The Death of Christian Britain

— The Statistics of ‘Christian Progress’ 1800–1950 —
congregations were still occupationally structured in roughly equal ways
to the nineteenth century: in Falkirk, between 50 and 66 per cent were
skilled working class, a further 5–20 per cent were unskilled, and the
remainder were middle and upper classes. 41 This evidence is of its nature
piecemeal, but it is very significant. Every major study based on socialcomposition
analysis of churchgoers or members shows for every part of
Britain from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries, for every
denomination, that the working classes were in the majority.
Church statisticians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have
argued about the impact of all sorts of other, non-class factors on churchgoing
levels: the weather, the time of the year, availability of pews, and
distance from church. The impact of the first and second of these was
certainly exaggerated. An analysis of the most extensive data, contained in
the London census of 1902–3, produced correlations between levels of
churchgoing on the one hand, and variations in the weather and in the
month of the year on the other, with extremely poor figures (of –0.1752
for weather and –0.2905 for month) – poor enough to conclude that neither
determined variations in churchgoing levels within the capital. 42 The
numbers and pricing of rented pews was thought by many Victorian
commentators to be a factor keeping attendances in some cities low, and
for keeping out the working classes and the poor. Bradford was identified
in 1858 as the most deficient for Anglican church accommodation in
England, and this was still thought by many in the late Victorian period
to be the cause of working-class alienation. 43 Certainly by 1881, the availability
of pews was not a factor which determined levels of church
attendance in different parts of that city; the difference between the proportion
of Bradford people and proportion of Bradford’s pews located in each
of the fifteen wards produced poor results (adjusted R 2 = –0.05, t statistic
= 0.59, sig. = .565) when regressed against church attendance figures for
each ward. 44 Yet, availability of church accommodation was probably an
important issue before 1850, when church provision in new industrial
centres was often slow to develop, and was low in some rural areas (such
as the Highlands and Hebrides). The issue in such cases was also the
distance from church. Dennis’ study of Huddersfield has produced data
that show that as towns grew in the second half of the nineteenth century,
existing congregations increased the proportion of their flock who lived
under 1 kilometre from the church – on average from 73 per cent in 1851
to 82 per cent in 1880 – whilst new congregations resulting from suburban
growth after 1851 started with initially high figures of around 80–98 per
cent living close to their church, but then declined slightly to stabilise at
an average of 74 per cent by 1880. Though Dennis uses this as evidence
that churches ‘facilitated the disintegration of territorially defined communities’,
the uniformly high proportion of church members living less than
a kilometre from their church (ranging from 52 per cent to 100 per cent
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