The Death of Christian Britain

— The Statistics of ‘Christian Progress’ 1800–1950 —
and most notorious low churchgoing area of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.
The implications of this exercise are statistically very important. If the
problem of under-recording of church attendance was so severe in the best
census, it was much greater in less accurate censuses. It was particularly acute
in urban areas where the times and forms of religious worship were much
more varied than in rural areas, and proportionately more difficult for
census-organisers to ensure the presence of enumerators. The more socialscience
method is examined closely, the less convincing is the case that
cities were uniformly more secularised than small towns, and that towns
were more secularised than rural villages. 14 Equally, the evidence from
Chelsea in 1902–3, in the best churchgoing census ever taken in Britain,
demonstrates that both contemporary churchmen and later historians have
placed unwarranted faith that social-scientific method was able to deliver
percentages of churchgoing, those ‘unimpeachable witnesses’, which could
present a true impression of religiosity in the supposedly ‘unholy city’.
CLASS AND RELIGIOSITY
Since 1800, social class has been the obsessive focus of statistical inquiry
into religion in Britain. The absence of any significant data on the social
class of churchgoers in the 1851 religious census did not stop its compiler
Horace Mann from branding the working classes ‘unconscious Secularists’:
‘These are never or but seldom seen in our religious congregations.’ 15
Such statements constituted the ‘official’ discourse on the irreligious city,
establishing that the working class were irreligious, and that the middle
classes were the churchgoing bastions of civil morality. Modern scholars
who use statistics have almost uniformly tended to agree. Hugh McLeod,
in analysing the different levels of churchgoing across London in 1902–3,
concluded that ‘the most important differentiating factor was class’, 16
reflecting what has been the burden of most writing on the social history
of religion from the late 1950s to the mid-1990s.
Sometimes the religiosity of middle-class parts of towns and cities was
the result of deliberate religious engineering. Hampstead was developed
between 1850 and 1914 by the landowners, Eton College and the Dean and
Chapter of Westminster, to exclude Nonconformists in an attempt to create
‘an exclusively Anglican colonisation’. 17 In Glasgow, it was widely reputed
that when Cambridge Street United Presbyterian Church moved in the
1860s to a more palatial church in the west end it was a deliberate attempt
to exclude the less wealthy members of the congregation. 18 Instances like
this probably abounded in Victorian Britain, but the social scientist should
not take this as evidence that the working classes were irreligious. However,
between the 1950s and 1970s most did precisely that. John Kent concluded
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