The Death of Christian Britain

— The Statistics of ‘Christian Progress’ 1800–1950 —
plethora of studies, many based on London, argued for a much greater
degree of active working-class connection with the churches, especially in
the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, than had previously been
thought. 27 Some argued that what was happening between the 1870s and
1930s was a decrease in weekly worship, perhaps especially by workingclass
churchgoers. Clergy at the time reported increasing non-weekly
attendance by worshippers, say every month, meaning that the proportion
of the population recorded attending church on a single Sunday may not
have revealed the true extent nor the true social balance of the churchgoing
population. 28 However, most historians would still say that the working
classes were under-represented in the majority of church congregations
compared to their numbers in local communities. Class remains the principal
factor attributed by researchers to account for variations in church
connection, with the working classes attributed both with having lower
levels of churchgoing that the middle classes and with causing a lowering
of church connection in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The Daily News census of churchgoing in London 1902–3 provides the
most reliable and complete data to explore the statistical reliability of socialclass
indicators as determinants of churchgoing. Despite its shortcomings,
especially its undercounting of less formal church worship (attended probably
by the working classes), it provides a unique opportunity to apply
class and other variables to test causative relationships. In the first instance,
a series of correlations (which test the existence of relationships) and regressions
(which gauge the extent to which one variable determines another)
were applied to the data in the London census. If class was such a significant
determinant of who went to church on a given Sunday, we should
expect there to be high correlation and regression coefficients.
Table 7.3 gives the results. These show that every variable had a relationship
with church attendance rate, but the degree to which each factor
actually determined the church attendance rates was in all cases between
poor and insignificant. In Metropolitan London as a whole (excluding
the City, where the figures were heavily distorted by low residential
population and high in-migration of church attenders on Sundays), levels
of servant-keeping and opulent housing determined 26 and 32 per cent of
churchgoing rates in positive relationships, and house overcrowding
determined churchgoing by 16 per cent in an inverse relationship. In the
Set C equations, death rate emerges as determining only 12 per cent of
churchgoing levels in an inverse relationship, but infant mortality rate determined
a very important 48 per cent; however, these must be treated with
caution as they come from a small sample. Servant-keeping is shown in
equations 8 to 11 in Set D to be a much more subtle indicator of churchgoing
habits. They show that servant-keeping had a positive relationship
with determining churchgoing in the lowest three quartiles of the 28
boroughs (that is, in the most working- and middle-class boroughs), but
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