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