The Death of Christian Britain

— The Statistics of ‘Christian Progress’ 1800–1950 —
worship overwhelmingly in the evening. Evening worship accounted for 87
per cent of women attenders at the mission stations of all the major denominations,
80 per cent at the Bible Christians, 76 per cent at the Salvation
Army, 74 per cent at the Primitive Methodists, followed by figures of 66,
62 and 60 per cent respectively for the fairly working-class Baptists,
Congregationalists and Brethren. Only in the solidly working-class
Catholic Church did 77 per cent of women attend at one or other of the
morning masses. By contrast, in the Anglican Church, the denomination
which contained the highest proportion of middle and upper classes from
the wealthy boroughs of the west end, only 53 per cent of women attended
in the evening. 52
The results of this investigation are highly significant. What has been
revealed about London in 1902–3 is highly likely to mirror the characteristics
of churchgoing elsewhere in Britain in the nineteenth and first half
of the twentieth centuries. It reveals the key role of women in determining
family churchgoing, mediated by the social status and servant-keeping
capacity of the household. It indicates an important irony. While women
attended church more than men, they were called upon to sacrifice the
primacy of that act to the needs of Sunday lunch and baby-minding.
Virtually all Protestant churches held their Sunday morning service at
11 am, the exact time at which the preparation of a hot Sunday lunch
required to start. If faced with the choice, Sunday lunch was a more important
ritual in households of all social status than going to church. Only in
the Catholic Church were women able to go to worship early and then
return home to cook; by the early twentieth century the number of services
in the larger parishes had grown to the point where there could be nearly
hourly masses between 7 am and 11 am. 53 The holding of Protestant
morning church service at the time when Sunday lunch required a woman’s
preparation emerges as a most significant cause of the variations in churchgoing
habits between Britain’s social classes.
LONG-RUN CHANGE IN BRITISH
RELIGIOSITY
So far in this chapter, we have looked at possible causes of secularisation
in the form of factors determining levels of non-churchgoing. This final
section looks at the statistical story of secularisation in Britain down to
1950 and beyond.
It is extremely difficult to use data on churchgoing to construct accurate
time series. However, a number of points can be made. It seems clear
to most specialists in the field that the levels of churchgoing revealed in
the 1851 religious census were historically very high. In England, attendances
at church on 30 March that year represented 59 per cent of total
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