The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
churches, there were minor falls in membership; in their Scottish branches
the falls were small, and in the case of the Congregationalists there was level
membership in 1946–56, whilst in England over the same period the Baptists
fell from 218,727 to 198,597 and the Congregationalists from 223,634 to
193,341. The biggest falls by far were in Wales, where a crisis of dissent from
the inter-war years continued in the 1950s; Wales deserves a detailed study
to ascertain the causes of this early and steep collapse of dominant Christian
culture. 71
But these were relatively small churches. In the larger churches in the
1950s there was significant growth. Leaving aside the sustained growth in
numbers of practising Roman Catholics (which reached a peak of mass attendance
in 1966), the Church of England reached its post-war peak of Easter
Day communicants in 1958–62, the Church of Scotland reached a post-war
membership peak in 1956, the Presbyterian Church of England in 1960 and
the Presbyterian Church in Ireland in 1967. 72 McLeod does not offer any
direct evidence against the proposition of rising church membership, and
admits a rise of 24 per cent between 1947 and 1956 in Easter Day communicants
as a proportion of English adults (a rise of 2.6 per cent per annum). 73
By any standards that was large, and was unprecedented in the twentieth
century. But McLeod seeks to challenge this argument of unprecedented
church growth principally by switching the argument to something different
– churchgoing where he rightly detects stasis in the 1950s. Church membership
and churchgoing are two different indicators, and they don’t always
move together. In relation to adherence, some churches were performing
less well than others in the 1950s, but there was no collapse of church
membership, no mass haemorrhage of the faithful, whilst in relation to
churchgoing there was equally no sudden collapse in the 1950s (as there was
to be in the 1960s).
Indeed, there was something of a religious boom in the late 1940s and
1950s. 74 This is borne out by statistics. The Church of England post-war
baptism rate stayed buoyant, reaching a peak (amongst the years with
recorded data) in 1950 of 632 births per 1,000 (up from 597 in 1947), and
only from 1958 does it fall permanently below 600. 75 The growth in youth
membership and religious participation is widely attested from statistics and
qualitative sources, and McLeod himself produces a table of data that shows
that female confirmations per 1,000 of population aged over 12 rose continuously
and sharply from 1948 to 1960, with the 1960 peak (at 40.9 per
1,000) being the highest since before 1934, whilst male confirmations also
reached a post-war peak (of 28.1) in 1956. 76 This boom in religious recruitment
can also be seen in the recruitment success figures (see Figure 8.1,
p. 189), with the Church of England’s success in turning baptised persons
into confirmations rising from 35.8 per cent in 1948 to 43.8 per cent in 1954,
its highest recorded figure in the twentieth century, and the Church of
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