The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
that ‘in the first half of the nineteenth century the churches were failing to
form the habit of church-attendance in the majority of the urban working
class’, and in the century as a whole ‘the Protestant churches had almost
lost any claim to express the religious aspirations of the working class’. 19
Edward Norman wrote that ‘Church leaders of the mid-century continued
to build more churches in the populous districts, and the masses continued
to decline to attend them’. 20 ‘Outside the church organizations’, David Mole
said of Birmingham, ‘lay the vast masses who rarely went to church.’ 21
Hugh McLeod has argued most strongly for there being a link between
class and formal church connection. His work on London between the 1870s
and 1914 is central to this case in which he argued that ‘the poorest districts
thus tended to have the lowest rates of attendance, those with large uppermiddle-class
and upper-class populations the highest’. He continued: ‘Except
among Irish Roman Catholics, only a small proportion of working-class
adults attended the main Sunday church services.’ 22 He used a wide variety
of social statistical data to lend support. McLeod applied averaged ranking
social data on London boroughs (as distinct from the absolute values) to produce
correlations which appeared to show that in 1902–3 social class had a
highly significant relationship with churchgoing levels at all churches (reaching
Spearman Rank Correlation coefficients of 0.70 for Greater London,
0.90 in Metropolitan boroughs, 0.85 for Anglican services, and 0.56 at
Nonconformist chapels in Greater London). 23 This was supplemented by
comparing maps of church attendance rates for London boroughs with
a map of proportion of large houses (of six or more rooms) in 1911. He
concluded from a visual analysis of these maps that there was a close positive
relationship, and this indicated a positive ‘relationship between class and
religious practice’, one especially strong in the case of Anglicanism whilst
Nonconformists appeared to be strongest in the parts of London which
were predominantly composed of those in the middle orders of society. 24
McLeod’s evidence seemed impressive, but was weakened in two ways. The
first was his use of ranking correlations rather than the absolute values
of social and religious indicators; ranking data fails to convey the degree of
difference between cases. The second weakness was that the social indicators
which McLeod amalgamated in a social index have remarkably poor relationships
with each other based on absolute values (rather than rankings of
combined indexes of social indicators), 25 and reduced the social composition
of a large borough to a mean (or average) which poorly reflected the social
diversity of each borough by being sensitive only to levels of wealth and not
to levels of poverty or deprivation. 26 Nonetheless, both this research and
McLeod’s later work presents the most sophisticated and sustained case for
social class being the principal variable explaining differences of churchgoing
and church affiliation in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain.
In the 1980s and 1990s, social historians of religion, including McLeod,
pursued a much more nuanced approach to class and churchgoing. A
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