In the ongoing scholarly debate about the secularisation of Scottish (and British) society, churchgoing is one of the few metrics for which longitudinal data exist, albeit fragmentarily. This article assembles and analyses the evidence about levels of church attendance in Dundee, Scotland’s fourth largest city, during the nineteenth to early twenty-first centuries. It draws upon quantitative data (twelve religious censuses, six with varying methodologies between 1836 and 1901, and six with standardised methodology between 1980 and 2016) and some qualitative sources (chiefly local newspapers). Relative to population, churchgoing in Dundee appears to have declined continuously since the mid-nineteenth century, when at least two fifths of Dundonians worshipped on an average Sunday, the equivalent figure c.2023 being just 3.76 per cent. Possible explanations for this decrease are briefly explored.
Clive D. Field (Sat,) studied this question.