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  • Letter to the Editor
  • Albion M. Urdank

The Editors:

I write to clarify some misperceptions about my book, Birth, Death and Religious Faith in an English Dissenting Community: A Microhistory of Nailsworth and Hinterland, 1695–1837 (Lanham, 2016), which appeared in Kathryn Lynch’s review in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLVII (2017), 414–415.

The first misperception is that the study’s aim is to compare or contrast Baptist and Anglican fertility over the “long eighteenth century.” The central goal is actually to gauge the impact of religious enthusiasm on fertility, as registered via the evangelical revival, and only secondarily to compare/contrast Nonconformist and Anglican fertility in this context. The “event-history analysis” in Chapter 2 established that for Baptists, the probability of an additional birth occurring, following religious conversion, increased significantly, particularly among wives.

The path analyses in the chapters about Baptist and Anglican fertility refined and affirmed this finding. Path analysis is a form of regression, in which the direct and indirect causal flows are broken down into their constituent parts. This method permitted an assessment of the relative importance of age at marriage, a standard socio-economic variable, and age at conversion, a religio-cultural variable, for procreative outcomes. So, in one example I write, “With regard to family size (D[ependent] V[ariable] ‘Kidcount’), age at marriage and age at conversion show parity in their respective direct effects, which are each robust, in terms of the size of coefficients and probability distributions. This remains true of the indirect effect of marriage age, although by the course of mediation by age at conversion, its coefficient size becomes reduced in its total effect, thereby rendering conversion age the dominant variable in the model” (69–70). The patterns of the diverse models, which are separated into pre-marital and post-marital subsets, in terms of the timing of religious conversion (which accounts for variation in sample size), are similar for Baptist and Anglican wives but not so [End Page 123] much for husbands. Furthermore, sample sizes in the path analyses differ from those in other parts of the text because the data were reconfigured into a long form in order to maximize the number of Ns. In Figure 4.7 (49), for example, the N for the pre-marital subset is 151 based on 26 family clusters, whereas in the post-marital subset, the N equals 355 based on 69 family clusters. The number of Ns among Anglicans, in the post-marital subset especially, is much higher—2,424 based on 462 family clusters.

The impact of evangelicalism on the marginal birth is especially evident among wives in the post-marital subset. However, calculations of fecund-fertility rates show that Baptist and Anglican patterns differed markedly among selected age cohorts (Figure 5.7, 72; Appendix 3). Hence, while the impact of evangelicalism on procreative outcomes might be broadly similar for Nonconformists and Anglicans, the respective fecund-fertility rates were not always similar.

The main point is that a cultural variable, in the form of religious experience and practice enjoyed co-equal status with a standard socio-economic variable, age at marriage, virtually fetishized by English historical demographers. How unusual is that? Very unusual, I would say.

Secondly, Lynch states that this study “fails to reveal whether Baptists constituted a well-defined community,” which would allow Baptist membership to predict reproductive behavior, “or whether they constituted an open fluid community, which would threaten the whole point of comparing Baptist and Anglican demographic rates.” This statement is odd, because else where in the review she refers to my first book—Religion and Society in a Cotswold Vale: Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, 1780–1865 (Berkeley, 1990)—for material about the social and economic background of industrial revolution in the locale. This book devotes itself specifically to establishing the Shortwood Baptist Church (the largest Baptist church outside London) as a “well-defined community.” At the same time, as this book also shows, the Baptists operated within a Low (Anglican) Church environment which was equally evangelical and saw the Baptists as an institutional threat (Anglican laity often attended Baptist services as hearers). In other words, evangelicalism was ubiquitous throughout the region; in this sense...

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