The Death of Christian Britain

— The Statistics of ‘Christian Progress’ 1800–1950 —
result of seemingly high working-class male church membership. 47
Nonetheless, religious worship was more often than not a highly feminised
environment. However, the way in which churches were gendered had a
complex interaction with social class.
To explore these issues, a new social index of London in 1902–3 was
created by merging three variables: female servants as a percentage of households,
the percentage of houses not overcrowded (with less than two
persons per room), and the percentage of persons living in houses of eight
rooms or more. 48 This index improves on that of Hugh McLeod by, first,
using absolute figures and not rankings, and second by including a sensitivity
to deprivation in the form of house overcrowding (resulting in a
significant change to the rank ordering of the boroughs from McLeod’s
index). This new social index produced a correlation of +0.5907 when
related to the church attendance rate for the twenty-eight London
boroughs. This suggests a firm (though not strong) positive relationship
between these two variables, indicating that churchgoing tended to rise as
the social composition of a borough rose. But using it in gender analysis
of the census data produced highly interesting results. Correlations with
the proportions of men and of women in the population who attended
church gave results of +0.6235 and +0.4217 respectively, indicating that the
social index was much more important in determining adult male churchgoing
levels than that of females. In short, female church attendance, in
direct contrast to male, was markedly less affected by variations in social
class composition of a borough.
Even more detailed analysis of gender attendance at Sunday worship by
time of day was instructive. The results are given in Table 7.4. These indicate
that the social status of a borough was a highly determining factor
upon levels of morning churchgoing, but was markedly less influential upon
male attendance in the evening and of almost negligible influence upon
female attendance in the evening. Bearing in mind that the data on Catholic
churchgoing will tend to moderate the results of all other churches (because
of its predominance in the morning), these correlations suggest that churchgoing
in virtually all remaining denominations was a socially determined
experience in the morning, resulting in characteristically bourgeois congregations,
but a socially democratic experience in the evening. The results of
equations 5 and 6 increase the intrigue. They indicate that if the proportions
of men and women attenders who went to church in the evening are
correlated against the social index, then it reveals negative relationships
which, in the case of women, was strong. This shows that there was a
strong propensity for women in boroughs of lower social status to attend
church in the evening rather than in the morning. The lower the social
status of a borough, the greater was the tendency for female churchgoers
to attend in the evening. Conversely, the higher status boroughs saw a
greater proportion of their female attenders going in the morning.
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