Everyone "knows" these things — yet few people, especially those who use stereotypes like these to explain the weakening of Western Christianity, seem to know the empirical truth. Once again, if the conventional account of secularisation was sound — if it correctly predicted who was religious, and why — then we would reasonably expect that the poorer and less educated people were, the more religious they would be. So the fact that these stereotypes are not correct, and that the opposite has been the case in some significant instances, would appear to falsify conventional accounts of what happened to the prevalence of Christian belief.

The British historian Hugh McLeod's painstaking work on London between the 1870s and 1914, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City, found that among Anglicans in London, "the number of . . . worshippers rises at first gradually and then steeply with each step up the social ladder." Put differently, "the poorest districts thus tended to have the lowest rates of [Church] attendance, [and] those with large upper-middle-class and upper-class populations the highest." In other words — and in contrast to the Dickensian image of the pious poor morally and otherwise outshining a debauched and irreligious upper class — reality among the populace seems to have been the opposite in Victorian London. "Only a small proportion of working-class adults," he observes, "attended the main Sunday church services" (Irish Catholics being the sole exception). Callum Brown, another expert on the numbers, makes the same point about religiosity in Britain during those years: contrary to conventional wisdom, "the working classes were irreligious, and the middle classes were the churchgoing bastions of civil morality." Much the same pattern can be found in the United States today — and it is one more pattern subversive of the idea that economic and intellectual sophistication are somehow the natural enemies of Christian faith, or that personal enlightenment and sophistication explain the current condition of Christian practice. 

A widely praised book by the political scientists Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, similarly refutes the notion that religiosity in the United States is a lower-class phenomenon. During the first half of the 20th century, the authors observe, the college-educated participated more in churches than did those with less education. This pattern changed during the 1960s, which saw church attendance fall off most among the educated. But following that "shock" there emerged another pattern, according to which attendance tended again to rise faster among the educated than it did among the less educated (or depending on how one looks at it, the drop in attendance then became more dramatic among the less educated than it was among those with college degrees). As Putnam and Campbell observe, "this trend is clearly contrary to any idea that religion is nowadays providing solace to the disinherited and dispossessed, or that higher education subverts religion."