I once edited a book that in part with the religious denominations of the middle-sized city of Rochester, NY in the late 19th century. In essence, the urban working class rarely attended church. Sunday was truly their day of rest after a six-day week (in theory) of often 10-hour work days. Church membership and attendance was a mark of being middle class.
Class is a large part of all this.... I understand that the current thinking is that working-class people in Britain in the 19th century were proportionately less likely to be religiously observant, but the working-class population was so large in absolute numbers that they were still well represented in the congregations.
Just to complicate any definition of "religion," I will throw in Jonathan Z. Smith's famous line: "Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no existence apart from the academy."
I once edited a book that in part with the religious denominations of the middle-sized city of Rochester, NY in the late 19th century. In essence, the urban working class rarely attended church. Sunday was truly their day of rest after a six-day week (in theory) of often 10-hour work days. Church membership and attendance was a mark of being middle class.
Class is a large part of all this.... I understand that the current thinking is that working-class people in Britain in the 19th century were proportionately less likely to be religiously observant, but the working-class population was so large in absolute numbers that they were still well represented in the congregations.
Just to complicate any definition of "religion," I will throw in Jonathan Z. Smith's famous line: "Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no existence apart from the academy."
https://www.learnreligions.com/jonathan-z-smith-on-the-definition-of-religion-251039