Social Compass

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Adolescent interaction in an anglican church

Bernice Martin
Social Compass 1967; 14; 33
DOI: 10.1177/003776866701400102

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Adolescent interaction in an anglican church
BERNICE MARTIN

L’étude, qui à la

fois autobiographique et à base d’observation par
est

participation, porte sur les processus d’interaction dans un groupe in-

formel, mais stable, d’adolescents au sein de l’église anglicaine au Lan-
cashire dans les années 1950.
Le facteur-clé pour la compréhension des mécanismes et fonctions du
groupe consiste dans son mode de recrutement dans un milieu social
populaire, toutefois caractérisé par une tendance à l’ascension sociale
via le système d’éducation. La participation de ses membres dans les
activités d’une confession jouissant, d’un prestige social élevé conduit
ceux-ci à un type de socialisation largement marqué par un système de
normes et de comportements propres aux classes moyennes. Toutefois,
les membres de ce groupe étaient l’objet d’exigences et d’identifications
sociales aussi essentielles que contradictoires de la part de l’église, de
la famille, du système scolaire et de leurs groupes d’amis. Si bien qu’il
en résultait des comportements ambivalents à
l’égard de pratique reli-
gieuse et de croyance, des aspirations intellectuelles, des classes moyennes
et des rôles féminins et masculins. L’article tend à montrer l’impact de
tels facteurs sur le taux élevé d’absentéisme religieux des sujets arrivés
à l’âge adulte et une fois le groupe initial disparu.
Enfin, dans une
dernière partie, un essai théorique conduit à élaborer une grille à base
d’éléments structurels permettant l’étude comparative de tels petits
groupes. Elle repose sur une triple classification a) par type de localités,
b) par type d’institutions et c) par type de groupes.

Recent sociological work has revealed how problematic and often tenuous is the
connection between religious belief and religious observance especially in Protes-
tant countries like Britain. The social significance of the churches may be a quite
separate question from that of the importance of religion in our national life.
This means that simple figures of church attendance are inadequate as an index
of religious vitality, because many of the factors which affect participation in
or abstention from activities based on traditional religious organisations may have
little or no relation to the kind and quality of religious belief and subjective
religious experience of the groups concerned. The theological language which
churchmen traditionally use to describe and explain participation in religious
organisations by no means fully encompasses these phenomena but must be
supplemented by analyses of the social functions of religious organisations
if our understanding of religion in society is ever to be more than one dimen-
sional. For example, no amount of theological discussion about the significance
of baptism, confirmation or marriage will bring the churches any clear an
understanding of why they have what they regard as alarming ’wastage rates’
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after these Christian ceremonies until they examine the social functions of these
rites of passage.
Furthermore the churches must cease to be afraid of the vocabulary of sociology.
There is nothing necessarily hostile to religion in a sociological analysis of group
behaviour within religious institutions. It is neither an attack on theology, nor
an
attempt to ’reduce’ religion to some other social phenomena. When a socio-
logist says that parts of the education system serve to make certain children
socially mobile he is not usually regarded as having denied the reality of
’education’ whereas if he says the same of a religious body he is all too often
regarded as having denied the existence of ’religion’ per se and having reduced
it to a front for social mobility. It is true that normally the sociologist is not
primarily concerned with the participants’ subjective religious experience or with
the theological significance of the activity which he is studying but rather with
the other social functions which it performs, for instance with the way in which
it affects the status of participants in the eyes of people who matter to them. This
however is not to deny the existence of religious experience but merely to acknow-
ledge that all social activities and institutions meet needs other than those for
which they overtly exist, and that often the participants are not articulately cons-
cious of these additional needs, however vital they may be, partly because the
conventional language in which the activity is described and justified makes no
reference to them.
The sociological analysis presented below is not intended to be hostile or des-
tructive or to reduce religion to some other social fact although it does seek to
show that the primary factor determining first membership of a particular church
organisation and later lapse from religious observance was social and not primarily
connected with the existence or absence of religious belief and experience.
The following study is autobiographical. The group which is to be discussed was
the author’s own major reference group in adolescence. The subsequent histories
of other members of the group have been followed up by such informal meetings
as were appropriate. No apology is offered for this apparently unscientific
pro-
cedure. Social psychology has tended to make far too little use of that essential
tool ’verstehen’. It has too often preserved its ’scientific’ integrity by studying
artificial groups in controlled laboratory situations and has derived from such
clinically pure experiments either unchallengeable tautologies or empirical obser-
vations which because of their remoteness from actual social situations are either
trivial or misleading.
The central proposition of the study is that the main social function of the
group in question was to assist in the socialisation of working and lower middle
class adolescents into middle class values, skills and behaviour, and that once
this process was complete, or where adult groups not based on churches took it
over, then participation in religious institutions became largely redundant for
group members. It was not the only need which the group fulfilled nor were
members conscious of it at the time, but it was the one common to all members
and was sufficiently vital to provide the basis for cohesion in spite of funda-
mental cleavages of interest and personality which became clear in adult life.

THE CHURCH

The main object of this section is to indicate the place in the local system

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of social stratification which was occupied by the particular church within which
the adolescent group was found.
The church in question was an church which dominated the
Anglican parish
centre of a Lancashire cotton town of about 50,000 population. It was one of
the most remunerative in
livings England, and perhaps for this reason had a
long tradition of upper-middle class or aristocratic incumbents almost invariably
educated at one of the major public schools and Oxford or Cambridge.
The parish itself was not primarily a residential area but like the centre of
most old industrial towns it was mainly filled with shops, hotels and offices.
The little housing which remained within the parish boundaries was predominantly
19th century working class terraces interspersed with a few larger houses for
doctors, dentists, solicitors and the like. The congregation of the parish church
contained a small nucleus of working class families from within the parish
who mostly had several generations of traditional association with the church.
In previous generations when the children of these families married and moved
out to daughter parishes they tended to retain an attenuated allegiance to the
old church. This was especially true of the women who more often than not were
then the family’s sole link with institutional Christianity.
The main body of the congregation however was drawn from the middle and
upper-middle classess living in two or three residential areas situated two miles
or so outside the parish boundaries. These groups preferred to attend the central

parish church rather than the daughter churches in their immediate areas which
were on the whole left to lower status groups. Most of the office holders and
informal leaders in the parish church came from these middle class groups with
a slight admixture at lower levels of
responsibility from the working classes
within the parish. There was co-operation between the two groups but informal
social intercourse was very restricted.
For the purposes of this study the most important sub-group within the church
was the choir. It was
exclusively male and very conscious of its high musical
standards modelled directly on King’s College, Cambridge. The organist and choir-
master was traditionally music master of the local direct grant H.M.C. grammar
school, which had a fee-paying preparatory department. The Rector was Chair-
man of Governors of the same school. The choir boys were drawn almost entirely
from this grammar school so that the high social status which was locally ac-
corded to both the school and the church re-inforced each other in relation to
the choir. The fact that the choir acted as a clear symbol of high social status
both actual and potential will be crucial in the later analysis of the adolescent
group.

THE PROCESS OF FORMATION OF THE ’FORUM’ GROUP

In churches of all denominations one tends to find that young people crystallise
into ’generations’, that is, informal but relatively stable social groups with a
three to four year age range and an existence of about that length of time.
Often the focus of these generational groups is a Sunday School or Youth Club.
In this case it was ’the Forum’, a discussion group which met after Evensong on
Sundays. Membership was purely informal: there were no rules. In theory any
member of the congregation of any age was invited to attend meetings but in

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practice hardly anyone except the adolescent group under discussion here, the two
young curates and a handful of social misfits ever attended. The Forum’s activities
were a conventional Sunday mixture of discussions on theological-cum-social topics,

films, dances, carol singing and coach trips to places of ecclesiastic or aesthetic
interest. In addition the Forum members would meet fairly frequently in various
sub-groupings for a variety of social activities.
The group evolved from several sources which coalesced into a recognisable
unit centred on the Forum about the time when the previous adolescent generation
was leaving the town for further education or national service. The choir was
the major source of recruitment. All but one of the ten boys in the group had
been in the choir. A second source was a loose grouping of girls which evolved
largely out of confirmation classes at the age of 13 or 14. These girls became
something like camp followers to the choir and a few of them ultimately passed
over into the Forum group. The third source, though not perhaps an independent

one, was Sunday school. Five boys (four of whom were also choirboys) and two
girls (one of whom was also a camp follower of the choir) entered the Forum
group via the Sunday school.
The notable feature of the process of group formation was the fact that in
the main the young people who failed to become part of the Forum group were
attending secondary modern schools. The choir was so nearly exclusive to the
direct grant grammar school that the nine Forum boys from the choir were virtually
the whole of their particular generation of trebles, and there was certainly no
pressure to exclude the two or three boys who ceased to attend church when their
voices broke. However, the ten or so camp followers of the choir who failed to
become part of the Forum group were either at secondary modern schools or in
two cases at maintained grammar schools which were locally accorded a social
status inferior to that of the direct grant school.
Most of these girls were also Sunday school pupils. They differed from most
of their secondary modern contemporaries in that they made the transition from
Sunday school to church. In the main the non-grammar school children tended to
drop Sunday school immediately after confirmation. One suspects that they
regarded the laying on of hands as an initiation ceremony not into but out of the
church and into the adult pattern of non-attendance common among the pre-
dominantly working class groups amongst whom they lived. Almost certainly
confirmation was for them what Father Hudson of Roehampton has called the
’leaving certificate’.
Within the Sunday school there was a marked tendency for pupils to polarise
into a grammar and a secondary modern school group. Of the latter those few
who survived into later adolescence tended to find avenues of service and social
activity in the Girls’ Friendly Society, Scouts, Church Lads’ Brigade, occasionally
in bellringing and particularly in the case of girls, in Sunday school teaching.
The grammar school group was hardly to be found in any of these ancillary
activities. The senior classes in Sunday school however were almost exclusively
their preserve. The secondary modern school children were socially and intel-
lectually ill at ease in these classes which were specifically designed by the
church as ’advanced’, that is academically oriented instruction. The one modern
school boy who persisted in attending was regarded as eccentric by both the
grammar and the modern school groups perhaps merely because of his ’in-
-

appropriate’ persistence or because this was part of his general tendency not
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to identify wholly with the obvious reference group. In general however, the more
the Church authorities noticed that only the grammar school pupils were attending
the senior classes in Sunday school the more the teaching policy was oriented to
meet their needs. They were actively discouraged from teaching the young children
in Sunday school and ultimately provided with a Bible Class instead of Sunday
school. The new class was held at a different time and place, a fact which
emphasised the status difference between it and Sunday school. The curates and
graduate school teachers who ran the Bible Class encouraged discussion of Marx
and Macchiavelli almost as much as conventional religious topics, again em-
phasising its ’sixth form discussion group’ nature.
The Forum was designed as a direct extension of this Bible Class. Again there-
fore its orientation tended to be noticeably ’academic’. The five boys and two
girls who had been regular attenders at Bible Class and a periphery of perhaps
half a dozen irregular attenders, passed over naturally into the Forum group,
serving an apprenticeship under the previous adolescent generation. They attracted
into the Forum orbit other same-sex friends from choir and school so that by the
age of sixteen all the grammar school children from Sunday school, and from the
choir’s camp followers, plus a strong nucleus of by now ex-choir boys, together
with a few previously un-churched school friends had crystallised into a cohesive
group with its own mores, private jokes, and strong sense of belonging. It was
recognised and treated as a group by rector. curates and lay leaders, although
it had no formal, organisational existence.

THE CHARACTER AND SOCIAL FUNCTIONS

OF THE FORUM GROUP

It is not a
simple matter to decide the exact membership of so informal a group
and clearly the boundary will tend to vary according to which member one
selects as central. Nevertheless the group itself was clear that there was a dis-
tinction between ’real’ and ’marginal’ belonging. There were probably eigtheen
nuclear members whose almost entire recreational life was spent in the company
of other group members. The degree of involvement in the group was not uniform
however and it is important to note that there was not continuous face-to-face
inter-action between each nuclear member and every other. The basic structure
was a small number of same-sex
groups of twos or threes strung together in a
series of over-lapping patterns so that at the extremes inter-action would be
incidental rather than intentional, or sometimes even negative. In addition to the
central network there was a minimum of twenty peripheral members who tended to
be either individual contacts of one particular nuclear member, or the social
misfits from the adult congregation who had a more or less tenuous association
with the group as a whole rather than with particular members.
Before examining the main descriptive features of the core group it is worth
commenting on two categories of peripheral member, both of which were explicitly
regarded as outsiders by the nuclear members. The first category is the social
misfits mentioned above. They attached themselves to successive adolescent
generations and clearly derived very necessary social satisfactions from this
contact in spite of being tolerated rather than welcomed by the young people. One
suspects that most congregations contain a few such people. In the present case
they were an odd assortment of semi-isolates:i
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(a) a middle-aged Irish woman ostensibly converted from Roman Catholicism,
intensely musical, unkempt, unskilled and mostly unemployed, she frequently
disturbed her landlady by noisily claiming either that the Pope had robbed her
aunt of canonisation, or blaspheming the Virgin ; she was almost certainly mentally
ill and has since left the church and become a tramp.
(b) a woman from a professional middle class family, perhaps about thirty years
old whose mind and manner had been affected by sleeping sickness when she was
a child.

(A) an apparently gregarious but in fact friendless young man of about thirty
years old, from one of the working class, actively Anglican homes in the Parish;
he ultimately became a male nurse and overseas missionary after unsuccessful
attempts to acquire the minimum academic qualifications to enter the ministry.
(B) a strikingly unprepossessing young man in his late twenties, with secondary
modern school education and working class background; like (A) he hoped to
enter the Anglican ministry but was academically too weak, and ultimately joined
the Church Army as a full time welfare worker.
(C) a notably unsuccessful trainee accountant in his early thirties, again socially
isolated although a choir member; He was ultimately imprisoned for homo-
sexual offences after which he left the church despite all the efforts which
the rector and curates made to re-integrate him into the congregation.
(D) a middle-aged bachelor, a gardener by profession, leader of the bellringers,
self-educated, proud of his Lancastrian lore, and genuine rural dialect; an acknow-
ledged eccentric and the only one of this category of misfits whom the group
accepted on his own terms and did not regard as pathetic.
Clearly any of the individuals would repay a study in depth there were -

probably elements of psychological disturbance in all of them except perhaps (D).

For the present purpose it is sufficient to note that they were all generally
considered odd by the congregation, and that tenuous connection which they
maintained with the Forum group was some slight alleviation of their otherwise
marked social isolation and highly ambiguous status.
The second category of people explicitly kept on the periphery of the group
in spite of fairly regular attendance at the Forum meetings consisted of the
secondary modern school girls who had been the choir’s camp followers in pre-
Forum days. They tended to be regarded by the boys in the central group as a
source of short term sexual satisfaction since any radical sexual experimentation
within the central group was disapproved by the group norms. The girls in the
central group despised and often disliked this peripheral group. The low status
of the latter was firmly fixed by the custom observed by both boys and girls of
referring to them by their surnames or some uncomplimentary nickname. Although
all these girls are still resident locally none of them is now even an intermittent
churchgoer. They married men whom they met at work (all had lower clerical
jobs) or through other friends unconnected with the church. They had white church
weddings and brought their infants to the font. It is however too soon to see
whether they will also send their children to Sunday school and themselves re-
enter the orbit of the institutional church through the children.
It is now appropriate to examine the main characteristics which the eighteen
nuclear members had in common and to see whether these are any guide to the
social functions which the group performed.
1 In the first place it will be clear from all that has gone before that it was

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 predominantly and self-consciously a grammar school group. Only one boy out
of the ten nuclear members was not attending the direct grant grammar school but
had joined the choir from the local maintained grammar school which had an
identical curriculum but was generally accorded lower social status than its direct
grant counterpart. Of the girls only two were not at the girls’ direct grant school
but at private commercial college on an adjacent site.
2 All but one of the boys had been choir boys and seven graduated into the
adult male section of the choir.
3 Apart from two members, a brother and sister, from a professional middle
class background the social origins of the members were upper-working (i.e.
artisan) or lower middle class (i.e. clerks or small shopkeepers).
4 The majority, ten out of eighteen, were from one child families. If the author
who has six siblings is excluded the average family size was below 1.5. This indeed
one might expect since the social stratum from which the members were drawn

normally displays lower than average fertility.

5 Only three members, two of them brothers, lived inside the Parish boundaries.
6 Only three members, again including the same two brothers, had parents who
attended the parish church. The parents of the rest were either nominal but non-
practicing Anglicans (ten) or nominal (two) or practicing non-conformists (two).
7 With only two exceptions both the group members and their parents were
strongly and vocally supporters of the Conservative party. The exceptions, one
Liberal (with non-conformist Liberal parents), one Socialist were both girls.
If they are seen in context all these features lend weight to the hypothesis from
which the study began, i.e. that the upward social mobility of all the members
of the group is the key to understanding its social functions and characteristics.
It is necessary, in explaining this, to restate the long-standing connection between
the choir and the direct grant grammar school. The connection was believed to
be so close that a popular superstition held that if one could get one’s eight
or nine year old son into the
parish church choir he was bound to be accepted
by the Preparatory Department of the Grammar School. In fact the connection
was more often the other way round. The
point however is that there was great
competition for a position in both places and that the two fused together as
indicators of high social position. Many parents who were educationally or
socially ambitious for their children sent them to the preparatory school if they
could by any means afford it. They believed with some justification that this
was the best guarantee of a
place in the senior school at eleven. The artisan,
clerk, or small shopkeeper might well consider it a very sound investment to
pay preparatory school fees for the last two junior school years if this made a
free or assisted place in the senior school a near certainty. All but one of the
boys came from such a home. The gratification to be derived from the public
indication of their son’s rising social position goes a long way to explain the
readiness of Non-conformist or apparently religiously indifferent parents to
encourage their sons to become confirmed Anglican choirboys and to travel up to
three miles from home to church. In two cases where boys had practicing Anglican
parents the latter left their local churches and regularly travelled an inconvenient
distance to the parish church. Low average family size is also relevant here:
lower middle class parents anxious to provide what they regard as the best
possible life chances for their offspring often feel unable to afford more than
one child.

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Similar factors were at work but much less strongly among the families of the

girls. The one striking example here is of a girl whose non-practicing parents
removed her from a Methodist Sunday school when she won her grammar school
scholarship and sent her to the Parish church because they believed she would
’mix with a nicer class of girl’ there. On the whole however the girls were drawn
into the group on their own initiative whereas the boys found themselves in the
church choir more because of parental pressures.
The common social origins and aspirations of the members of the group were a
much more important source of cohesion than anyone at the time realised. It is
clear in retrospect that all the members were experiencing similar stresses asso-
ciated with upward social mobility through the education system. They had the
same dichotomous existence divided between a firmly middle class school en-
vironment and a family on one side or the other of the thin line which divides
the artisan from the minor clerical class. Consequently they spoke the same
language, suffered from the same social gaucherie, and being in so ambiguous
and insecure a status position were very ready to repudiate those whom they
regarded as their social inferiors, but conversely ready to acquire social polish and
self-confidence through association with the securely middle class laymen of the
adult congregation. The latter process was particularly facilitated by the onset
of the Liturgical movement in the church when the Forum group and the middle
class lay leaders were together extensively used in liturgical re-organisation and
stewardship campaigns.
In spite of this the reaction of the group to the middle class was ambiguous
and contradictory. It was dangerous to take on middle class characteristics too
swiftly or emphatically. The boy from the maintained grammar school who at the
age of seventeen suddenly adopted an ultra-establishment accent was much resented
and ridiculed. More unhappy examples of the same process were the two girls who,
having failed the eleven plus examination were sent to a private commercial col-
lege. Both started to attend the church specifically in order to meet grammar
school boys, one with the stated intention of finding a ’rich husband’. She was
ultimately rejected by the group when she paraded her intentions too openly
and calculatingly. The second girl was less attractive and very insecure. She was
ultimately accepted by the group more because of her own persistence than
through any real willingness on the part of the other members to be associated
with her. She was the constant butt of the other members because of her pathetic
attempts at sophistication, her affected accent which often slipped, her misuse
of words and her exaggerated gestures.
The three examples given above were all more marginal in status, (given that
they were the only three members not attending the direct grant school) than the
rest of the group and therefore the more likely to feel the need to display symbols
of the status to which they aspired. But the established middle class members
were not immune from hostility and
charges of snobbery. Thus the brother and
sister whose parents were both middle class professional people, and who because
they were originally Londoners had no Lancashire accent, had to tread very
carefully to avoid hostile reactions. It was very noticeable that after visits to their
home uncomplimentary and usually quite unwarranted comments on the family
were to be expected not merely from
group members but even more from their
parents. Mothers in particular would use all the sanctions of ridicule and moral
indignation against the professional woman who pursued her own career and
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so ’necessarily’ neglected her adolescent children: this against all the evidence of
the senses that here was an unusually close and happy family based on the open,
democratic relationships which many sociologists regard as typical of industrial
society. The root of the trouble, one suspects, was that lower middle class
notions of respectability were more restrictive and hierarchical especially with
respect to ’correct’ role segregation within the family than were the norms of
the intellectual/professional middle classes which this particular family reflected.
The latter moreover were articulate about subjects such as sex and status which
were informally tabooed by the self-consciously respectable parents of most of
the group members.
The delicacy of the balance between admiration and hostility to the middle
classes can be further illustrated by an intrusion which almost broke up the group
prematurely. Just before the first contingent left the town for further education
three upper middle class girls just back from boarding school began to attend
Forum discussions. This was very unusual because the children of the upper
middle classes in the church congregation were normally kept quite separate from
the local grammar school children. The former, but not the latter, made friends
with the Rector’s children and visited the rectory in school vacations but had
never before been known to join in normal church activities. The first reaction
of the group was stunned delight on realising that three very self-assured, attrac-
tive and high status girls were requesting entry to the group. The local members
visited the opulent homes of the newcomers (’one of Lord Derby’s smaller
hunting lodges’), admired the family oil portraits and listened to their tales of
boarding school life. After a month or so, however, acute hostility to this new
element which had silently assumed a central place in the group became apparent
coming first from the local girls who resented the intrusion of exotic rivals
whereas the boys were prepared to be charmed a little longer. The whole episode
petered out within three months when the new girls left for London and Switzer-
land. The intra-group conflict remained longer however and accusations little
short of treachery were brought against those who had succumbed most deeply
to the influence of the unattainable.

Just as the group’s attitude to the middle classes was ambivalent so was its reac-
tion to education and intellectual interests. A too obvious intellectualism could
engender hostility just as easily as stupidity. Although the main common factor
in the group was its members’ social mobility on the basis of the education system
it would be a mistake to regard it as academically oriented. A certain level of
intelligence and articulateness it took for granted and its ridicule and contempt
were trained on those who did not live up to the unanalysed group norms on
this matter, for example the insecure girl from the commercial college who
was clearly unable to cope with Forum discussions. But anyone who appeared too

academic, who became more interested in Forum discussions per se than in the
social life surrounding them, was quickly classed eccentric, priggish, and probably
sanctimonious too since most discussions centred on explicitly religious topics.
Thus a grammar school friend of one of the central group members, a highly in-
tellectual, aesthetic, musical, sensitive girl who was totally uninterested in sexual
relationships was barely tolerated by the group and firmly kept on the periphery.
This last example illustrates another curious feature of the group’s attitudes.
The girl in question was unmistakably devout and it was this as much as her
intellectualism which cut her off from the group. A dislike and distrust of

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obvious religious devotion was very marked in the group, many of whom clearly
cherished a stereotype of a ’religious’ person as narrow, puritanical and probably
hypocritical. It is perhaps surprising, but true nevertheless that young people
who spent their whole recreational life within the context of organized Christia-
nity were still incredulous and suspicious when they found a cleric who did not
disapprove of alcohol, sport, dancing and the like, in spite of never having
encountered any other kind of flesh and blood cleric. Again, the parents’ lower
middle class notions of respectability coloured the children’s perceptions: it was
clear, especially in the case of the boys with practicing Anglican parents, that
religion and restrictive parental attitudes had become fused. The connection was
re-inforced by the schools which tended to equate religion with authority, hierarchy
and restraint. This may perhaps help to explain the group’s mistrust of intel-
lectualism also. Academic interests and religion were together approved indeed
enjoyed by the major authority systems to which the group members were subject,
school and home. Anything less than total acceptance of authority’s norms on
either front probably meant rebellion, open or suppressed, on both fronts. Any
intra-generational tension or any resentment of school discipline and attitudes
was very likely to manifest itself in hostility to religion and/or academic striving.
A further factor complicated the situation, that is the expectations of sexual role
segregation. The parents of most members of the group had strict notions about
the proper place of women, the impropriety of women caring over-much about
a career once they married, and the need for men to assert manliness by at least

appearing superior to women on most counts. The offspring on the whole did
not dissent from these views. However it happened that, excluding the two non-
grammar school girls, the intellectual ability of the girls was greater than that
of the boys, and this became embarrassingly obvious in discussions, through
examination results and in the competition for entry into further education. This
was particularly awkward since the sense of superiority over excluded categories
of people rested on the group’s claim to greater intellectual ability. The boys,
if they were to maintain status vis-a-vis the girls and indeed most of the girls
themselves who accepted this definition of male/female role differentiation, were
in the dilemma of having to denigrate that quality which fundamentally they most
treasured. This was partially solved by sneers against mere hard work n-hile native
ability still received due deference.
Attitudes to religion too were affected by the male/female role dilemma. In
general the definition of masculinity accepted by the group and their parents and
indeed most of the wider society meant aggressive assertiveness and a good measure
of cultural philistinism, whereas females could appropriately have aesthetic
interests. In short the contrast was much the same as Parsons’ characterisation of
feminine roles as ’expressive’ and masculine roles as ’instrumental’.
Interestingly however an exception had to be made in the case of music. In the
wider society and indeed amongst the school and neighbourhood peer groups of
the Forum members, music was clearly in the aesthetic/expressive category and
therefore only suitable for females. The Forum boys however were choirboys and
therefore steeped in ecclesiastical music with which they had all strongly iden-
tified. This they regarded as their exclusive sphere and one in which females
should not meddle. One of their most cherished principles was the sanctity of the
exclusive masculinity of Anglican choirs and contempt for the female soprano

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voice. In this way the high status of choir membership was preserved against
the general value system.
Religion however like art and literature (especially poetry) was regarded as part
of the category appropriate to females since it involved not only moral and
aesthetic sensitivity but in the context of school authority, submissiveness also.
Religious boys therefore always ran the risk of being regarded as effeminate by
their non-religious peer groups. The Forum boys therefore faced a further dilemma
of how to assert their masculinity within the context of the church. It should be
stressed that none of them openly entertained extensive intellectual doubts about
the theological propositions of Christianity. They were mostly as indifferent
to theological argument as they were to humanist scepticism since both came under
their ’over-intellectual’ imprimatur. But they accepted what they regarded as
basic Christianity, which in some cases was as vague as the deism of the general
population allied with a belief that one should be decent to other people.
Despite the best efforts of the clergy then, the boys did not concern themselves
with theological profundity, but they were emphatically not hostile to Christian
beliefs. There was however a substantial undercurrent of hostility to the church,
largely expressed in terms of dislike of the hypocrisy and kill-joy attitude which
they believed was characteristic of churchpeople, lay and ordained alike. It is
important to note however that this hostility was not focused on the organisation
of the church but on the narrowness, as they perceived it, and imperfection of those
who preached perfection. There was never any fundamental objection to the notions
of authority and hierachy which indeed they held to be good and essential elements
in social life. Their political Conservatism was founded on the belief that people
were unequally talented and that therefore some should have authority over
others. Parallel to this in the sphere of religion they upheld episcopacy on
organisational rather than theological grounds. Even where there were elements
of rebellion against authority in home, church or school, the rebellion was personal,
not structural: particular people were held to be unreasonable in their exercise of
authority but the rebellion never extended to criticism of the authoritarian element
in relations between husband/wife, parent/child, teacher/pupil, priest/layman
etc.
They solved the problem of how to assert masculinity within the context of the
church in two ways therefore. Firstly by combining an unsophisticated modicum
of religious belief with hostility to some elements in the religious institution,
and secondly by leaving piety, and most of the aesthetic and metaphysical elements
in religion to the females while seeking organisational and leadership posts for
themselves. They also made a great point of symbolic irreverence, for instance
eating, talking and reading detective novels or science fiction during sermons.
The point of this was lost if the girls ever failed to play out their appropriate
role by protesting against masculine impiety. In these ways they were able to
counterbalance the possible imputation of effeminacy which any involvement in
religious institutions might draw from their peers by playing out the most mas-
culine roles (that is those involving assertiveness, irreverence and practicality)
which were possible within the context of the church.
The attitudes towards middle class attributes, towards intellectualism and towards
religion all involved paradoxes and contradictions. The internal conflicts in atti-
tudes could not easily have been eliminated because they were essential accom-
modations to the variety of roles which the members were required to play, male

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towards female, child towards parent, church member against non-churchgoing
peer in school and neighbourhood, half-socialised, potentially middle class success
vis-A-vis the groups he was leaving below him and those towards which he was
climbing.
All these conflicts are well illustrated in the contrast between two brothers in
the central group who could almost be said to personify the extreme attitudes
which the group had to hold in perpetual tension. The elder of the two desperately
wanted to become a priest and this was his mother’s highest ambition also. The
group regarded him as eccentric, puritanical and effeminate. Only his strong
sense of humour and central position in the choir prevented his being relegated
to the periphery of the group. He was ridiculed moreover for his notable lack of
academic success in spite of very hard work. The younger brother despised and
disliked him and regarded him as the puppet of his puritanical domineering and
over-ambitious mother. The younger brother displayed most emphatically the anti-
intellectual and anti-pious tendencies in the group and he came nearest of the
group members to rebellion against authority as such. Although academically very
able, (markedly superior to his elder brother) he was seriously alienated from
the school ethos and despised academic effort. He left school at sixteen and
refused to enter the sixth form. He adopted as many non-middle-class attributes
as possible to his mother’s extreme distress: he preserved a thick Lancashire
accent, unlike his brother, and revelled in pop-music and all the other elements
of what his working class parents regarded as vulgar youth culture. Of all the
boys in the group he was the most frequent consort of the secondary modern
school girls. He was unmistakably hostile to religious institutions and at best
indifferent to religious belief. Like all the boys in the group however he has
retained a deep attachment to church music and in spite of the fact that he ceased
to attend church the moment he left his parents he for some years on his own
initiative gravitated back to the choir on his visits home. The important point to
note about the contrast between the two is that the latter rather than the former
was central to the network of interaction in the
group. While the elder brother
had accepted the norms of parents, school and church too completely to be un-
equivocally accepted by the group the younger acted out all the resentments which
the other members of the group felt, though to a lesser degree, about the dis-
comforts of being made socially mobile.

THE BREAK UP OF THE GROUP

The group broke up over a period of about eighteen months or so during which
time the majority of the participants left the town either permanently (eleven),
or
temporarily (five) for some form of further education and/or national service
in the case of the boys. Only the two non-grammar school girls never left the
town. The members made attempts to contact other members on their visits home
which occurred fairly often during the first two or three years, but by the time
the majority graduated from university or training college the group had ceased
to have any effective existence. After five years, contact between even the members
of the same sex sub-groups on which the original group had been based was
very half-hearted and intermittent.
It is appropriate here to examine some features of the adult life of the group

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members in order to explain the high degree of lapse from churchgoing which
occurred when the group broke into its constituent units.

1 Occupation and Education h>

Of the eighteen group members seven of the group attended university. 1 A

further five went to teacher training colleges (Anglican) and four of the five
(one a girl) did so after a taste of clerical or administrative work and national
service in the boys’ case. This category included the strongly anti-intellectual
boy mentioned above. In all these cases the pull of the group’s anti-intellectual
attitudes partially gave way to the opposite view which also had been inherent in
the group’s attitudes after a spell ’in the world’. All could have gone straight
to teacher training colleges from school. The fact that they did not illustrates
the degree of resistance to intellectual norms among group members. The re-
maining six took clerical or administrative positions.2
The range of occupations extended from marginal to firm middle class status.
In all cases there was a distinct rise in status position from that of parents.

2 Geographical mobility
Only eight of the eighteen either remained in or ultimately returned to the
town. The rest are now scattered over the British Isles.

&dquo;

3 Marriage
All the girls and all but two of the boys married, but in spite of some very
close attachments which were formed while the group was functioning there was
only one intra-group marriage, and even this was based on a relationship estab-
lished after the rest of the group had scattered. The other six who are still in or
near the town all married
people whom they met through other members of the
group especially at the point just prior to complete disintegration when most of
the members began to put feelers outwards. There is now hardly any contact
between the ex-members of the group who find themselves still in the town. Each
has his or her own small social network based on kinship, immediate neighbours
and husband’s work group.

4 Chrerehgoing
The most scriking feature of all about the adult life of the members of the
Forum group is the very high rate of lapse from churchgoing. Of the ten who left
the town permanently one boy became a priest and one a church organist. None of
the remaining eight is now a regular churchgoer, and indeed no more than two of
them claim to have gone to church at all during the last five years except for rites
of passage. Of the other eight who remained in or near the town only one girl,
and two boys (both church organists) are now regular churchgoers. The rest have

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again lapsed almost entirely. But all were married in church and all have had
children baptised. Only one (a girl) out of the thirteen who lapsed cited intel-
lectual doubts as a reason for the change in behaviour. Two boys, who had always
been most notably hostile to church-people though not to some minimal Christian
beliefs argued that they did not want to continue to link themselves with hypo-
crites and their meaningless rituals. Both ceased to attend church the moment they
left home. These significantly were the two whose parents had attended the church
in question. Both fathers were artisans and both mothers for some part of the
son’s school career had taken semi-skilled factory jobs. They, especially the
mothers, were unquestionably the most ambitious, possessive and restrictive parents
in the group and it is surely no accident that of all the group members their sons
ultimately displayed the most open hostility towards religion; hostility moreover
which had clearly emotional rather than intellectual roots.
The remaining ten who lapsed could explain their behaviour no more precisely
than that they just lost the habit of churchgoing, without noticing that their
beliefs or attitudes to the church had changed at all. Three girls added that
churchgoing was difficult with small children. It seems very likely that the latter
will return to churchgoing when their children are of school age as so many
women do.

It is striking that the beliefs and attitudes of the ten who simply lost the habit
of churchgoing do not differ in any noticeable way from those of the three church
organists who remained practicing churchgoers (more one suspects through the
agency of music than because they were more committed to Christianity or the
Anglican church than the rest). The one girl who is still a regular churchgoer is
unwilling to speak at all about her beliefs, except to emphasise her reverence for
’tradition’,3 her acute nostalgia for adolescence and the sense of belonging that
she got from the group. She alone of all the group, has largely failed to replace
it by wider social contacts, and has restricted her social activity entirely to her
husband and parents.
The rest of the group members now have the normal middle class network of
social relationships based on work groups (largely the husband’s), selected
neighbours and immediate family (i.e. their own children and respective parents).
Marriage plus this social network seems to fulfil all requirements for social
contact and the church is not regarded as anything better than an optional and
slightly tedious extra. The ex-members of the Forum simply found churchgoing
redundant when other groups appeared to fill the need for social intercourse, and
more importantly when, having achieved adulthood and a stable social status

dependent on occupation, they were no longer subjected to the strains inherent

in the process of moving from lower to higher status positions. It was this latter
situation which had provided the occasion and need for such a body as the Forum
group. During the period of further education and national service the strains
had continued to be felt but less acutely since one’s ultimate destination was
clearly in sight. But because some strains still remained attempts were made to
keep the Forum group alive or to replace it by membership of similar groups
in the new environment. For those who lapsed from churchgoing the break came
either when the member became integrated into a new non-religious peer group
experiencing the same social needs this was the case with most of the univer-
-

sity students-

or, if the new environment provided a group which was almost

an exact
replica of the Forum group as was the case with the five who went
-

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to Anglican teacher training college then the break with churchgoing came
-

on taking a job. In all cases marriage finalised the break when new preoccupa-
tions, responsibilities and roles eliminated the last vestiges of adolescent needs
and fixed the adult social status.
~
._

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

It isimpossible to tell how typical this pattern of group formation and function
may be without considerable further research. Two sets of suggestions for further
research will be discussed below, the first concerning possible hypotheses about
the function of religious institutions in British society and the second outlining
a
possible scheme for the comparative study of small groups in an on-going social
context.

(a) Some hypotheses and questions

Four major interpretive hypotheses have emerged from the small group study
discussed above.
In the first place it is surely worth pursuing with further research the hypothesis
that religous institutions act as agencies of social mobility. Many social observers
including Max Weber and Horace Mann (the analyst of the 1851 religious
census) have suggested that religious institutions often send their adherents
’up the hill’. Indeed, if one partially excludes revolutionary sectarianism, attach-
ment to religious institutions of all kinds is often taken to be
part of a definition
of ’middle-classness’ whether this is defined objectively or in terms of subjective
identification. It is known moreover that congregations often tend to be self-
selecting on a social status basis, and that in Non-conformity and Roman Catho-
licism as well as Anglicanism some churches are more fashionable and serve higher
status groups than do others. For these reasons one suspects that the situation
discussed in this study is not unique.
The second hypothesis utilised in the present study is one which needs a great
deal more documentation, namely that male/female role differentiation in our
society is intimately bound up with perceptions of and attitudes to religion. The
mere fact that churchgoing is so
predominantly a female activity lends weight
to this suggestion. The present writer is by no means convinced that the democ-
ratisation of the family and the development of interchangeable male/female
roles has gone nearly so far as many sociologists have assumed. The elucidation
and documentation of this area might well involve studies of the dynamics of
interaction in non-pathological families, and an assessment of the influence and
consequences (if any) of different fashions of childrearing on the male/female
role structures.4
The third suggestion which emerges from the present study is that in some
circumstances religious institutions act as reinforcements and parellel extensions
of other authority systems to which adolescents are subject mainly home and -

school in the present case. One would like to know how far religion does act as
a symbolic focus for rejection or
acceptance of other authority systems and what
factors determine the degree of rejection of authority and/or religion among

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present day adolescents who may be very different in this and many other respects
from adolescents of the mid 1950’s.
The fourth hypothesis implicit in the study, and indeed perhaps one of the most
pervasive assumptions in the sociology of religion is that the church is one of
many functional alternatives. The empirical identification of structures which
are functionally equivalent to the church for particular groups at particular points
in their life cycle could do a great deal to render meaningful what otherwise is
often a rather vague assumption.
A number of other questions arise from the foregoing study: is the experience
of the socially mobile different from that of the socially static adolescent in
relation to religious instititutions? Are church youth groups different from youth
organisations unconnected with churches? How do adolescents within churches
differ from their non-churchgoing peer groups? Under what circumstances do
young people carry their churchgoing habits through into adulthood? What
precisely is the relation between personal and institutional belief systems and
between both and religious practice? How far are regular churchgoers misfits
in other social settings?
There are many ways other than small group studies in which these sorts of
questions might be tackled, from large-scale statistical comparisons to institutional
studies of neighbourhood, schools, parishes and families.

(b) Sugge.rtion.r for an 111Jh11111o)1R~ and coniparafive study

of small grollps
Small group studies can undoubtedly be a valuable means of shedding light on
some of the questions mentioned above and may suggest further hypotheses

relating to the function of religion. But their value goes beyond this: they may
enable us to construct a comparative classification of small groups in religious
and indeed other types of institutions, although such an enterprise contains
many hazards.
It is no very difficult matter to devise a formal, descriptive typology of small
groups in the abstract, constructed around such polarities as led/leaderless,
stable/fluid membership, autocratic/democratic structure, tight/loose social
control, short/long lived, self-expressive/purposeful, unifunctional/multifunc-
tional, homogeneous/heterogeneous age, social status, sex composition and so on.
One could subsequently, in theory at least, contrast the social functions of actual
adolescent groups possessing various combinations and degrees of such charac-
teristics. The foregoing study suggests that it may be crucial to assess the degree
of congruence between manifest and latent functions. But and surely this -

is why social psychology has normally avoided the study of actual groups in
concrete situations -

the specificity of the institutional and local context

inevitably defeats attempts to apply the scientific principle of holding constant
all except the variable whose effect one wishes to assess.
The sociological method of minimising the problem of local, institutional, and
historical specificity would be to categorise types of institutional and local
context. In the case of localities for example one might categorise on a number
of possible socio-economic criteria. The obvious categorisation would be in terms
of an urban/rural continuum: here one might devise a series of definitions in
terms of size and the gemeinschaft/gesellschaft dichotomy.5 Alternatively, or

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in conjunctionwith this one might utilise a more empirical rather than theoretical
set of dimensions on the lines of the painstaking statistical analysis of socio-
economic variables produced by Moser and Scots.6
Similarly one can break down institutions into a series of categories either covering
all types of complex organisations7, or concerning oneself with religious institu-
tions in particular. The church/denomination/sect typology for Judeo-Christian
cultures is the obvious tool in the latter case.
However if these categories are to be manageable concepts they must be ideal
types in the Weberian sense, abstract models with an inherent logic, and not
endless lists of possible empirical combinations of features. The more empirical
and the less abstract and formal a typology becomes, the less useful it is for
comparative purposes because the ultimate in this direction is to make every
actual variation a ’sub-type’. Conversely however the more formal and logical
the categories are the more likely it becomes, especially where one is primarily
concerned with the nuances of personal interaction and group function on a
very small scale, that the local and specific deviations from the most nearly ap-
propriate category are more significant than the points at which the church or
locality fits the category in question.
But may it perhaps be that the categories most ready to hand are not the most
useful ones for this purpose? Perhaps one’s expectations ought to be reversed so
that instead of trying to construct a ready-made framework of categories first
one ought to make random forays into small group study in the hope that the

appropriate categories will be suggested by more empirical exploration. Possibly

a
preliminary examination of one of the sets of categories available may show
the limitations of starting from existing typologies. How appropriate does the
church/denomination/sect typology seem to be?
Several awkward circumstances immediately present themselves. For example
Roman Catholicism which must come under the ’church’ category on the basis of
its hierarchical organisation and its centuries-long accommodation to the demands
of Caesar, hardly appears church-like on other grounds in the English context -

it is not the majority church, its members are on average of low social status,
it is not fused with the political and social elite of Britain, its members tend
to be Labour supporters all of which are probably denominational rather
-

than churchly characteristics. But this kind of consideration does not trouble
American sociologists unduly since they have recognised that all religious bodies
in America are functionally denominations (where they are not sects) although
some have inherited formal churchly characteristics from their European past. But
the problem of the degree and the determinants of continuity or discontinuity
between the formal, organisational category and the category appropriate in
social/functional terms remains even when the problem is identical for all actual
congregations within a national religious body.
The problem is much greater however when one has to recognise that even within
some religious bodies local variation may be so extreme that to assume
appro-
priateness of a particular category is very risky. For instance it may be very
important whether the institution in question is in a minority or majority position
in the area concerned. Who can say how majority Anglicanism in rural Hereford
differs from the minority Church of England in say Dagenham or the Episcopal
Church in Wales.
Further, most of our national religious bodies are known to have different wings

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or schools of thought and tradition. Methodism ranges from conversionist-
evangelical to Wesleyan-high-church in spite of the formal end of schism. In
Anglicanism too one would want to find out whether the moderate church tradition
(the background in this study) provides a significantly different context from
the Anglo-Catholic and the Evangelical traditions. One strongly suspects that
the Anglo-Catholic context (churchly? but often Socialist) would be dramatically
different from the Evangelical context (denominational? but often Conservative)
but it is very unclear whether the difference if there is a difference
-

rests -

on idea-systems or social recruitment, or some other variable.

Along with probable differences within our national religious institutions there
are cross-cutting similarities between congregations which in terms of the category

appropriate at national level are of different ’types’. Thus one suspects that
with regard to social composition, and political/social assumptions and values,
suburban Methodism in South East England may be closer to Anglican congre-
gations in the same area than it is to say Tyneside Methodism or Welsh-speaking
Non-conformity. It would not be too surprising if groups of adolescents very
similar to the one discussed in this paper were to be found in Non-conformist
congregations in the London commuter belt.
But do considerations like these really make the church/denomination/sect
typology unusable for the purposes of comparison of actual small groups in local
contexts? It seems rather that instead of discarding the categories one must use
them with more subtlety than would be implied in the simple equation of Angli-
canism with ’church’ and Non-conformity with ’denomination’. For each individual
congregation one could chart the relative weight of churchly, denominational or
sectarian characteristics, probably making two main distinctions, that between
official organisational structure and formal idea-systems and norms on the one
hand, and substantive social characteristics on the other, such as power and status
structure both within the congregation and between the congregation and the
local community, and the actual political, social and theological beliefs and atti-
tudes of the congregation in question. On this scheme then Methodism would be
mainly denominational on the organisational count but particular chapels might
have more predominantly churchly social recruitment, power positions vis-a-vis
the local community and so on. In other contexts Methodism could have conside-
rable sectarian characteristics, while Anglican or Roman Catholic congregations
might have denominational social attributes which run partly against the grain
of their formal churchliness. For the purpose of comparative study of adolescent
groups it would then be important to identify and categorise the relevant charac-
teristics which form the effective context of the group activity.
It might indeed transpire from a series of small group studies that particular
sorts of areas tended to be associated with particular kinds of deviation from
the categorisation of the religious institution either as a national body or on
the dimension of formal organisation and norms. Assumptions to this effect
have in fact been made in the preceding discussion. At the same time one might
be able to discover whether adolescent groups tended to have particular constel-
lations of formal, descriptive characteristics in some types of institutional or
local context. In short, what is proposed is an attempt to classify adolescent groups
or indeed any other
sub-groups in a congregation along three dimensions, (1) the
descriptive characteristics of the group itself, (2) the local institutional context,
that is the constellation of church/denomination/sect characteristics of the

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congregation within which the group is found, (3) the socio-economic charac-
teristics of the area in which the congregation exists.
The number of theoretically possible combinations is enormous but probable
constellations may be much smaller. There are, for instance, some common ideas
within the categorisations at all three levels: for instance, the contrast between
formality, hierarchy, authority, and informality, individualism, democracy are
central to both the categorisation of small groups and the church/denomination/
sect typology. There is also an important overlap between the characteristics which
are used to distinguish gemeinschaft from gesellschaft localities (cohesiveness,

strength of social control, etc.) and some elements in the church/denomination/

sect typology and again with many of the descriptive features of the small group.
Thus to take a very crude example: one would expect to find a small group with
a leader, an autocratic structure and tight social control in a predominantly church-
like or sectarian rather than denominational setting; one would expect to find
a heterogeneous, multifunctional group in a small scale community rather than
a large urban area. However, such crude but logical correlations may not hold

good empirically, and if they do not, one will need to explain why they do not.
This is where the participant observer’s study of the small group has a particularly
important contribution to make because a study in depth based on the technique
of ’verstehen’ can attempt to elucidate causal connections where mere statistical
correlations cannot. Both where the logically likely connections fail to occur
and where there is a priori no specially likely constellation of empirical charac-
teristics then actual correlations in any particular instance can be explained and
indeed such an explanation would surely be the main object of each study. In
this way even as little as a dozen small group studies might point to what -

the present writer suspects is only a manageable handful of correlations of central

constellations of the three levels of group, institution and locality.

NOTES

1. Their subsequent careers were: one university teacher (f), two grammar school language
teachers (f), two business executives (m), one Anglican priest (m) and one doctor (m).
2. Of the rest three (f) became secretaries, one girl married and left the town immediately
on leaving school at eighteen, one boy became a bank clerk and the last entered the
executive grade of the civil service.
3. N.B. Her parents were non-conformist.
4. In this respect it could well prove that the liberating elements in post-Freudian psychology
have largely been cancelled out for married women by the popularisation of maternal
deprivation theories among just those groups of middle class women who are most able to
take advantages of other features of life in industrialised societies which in theory make
possible a less rigid division of family labour.
5. See for example P. Mann, "An Approach to Urban Sociology" and R. Frankenburg,
"Communities in Britain".
6. C. A. Moser and W. Scott, "British Towns".
7. A possible starting point might be the analysis in A. Etzioni, "Complex Organisations".

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