The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
non-mainstream churches increased their proportion of marriages from 7.3
per cent in 1895 to 9.1 per cent in 1935, only to fall in subsequent years,
whilst a similar though less significant trend occurred in England. 64 For
others, there was a trend of less frequent churchgoing, a trend largely
apparent amongst adults. They were attending church less, but associating
with it still quite strongly.
This need to associate with a church without necessarily worshipping in
it is very important to the understanding of what was happening to religion
in the first half of the twentieth century. To take figures from the
best recorded part of Britain – Scotland – it seems that by the middle of
the century something like a minimum of 44 per cent of the Scottish people
had a church affiliation (including Sunday school enrolments), but only
about 12 per cent of the people attended church on a given Sunday. 65 This
means that about just over one in four of church affiliates attended on a
given Sunday, with figures of very similar proportions probably pertaining
in the rest of Britain. Large numbers of people were sustaining a relatively
inactive church connection. They were keeping a bond between themselves
and a church, an act of symbolic attachment. This was most apparent in
the people’s connections with religious rites of passage. The British people
retained a very strong attachment to religious baptisms, marriages and
funerals. Figure 7.3 shows that marriage sustained a very important hold
on the affections of couples, giving way only marginally to civil marriage
between 1900 and the late 1950s. Even more striking from Figure 7.4 was
the growing popularity of baptism in the Church of England during the
first four decades of the century. Similarly, there was an exceptionally high
level of Sunday school enrolment (Fig. 7.5), a level about double that of
the mid-Victorian period. Though it declined notably in the 1930s, it recovered
strongly during 1945–55, and was by then the British people’s most
common form of participation in organised religion. To these ‘official’ rites
of passage were the unofficial systems of popular religious belief which
survived very strongly amongst women. 66 Popular attachment to such
religious rites, ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’, not only sustained a continuity
between industrial and pre-industrial eras, and between urban and rural
Britain, but their survival and, in the case of Anglican baptism, growth in
popularity constituted a critical element in the changing pattern of people’s
religious identity.
It should be clear, even in this brief chapter, that existing secularisation
theory fails to explain the observable statistical data upon which it has been
erected for two centuries. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, social
class was a poor predictor of variations in churchgoing, the working classes
dominated the congregations of virtually all denominations, and churchgoing
and church membership per capita grew during Britain’s most rapid
urbanisation between 1800 and 1880. The consequence is that it is an error
for the historian or sociologist to conclude from religious statistics that the
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