Truth? A Reply to Bruce

Abstract

Steve Bruce's impassioned defense of the secularization of Britain is largely irrelevant to our theory, partly because it ignores our very careful distinction between organized religious participation and subjective religiousness, and partly because it repeatedly equates religion and Christianity. As will be discussed, we did not suggest that the medieval masses were lacking in subjective religiousness. We did argue that for lack of vigorous religious firms, participation in organized religion was very low in medieval Europe (including Britain), and hence there could not have been a substantial decline since then. Bruce's efforts to document such a decline rest on a mixture of unfounded assertions and statistical solecisms. Bruce's church membership statistics (1800-1990) are very misleading. He suggests that we should not have used Currie, Gilbert, and Horsley's summary table, but instead should have worked from the detailed statistics for each denomination. This is a merely a debater's trick, since Bruce knows very well that either procedure yields virtually identical totals. The real reason Bruce's rates differ from ours is that Bruce used the population over 14 as his denominator, whereas we used the total population. Because the proportion over 14 has increased very substantially since 1900 (from 66% to 79%), use of this denominator forces an artifactual decline in church membership. However, no matter how the rates are calculated, Bruce's claim that a substantial decline in church membership has taken place in Britain rests entirely on his extraordinary distortions of the 1990 rate. First of all, Bruce limited religious membership to Christians, conveniently omitting Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and other non-Christians. This would have been proper in earlier times when non-Christian religious membership in Britain was trivial, but these are no longer small bodies. The United Kingdom Christian Handbook, 1988/90 (Brierley and Longley 1988) reported that in 1987 these groups had a total membership of 1,578,300. If these are added to Bruce's Christian membership totals, then the 1990 membership rate will be 17.5% of the population over 14, not 14%. Of even greater significance is the fact that Bruce's Catholic totals do not represent members, but average weekly mass attendance! In his footnote 4, Bruce claims that today only about 30% of Catholics attend mass weekly (although the 1991 World Values Survey for Great Britain shows 48%). It would be very conservative to estimate the actual number of Catholic members in Britain as twice the number who attend in an average week. With this correction, British church membership for 1990 rises to 21.2% of those over 14 and 17.2% of the total population. Clearly, the true rates lie between those based on the entire population and those limited to persons over 14, since some denominations counted children and others did not. In our judgment, those based on the total population are to be preferred since they are not influenced by biases in the denominator. But, either way, the trends shown in Table 1 offer no comfort to the secularization faithful.