ABSTRACT
When the results of the government’s religious census became known in the 1850s, considerable alarm was aroused at the apparently ‘low level’ of church attendance. The census compiler, Horace Mann, set the tone when he wrote in his report that ‘a sadly formidable portion of the English people are habitual neglecters of the public ordinances of religion’. However, what strikes the modern eye in the census results (Map 11.1) is not the low but the high level of church-going in 1851. The number of attendances on census Sunday throughout Great Britain was 11,807,292, representing 56.7 per cent of the total population. However, a significant proportion of these attendances were by ‘twicers’ and ‘thricers’—that
is, worshippers who attended two or three of the services during the day. Unfortunately, it is impossible to make an accurate allowance for multiple church attendances, but we can say that the minimum number of individual worshippers were those recorded at the highest-attended diet, the morning service, who were enumerated at 5,169,182, or 24.8 per cent of the population. A further di f f icul ty is that both of these figures make no allowance for non-returns which were particularly high in Scotland (20 per cent), because of the lack at that time of local Registrars to supervise the enumeration; nonreturns in England and Wales, where there were Registrars, were significantly lower
(4 per cent). If non-returning congregations are assumed to have been the same size as returning ones, the proportion of population attending church rises to 26.9 per cent for morning services and 60.8 per cent for all three services. In reality, the true figure lay somewhere in between, possibly around 40 to 45 per cent. Contrast this with the figure for average Sunday attendances in 1979-84 of 11.3 per cent. Clearly, church-going played an enormous part in the l ives of the Brit ish people in the mid-nineteenth century, but much less so today.
