Supply and perceived demand

 Many years ago, I visited some old churches in England, often stopping for Evensong.

Usually, the congregation could be counted on two hands. I heard, time and again, the story of how difficult it was for a tiny religious community to keep a building that was several hundred years old in repair.

It’s an interesting problem: what to do with those buildings.

The flip side of the problem was the movement to build churches that swept England in the mid 19^th century. Better concepts in statistics, demographics and planning were taking hold, and someone figured out that all the churches in England had seating for 15 percent of the population.

We think that pop psychology was invented in our era. But the psychology of the day held that the members of the class of virtuous poor would slide into the class of the criminally poor unless something were done.

A lot of churches, now historic, were built in that era. A lot are empty today.