The Death of Christian Britain

— The Statistics of ‘Christian Progress’ 1800–1950 —
churchgoing in 1851. The census compiler, Horace Mann, told parliament:
‘more especially in cities and large towns it is observable how absolutely
insignificant a portion of the congregations is composed of artizans’. 5 Socialscience
scholars of the 1960s used the census data to support the same
interpretation. Pickering grouped towns according to their level of churchgoing
in 1851, and deduced that ‘within given bounds, church-going is
broadly inversely correlated with the size of an urban population’. 6 Perkin
carried out a similar exercise and came to the same conclusion. 7 McLeod
produced various statistical exercises which showed that English towns had
lower rates of churchgoing than rural ones, and that industrial zones had
lower rates of churchgoing than agricultural zones. 8
More recent revisionist work has, however, challenged this enduring
interpretation. For while the 1851 census’ published data showed that
churchgoing was higher in rural than urban places in England as a whole
(but not in Scotland), detailed research (including on unpublished data
which can allow more precise distinguishing of rural from urban) tends to
show results of low significance. This is certainly the case in the English
north Midlands (Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Rutland and
Nottinghamshire) where the correlation of churchgoing with level of
urbanisation produced a low negative correlation (r = –0.157) and an even
lower positive correlation with level of ruralisation (r = 0.147). 9 These indicate
that urban and rural conditions were not determining factors in
churchgoing levels in the north Midlands; if the correlations are turned into
regressions, each produces statistically insignificant figures (in each case,
R 2 = 0.02). In Scotland, towns had higher churchgoing rates than rural areas
and virtually all large cities had higher attendance rates than their surrounding
rural counties. 10 Revisionist research results are not limited to
regional case studies. The present author undertook regression analysis on
all the urban data (for 116 towns) in the published 1851 census, and found
that in England and Wales there was no statistically significant relationship
between town size, or rate of growth of towns over ten or fifty years, upon
churchgoing rate (R 2 = 0.04, t statistics = –1.61, –1.35, –0.65). However, in
Scotland rate of growth of a town over fifty years explained a quarter of
variations (R 2 = 0.26, t statistic = –4.21). 11 These results were challenged
by Bruce, who used a 56 per cent sample of towns from the census, but
despite employing methods to improve his results (log 10 arrays and omitting
the outlier London), he showed that even at its best only 14 per cent
of the variations in churchgoing rate amongst his sample towns could be
accounted for by town size. 12 Admittedly, church attendance rates for
English cities in the nineteenth century generally compared unfavourably
to those of country areas, but there were largely unrecognised, in-built
reasons exaggerating this. First, urban church services – especially between
the 1850s and the 1930s – were much more spread out amongst a variety
of types of places of worship which enumerators, frankly, had difficulty in
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