I’m currently live-tweeting whilst reading Why Men Hate Going To Church by Dave Murrow. You can check out my tweets on Twitter with the hashtag #WMH. I tweeted this page from the book:
Tom McLean (@Tom_McLean) kindly send me some GREAT information to counter the stuff listed here, hope you find it as useful as I did!
In the two paragraphs above, sentence by sentence:
1. You’ll struggle to find detailed evidence of attendances in C13th. Was an era of huge change – rise of the mendicant orders (the Dominicans, the Franciscans). Parallel growth of women’s religious orders, but from earlier roots (e.g. Scholastica, sister of Benedict, so C6th), not completely new. Change was social as well, but the claim about men’s attendance is at best unprovable.
2. Catholicism has never worshipped Mary. Devotion to her stems from at least the C3rd. (Have a search for Sub tuum praesidium – the John Rylands Papyrus Gr. III 470 is of note! Pic here: http://frederica.com/gallery/places-and-things/1067611) Title of Theotokos (God-bearer) given to her by the Council of Ephesus (431). Growth in C12th/13th period of devotion to the Blessed Sacrament – so Jesus, in the form of the sacramental bread. (Growth of Feast of Corpus Christi – originates with Juliana of Liege, but popularized by Pope Urban IV and Thomas Aquinas). On Corpus Christi and popular devotion in the period, see Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi. On Marian devotion, see Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary.
3. Weakness and dependency seem to get commended from at least Paul onwards… Struggle and sacrifice never portrayed as an alternative, but integrated with. E.g. Franciscan poverty is about sacrifice of possessions and wealth, but necessarily leads to a degree of dependency on (theologically) God and (practically) whoever gives you a meal, but also to freedom to go where the Church requires.
4. Some degree to which clergy became practitioners of faith, and reduced reception of the Eucharist. Though this led to a great growth in popular devotions aside from the official liturgies of the Church, see popularity of places of pilgrimage, the rosary, guilds, mystery plays, etc. On sociology of Christian worship, see Martin Stringer, A Sociological History of Christian Worship.
5.…and probably of women. Though only really know about men who became important. (Not so much on what Teresa Berger calls ‘men who were only men’ – see her Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History).
6. Men in the New World, yes – the first round with the likes of Columbus were the Jesuits. I know nothing about Puritan history which I suspect is more his focus… My instinct would be that a response needs to consider the make-up of the population more – was there an imbalance between men and women in the population at large?
7. Perhaps! But how do such rolls relate to the population at large? The comments in Bryan D. Spinks, ‘Imagining the Past: Historical Methodologies and Liturgical Study’, In Liturgy’s Imagined Past/S: Methodologies and Materials in the Writing of Liturgical History Today, edited by Teresa Berger and Bryan D. Spinks, Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2016, pp. 3–18; and Breen, Timothy H., Imagining the Past: East Hampton Histories, Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1989 might offer something interesting.
Good introductions to Church History:
- Very accessible introduction – Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, The Essential History of Christianity
- Detailed single volume – Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity
- A little dated in places, but quite accessible, and still worth reading – The Pelican/Penguin History of the Church – several volumes by one of the Chadwicks, but other authors too. First one: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Penguin-History-Church-vol-1-Early/dp/0140231994
- Victorian Church – Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church (2 vols)
- A bit more theological in character, the early chapters of Alistair McGrath’s Christian Theology: An Introduction (and the Reader that goes with).
God Loves Women 