The Death of Christian Britain

Chapter seven
‘Unimpeachable
Witnesses’: The Statistics
of ‘Christian Progress’
1800–1950
URBANISATION AND RELIGIOSITY
Church historians are privileged by the volume of statistics they have at
their disposal. There is no other area of popular culture for which such
data are so profuse. One consequence is that scholars have tended to
privilege statistics of religion in their research, following the maxim of one
English investigator of 1904 who wrote that figures were ‘unimpeachable
witnesses to vigour, progress and interest’ in the Christian condition of the
nation. 1 The Victorian and Edwardian churches, social investigators and
newspapers attached great evangelical discursive power to their creation,
and academics reciprocated that faith by attaching to them social-science
power in the late twentieth century. This chapter explores and questions
the use of statistics by churchmen and academics in apparently ‘proving’
the unholy nature of the Victorian city and the working-class ‘heathens’
within them. Instead, it offers an alternative ‘reading’ of the data which
raises gender to primacy in understanding the social history of British religion,
and concludes with a revised statistical chronology to secularisation.
This quantitative exercise might seem out of place in a book which locates
statistics as part of the Enlightenment project which the author seeks to
eschew. But statistical method still has its place in modern cultural theory,
especially when investigating the impact of discourse change upon the
protocols of people’s behaviour.
Nineteenth-century churchmen were convinced that the growth of cities
was undermining religion. Thomas Chalmers was the first to come up with
data which apparently ‘proved’ this issue. He published results of surveys
in the late 1810s of church sittings taken in selected areas of Glasgow.
As Table 7.1 shows, these results were varied, but were interpreted by
Chalmers as showing higher non-attendance at church in the industrial
working-class suburbs of cities. In one suburb, where dissenters made
up 77.9 per cent of all pew-holders, he wrote that were it not for them
‘there would have been a district of the city . . . in a state nearly of entire
Heathenism’. 2 Chalmers took Glasgow as representative of British cities,
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