Local Churches in New Urban Britain, 1890-1975

"The Greatest Challenge"?

Grant Masom

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030480950
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Grande-Bretagne

"This monograph is an important contribution to our understanding of the varied fortunes of British Christianity during the twentieth century."

- Rev Dr Andrew Atherstone, Tutor in Church History and Latimer Research Fellow, Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford, UK

"This book is an important and original work. Anyone interested in twentieth-century Christianity in Britain will learn much from it. Grant Masom enables the reader to make sense of the new urban spaces that became a key part of British life in the last hundred years."

- Rev Dr David Goodhew, Visiting Fellow of St Johns College, Durham University, UK

"This ground-breaking study adds new depth to our understanding of the importance of religion in English life and the role of the churches in shaping their own destiny in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century."

- Dr Mark Smith, Associate Professor in History, University of Oxford, UK

This book contributes to the ongoing academic debates on secularisation—or the marginalisation of mainstream religious beliefs and practices—in twentieth-century British society. It addresses three areas in which the current literature is weak: the 'agency' of organised religion in the outcomes described as secularisation, rather than explanations based on external challenges (such as the 'modernisation' of society and thought, increased affluence, and more leisure choices); a focus on urban areas transformed by twentieth-century industrialisation and suburbanisation; and an extended time period to the end of the third quarter of the twentieth century, allowing proper consideration of long-term trends alongside short-term upheavals such as the World Wars, the Great Depression, and the social changes of the 1960s. Further, the book employs a distinctly different, highly data-driven approach, considers all religious movements, and sets its conclusions within the wider social and cultural context of a representative community.

© The Author(s) 2020

G. MasomLocal Churches in New Urban Britain, 1890-1975Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700–2000https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48095-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Grant Masom¹

(1)

Farnham Common, Buckinghamshire, UK

Grant Masom

End Abstract

Five times during the interwar period, the Bishop of Oxford asked his clergy what efforts they were making to deal with religious apathy and a range of social problems. If eighteen South Buckinghamshire parishes are any guide, the question nonplussed its recipients, or was deemed unworthy of reply; three quarters of clergy failed to respond on the form returned to the Bishop. Most others answered, in effect, ‘what we do already’. The vicar of Langley, Buckinghamshire, perhaps unwilling to give no reply, ventured plaintively: ‘what can be done?’¹

Twenty-five years later, in the adjacent parish of Colnbrook, another highly experienced clergyman was struggling with attendances at the four Sunday services. Despite efforts to encourage increased attendance, not only were congregations ‘painfully small’—barely into double figures—but all were elderly and declining. However, after facing a 1962 Palm Sunday congregation numbering precisely one, he concluded it was no longer ‘what can be done’, but that he must do something. Services were incomprehensible and boring to ordinary people: ‘the enemy in fact, is boredom. Give [the ordinary man] a service he can understand, and really enjoy taking part in, and he will come’.² The changes he made—visiting and consulting parishioners, trying to make preaching and worship more accessible and focusing one service to be more appealing to young families—were clearly welcomed by many previously not attending the church, as shortly afterwards the family service had a regular congregation of one hundred.³ Why had he not made these apparently modest changes earlier? Writing of his experiences two years later, he warned: ‘any incumbent who considers doing something along [these] lines … will run into bitter opposition from those older members of the congregation who dislike change of any kind; and the more successful his efforts, the more bitter the opposition may become’.⁴

The decline in adherence to formal religious institutions during the twentieth century is often attributed to external factors such as industrialisation, urbanisation, the increasing role of the state in welfare, education and local government and the ‘modernisation’ of thought and attitudes. The institutions themselves can often appear as passive bystanders in the face of massive demographic and social change. But were the churches, their ministers and congregations, powerless to influence either specific events or the direction of travel? This book is concerned with examining whether they could and did; and with what measurable effect.

It is also based on the conviction that most people’s experience of organised religion in this period was both personal and local: experience of a local church and its minister; or of family, friends and acquaintances either linked with a church or with reasons why they were not; or personal events where organised religion was either found to be helpful and relevant—or not.

This area of historical debate has been informed by local studies extending back at least sixty years. These have mainly focused on large towns and cities, particularly in the industrial north and several London boroughs.⁵ However, these were generally communities established well before institutional religious decline became evident, and most studies end in the early twentieth century, with very few examining the mid to late twentieth century.⁶

The interwar years saw Great Britain’s economic centre shift from areas dominated by heavy industry towards the South. New industries located themselves close to the major markets of London and the south-east rather than close to natural resources. As the balance of employment shifted, major economic migration ensued, prompting growth of new towns in the south-east, and the outward spread of the London conurbation. Further impetus was given to these trends in the 1950s through the Greater London Plan.

The economic and demographic consequences posed enormous challenges for all institutions, and the Christian churches were no exception. In 1935, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, described ‘this problem’ as ‘one of the greatest ever presented to the Church of England in the course of its long history’, estimating that perhaps half the population was not being properly served.⁷ The challenges extended to churches of all denominations, and would subject their responses to such demographic change, and wider changes in social life and cultural attitudes, to rigorous practical examination.

This book has three primary aims, therefore—to investigate the ‘agency’ of organised religious institutions, practitioners and participants in their own fortunes; to do so over an extended period, from the end of the nineteenth through the first three quarters of the twentieth century; and to ground the analysis in a local study of one of these fast growing areas of the country.

While the examples above were from the Church of England, others could be quoted from other denominations, and this book examines all churches and churchmanships, where records allow. The extended time period allows trends to be discerned that cannot properly be observed within shorter timeframes. It focuses not only on the formal ministry, but also on church members and congregations: those who were committed and welcoming, and those who were not. It also considers the churches’ engagement with local society and culture, the message they presented and how it changed over time away from what one churchwarden described as the weekly obligation ‘to give 60 minutes to God, and to put up with what you do not like when you get to church’.⁸ Wherever possible, the conclusions are supported by data and quantified analysis, to avoid broad generalisations. The book explores whether cause and effect can be discerned—whether, on all the levels to be examined, human agency can be seen to have had a material effect, either positively or negatively, on the outcomes known as secularisation.

1.1 Secularisation

The marginalisation of mainstream religious belief and practice in England over the last century and more is part of a wider debate about the reduction in the social significance of religion, or secularisation, defined by one of its major proponents as:

the sequestration by political powers of the property and facilities of religious agencies; the shift from religious to secular control of various of the erstwhile activities and functions of religion; the decline in the proportion of their time, energy and resources which men devote to super-empirical concerns; the decay of religious institutions; the supplanting, in matters of behaviour, of religious precepts by demands that accord with strictly technical criteria; and the gradual replacement of a specifically religious consciousness… by an empirical, rational, instrumental orientation; the abandonment of mythical, poetic, and artistic interpretations of nature and society in favour of matter-of-fact description and, with it, the rigorous separation of evaluative and emotive dispositions from cognitive and positivistic orientations.⁹

Many aspects of secularisation are contested. A recent survey argued: ‘the absence of agreement on its definition, characteristics, timing, causes or applicability to particular p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Where We Live Now: A Twentieth-Century Industrial Town
• 3. Organised Religion in New Urban Britain
• 4. 1890–1918: Churches at the Centre
• 5. 1919–1945: Churches Under Challenge
• 6. 1946–1975: Churches at the Margin
• 7. The Churches and the Young
• 8. Conclusions
• Back Matter