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Introduction—Historiography and Sources

This chapter provides essential context by outlining the recent historiography of secularization in Britain and the sources of religious statistics, on which subsequent chapters are largely based. The work of leading contributors to the debates about British religious change is summarized, notably Steve Bruce, Hugh McLeod, Callum Brown, Jeffrey Cox, Jeremy Morris, and Simon Green. In this book, secularization is used as a convenient shorthand descriptor for the waning social significance of religion, rather than an invocation of the classic theory of secularization as a by-product of modernization. Specifically, the focus is on secularization in relation to the individual, particularly religious allegiance (subsuming affiliation and membership of churches and Sunday schools) and churchgoing, being the two performance indicators of religious belonging and behaving most susceptible to long-term quantification. Data on them were variously gathered by the state (comparatively little), the Churches, and social investigators (including local religious censuses).