The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
a Congregationalist home where wall pictures tended to be religious
subjects ‘such as John Wesley’s house on fire, you know, and that sort of
thing. He’d got his children round him, and making some pronouncement
about “let the house burn, I am rich enough”, you know, that sort of
thing.’ 119
In London, where rates of churchgoing were lower than in most of the
rest of Britain, the churchgoing family had a certain status: Hetty Beck
recalled of the 1880s and 1890s that ‘in those days, if you went to church,
well then you were regarded as someone of – er – a certain amount of importance’.
People ‘who really looked to the serious side of life went to
church or chapel or Salvation Army or Church Army’, people you ‘would
– er – deal with and have a good deal of conversation with really’. 120
Churches represented a ‘well-off other’ to many families. Working-class
religion, as Hugh McLeod has said of London, was ‘severely practical’, with
an epigrammatic and pragmatic view of both God and the churches. Those
who held a strong faith were seen by others as self-reliant individualists
and thus outsiders to the majority of working people; the practical was
prioritised over the other-worldly. 121
Yet, what made Britain a Christian nation before 1950 was not the
minority with a strong faith, but the majority with some faith. The families
in which one or both parents did not go to church are important in any
study of religious decline. The numbers of families with no regular parental
churchgoing emerges from McLeod’s review of oral testimony as quite high
(50–60 per cent), whilst an analysis of the Stirling archive produces a much
lower figure (13 per cent). The oral testimony which chronicles these families
is fascinating, for they reveal more church influence than the bald figures
suggest. James Mahoney (born 1899) was brought up in Poplar and East
Ham, both areas of low church attendance, his father a lapsed Catholic
stevedore and socialist and his mother nominally Church of England. His
‘mum and dad were not churchgoers, so, but we were made to go to Sunday
school always.’’ He described his parents as ‘Hundred per cent Christians
but not churchgoers’, teetotallers who never gambled and who made their
children say prayers at night and memorise the Lord’s Prayer. 122 Probably
the majority of interviewees born between the 1870s and the 1920s with
non-churchgoing parents participated in church activities themselves. In
some cases they imply that they were ‘sent’ by parents, but many found
religion for themselves. 123 Leah Ward’s parents weren’t churchgoers in their
Nottinghamshire mining village in the 1880s, but she went to Sunday
school, Band of Hope and Methodist Church services, and when she was
thirteen her father joined the Christadelphians. 124 David Mitchell was
brought up by parents who only went to church to christen their children,
but yet they celebrated Sunday as strictly as most churchgoers: they had a
big Sunday lunch, his dad wore a Sunday-best suit to lead a family walk,
and no games were allowed. In turn, David became highly involved in
142