The Death of Christian Britain

— The Problem with ‘Religious Decline’ —
From the emergence of the industrial towns in the eighteenth century,
the working class, the labouring poor, the common people, as a class,
substantially, as adults, have been outside the churches. The industrial
working class culture pattern has evolved lacking a tradition of
practice of religion. 55
With Wickham, the theory of secularisation turned Thomas Chalmers’
fears, his statistical methodology and his discourses into an entire academic
discipline relying on Chalmers and his clerical ilk as the ‘sources’ to ‘prove’
the theory. Wickham, like many who followed him, relied on church
sermons and clergy’s social commentary to identify the working-class
haemorrhage from the nineteenth-century churches:
Hitherto [before 1830] the general alienation of this class from the
churches has been a matter of deduction from circumstantial evidence,
but in the ’thirties and ’forties there is forthright evidence to support
the desertion; it is middle-class comment, literate comment, but its
objective accuracy need not be questioned. 56
This reliance on ‘middle-class comment’ became a hallmark of much scholarship
on secularisation theory in the 1960s and 1970s. K.S. Inglis in 1963
rejected a priori that ‘the typical late-Victorian working man went to public
worship for part of his life and then stopped’, and equally rejected the
notion of ‘his early-Victorian father or Georgian grandfather worshipping
for a time and then staying away’. Instead, Inglis returned to a purist
Chalmerian view of modern British religiosity, arguing that ‘the social historian
of religion in modern England could find a worse guide than the
clergyman who remarked in 1896: “It is not that the Church of God has
lost the great towns; it has never had them.”’ 57 Completing the circularity,
the man Inglis was quoting, A.F. Winnington-Ingram, cited Chalmers as a
prominent source. 58
From this point, the clerical myth of the unholy city, and of the irreligious
working classes in particular, was cemented into modern scholarship.
It more especially re-entered general history books as historians used
Victorian clerics as sources. G. Kitson Clark in 1962 discussed how evangelists
sought ‘to penetrate to the savagery and ignorance of the neglected
and indifferent’. In 1973 John Kent wrote that ‘in the years 1815–48, when
the new cities were at their most chaotic, it had looked as though workingclass
Christianity would vanish’, whilst David Mole wrote that the majority
of the Birmingham working classes were ‘lost to organized religion, and
were scarcely or never seen in the churches or chapels, for whom they
formed a vast and increasing mission field’. 59 John Kent repeatedly returned
to the theme of an alienated working class, arguing in 1978 that revivalism
left them largely untouched. 60 Many historians from the 1950s to
the 1980s came to uncritically believe Victorian church sources on the
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