This article is a preview from the Autumn 2017 edition of New Humanist.
‘‘In the long run it would be better for the Church, better for people of faith, and better for Anglicans, if the Church and state were to stand on their own two separate feet.” In expressing this view in 2014, the then Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg became the first senior politician to explicitly endorse the idea of the disestablishment of the Church of England. In responding to the then Prime Minister David Cameron’s claim that Britain is a “Christian country”, Clegg argued that whilst Britain undoubtedly has a Christian heritage, an increasingly atheistic and multi-faith society requires a secular state: one that protects all religions, but privileges none. So what does establishment currently mean, and how easily could church and state be disentangled?
The notion of an “established” church carries different meanings in different countries. But typically it has some of the following features. Firstly, explicit constitutional recognition that one church holds a special position with regard to the state. Secondly, sovereignty of the head of state, national legislature or government over the state church, meaning control of its powers and official appointments. Thirdly, ecclesiastical representation by right in the national legislature. Fourthly, payment by the people of taxes for church maintenance, or the state’s subvention of monies for that purpose. And lastly, wide-scale popular membership of the church, and submission to it. In the UK, establishment certainly includes the first three elements. It has only a few remnants of the fourth, and has long since ceased to have the last feature: popular churchgoing. The UK’s only fully established church is the Church of England: Anglicanism was formally disestablished in Ireland in 1871 and in Wales in 1920. The status of the Church of Scotland is ambiguous: nobody is quite sure whether it is an established church or not. So within the UK the Church of England occupies a unique position in terms of its institutional links to the state. These links are deeply embedded in law and the constitution.
This most visible manifestation of this is the monarchy: the Queen is simultaneously head of state and head of the Church, holding the titles of Supreme Governor of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith. In a coronation ceremony presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Queen swore an Accession Oath to “maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline and government thereof, as by law established in England”. There are countless other visible manifestations of establishment: 26 bishops sit in the House of Lords, giving the Church a platform in parliament and making the UK one of only two countries in the world to include religious leaders in the legislature as of right (the other being Iran). There are Anglican prayers at the start of parliamentary business; the Archbishop of Canterbury presides over the remembrance service at the Cenotaph.
But there are also many other less visible interconnections between Church and state. Bishops and archbishops are appointed by the monarch acting on advice from the Prime Minister. Key matters of Church governance – including theological matters such as authorised liturgy – are passed by the Church of England General Synod, but are subject to parliamentary approval and Royal Assent. Chancel Repair Liability – a common-law relic dating back to Norman times – means that we can sometimes be compelled to finance the Church directly. In theory the Church of England is required to conduct a “national mission” to minister to the whole of the English population – provide pastoral care in every local parish and to marry, bury and baptise those who reside within a parish church. Church canons (rules authorised by parliament) require it to conduct communion and evening prayers in every parish each Sunday, and on specified days in the Christian calendar.
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To be sure, the legal underpinnings of establishment have altered considerably over time. For 300 years after the Reformation, the Church of England wielded a panoply of constitutional and legal privileges much vaster than it enjoys now. Central to this structure was the requirement for public officials to be members of the established Church. In 1800, as part of the Union of England and Ireland, Pitt the Younger tried to secure a measure of Catholic emancipation; this was frustrated by George III, who saw it as a breach of his coronation oath to protect the established Church. In terms of its implications for the power of the established Church, George III was probably right to regard Catholic emancipation as the thin end of the wedge. In 1828 the Sacramental Test Act removed the requirement for public officials to be members of the Church of England, and in 1829 the Roman Catholic Relief Act allowed Catholics to become Members of Parliament: these changes were then followed by other significant reductions in the power of the established Church, for example The Matrimonial Causes Act 1857, which took divorce out of jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts. Other legislation abolished tithes and church rates.
However, although the disestablishment of churches in Ireland and Wales led to a reduction of church-state links in Britain as a whole, in the 20th century the process of reforming church-state relations in England tended to stall. Of the twentieth-century British Prime Ministers, only two – Lloyd George and Tony Blair – displayed any real interest in constitutional reform; in neither case did this really extend to the Church of England, although it could be argued that in 1919, during Lloyd George’s premiership, there was a tilt in the direction of disestablishment with the creation of the Church Assembly of the Church of England (reconstituted in 1970 as the General Synod): this body was given the power to formulate Church legislation to be submitted to parliament for approval, as it had become clear that parliament had lost the appetite to initiate Church legislation. But the only really significant reform to the status of the Church of England in the last 150 years has been the Succession to the Crown Act 2013, which removed the prohibition on the new monarch being married to a Catholic. Despite some reduction in its power in the 19th century, the Church of England continues to wield significant influence over British politics, law and society.
Can the influence and power flowing from establishment still be justified? Some proponents of establishment rely on a Burkean argument that the role of the Church of England in national life is so long-standing and deep-rooted that disestablishment would shatter a carefully nurtured social fabric. In this view an established Anglican Church is essential to nationhood. On this argument the parish – “the basic territorial unit in the organisation of this country”, according to one historian – remains what PD Thompson termed “a training ground in community life”.
Historically this may have been true: England, as the Catholic historian Adrian Hastings put it in The Construction of Nationhood, “was imagined through intensely biblical glasses”. But the concept of a “Christian nation” – old maids biking to holy communion through the mists of the autumn morning, in George Orwell’s words – is clearly increasingly untenable given long-term religious decline and increased pluralism of belief. Church attendances have been low for decades; the proportion of the UK population self-identifying as Christian has substantially declined to less than half, and is now exceeded by the proportion self-identifying as having no religion. This latter proportion now stands at 48 per cent – up from 32 per cent in 1983; in the same period, the proportion of the population self-identifying as “Church of England” has halved from 40 to 20 per cent. Meanwhile, with immigration, non-Christian faiths have also grown.
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Perhaps recognising that the notion of a “Christian nation” is no longer a tenable basis for defending establishment in a pluralistic society, some proponents of establishment have reconfigured the argument: in a multi-faith society, they argue, establishment is a moderating bulwark protecting faith of any kind from “aggressive secularism” on the one side and religious extremism on the other. Prince Charles – who says he wants to be the “defender of faiths” – suggests that an established Church sends a signal that faith is welcome in public life. This argument is shared by some from non-Christian faiths and is expressed thus by a Muslim commentator, Anjum Anwar: “Anglicanism listens and gives voices to the outsiders. I believe that the Church of England plays a vital role in representing and speaking, not only for Christians, but also for people of other faiths… For me Anglicanism provides a sense of an identity under the umbrella of ‘people of faith’. Instead of disestablishing the Church, I would want the UK to enhance the way it works so that both church and state, together, can cater for many different communities.” Anwar goes on to explain that “As a Muslim I feel that once the Church is disestablished, aggressive secularism may further weaken faith, culminating in a totally secular state, eventually leading to what happened in the former Yugoslavia in the time of Tito.”
A modern argument for establishment, then, seems to be that an established Church validates the role of faith generally in the public square, giving it a presence and legitimacy that it would otherwise lack. But this argument begs too many questions. If faith needs state power in order to sustain itself, how much moral and intellectual legitimacy does it really have? How precisely is a monarch sworn under oath to uphold the Church of England to act as a defender of “faiths” in the plural? Why should the monarch be upholding faith anyway, when the proportion of the UK population self-identifying as Christian is exceeded by the proportion self-identifying as having no religion? Also, what would it mean in practice for the Church of England to promote other faiths? The public reaction to the suggestion by Rowan Williams, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, that Sharia law could become part of the law of England suggests that such a notion may not be popular. And Anwar’s hyperbole about disestablishment turning Britain into Yugoslavia seems self-evidently absurd. Sweden disestablished its national Church in 2000, yet its Church has retained a mass following. Christianity flourishes in the USA, which has a constitutional “wall of separation” between church and state, and many observers have argued that this flourishing is a consequence of separation, which energised and popularised religion in an way an established Church never could. So establishment in and of itself may not validate and promote faith: indeed the opposite may be true.
A linked defence of establishment is the “moral” one: the notion that the Church of England provides an essential repository of moral guidance for society as a whole. Take this away, say some proponents of establishment, and you risk society descending into moral relativism – but again, this argument quickly breaks down. It is absurd to suppose that the modern Church of England – insipid, inward-looking, riven with internal obsessions about the status of women and homosexuality, and now fending off child-abuse scandals on a scale previously only associated with the Catholic Church – can claim to offer a coherent source of moral guidance. On matters of personal behaviour, it is clear from repeated public opinion surveys that on issues such as the role of women, abortion, same-sex marriage and assisted dying, 80 per cent or more of the British population subscribe to liberal moral values. This is a societal reality. Some prominent figures in the Church of England share these liberal views, some vociferously oppose them. But the Church of England has no single or coherent stance on these subjects – indeed it seems irreconcilably divided to the point where a split in its ranks may be unavoidable. And given that the liberal social consensus is now well established, people would be unlikely to be influenced one way or other by the Church of England in any event.
Moreover, if one considers morality more widely than simply issues of personal sexual behaviour and autonomy, it seems obvious that the institutional privileges of the Church of England weaken rather than strengthen its moral voice. As a leading Quaker puts it:
When Constantine established Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire, a hitherto radical and subversive movement began its journey to the Christendom model of an organisation at home in the corridors of power. Its leaders became accustomed to operating from positions of privilege and – as power tends to corrupt – a habit of protecting its own interests inevitably developed. In our own times ... the Church of England can seem very far removed from the lives of marginalised and vulnerable people. Jesus had little time for the religious establishment of his own day and scandalised it by his teaching and actions. The efforts of good people within the Church of England to follow the way of this turbulent rabbi are often rendered absurd – witness George Carey complaining about the marginalisation of Christians from his seat in the Lords – and at worst are betrayed, alienating the very people who could justifiably expect solidarity from the Church. When the prophetic assemblies of Occupy pitched their tents outside St Paul’s Cathedral in 2011, the institution reacted in a way that revealed the relationship between heart and treasure. Priority was given to the revenue from the cathedral’s status as a tourist attraction. Where the established Church fails to interrogate its sense of entitlement and self-interest, the spirit of Jesus is not made manifest. If disestablishment could free the servant heart which beats in the best of its clergy and people, it would surely be an instrument of mission.
This view is acknowledged by Rowan Williams, who says separation would give the Church of England “a certain integrity”. As the commentator Theo Hobson puts it, communication of the church’s social gospel is “blocked by the decaying relics of theocracy”.
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So if the arguments in favour of an established church are increasingly tendentious and unsustainable, how might disestablishment actually come about? Although untying the multitude of interconnections would not be simple, it could plainly be done. So far as legal mechanics are concerned, there are ample precedents. Ireland has had two established churches and then disestablished them: the Church of Ireland was disestablished in 1871; the Roman Catholic Church was the state religion of the Irish Republic between 1937 and 1973, but then ceased to be so. In jurisdictions where there used to be an established church, there is always an identifiable legislative process which brought about disestablishment – for example the Irish Church Act 1869, or the Welsh Church Act 1914 (which took effect in 1919-20).
The main legislative measures are obvious: rewrite the coronation oath; end the right of Bishops to sit in the House of Lords; end the involvement of Queen and parliament in the appointment of bishops and the governance of the church. Some of these steps are more complicated than others. Issues involving Church finances and Church assets may also be convoluted, but again there are historical precedents to draw upon, even if at first glance they seem distant from our own situation, for example the settlement on Church property in the 1905 French law on the separation of church and state.
So the question of “how?” is as much a political as a legal one. In order to happen, disestablishment would need to become more of a hot-button issue than it currently is. There is certainly already some religious support for disestablishment. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the former Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, has argued that disestablishment “will happen and I think it might be of benefit to Anglicans if it did at some point. They obviously think that at the moment it’s an advantage to them, and I respect that. But I think it will change with time.” At the top of the Church of England, there is recognition that disestablishment has a certain logic and may ultimately be difficult to resist. While Rowan Williams has said that disestablishment would be “by no means the end of the world”, the current Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby appears less sympathetic, but says such an outcome would be “just another event in a very long history”. There is also some evidence of support for disestablishment amongst the ranks of Church of England clergy. But amongst politicians and legislators, support for disestablishment has yet to gain significant traction: only the Liberal Democrats have explicitly endorsed it, and although many Labour MPs probably support it, few regard it as a priority. And at the moment MPs are unlikely to vote for disestablishment given the Conservative–DUP parliamentary majority.
Ultimately, however, legislators will bow to the will of the public. Unsurprisingly, polls suggest that support for an established Church is strongest amongst older, Conservative and English voters, and weakest amongst the young, Labour and Liberal Democrat voters, Scots and non-Anglicans. So disestablishment attracts greatest support amongst growing demographics, a fact that is bound in time to translate into growing political support for change. With the collapse in the proportion of the UK population self-identifying as Christian, and the context of long-term religious decline and increased pluralism of belief, the establishment of the Church of England seems increasingly anachronistic. The bishops, mainly white and male, are unrepresentative of the UK population and their positions on moral and social issues are particularly at odds with the views of young people. In the past few years most British institutions have faced unprecedented scrutiny, but as Mike Hampson, author of Last Rites: The End of the Church of England, says, “only the Church of England has created a situation where virtually all its energy is invested in self-defeating pursuits at every level of the organisation”. This has created a sense of the Church of England as increasingly irrelevant, if not ridiculous.
Of course, for those arguing for change, the lack of popular respect for the Church of England, and Anglicanism’s limited influence on British culture, itself poses a problem: public indifference. The greatest difficulty for proponents of disestablishment is not that their arguments are not accepted, but that the Church of England has become so irrelevant to the lives of the large majority of the British population that the public may not care. However, even if indifference to the Church of England means that disestablishment is not an immediate political priority for voters, history suggests that it will ultimately become a lever for change: in Ireland in 1871 and Wales in 1920 the key to disestablishment was the fact that the majority of the population did not subscribe to the state religion. From today’s vantage point, living as we are under a Conservative government, led (at the time of writing) by a churchgoing Anglican, it is easy to assume that the innate conservatism of the British people will militate against disestablishment, at least for now. However, underlying social changes inevitably precipitate political and constitutional change, even if only after a time lag.
In Forging the Nation, the historian Linda Colley wrote that “The factors that provided for the forging of the British nation in the past have largely ceased to operate. Protestantism, that once vital cement, has now a limited influence on British culture, as indeed has Christianity itself.” For Colley, an implication of this change was that the union between England and Scotland would come under strain, as indeed it has. But the dissolving of the factors which underpinned the British state for centuries has other constitutional implications, and must also raise serious questions about the sustainability of establishment, particularly as we are living through a period of significant political upheaval.
We do not know what the precipitating factors for reform of church-state relations might be. The death of the current monarch might give rise to argument about the validity of the traditional coronation oath. A formal split between the liberal and evangelical wings of the Church of England may also force the issue. Either way, in the longer run change will be difficult to resist. This may be a conservative country in many ways, but ultimately, as Nick Clegg suggested, the continuance of an established Church must be unsustainable.
