I haven’t written anything about this sort of thing for a while. But, if you want to really understand why working class people struggle in the UK church, let me highlight a little example that I think explains the issues in a nutshell. I want to say from the front end here, the fault doesn’t lie with the thing or person at the centre of this example. The thing itself simply serves to help us see the issues at play. If you really want to understand why class is still a problem, why it is an issue in the UK evangelical church and why working class people are so deeply frustrated, this will give you some insight.

A new book on class and church has been published. Hot off the press in July 2024. I even saw it being promoted by a few well known, prominent UK Christians. I also saw a lot of praise and talk of how “important” this book is and how “vital” it is that we hear its challenges and respond to it properly so that we can address the real issues it raises. That book is Class and the Evangelical Church in England by Kirsten Birkett.

Now, before I go on, let me say once again: the problem here is NOT with the book or its author. I am glad people from different backgrounds (non-English and even non-British backgrounds) are recognising and raising these issues. Nor does Birkett present what she is saying a though she is the definitive voice on the matter nor raising issues that have never been raised before. She states, ‘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.’ She references two of them directly here. So none of what follows is any issue with Birkett or her book. It is the reaction to her book, and indeed the relative response to other voices, that speaks into the issues at play.

The voices welcomed

There are, indeed, other books out there on this issue. Good books. There are practitioners (the poncey word we seem to use now for people working in relevant contexts) who have been raising these issues for many years. Some of us have even written some of those books and our other writing and comments are referenced across many of those other books too. We are the people those other “good books” are either written by or whose writing is referenced in them.

Yet, it seems to me, there is much more cooing and hoopla for a book written by an academic from the Church of England who is not a “practitioner” on the ground nor is a British working-class voice on the receiving end of the issues being outlined. Again, that it NOT to say Birkett shouldn’t be allowed to speak, has no insight on the matters at hand, doesn’t fully understand or that academic interest is not valuable. I want to be clear, I’m not saying any of these things and, once again, the issue is not Birkett nor her book which I am sure makes a valuable contribution to these discussions.

The issue is, Birkett’s work is welcomed with much applause; working class voices who have been saying these things for many years are not. If you want to understand why working class people feel so frustrated in the church, it is writ large in that people are allowed to write about them, are even considered more authoritative as they write about them, and yet when they speak for themselves their voices are either not welcomed or dismissed altogether. It is patronage that says we know what is best for you, you must listen to us. Those from the in-group (in this case, the middle classes) will be heard as reasonable voices who understand the working class; the working classes can be dismissed as not truly understanding what is good for themselves.

The voices heeded

That attitude works its way into how working class people are viewed. The long and short of it is that they are usually seen to be examples; typically, not positive ones and certainly not with the good sense or ability to properly understand the issues at play. We are happy to quote the occasional working class person, we might reference their experience but if and when working class people speak for themselves and interpret the evidence for themselves it is routinely rejected. When middle class people determine to say the same thing – referencing some of those same working class voices – those who previously dismissed the working class cannot fall over themselves fast enough to praise and laud the middle class voice saying the same thing.

The same is even seen in many ministries that explicitly aim at helping and supporting working class people. They are typically setup by middle class people and, even when they have some token working class people on their boards, as one writer once put it, they’re given a seat at the table, but it’s always a kiddie seat. They are happy to have a working class representative on their board, but they aren’t always willing to submit to working class opinions of how to actually help the working class. Nor, when working class people seek to access support and suggest that the way things are run may not serve the best interests of working class people, they are often ignored in favour of the views and opinions of the middle class people running the show. Of course, if it’s middle class money we’re talking about, middle class people have every right to spend it however they want. But if it’s designed to help the working class, to reach working class people and raise up working class people in the church and for wider ministry, they are not actually helping by doing the one most basic thing that would help most of all: listening to working class voices.

The voices sought

The same is true when it comes to the platforms we tend to give people. There are, of course, the occasional example that bucks the trend. But on the whole, we would rather front middle class voices over working class ones. We would rather read a book by an academic writing about working class people – like they are some sort of zoological study piece – than to working class people speaking and writing for themselves. As Darren McGarvey rightly says in his book Poverty Safari, ‘the conversation about poverty is usually dominated by people with little direct experience of being poor.’

In exactly the same way, it is people who have gone to deprived communities from middle class backgrounds who are more readily sought than working class people who have committed to staying in those communities. If there is a middle class person saying similar things we tend to prefer them to speak over the working class person with direct experience of the matters at hand. Even when there is some representation of deprived communities on a platform, you’re far more likely to find a middle class voice representing it than a working class one.

I don’t in any way blame the middle class people who have gone to deprived communities, who are given the chance to raise the issues about such communities, from taking that opportunity. It’s not their fault and I would much rather they grasped hold of that opportunity than nobody did and nothing was said about these issues at all. The issue is that they are always preferred to the working class voice and often sought over and above any working class voice. I suspect that is because the working class are seen as ‘loose cannons’ while the middle voice speaks the majority language. But again, we end up with patronage that insists the middle class speak on behalf of the working classes rather than giving them their own voice.

The voices we understand

One of the big issues that middle class people don’t fully understand – especially those who want to champion the working class and their voice – is when working class people do not welcome their input. Such middle class people are genuinely well-intentioned and, in many ways this makes their confusion worse, when they then face frustration and anger from the very working class they think they are serving. Again, Darren McGarvey writes:

Because this specialist class is so genuinely well-intentioned when it comes to the interests of people in deprived communities, they get a bit confused, upset and offended when those very people begin expressing anger towards them. It never occurs to them, because they see themselves as the good guys, that the people they purport to serve may, in fact, perceive them as chancers, careerists or charlatans. They regard themselves as champions of the under class and therefore, should any poor folk begin to get their own ideas or, god forbid, rebel against the poverty experts, the blame is laid at the door of the complainants for misunderstanding what is going on.

There is a long history of patronage towards the working class. Most working class people do not have happy memories or many good examples of their dealings with middle class people who purport to serve them and their needs. For many, the ‘help’ they receive is either actively unhelpful, misunderstands the nature of working class life whilst at the same time insisting it is the working classes who don’t understand what is good for them or is delivered by those who always appear to have something in it for themselves. It may be a round of applause, it may be career advancement, it may be part and parcel of their job or a good feeling they are doing something but it rarely looks like anybody actually asking what would be helpful and then listening and so acting when the answer comes back.

Again, Darren McGarvey writes:

It’s the belief that the system is rigged against you and that all attempts to resist or challenge it are futile. That the decisions that affect your life are being taken by a bunch of other people somewhere else who are deliberately trying to conceal things from you. A belief that you are excluded from taking part in the conversation about your own life. This belief is deeply held by people in many communities and there is a very good reason for it: it’s true.

Working class people in the church – if they stick around at all – find this happens in our churches, our ministries, our funding bodies and pretty well shot through the entire evangelical enterprise. But because many middle class fail to understand the frustrations, and do not recognise quite why working class people may respond to their offers of help as they do, they simply back away altogether or prefer to find voices that speak their language and front them instead. But having middle class people speaking on behalf of working class people only adds to the feeling that others are speaking for you and you are being excluded from conversations about your own church experience.

The latest book is not a problem in and of itself. It’s not a problem in what is says. But it has been welcomed because it is the right kind of voice, saying things in the right kind of way, from the right kind of background, speaking language the majority understand and therefore lauding it as a great step forward. But the church needs to understand what a kick in the teeth that reaction is to the working class voices (and this is not sleight on Birkett, who clearly references some of them) who have said all these same things and yet we either ignored them or dismissed them. Often, dismissed not because we could actually fault what they said – and those selfsame people lauding Birkett’s book prove it isn’t what was said that’s at issue – but who said it and how they said it. We don’t want to hear working class voices.

The issue at hand

That, in a nutshell, is what deeply frustrates working class evangelicals. Many of them feel their voices are dismissed. They must be seen and not heard. If any of them do dare to speak, they are patronised, dismissed – often called defensive, aggressive, divisive – when they are only being honest about their experience. The proof they are right is that a middle class person writes and says the same thing and the church falls over itself to listen, applaud and say how insightful it is when working class people have been saying it for decades and yet keep being told they’re basically moaning about nothing and that class isn’t really an issue anymore. That is, until there’s an academic paper or a book in it for a middle class person – naturally from within the Church of England – saying it is.

And just in case this has been lost, let me say it again: this is not Kirsten Birkett’s fault. This is not a problem with anything she has said nor added to this conversation. The issue is the wider evangelical reaction to what has been said and why many respond so positively to this when, by Birkett’s own admission, it has all been said before and – in the experience of those saying it – welcomed much less happily. The issue is not personal. It is nothing to with the author or her book in and of themselves. They are simply the latest example that may give some insight into how and why working class people so often feel marginalised in our middle class majority churches.

This example is important because the issue of the voices we hear and middle class patronage toward the working class is at the heart of pretty much every other manifestation and symptom of the wider problem. Whether we are speaking about lifestyle, language, clothes, interests, family life and all manner of things, these are all symptoms and manifestations of the issue. When working class people insist these are no less Christian, but legitimate parts of their culture, they are routinely dismissed by the middle class who claim to know better. When working class people insist they don’t need to look middle class to be elders, preach or be respected within the church, they are told this is sub-Christian and to be Christian is to be middle class in dress, speech and lifestyle. But these things are just symptoms of the essential problem: the working class are patronised, told they don’t know what they’re talking about and made to assimilate to middle class lifestyles and ways of behaving because their self-appointed cultural superiors say it so. And the real kicker is, the middle class are only prepared to listen at all when another middle class Christian they actually respect says it is so.