ABSTRACT

Descriptions of urban religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveal a high level of participation among working-class populations in religious rites of passage.1 The involvement of these groups with the church at strategic moments in family and community life is frequently regarded as anomalous in the light of the failure of the majority of the working class to attend church on a regular basis. Historians have, in general, followed the avenues carved out by contemporary middle-class observers and have assumed a correlation between an absence of regular church practice and the supposed prevalence of religious indifference among the people. Consequently, the anomaly presented by the pattern of occasional church practice in the form of the rites of passage is generally explained in relation to factors external to the beliefs of the participants and ascribed to motives other than religious persuasion, such as a desire for social status, recognition and respectability.