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