Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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therefore felt humiliated by the concession (a feeling reinforced by a lack of
decent clothing). This sense of proud independence was impressively exempli-
fied in certain other non-established Glasgow and Edinburgh churches where
pew tariffs were fixed by congregational vote; here there were few seats at less
than s., and the cheapest seats tended to go un-let. Thus, despite the indubita-
ble off-putting effects of pew renting, analysis of the social composition of the
membership of several Glasgow churches from the s to the s has dem-
onstrated that at least per cent, and sometimes as many as three-quarters, had
working-class (particularly artisan) occupations. Consequently, in many places
pew-rent reformers achieved little until the early s, when the idea of abo-
lition gained ground as parsons in the age of the ‘social gospel’ became uncom-
fortable with them – but also because mounting church debt prompted the
adoption of different methods of fund raising, as in Halifax and Keighley. Yet,
everywhere the damage done to church attendance was long since done, for
neither the abolition of pew rents, nor their erosion through desertion of city-
centre churches by the suburban-bound, restored those absolute falls in church
attendance which were already becoming apparent by . Furthermore, atten-
dance rates in the Church of Scotland (whose male members suffered massive
unemployment in the early thirties) held up much longer than those of its
English counterpart, even though it enforced pew rents until the s.
72
Despite Mann’s warnings, competitive campaigns of church building marked
the decades after , as nonconformist churches were built and rebuilt in a
physical demonstration of the arrival to social power and influence of the pre-
viously excluded dissenters, and the establishment retaliated. Together they
asserted the presence of religious authority in the urban landscape. Grand non-
conformist chapels were the ‘spiritual expressions of men who had . . . moulded
. . . their towns’, who built villas, banks, warehouses, town halls, YMCAs and
Douglas A. Reid
72
Smith, Religion in Industrial Society, pp. –; Wickham, Church and People in an Industrial City, pp.
–, –, –; Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes, pp. –, ; Dalton, ‘Walter
Farquhar Hook’, –; R. B. Walker, ‘Religious changes in Liverpool in the nineteenth
century’, JEcc.Hist., (), , –; Callum G. Brown, ‘The costs of pew-renting: church
management, church-going, and social class in nineteenth-century Glasgow’, JEcc.Hist.,
(), esp. , ; P. Hillis, ‘Presbyterianism and social class in mid-nineteenth century
Glasgow: a study of nine churches’, JEcc.Hist., (), –; W. R. Ward, ‘The cost of
Establishment: some reflections on church building in Manchester’, in G. J. Cuming, ed., Studies
in Church History:Volume III (Leiden, ), p. ; Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society,
p. ; Brown, Social History of Religion in Scotland,pp., , –, , , –, ‒;
cf. A. A. McLaren, Religion and Social Class:The Disruption Years in Aberdeen (London, ), p. ;
Trainor, Black Country Elites,p.; Brown, ‘Did urbanisation secularise Britain?’, –, –;
Eileen Yeo, ‘Christianity in Chartist struggle –’, P&P, (), –, esp. –;
Lewis, Lighten their Darkness, pp. –; Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, pp. ‒, esp.
n., –; Stephen Yeo, Religion and Voluntary Organisations in Crisis, – (London, ),
pp. –; Nigel Yates, Robert Hume and Paul Hastings, Religion and Society in Kent, –
(Woodbridge, ), p. ; Paul A. Welsby, ‘Church and people in Victorian Ipswich’, Church
Quarterly Review (April–June ), ‒.
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Mechanics’ Institutes as recreations of Rome, Florence or Milan: ‘Halifax is a
restless Renaissance city, with the Crossleys of Square Chapel as its Medici’,
writes Clyde Binfield. George Gilbert Scott’s All Souls, Haley Hill, was the
notable Anglican reply to Square Chapel’s translation to Gothic magnificence in
. Glasgow saw the dominating Greek Presbyterian style of Alexander
Thomson; London’s East End got the imposing brick structures of James Brooks.
The second major impetus to church building came from shifts in populations
and property values. Thus Birmingham Baptists and Methodists built intensively
in the suburbs between and , with a grandeur reflecting the rise in the
worldly fortunes of their congregations. ‘Dissenting Gothic’ was the style in
Bowden, ‘Manchester’s most relaxed suburb’. Some suburban churches (like
some public parks), may have been developed as speculative ventures, to improve
the value of surrounding dwellings; like theatres, others moved to escape dete-
rioration in their locality. The pace of building varied from town to town. In
Birmingham the late s saw ten new churches opened in five years. Between
and the number of churches in Halifax quadrupled. In Glasgow nine-
teen suburban churches were built in the last five years of the century.
73
The result was massive debts, and an increase in the costs and obligations of
membership, one consequence of which was the annual resort to bazaars and
sales of work from the s. And the wasteful competition may have contrib-
uted to a demoralising feeling of decline because of the half-empty inner-urban
churches. In contrast, Roman Catholicism built fewer churches, most of them
were full, the congregation felt part of a thriving community and Catholicism
was helped to its position as the denomination which resisted longest the ten-
dency to attendance decline.
74
The erection of new churches and chapels was complemented by the devel-
opment of the mission hall. This occurred partly in a natural process as urban
missionaries achieved some success and moved from evangelisation to pastoral
care, and partly as a deliberate process of plantation, in recognition of the need
to evangelise working-class communities from within to overcome the class gulfs
Playing and praying
73
Faucher, Manchester in , p. n. ; Kendall, Origin and History, , pp. –; Clyde Binfield,
So Down to Prayers:Studies in English Nonconformity – (London, ), pp. , ; Green,
Religion in the Age of Decline, pp. –, esp. and –; Dixon and Muthesius, Victorian
Architecture, pp. , –, –; Ward, ‘The cost of Establishment’, pp. ‒; R. Dennis,
English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, ), pp. –; VCH,
Warwickshire, , pp. –, ; John H. Y. Briggs, ‘Elite and proletariat in nineteenth-century
Birmingham Nonconformity’, in A. P. F. Sell, ed., Protestant Nonconformists and the West Midlands
of England (Keele, ), p. ; R. Q. Gray, ‘Religion, culture and social class in late nineteenth
and early twentieth century Edinburgh’, in Crossick, ed., The Lower Middle Class in Britain,pp.
–; Brown, Social History of Religion in Scotland, pp. –.
74
Gill, The Myth of the Empty Church, pp. –, , , –, , –, , –; Green,
Religion in the Age of Decline, pp. –, ; Royle, The Victorian Church in York, pp. –;
Brown, Social History of Religion in Scotland,pp.–; H. A. Mess, Industrial Tyneside (London,
), p. .
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between clergy and people tellingly emphasised by Mann. The former process
is difficult to trace but it is noteworthy that by there were approximately
half as many professional lay missionaries in London as there were clergymen.
One of the problems for the established churches and respectable dissenting con-
gregations in the new urban conditions was the relative fluidity of the industrial
and service-class population as industries shifted and commerce and railways
remade the character of central areas. The flexibility of small missions in rented
premises helped to meet these conditions. Judging by the example of
Birmingham, nonconformist churches were in the van of mission plantation,
but, like the Anglicans, they too reached peaks of activity in the s and s.
By Booth commented that London was ‘dotted over’ with ‘shabby’mission
halls, ‘in almost every street’ in the poorer parts, ‘more numerous than schools
or churches, and only less numerous than public-houses’, preaching the Gospel,
teaching children, guiding mothers, visiting the sick, relieving poverty and pro-
viding temperate ‘social relaxation and enjoyment’. It is difficult not to be
impressed by the ubiquity of these mission churches and their unsung contribu-
tion to the texture of life in poor districts.
75
Institutional expansion was more than matched by church auxiliaries and asso-
ciations so that by the last decades of the century the churches, collectively, had
established themselves as among the most significant providers of community
facilities. The initial rationale for this was to evangelise the ‘home heathen’, and
to undertake ‘practical Christianity’, especially with ‘the poor and lowly’ and ‘the
hungry’ (through coal clubs, clothing clubs, provident and sick societies, savings
clubs, sewing classes, soup kitchens and medical missions), and thereby gener-
ally to increase the influence of religion upon society. To some extent noncon-
formity developed parochial attributes as a natural accompaniment of the
transition that so many denominations were making in these decades from
‘chapel’ to ‘church’. Similar developments took place in areas with strong Irish
immigrant populations as a means of ‘building the Catholic ghetto’.
76
Douglas A. Reid
75
Lewis, Lighten their Darkness, pp. , –, –; J. R. Kellett, The Impact of Railways on Victorian
Cities (London, ), pp. –, –; Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England, pp.
–, ; VCH, Warwickshire, , pp. –, –, –, –; Briggs, ‘Elite and pro-
letariat in nineteenth-century Birmingham’, pp. –, –; also Binfield, So Down to Prayers,
pp. ‒, for Kensington Congregational Church and Notting Dale Mission; Morris, Religion
and Urban Change, p. ; Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, p. ; Booth, Life and Labour of the
People in London, rd series, , pp. , , ; C. Ward Davis, ‘One man’s answer’, in W. S. F.
Pickering, ed., A Social History of the Diocese of Newcastle – (London, ), ch. . For
insights into the contrasting styles of ‘back street Bethels’and ‘West End chapels’ see Peter Ackers,
‘West End Chapel, back street Bethel: labour and capital in the Wigan churches of Christ c.
–’, JEcc.Hist., (), –, and for the ‘community’ role of chapels in smaller
towns see Ainsworth, ‘Religion in the working-class community’, – and McLeod, ‘New
perspectives on Victorian working-class religion’, –.
76
Quotations from John M. Brindley, Church Work in Birmingham (Birmingham, ), pp. , ;
Reid, ‘Labour, leisure and politics’, pp. –; Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society,
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However, the most popular church auxiliaries had been founded long before,
namely the Sunday Schools. Their enrolments expanded from per cent of the
population of English under fifteens in to their peak of per cent in .
Given similar trends in Scotland – per cent belonged in Glasgow in –
religion was thus at its most generally influential through Sunday Schools. From
the mid-century, nonconformists, at least, began to see them as ‘nurseries’, espe-
cially through the development of the adolescent upper schools, Bible classes and
(virtually all male) mutual improvement societies, which in Lancashire factory
towns, in particular, were often deeply implicated in the development of popular
party political activity. At a less committed level, it was said in Manchester that
‘to the young people of the working classes it is their club; there they seek their
diversions, form their friendships, and begin their courtings’.
77
As Puritanism was reconsidered by leading clerics in the s and s,
church-sponsored recreations grew apace, both with evangelical and moralising
intent, but also as extensions of the increasing ambitions of their members –
making ‘rational recreations’ really very popular. It has even been claimed that in
Scotland they ‘created a religious dominance of “respectable” urban culture in
the mid-Victorian decades’. The result was a plethora of clubs and associations
for adult men, young men, boys, girls and women, temperance clubs, Mothers’
Meetings (a mixture of prayer, sewing, summer treats and tea), concerts, debat-
ing societies, gym or recreation classes, sports clubs and Christian Endeavour
societies. Another important impulse was to induce young men to bridge the
gap between Sunday School and church – the egalitarian Pleasant Sunday
Afternoon movement (begun in West Bromwich in ), attracted four-figure
attendance in numerous towns, though its success was also a measure of the social
distance still felt between ordinary men and socially respectable churchgoers.
Judging by evidence from Birmingham in , Anglicanism was more condu-
cive to both charitable and recreational auxiliaries. However, in Lambeth’s
nonconformists had left behind much of their puritan inheritance, having a
higher proportion of recreational organisations than Lambeth’s Anglican
churches. A little further south into the suburbs, a typical Congregational church
provided ‘dances, socials, badminton tournaments, discussions and amateur
Playing and praying
pp. –, –, –; Brown, Social History of Religion in Scotland, pp. , –; Morris, Religion
and Urban Change, pp. , ; Hugh McLeod, ‘Building the “Catholic ghetto”: Catholic organ-
isations, –’, in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood, eds., Voluntary Religion (Studies in Church
History, , Oxford, ), pp. –.
77
Gill, The Myth of the Empty Church, p. ; Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England,
pp. –; Gill, ‘Secularisation and census data’, ; Chadwick, The Victorian Church, ,
pp. –; David Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society – (London, ),
pp. –; Brown, Social History of Religion in Scotland,p.; Callum Brown, ‘Religion, class and
church growth’, in Fraser and Morris, eds., People and Society in Scotland, , p. ; Joyce, Work,
Society and Politics, pp. –, –; John M. Elvey, Recollections of the Cathedral and Parish Church
of Manchester ([Manchester], ), p. .
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entertainments’ to its younger members. And in Edinburgh’s Morningside, the
minister of St Matthew’s Free Church depicted its social fellowships, guilds and
societies (providing literary and dramatic activities, rambling, curling and golf ),
as valuable new ‘links in the chain of full Church membership’. Thus, later nine-
teenth-century suburban living tilted the role of the churches further towards
associational and recreational objectives.
78
Yet they were by no means purely absorbed in their own sense of mission and
institutional developments, and the civic impact of the churches constitutes
another major theme. The Scottish burgh councils had owned their churches
since the Reformation, and were the earliest in Britain to develop a religious
response to the new urban problems, playing an important role in coordinating
educational, philanthropic and medical agencies. It is true that the removal of
the parish vestry from the administration of poor relief in England in , and
in Scotland in , represented a measure of institutional secularisation, yet the
churches’ role in education continued to expand into the second half of the
century, and a more widely defined religiously inspired public welfare policy
developed in the s and s as the intractability of the social and moral
problems of the cities became apparent. As the discussion of parks and libraries
illustrated, Buchanan in Glasgow, and Dawson and Dale in Birmingham, helped
to moralise local politics. Although high church attempts to reform liturgical
practice emphasised spiritual authority over a narrow field rather than over the
wider society, evangelicals and broad churchmen within the Church of England
did play a part in the quest for housing reform. It was thus at least partially as a
result of the religious enthusiasm for social reform that the state became more
important in the last third of the nineteenth century. The logical outcome of
this approach was the vigorous slum clearance policy of Canon Charles
Jenkinson as chairman of Leeds’ Housing Committee (-).
79
Douglas A. Reid
78
Reid, ‘Labour, leisure and politics’ pp. –; Hewitt, The Emergence of Stability in the Industrial
City, p. ; Gray, ‘Religion, culture and social class’, pp. , –; Brown, Social History of
Religion in Scotland,pp., , –, –, , ‒, , –; Mole ‘Challenge to the
Church. Birmingham, –’, pp. –; John Blackham, ‘“I remember”. The true story of
the P.S.A. Movement’, Birmingham Gazette and Express, Mar. ; Wickham, Church and People
in an Industrial City,p.; Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes, pp. ‒; McLeod, Class and
Religion,pp.–, n. ; Bradley, ‘The English Sunday’, ; Kenward, The Suburban Child,
p. ; Besant, London in the Nineteenth Century, p. ; John M. Brindley, Church Work in Birmingham
(Birmingham, ), pp. , and passim; Yeo, Religion and Voluntary Organisations, pp. ‒;
Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society, pp. –, –; Morris, Religion and Urban
Change, pp. –; Rowntree, Poverty,pp., –; Royle, Victorian Church in York, pp. –.
79
J. Sandford, Social Reforms; Or the Habits, Dwellings and Education of our People (Birmingham, );
Roy Peacock, ‘The Church of England and the working classes in Birmingham –’
(MPhil thesis, University of Aston, ), pp. ff.; Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons, pp. , ;
Callum G. Brown, ‘A revisionist approach to religious change’, in Bruce, ed., Religion and
Modernisation,pp.–; Alastair Mason, ‘Jenkinson and Southcott’, in Mason, ed., Religion in
Leeds, pp. –; Roger Lloyd, The Church of England in the Twentieth Century (London, ‒),
vol. , pp. –.
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Although there were periodic waves of evangelical activity between and
, the s was a particularly significant decade. The s had seen
Anglican street preaching, the (female) Ranyard Bible Mission and the hiring of
theatres for evangelism; the s saw Methodist street-corner revivalism; the
mid-s saw the enormous impact of the revivalist campaign of visiting
American evangelists, Moody and Sankey, and the Salvation Army (which, after
tumultuous opposition, stimulated another characteristic and lasting feature of
street life, the Mission Band). However, the s refocused the churches’ atten-
tion even more on the problem of evangelising the poor. The local censuses
showed little progress had been made in attracting the working classes, and the
socio-economic impediments to religious faith were emphasised by several
influential publications, in particular Rev. Andrew Mearns’ sensational revela-
tions of slum degradation, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London () – all capped
by economic depression in mid-decade, and the rebirth of socialism. The relig-
ious (and rational recreational) responses indicate that this was regarded as the
most serious social crisis since the s: university settlements (the first in
Whitechapel in ), the Wesleyan Central Mission Hall movement (from
), the People’s Palace movement (from ); the Anglican Christian Social
Union () and, as we have seen, innumerable church missions and parish aux-
iliaries. More specialised, but essentially part of the same movement to ‘civilise’
the working classes were the uniformed youth organisations: the Church Army
(), the (Baptist) Boys’ Brigade, formed in Glasgow in , and its Anglican,
Jewish and Roman Catholic counterparts, especially the very popular (Anglican)
Church Lads’ Brigade, established in London in .
80
Collectively then the churches developed the most extraordinary web of
social institutions, and even when seen purely as voluntary organisations against
other voluntary organisations their reach was impressive. For example, in
Lambeth, in there were churches, chapels and mission halls, attended
by perhaps per cent of the population, running numerous recreational
Playing and praying
80
Lewis, Lighten their Darkness, ch. ; Winter, London’s Teeming Streets, pp. –; Brown, Social
History of Religion in Scotland, pp. –, , –; Chadwick, The Victorian Church, , p. ;
G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Oxford, ); A. Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London
(London, ; new edn, ed. A. S. Wohl, Leicester, ); Victor Bailey, ‘Salvation Army riots,
the “Skeleton Army” and legal authority in the provincial town’, in Donajgrodzki, ed., Social
Control, pp. ‒; Asa Briggs, ‘The Salvation Army in Sussex –’, in Kitch, ed., Studies
in Sussex Church History, pp. –; Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, pp. –; Inglis,
Churches and the Working Classes, pp. –, , –, –, –, –; McLeod, Class and relig-
ion, pp. –; Morris, Religion and Urban Change, pp. –, , –; Gerald Parsons, ‘A ques-
tion of meaning: religion and working-class life’, in G. Parsons, ed., Religion in Victorian Britain,
vol. : Controversies (Manchester, ), p. ; S. Joyce, ‘Castles in the air: the People’s Palace, cul-
tural reform and the East End working class’, Victorian Studies, (), –; Elspeth King,
The People’s Palace and Glasgow Green (Glasgow, ); J. Springhall, Youth, Empire and Society
(London, ), pp. –, –, et passim; John Springhall, Sure & Steadfast:A History of the Boys’
Brigade, to (London, ).
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auxiliaries, as compared with pubs and beerhouses. Their influence was
much wider than indicated by snapshot census computations: through church
day schools, and Sunday Schools, and post-Sunday School organisations,
through their charitable and recreational ancillaries, through the popularity of
religious festivals, through missions and street campaigns, and, indirectly but
significantly, through the increasing proportion of women in most congrega-
tions, aspects of the Gospel message touched enormous numbers even of the
working-class population.
81
(viii)
Nevertheless, if few historians would now maintain that urbanisation was com-
prehensively detrimental to habits of religious attendance, few would dissent
from the view that formal religious adherence began to falter in the last two
decades of the nineteenth century, and to decline absolutely early in the twen-
tieth century. The local surveys conducted in the s in large towns in both
England and Scotland showed overall evidence of only a slight decline in the
proportion of worshippers since mid-century. However, over the following
twenty-five years there were very different results. Thus in ‘metropolitan
London’ attendances fell by nearly a quarter, from . per cent to per cent
by –, and in eight northern and Midland towns in the early twentieth
century were down to per cent. Thus the rot had set in from the s, or,
judging by three censuses conducted in Liverpool between and ,
mainly in the s. Moreover, between and both Anglican and non-
conformist attendance in Liverpool declined by per cent, although Roman
Catholic attendance continued to grow proportionately to the population.
Where adequate membership figures exist for England as a whole (mostly for the
Methodists), they also suggest the importance of the s as the period when
steady relative decline set in, though it should be stressed that absolute growth did
not peak until for some Methodists and for English Baptists, and non-
conformist confidence was hardly shaken until this period. Disruption to ordi-
nary routines during the First World War had considerable effects on church
attendance, and more than cancelled out the boost provided by anxious wartime
worship, but afterwards Anglicans and Wesleyan Methodists, in particular, recov-
ered somewhat, and reached their absolute peaks in the period –. In an
Douglas A. Reid
81
Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society, p. ; McLeod, Class and Religion, pp. ‒, ‒,
; Clive D. Field, ‘Adam and Eve: gender in the English Free Church constituency’, JEcc.Hist.,
(), ‒; McLeod, Religion and Society in England, pp. –; H. McLeod, Piety and
Poverty (New York and London, ), pp. ‒; Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, pp. ,
–; see also Callum G. Brown and Jayne D. Stephenson, ‘“Sprouting wings?”: women and
religion in Scotland c. –’, in Esther Breitenbach and Eleanor Gordon, eds., Women in
Scottish Society – (Edinburgh, ), pp. –.
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indication of the strength of Scotland’s Calvinist tradition, Presbyterian mem-
bership continued to grow (though much more slowly) well into the twentieth
century, despite attendances declining.
82
Why did these declines occur? In order to begin answering this question it is
important to understand how they occurred: in other words, were there
differential falls between different social groups? The short answer is that the
‘respectable classes’ were those whose attendances showed the greatest falls. Thus
late nineteenth-century attendances in London declined most in the wealthiest
areas, especially in Hampstead, Kensington and Westminster, whereas in the
poorest areas the reduction was very limited; there was even an increase in atten-
dances in the case of Bermondsey and Finsbury. In Lambeth, attendances of the
wealthier nonconformists, the Congregationalists and Wesleyans, ‘declined most
rapidly’. And in Edwardian Liverpool attendance in the wealthiest suburbs fell
by a fifth, nearly twice as much as in the Protestant working-class areas.
Consequently, by the s, even where attendance figures showed little dimi-
nution, as in Glasgow, there were difficulties in recruiting district visitors, and
Sunday School teachers – evidence of a lesser commitment to the churches by
the middle classes.
83
Initially, at any rate, it is arguable that the decline in religious attendance was
more a consequence of apologies than of apostasy. In Lambeth, for instance,
morning attendances were particularly hit, which suggests that bicycling, or
boating or golf were becoming major disincentives to former ‘twicers’. By
motoring was noticed as a factor. In so far as the churches constituted ‘clubs for
respectable people’ competing attractions were becoming more powerful. Much
ink has been spilt trying to define the connection between the shaking of belief
by Biblical criticism, Darwinism, the repudiation of the doctrine of Hell and the
decline in church attendances. However, while not wishing to minimise unduly
the influence of intellectual doubt it seems likely that it was not the immediate
key to falls in church attendance, because, to put it at its simplest, and as we shall
see, it was possible to continue to believe in God while not feeling any urgent
need to go regularly to church. Rather, for the respectable classes, it was the
social incentives to go which were reducing while the incentives to be elsewhere
Playing and praying
82
Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England, pp. , , ; Gill, The Myth of the Empty Church,
pp. , , ; McLeod, Class and Religion, pp. ‒, –, n. ; McLeod, ‘White collar
values and the role of religion’, pp. –; D. C. Jones, ed., Merseyside (London, ), vol. , p.
; McLeod, Religion and Society in England,pp.‒; Cox, The English Churches in a Secular
Society, pp. –; Currie, Gilbert and Horsley, Churches and Church-Goers, pp. –, ‒,
–, –; Brown, Social History of Religion in Scotland,pp.‒, n. ; K. K. Harrison,
‘The decline of Methodism in Kingston upon Hull in this century’ (MA thesis, University of
Hull, ), pp. , , .
83
McLeod, Class and Religion, pp. , ; McLeod, ‘White collar values and the role of religion’,
pp. –; Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society, pp. , –; Brown, Social History of
Religion in Scotland, pp. –ff; Morris, Religion and Urban Change, p. .
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were increasing. Intellectual doubt, not to mention a reaction against Puritanism
and the churches which preached it, damaged the enthusiasm of religious adher-
ents, but were solvents of religious beliefs in the longer term.
84
Other social disincentives were consequent upon changes in the nature of the
capitalist firm at the end of the nineteenth century, and in the loyalties of employ-
ees – by weakening the industrial paternalism which had formerly encouraged
employers to emphasise churchgoing amongst their factory workers by the
(sometimes coercive) force of their example. Reinforced by suburbanisation, the
withdrawal of this ‘Vice-Presidential class’ from close involvement in factory dis-
trict churches resulted in financial problems for them and their elaborate parish
organisations, reducing their ability to compete with commercial leisure.
85
The churches’ increasing stress on the necessity of social reform meant that it
came to be seen as a Christian’s duty to pursue it, but by the end of the nine-
teenth century there were more effective channels for ‘social service’ than phi-
lanthropy, namely local sanitary boards, municipal councils, school boards and
local education authorities. Simultaneously, the ideological challenge of collec-
tivism reduced both the confidence and appeal of individualistic evangelicalism.
The result was that the churches became marginalised – a process accelerated by
wartime and post-war welfarism. More particularly, nonconformity was a victim
of its own political success in eliminating discrimination against it. The integra-
tion of nonconformists into the governance of society inevitably eroded that
sense of apartness which had sustained earlier generations of dissenters, and pros-
perous youngsters growing up in the last years of the nineteenth century saw less
and less point in nonconformity in a society which had eradicated most of their
civic and religious grievances. Some drifted to a looser religious affiliation with
Anglicanism; others, affected by the theological liberalism characteristic of the
more intellectual free churches, became susceptible to the appeal of alternative
late nineteenth-century philosophies such as secularism and socialism. Paradox-
ically, ‘men’s meetings’ and the (almost exclusively male) mutual improvement
societies may have facilitated this kind of transition by developing the critical
faculties as well as the social consciences of their members – in the case of
Halifax’s North End Unitarian Chapel, via the town’s Labour Church () to
socialist politics. Amongst urban elites too the rise of class politics meant that it
no longer mattered so much to them whether one was a nonconformist or an
Douglas A. Reid
84
A. D. Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain (London, ), p. ; Cox, The English
Churches in a Secular Society, pp. , –, ; Gill, The Myth of the Empty Church, p. ; Green,
Religion in the Age of Decline, p. , cites ‘clubs’ quotation; Chadwick, The Victorian Church, chs.
–; Brown, Social History of Religion in Scotland,pp.–; McLeod, Religion and Society in
England, pp. –; Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes, pp. –.
85
Ye o , Religion and Voluntary Organisations in Crisis, pp. –; Cox, The English Churches in a Secular
Society, pp. , –, ; Brown, Social History of Religion in Scotland, pp. –, –, ;
Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, pp. –; cf. Wickham, Church and People in an Industrial
City, pp. –.
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Anglican, and in interwar England nonconformity’s remaining strength ebbed
away from the once-Liberal industrial North to the more prosperous and
Conservative South-East.
86
In a pluralistic society religious organisations must ‘recruit or die’. What incen-
tives were there for the young to continue to join the churches? In so far as they
appealed to young people’s idealism regarding social reform the alternative prac-
tice of secular socio-political work and alternative ideal of socialism were dam-
aging. Moreover, although the decline in numbers was led by the respectable
classes, the gradual fall-off in urban immigration meant that the young urban
populations were town bred, and therefore decreasingly likely to be reared as
churchgoers, even in regions where churchgoing was higher. Consequently,
when Sunday School attendances began gradually to decline (noticeably by )
the churches knew they were in trouble, especially as the birth rate decline meant
proportionally fewer children from whom to recruit adult membership.
However, real membership losses from Sunday Schools were smaller than those
from adult church membership: there was a lag between rates of decline of adults
and children. Therefore, one has to ask why were the churches unable to trans-
late their popularity with children into popularity with adults? One reason is that
like is not being compared with like. Many children must have been directed to
Sunday School; when they became adults they could signify that status by choos-
ing to ‘put away childish things’. Beyond this explanation one comes to the issue
of competition for time and newer, more compelling, sources of aspiration and
identity. Involvement in increasingly multifarious church and chapel auxiliaries
for charitable or sporting purposes absorbed energies and time, and tempted a
lesser commitment to worship as they came to be seen as its religiously sanctioned
surrogate. Although Sunday School leagues were still strong in the interwar
period, especially in cricket, commentators in the s were plausibly seeing
football as an emotional substitute for religion.
87
Missions, outgoing parsons, and philanthropic and recreational auxiliaries may
Playing and praying
86
Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society, pp. ‒, –ff., , –ff.; Binfield, So
Down to Prayers, pp. , ; Morris, Religion and Urban Change, chs. and ; S. J. D. Green,
‘Religion and the rise of the common man: mutual improvement societies, religious associations
and popular education in three industrial towns in the West Riding of Yorkshire c. –’,
in Fraser, ed., Cities, Class and Communication, pp. –; McLeod, Religion and Society in England,
pp. –, –, n. ; Currie, Gilbert and Horsley, Churches and Church-Goers, pp. –;
Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity (London, ), pp. , n. .
87
Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society, pp. –, –, tables –; Gill, The Myth of the
Empty Church,p.; Jeffrey Hill, ‘“First class” cricket and the leagues: some notes on the devel-
opment of English cricket, –’, International Journal of the History of Sport, (), –;
David Bowker, ‘Parks and baths: sport, recreation and municipal government in Ashton-under-
Lyme between the wars’, Jeffrey Hill, ‘League cricket in the North and Midlands, –’,
and Jack Williams, ‘Recreational cricket in Bolton between the wars’, all in Holt, ed., Sport and
the Working Class, pp. , –, ; Fishwick, English Football and Society, pp. , ; Jones,
Workers at Play,pp., n. ; McLeod, Religion and Society in England, p. .
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