Class and the evangelical church in England
‘I wanted to be a pastor. But it didn’t seem to be something that a working-class man could do.’ (Retired working-class Anglican man).
‘I felt like an NCO walking into the Officer’s Mess.’ (Working-class pastor on his experience of attending an evangelical conference).
‘My first thought was: they’re going to cover up this one, too.’ (Working-class evangelical Christian on hearing of Jonathan Fletcher’s activities).
‘My great-grandfather had to doff his hat at the squire. Didn’t matter how good a man he was or how bad a man the squire was. It made my grandfather full of fury. I still get angry about it when I hear posh accents.’
I have been asked to write some observations on class in the evangelical church in England. Those who asked me apparently think that my Australian background gives me an advantage; I am not embedded in the British class system myself, so can be more objective. I’m not sure that this is all that much an advantage: class in Britain is a very complicated and deeply-entrenched matter, not at all easy to understand. It still surprises me that even after 17 years living and working in Britain, I find certain aspects of the class system entirely foreign. Reading and researching on class issues has demonstrated that there is a lot that even now I had never realised, in particular the how powerful are the emotions and attitudes involved. The classes are different, in significant ways, and it really matters to people.
What has struck me most, and what will be the main point of this series of articles, is that running middle-class churches will not reach the working classes. This strategy will not be evangelistically successful, any more than running English-speaking churches in China would. There are exceptions and miracles, and small successes; they do not change the basic issues.
What I have also discovered is that what I will be saying is nothing new. Plenty of research has been done, and good books written, on class in the evangelical church, from the academic level to the general. The statistics and the analyses are out there. Books and papers provide summaries of government and academic research, collections of personal testimony, insightful analysis and practical suggestions.[1] Working-class Christian authors testify to years of being ignored or overlooked by otherwise faithful evangelicals who don’t believe that there is a problem, or fail to do anything about it. Yet some of the voices they record tell a poignant story: ‘The people didn’t dress like me, they didn’t talk like me, they didn’t socialize like me … Even the humour they used was different; nothing was the same’.[2]
Evangelical churches are not reaching the working class. It is not that they necessarily lack conscious ministry to the poor; a lot of churches have social action projects, and even see people come to faith. ‘But often,’ Williams and Brown comment, ‘we then struggle to help them find true belonging and community in the church’.[3]
More commonly, the gospel is not being preached and churches are not being established amongst working-class communities. Instead, writers report a sense of disdain for the working class, the ‘chavs’ who claim benefits, hang around on street corners, work as trainee hairdressers, cleaners, bar staff and security guards, eat Pot Noodles and McDonalds and drink cheap cider. ‘The danger in any church where there is a majority culture is that we assume that that culture’s habits and traditions and ways of doing things are ‘right’ and others are ‘wrong’’.[4]
It is not just evangelicals who appear to be blind to the effects of class in British religion. Some scholars have noticed this absence in understanding religion in general:
The virtual absence of social class in the sociology of religion is almost as mysterious as it is telling. Long one of the central organising concepts in the discipline as a whole (particularly in the UK), there has been a dearth of discussion about class in the sociology of religion, just as class analysis has been markedly inattentive to the role of religion in the formation of classes and class subjectivities.[5]
Nor is this a purely modern problem:
The British educated classes have long worried and fantasized about working-class religious belief and unbelief. Anglican churchmen feared Methodist “enthusiasm” in the eighteenth century, radicalism in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and urban, industrial irreligion after the 1851 Religious Census on churchgoing.[6]
Traditionally the English educated classes feared there was too much working class religion, not too little; but they still did not understand working-class religion, and did not feel it reflected ‘real’ Christianity. The problem of misunderstanding, and underlying judgement, remains; and with the decline of working-class gospel churches, this means large parts of British population remain unevangelized.
Yet evangelical Christians want to reach the nation. Conservative evangelicals have discussed and researched evangelism and church planting in considerable depth over the past few decades, and that involves ‘considerable discussion of strategies for more effective ministry outside of the middle classes’.[7] Middle-class evangelicals want people to be saved, and want people to be helped; they want to be generous and welcoming. What, then, is going wrong?
There seem to be a number of issues that are easily confused when discussing class and the church. Some overlap, but all need addressing.
What is the working class?
I find that in casual conversation the term ‘working class’ is tossed around as if everyone knows what it means. Yet secular as well as Christian writers struggle to define what the ‘working class’ is and who belongs to it. Even when considerable time is spent on careful definition and description of categories, it is easy for the discussion to slide from one definition to another. Do we mean people who live on council estates? People who work in manual labour? People without university degrees? Those on benefits? If you have none of these things, does that make you middle class – or is it possible to be a working class person with a degree and a professional job? Many writers say that it is – that in fact working class-ness has more to do with attitudes and feelings than (necessarily) economic or geographical location.
Should people stop being working class?
Is that what the aim is – to move everyone out of poverty/benefits dependency/menial work/working class culture to property ownership/ ‘meaningful’ work/middle class values? Is it right to aim for all of Britain to become middle class, as various politicians over the years have suggested? Is there not anything good about being working class that society, and churches, might want to preserve and champion? Asking this question brings us to:
What exactly is a Christian culture?
What sort of lives do we want people to have? If by social action we somehow managed to get everyone out of poverty, how ought they to live? What would socialising look like? Hospitality? Sharing? Homes? Dress? How much time would we spend together and what would we do?
What exactly is the problem with the middle-class church culture?
Is it that it is too ‘intellectual’, with long, difficult sermons? Is it too book-based? Is it a manner of speaking that tends to the indirect and values politeness over honesty? Is it an assumption that money should be accumulated and invested? Is it an insular nuclear family that puts children’s education on a pedestal? Is it a failure to preach and practice self-sacrifice?
Questions 2 and 4, I suspect, could entirely accurately be answered both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. The failure of evangelical churches to reach the working classes has many dimensions, and part of it is a failure to challenge all cultures with the Bible.
There are some non-negotiables. For instance, Christianity is word-based. It requires a book. Christians have always spread literacy and education for precisely this reason. Moreover, it assumes that people are capable of hearing and understanding Scripture. Any church service must include the word taught and responded to in some way. Moreover, there are a whole host of moral behaviours that are required by Scripture, including honesty in speech and work, hospitality, faithfulness in marriage, purity of conduct, responsible management of families. What exactly it looks like to live according to these values, however, can encompass a wide range of social types.
This seems to be where the majority of commentators see the problem with the evangelical church in Britain. ‘Middle-class values have become confused with biblical values’.[8] For that reason, those who have not grown up with middle-class values feel either that they are forced to change unnecessarily in order to conform to church culture, or that they are excluded altogether by that culture. Moreover, when new churches are planted, they fail to preach to anyone who does not already have similar values. This means not only that whole sections of society are not reached with the gospel, but that middle-class Christians are not being rightly challenged to conform to Christ.
There is definitely a problem. Even though other problems in the church might seem to be looming larger at the moment, the problem of whole swathes of the country never hearing the gospel is actually more important.
As I said at the beginning, the research has been done. It is out there. We need to start listening, and doing something about it.
[1] Two particularly helpful books, both well-researched and accessible: Natalie Williams and Paul Brown, Invisible Divides: Class, Culture and Barriers to Belonging in the Church (London: SPCK, 2022) and Mez McConnell, The Least, the Last and the Lost: Understanding Poverty in the UK and the Responsibility of the Local Church (Leyland, Evangelical Press; 2021).
[2] Williams and Brown, p. 9. Of course, class is not the only division that creates this kind of experience. It could be applied to race, or foreignness in general, or age, marital status or sexuality, and will differ from church to church. There are many groups that can potentially find themselves in a minority and feeling excluded in church, and that should never happen for anyone. Here, however, we are focussing particularly on class.
[3] Williams and Brown, p. 7.
[4] Williams and Brown, p. 12.
[5] Andrew McKinnon, ‘Religion and Social Class: Theory and Method After Bourdieu’ Sociological Research Online, 22 (1), 15.
[6] Peter Ackers, ‘Protestant Sectarianism in Twentieth-Century British Labour History: From Free and Labour Churches to Pentecostalism and the Churches of Christ’, International Review of Social History, 64 (2019) 129-142, p. 129.
[7] Joanne McKenzie, ‘A different class? Anglican evangelical leaders’ perspectives on social class’, pp. 170–189 in Abby Day (ed.), Contemporary Issues in the Worldwide Anglican Communion: Powers and Pieties (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), pp. 170-71.
[8] Williams and Brown, p. 12.