 6,000 paid up members, certainly not more than 10,000.
See http://starcourse.blogspot.com/2009/06/national-secular-society-has-fewer-than.html
NBeale´s last blog post..National Secular Society has fewer than 10,000 paid up full members
Thanks for that – that’s one particular calculation I had not done.
Matt
My brother is a member of this so-called society and he has become very agressive towards me because I have faith. To me, therefore, this society is creating hate in people and is certainly underpinned by ignorance. My brother makes up all sorts of things about what faith is which are mostly wrong. I wonder if it is something that we should be really tollerating in this country.
[...] income of around a quarter of a million pounds and a few thousand members; for some reason the accurate membership figures are never published. The NSS aims to achieve influence via several [...]