The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
Table 7.4 Church attendance, gender and social class in Metropolitan London,
1902–3: correlations and regressions
Dependent variables correlated and regressed against the social index
for 28 boroughs
Where women were more numerous than men in the population, churchgoing
increased. The proportion of women varied significantly between
the London boroughs, reaching a high of 64 per cent in Kensington.
Correlations of churchgoing levels in west London boroughs set against
the proportions of men and women in the adult population of each of those
boroughs produce a positive correlation for women and a corresponding
and equal negative correlation for men. 49 In short, the more women there
were in a population, the higher was the churchgoing. Moreover, regression
analysis of those west London boroughs shows that variations in the
proportion of women in the population determined 78 per cent of variations
in the proportion of women amongst adult church attendances. 50
The implication of this is that a high sex imbalance towards women in a
community tended very strongly to increase churchgoing by women, which
in turn tended to increase overall churchgoing. Equally, the converse was
also true; relatively high levels of men in a community (even a variation of
a few per cent) tended to reduce overall churchgoing levels. High churchgoing
was thus strongly associated with highly feminised communities.
The position of children further illuminates the importance of gender
to churchgoing. Of 1,003,361 recorded churchgoers in London in 1902–3,
32.3 per cent were children, of which just over half – 57.2 per cent – went
in the morning. Their attendance patterns also varied between boroughs.
Amongst factors influencing these variations, the social index showed a
correlation of –0.6284, levels of male churchgoers attending in the evening
158
r Adjusted t sig.
R 2 statistic
1. % male population attending
in morning +0.6509 0.401 4.369 .000
2. % male population attending
in evening +0.4833 0.202 2.803 .009
3. % female population attending
in morning +0.6627 0.419 4.522 .000
4. % female population attending
in evening +0.1731 –0.006 0.911 .371
5. % male attenders going in
evening –0.4963 0.217 –2.911 .007
6. % female attenders going in
evening –0.7784 0.591 –6.329 .000