Clive D Field

Biographic Data

ID3660052
NAMEClive D Field
GIVEN NAMESClive D
FAMILY NAMEField
SIGNATUREFIELD C D
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Birmingham
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS54
TOTAL CITATIONS166
AUTHOR COUNT53
EDITOR COUNT1
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1977
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX6

  • Anti-Methodist Publications of the Eighteenth Century: A Second Supplemental Bibliography

    Clive D FieldARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2026

    This is a second supplement to the consolidated list of anti-Methodist publications of the eighteenth century, which appeared in 1991. It records details of an additional thirty-one books and pamphlets printed in the British Isles between 1751 and 1800 that incorporated anti-Methodist motifs. A full bibliographical description is offered for each item, together with background notes that illuminate its content and context. Six works formerly cate…

  • Churchgoing in Aberdeen, 1836–2016: The Statistical Record

    Open AccessClive D FieldARTICLENorthern Scotland2026

    Historiographical debate about religious change and secularisation in Scotland often fails to take a sufficiently long-term perspective and to subject the sources used to critical scrutiny. In this article, one possible metric of secularisation (churchgoing rates) is investigated for Scotland’s third largest city (Aberdeen), by a statistical examination of thirteen church censuses between 1836 and 2016. Emphasis is placed on the varying methodolo…

  • Secularisation Exemplified: Churchgoing in Dundee, 1836–2016

    Open AccessClive D FieldARTICLEJournal of Scottish Historical…2025

    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 metho…

  • A secularizing society? Case studies of English northern industrial towns in the 1950s

    Open AccessClive D Field, Clive FieldARTICLEHistorical Research2024

    The religious historiography of Britain during the 1950s remains underdeveloped. Such scholarship as there is has drawn disproportionately upon national church statistics and opinion polls. In this article, the findings of three contemporaneous studies of religion in northern industrial towns are presented: Rawmarsh and Scunthorpe (1954-6), Billingham (1957-9), and Bolton (1960). Sundry indicators are illuminated, including churchgoing and rites …

  • ‘A reading people’: Mapping the personal libraries of prominent British Methodists

    Open AccessClive D FieldARTICLELibrary & Information History2023

    Reading is acknowledged to have been a key means of transmission and reinforcement of the Methodist message in Britain, yet the role played by libraries in the history of the movement has been comparatively neglected, certainly in the aggregate. This article offers a preliminary collective overview of non-institutional private libraries and collections of Wesleyana formed by individual British Methodists, from the eighteenth century to the twenty…

  • British Christianity and the Second World War

    Michael Snape, Stuart Bell et al.BOOKBritish Christianity and the…2023

  • Hugh McLeod, Religion and the Rise of Sport in England

    Open AccessClive D FieldARTICLETheology2023

  • Counting Religion in Britain, 1970-2020: Secularization in Statistical Context

    Clive D FieldBOOKCounting Religion in Britain,…2021

    Counting Religion in Britain, 1970–2020 , the fourth volume in the author’s chronological history of British secularization, sheds significant new light on the nature, scale, and timing of religious change in Britain during the past half-century, with particular reference to quantitative sources. Adopting a key performance indicators approach, twenty-one facets of personal religious belonging, behaving, and believing are examined, offering a much…

  • Periodizing Secularization: Religious Allegiance and Attendance in Britain, 1880-1945

    Clive D FieldBOOKPeriodizing Secularization2019

    Moving beyond the (now somewhat tired) debates about secularization as paradigm, theory, or master narrative, this book focuses upon the empirical evidence for secularization, viewed in its descriptive sense as the waning social influence of religion, in Britain. Particular emphasis is attached to the two key performance indicators of religious allegiance and churchgoing, each subsuming several sub-indicators, between 1880 and 1945, including the…

  • Abortion and public opinion in Great Britain: A 50-year retrospective

    Ben Clement, Clive D FieldARTICLEJournal of Beliefs and Values2018

    Trends in attitudes to abortion in Britain are reviewed from the perspective of opinion polls and sample surveys for the half-century since the passage of the Abortion Act 1967. The public’s approach to abortion is found to have been mostly ‘situationalist’, conditioned by the circumstances in which abortions were to be carried out, rather than absolutist. Abortions for traumatic reasons have typically been approved from the outset but abortions …

  • David Martin, Secularisation, Pentecostalism, and Violence: Receptions, Rediscoveries, and Rebuttals in the Sociology of Religion

    Open AccessClive D FieldARTICLETheology2018

  • Secularization in the Long 1960s: Numerating Religion in Britain

    Clive D FieldBOOKSecularization in the Long 1960s2017

    This is a major empirical contribution to the literature of secularization, both generally and in Britain, which moves beyond the now largely sterile and theoretical debates about the validity of the secularization thesis or paradigm. Combining historical and social scientific perspectives and approaches, the author uses a wide range of quantitative sources, many of them unpublished or otherwise neglected, to probe the extent and pace of religiou…

  • Britain on its knees: Prayer and the public since the Second World War

    Open AccessClive D FieldARTICLESocial Compass2017

    As an additional – and less familiar – key performance indicator of secularization, this article offers a meta-analysis of over-time quantitative data about private prayer in modern Britain, mostly derived from national cross-sectional sample surveys among adults. Despite the fragmentary nature of the evidence and its methodological challenges, with consequent variability in results, the direction of travel is clear. Self-reported regular (weekly…

  • Has the Church of England lost the English people: Some quantitative tests

    Open AccessClive D FieldARTICLETheology2017

    Claims made by the authors of That Was the Church that Was (2016) that the Church of England has 'lost' the English people since 1986 are examined through religious statistics. Both attachment and attitudinal indicators are reviewed, the former showing the decline of the Church has been long-term, the latter that division between Church and nation is not always clear-cut

  • Secularising selfhood: What can polling data on the personal saliency of religion tell us about the scale and chronology of secularisation in modern Britain

    Clive D FieldARTICLEJournal of Beliefs and Values2015

    Sample surveys on the personal saliency of religion provide an additional lens on the scale and chronology of secularisation in Britain from the 1960s to the present. Six self-rating measures have been derived from both non-recurrent and serial surveys: religiosity (binary questions), religiosity (non-binary questions), spirituality versus religiosity, importance of religion, importance of God, and difference made by religion. The methodological …

  • Britain’s Last Religious Revival: Quantifying Belonging, Behaving, and Believing in the Long 1950s

    Open AccessClive D Field, C FieldBOOKBritain's Last Religious Revival?2015

    This is a major contribution to scholarly debates on the chronology and nature of secularization in modern Britain. Combining historical and social scientific insights, it analyses a range of statisti

  • Fun, faith and fellowship: British Methodism and tourism in the twentieth century

    Clive D FieldARTICLEJournal of Tourism History2015

    The interaction between religion and tourism has been little studied in the British historical context. A case study is offered of the contribution made by Methodism, the largest of the British Free Churches, to the development of holidays during the twentieth century. The provision of resort hotels in Britain by Methodist-affiliated agencies is reviewed, including the history of Methodist Guild Holidays (MGH) and Methodist Holiday Hotels (MHH). …

  • Anti-Methodist Publications of the Eighteenth Century: A Supplemental Bibliography

    Clive D FieldARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2014

  • No Popery’s Ghost: Does Popular Anti-Catholicism Survive in Contemporary Britain

    Clive D FieldARTICLEJournal of Religion in Europe2014

    Anti-Catholicism has been a feature of British history from the Reformation, but it has been little studied for the period since the Second World War, and rarely using quantitative methods. A thematically-arranged aggregate analysis of around 180 opinion polls among representative samples of adults since the 1950s offers insights into developing attitudes of the British public to Catholics and the Catholic Church. Anti-Catholicism against individ…

  • Another Window on British Secularization: Public Attitudes to Church and Clergy Since the 1960s

    Clive D FieldARTICLEContemporary British History2014Cited by: 14References: 12

    Opinion polls of adults are used to illuminate public attitudes to Church and clergy in Britain since the 1960s. Wherever possible, comparative data are provided for other institutions and professions. The standing of Church and clergy diminished over the half-century, especially in the 1990s and 2000s, mirroring the net decline in institutional Christianity revealed in performance indicators of church membership, attendance, rites of passage and…

  • Is the Bible Becoming a Closed Book? British Opinion Poll Evidence

    Clive D FieldARTICLEJournal of Contemporary Religion2014Cited by: 3References: 1

    Opinion poll data from 123 national sample surveys of the adult general population and 35 national and local sample surveys of adult religious populations are used to study changes in the status and influence of the Bible in Britain since the Second World War. The principal measures of 'Bible-centricism' comprise Bible ownership, readership, knowledge, literalism, beliefs, and attitudes. The analysis proceeds both at top-line level and by breaks …

  • Keeping the Spiritual Home Fires Burning: Religious Belonging in Britain during the First World War

    Clive D Field, Clive FieldARTICLEWar & Society2014

    The religious impact of the First World War on the home front in Britain is assessed in terms of churchgoing and church membership and affiliation. Church attendance rose briefly at the start of the war but fell away thereafter in the Protestant tradition, accelerating a pre-existing trend, which was not reversed after 1918. The disruption caused by the war to the everyday life of organized religion probably accounts for the decrease, rather more…

  • Public Opinion toward Homosexuality and Gay Rights in Great Britain

    Ben Clement, B Clements et al.ARTICLEPublic Opinion Quarterly2014Cited by: 59References: 2

    Journal Article Public Opinion toward Homosexuality and Gay Rights in Great Britain Get access Ben Clements, Ben Clements * B en C lements is a lecturer in politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK. Clive D. Field is an honorary research fellow in the Department of History, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK, and an honorary research fellow in the Institute for Social Change, …

  • Measuring religious affiliation in Great Britain: The 2011 Census in Historical and Methodological Context

    Open AccessClive D FieldARTICLEReligion2014Cited by: 4References: 19

    The British religious census of 2011 is located in its broader historical and methodological context. The principal developments in the measurement of religious affiliation (proxy-assigned or self-assigned) in Britain are traced from the Reformation to the present day, charting the relative contribution of the Churches, the State and empirical social science. The key statistics which have emerged from their respective efforts are summarised, with…

  • Gradualist or Revolutionary Secularization? A Case Study of Religious Belonging in Inter-War Britain, 1918–1939

    Clive D FieldARTICLEChurch History and Religious…2013

    The timing of secularization in Britain remains a contested topic among historians and sociologists, some regarding it largely as a post-Second World War phenomenon (with the 1960s a critical decade), others viewing it as a more gradual process commencing in the Victorian era. The inter-war years (1918–1939) have been little studied in this context, notwithstanding a coincidence of social, economic, and political circumstances which might have be…