The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
— <strong>The</strong> Statistics <strong>of</strong> ‘<strong>Christian</strong> Progress’ 1800–1950 —<br />
and most notorious low churchgoing area <strong>of</strong> the nineteenth and twentieth<br />
centuries.<br />
<strong>The</strong> implications <strong>of</strong> this exercise are statistically very important. If the<br />
problem <strong>of</strong> under-recording <strong>of</strong> church attendance was so severe in the best<br />
census, it was much greater in less accurate censuses. It was particularly acute<br />
in urban areas where the times and forms <strong>of</strong> religious worship were much<br />
more varied than in rural areas, and proportionately more difficult for<br />
census-organisers to ensure the presence <strong>of</strong> enumerators. <strong>The</strong> more socialscience<br />
method is examined closely, the less convincing is the case that<br />
cities were uniformly more secularised than small towns, and that towns<br />
were more secularised than rural villages. 14 Equally, the evidence from<br />
Chelsea in 1902–3, in the best churchgoing census ever taken in <strong>Britain</strong>,<br />
demonstrates that both contemporary churchmen and later historians have<br />
placed unwarranted faith that social-scientific method was able to deliver<br />
percentages <strong>of</strong> churchgoing, those ‘unimpeachable witnesses’, which could<br />
present a true impression <strong>of</strong> religiosity in the supposedly ‘unholy city’.<br />
CLASS AND RELIGIOSITY<br />
Since 1800, social class has been the obsessive focus <strong>of</strong> statistical inquiry<br />
into religion in <strong>Britain</strong>. <strong>The</strong> absence <strong>of</strong> any significant data on the social<br />
class <strong>of</strong> churchgoers in the 1851 religious census did not stop its compiler<br />
Horace Mann from branding the working classes ‘unconscious Secularists’:<br />
‘<strong>The</strong>se are never or but seldom seen in our religious congregations.’ 15<br />
Such statements constituted the ‘<strong>of</strong>ficial’ discourse on the irreligious city,<br />
establishing that the working class were irreligious, and that the middle<br />
classes were the churchgoing bastions <strong>of</strong> civil morality. Modern scholars<br />
who use statistics have almost uniformly tended to agree. Hugh McLeod,<br />
in analysing the different levels <strong>of</strong> churchgoing across London in 1902–3,<br />
concluded that ‘the most important differentiating factor was class’, 16<br />
reflecting what has been the burden <strong>of</strong> most writing on the social history<br />
<strong>of</strong> religion from the late 1950s to the mid-1990s.<br />
Sometimes the religiosity <strong>of</strong> middle-class parts <strong>of</strong> towns and cities was<br />
the result <strong>of</strong> deliberate religious engineering. Hampstead was developed<br />
between 1850 and 1914 by the landowners, Eton College and the Dean and<br />
Chapter <strong>of</strong> Westminster, to exclude Nonconformists in an attempt to create<br />
‘an exclusively Anglican colonisation’. 17 In Glasgow, it was widely reputed<br />
that when Cambridge Street United Presbyterian Church moved in the<br />
1860s to a more palatial church in the west end it was a deliberate attempt<br />
to exclude the less wealthy members <strong>of</strong> the congregation. 18 Instances like<br />
this probably abounded in Victorian <strong>Britain</strong>, but the social scientist should<br />
not take this as evidence that the working classes were irreligious. However,<br />
between the 1950s and 1970s most did precisely that. John Kent concluded<br />
149