The Death of Christian Britain

— The Statistics of ‘Christian Progress’ 1800–1950 —
that in the fourth quartile (the most wealthy of London) servant-keeping
had a negative relationship with churchgoing rate. In other words, in the
parts of London with the upper classes and multiple-servant households
(Hampstead, Kensington, Westminster, Chelsea, Marylebone, Paddington
and Lewisham), the wealthier the borough the lower was the rate of churchgoing.
This suggests that as house size increased from upper-middle to
upper class, churchgoing went down; residents of upper-class districts were
less churchgoing than those of middle-class districts. In short, class did not
act as a uniformly stable indicator of variations in churchgoing in all major
sections of the social spectrum.
The equations show further problems with social class as either a stable
or significant determinant of churchgoing. In Set B, equation 4 shows the
extraordinary result that amongst the 25 boroughs in Greater London
with more than 7.7 per cent of the male workforce employed in industries
characterised by large-scale production, the proportion of men working in
those industries determined 12 per cent of the variations in churchgoing
in a positive relationship; in other words, as male industrial employment
rose, churchgoing rose too. This applied only to those 25 (out of 51)
boroughs, but is highly suggestive of the influence of an industrial as distinct
from non-industrial male workforce. This should not be taken to imply
that industrially employed men were necessarily more churchgoing than
their non-industrial counterparts, but may indicate something about the
churchgoing habits of the women, children and men in such households.
It would suggest a cultural differentiation between industrial and
non-industrial families. Turning to infant mortality and death rates, they
appear from these regressions on London in 1902–3 as significant predictors
of churchgoing rates. This seems to be supported by the work of
Chadwick on Bradford in 1881 where she used the same types of data to
argue that churchgoing was higher in middle-class as compared to workingclass
areas, concluding that the Bradford churches were failing to attract
the lowest social groups. 29 However, regression analysis on her data does
not support her interpretation. Using her fifteen wards of Bradford
and district, both independent variables produced results which showed no
statistically significant relationship with church attendance rate. (Death rate:
adjusted R 2 = –0.059, t statistic = 0.46, sig. = .651; and infant mortality rate:
adjusted R 2 = –0.075, t statistic = –0.16, sig. = .873.) 30
The lesson from this is that social indicators may be important, but
they comprehensively fail to provide a universally reliable predictor of
churchgoing rates. Even at their best, social indicators fail to account for
a majority of the variations in churchgoing between different parts of a
town or city. In any event, the major shortcoming of this approach is that
social indicators are merely surrogates for social class – that is indirect
indicators – and no substitute for the direct evidence of social composition
analysis.
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