The Death of Christian Britain

— The Statistics of ‘Christian Progress’ 1800–1950 —
A study of church membership reveals that its pattern of decline was
very different to that of churchgoing. Despite the problems with the data,
it is possible to say with reasonable certainty that church membership per
capita grew from the 1840s (the earliest point when it can be sensibly
assessed) to reach a peak in England and Wales in 1904 and in Scotland in
1905. The growth was rapid until 1863, then lessened until fluctuations
between growth and decline set in during the 1880s and 1890s, until the
peak membership rate in 1904–5. This growth took place during the most
profound growth of towns and cities in Britain, posing further contradiction
to the tenet of secularisation theory that urbanisation caused religious
decline. 59 The patterns of individual churches’ growth varied considerably;
for example, the Wesleyan Methodists peaked as a proportion of population
in 1840, the General Baptist New Connexion in 1851–63, the
Congregationalists in 1863, the Particular Baptists in 1880, the Church of
England in 1904, the Scottish Episcopal Church in 1914, the Church
of Scotland in 1925, and the Roman Catholic Church considerably later
– in Scotland in 1981. 60 But aggregating the data shows that the British
people as a whole attained their highest levels of church adherence in the
Edwardian years. This is confirmed by analysis of the long-term aggregate
data on church membership, augmented by estimates, produced by Currie,
Gilbert and Horsley, which shows that in Britain as a whole church
membership per capita grew continuously from 1800, when it stood at an
estimated 11.7 per cent of total population, until 1910, when it peaked at
19.3 per cent. This pattern was also confirmed for Protestants alone, whose
church membership as a proportion of the non-Catholic population rose
from 10.6 per cent in 1801 to a peak of 14.7 per cent in 1910. 61
Between 1900 and 1955, most British churches showed declines in church
membership, but it was relatively modest decline, and much slower than
the decline that is likely to have occurred in churchgoing. In the Church
of England, as shown in Figure 7.1, the high points in Easter Day communicants
as a proportion of population occurred in 1903 and 1913 from when
there was only modest decline of 11.7 per cent to 1939. World War II then
caused a fall followed by a modest recovery to a post-war high in 1956,
by which date the net loss since 1903 had been 21.4 per cent. That amounts
to an average annual loss of 0.26 per cent of communicants over 81 years.
This was as nothing compared to the loss of 1.3 per cent per annum (a
total of 36.4 per cent) which ensued between 1956 and 1984, reaching a
level in 1995 some 60 per cent lower than at the start of the century. The
same story can be obtained from data on the Church of Scotland (which
includes its pre-1929 constituent, the United Free Church) as shown in
Figure 7.2. This shows that its high point of adherence came in 1905, and
then fell only slightly to revitalise to a marginally higher figure in 1956;
then it lost 33.4 per cent by 1984 (a loss of 1.2 per cent per annum), reaching
a level in 1998 some 48 per cent lower than in 1900. The similarity is
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