Christianity in Britain, R. I. P

Sociology of Religion, Summer, 2001 by Steve Bruce

SUNDAY SCHOOLS

One way in which the British churches dominated the culture and society was through the provision of education. Until the middle of the nineteenth century (and later in many places) most formal schooling was provided by the churches and many children (and some adults) attended Sunday schools to gain a 'secular' education. Even as a viable nation-wide system of state schools was being constructed, very many non-church-going parents sent their children to Sunday schools. Their motives may have been secular but the result was that most Britons gained at least an elementary knowledge of the Christian faith. Table 2 gives figures for UK Sunday school scholars. What it shows is that at the start of the century half of Britain's children were socialized into Christian beliefs and doctrines. By the end of the century, the number of Sunday Scholars was so small that either only the children of church attenders went to Sunday school or not even all the children of regular churchgoers were being so socialized.

FULL-TIME PROFESSIONALS

Full-time clergy may be paid either out of public taxation or the donations of the congregants. In the first case the size of the clergy is a useful indicator of the social power of religion; in the second, it is a good sign of its popularity. In 1900 there were 45,408 clerics in the UK. That figure has declined steadily, until in 2000 there were only 34,157: a fall of 25 percent at a time when the population almost doubled. Or to put it another way, had the Christian churches been relatively as powerful or as popular at the end of the century as at the start, there would have been 80,000 clerics. For the first half of the century, the Catholic Church in Britain showed considerable growth, as the small pre-Reformation population was boosted by migration from Ireland. In Scotland the number of Catholic priests rose from 475 in 1900 to peak at 1,437 in 1960. It then started to decline so that in 2000 there were only 861 priests (Brierley 1999:Table 8.6.4). Entries to training have declined even faster. In 1979 there were 193 men studying for the priesthood. In 1999 there were only 57 (Mackay 1999).

I might add that, were the churches dependent on their present power or popularity, there would be even fewer clerics than there are. Most of the major UK organizations now depend for almost half their income on profits from invested capital garnered during better days.

RELIGIOUS OFFICES

One way in which the unchurched can continue to have some contact with organized religion is through the use of religious offices for rights of passage. While the proportion of people coming to church to be married, baptised and buried remains higher than the number of members or regular attenders, the trends are moving in the same direction. In the nineteenth century almost all weddings were religious ceremonies. For all religions, we only have data from 1971, but these show that the proportion of English weddings that were then religious was 60 percent. This declined fairly steadily to 31 percent in 2000. Given its position as the national church, the Church of England's record of weddings is a good indicator of how popular church weddings are for those Outside the narrow circles of committed church members. In 1900, 67 percent of all weddings in England were celebrated in an Anglican church; in 2000, it was only 20 percent (Brierley 1999:Table 8.5).