The Established Church: Past, Present and Future (Affirming Catholicism)

The Established Church

Other titles in the Affirming Catholicism series include: The Anglican Covenant edited by Mark Chapman The Hope of Things to Come edited by Mark Chapman Lay Presidency at the Eucharist? edited by Nicholas Taylor Living the Magnificat edited by Mark Chapman Women as Bishops edited by James Rigney

The Established Church Past, Present and Future

Edited by Mark Chapman Judith Maltby William Whyte

Published by T&T Clark International A Continuum Imprint The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. © Mark Chapman, Judith Maltby, William Whyte, with contributors, 2011 Mark Chapman, Judith Maltby, William Whyte and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-567-35809-7 (paperback) Typeset by Mark D. Chapman Printed and bound in Great Britain

Contents

Series Foreword Mark D. Chapman

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Notes on Contributors

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Preface Sarah Foot

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1

Why the ‘establishment’ of the Church of England is Good for a Liberal Society Nigel Biggar

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Opportunity Knocks: Church, Nationhood and Establishment Martyn Percy

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3

The Dog that Didn’t Bark: the Failure of Disestablishment since 1927 Matthew Grimley

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‘A Free Church in a Free State’: Anglo-Catholicism and Establishment Mark D. Chapman

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Gospel Opportunity or Unbiblical Relic? The Established Church through Anglican Evangelical Eyes Andrew Atherstone

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Gender and Establishment: Parliament, ‘Erastianism’ and the Ordination of Women 1993–2010 Judith Maltby

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The Establishment, Multiculturalism and Social Cohesion Elaine Graham

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1

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Contents 8

A Uniform British Establishment Iain McLean and Scot Peterson

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Methodism and Establishment David Carter

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Anglican Establishment, Roman Catholics and Receptive Ecumenism Philip Endean SJ

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What Future for Establishment? William Whyte

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Index

197

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Foreword by the Series Editor Affirming Catholicism exists to promote education and informed theological discussion in the Anglican Communion. While it seeks to embrace the best of the catholic tradition it is not narrowly partisan and strives to encourage the kind of thinking that rises above the prejudices that so often characterize theological debate in the churches. This series of books is intended to provide resources for the Church as it seeks to move forward into the future.

Mark D. Chapman Cuddesdon Epiphany, 2011

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Notes on Contributors Andrew Atherstone is Tutor in History and Doctrine at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. Nigel Biggar is Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford, and Canon of Christ Church. David Carter is a Methodist Local Preacher and Lecturer for the Open University and Wesley College, Bristol. Mark D. Chapman is Vice-Principal of Ripon College Cuddesdon, Oxford and Reader in Modern Theology at the University of Oxford. Philip Endean SJ is Fellow in Theology at Campion Hall, Oxford. Sarah Foot is Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Oxford and Canon of Christ Church. Elaine Graham is Grosvenor Research Professor in Practical Theology at the University of Chester. Matthew Grimley is Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Merton College, Oxford. Judith Maltby is Chaplain and Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Iain McLean is Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford Martyn Percy is Principal of Ripon College Cuddesdon and honorary Professor of Christian Education at King’s College London.

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Notes on Contributors Scot Peterson teaches politics at Balliol College, Oxford. William Whyte is Fellow and Tutor in Modern History, St John’s College, Oxford.

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Preface SARAH FOOT

‘Disestablishment’ might not be the first answer an observant Anglican would give if asked to identify the most pressing dilemma facing the Church of England today. The essays collected in this volume show with some force, however, the continuing relevance of the establishment question even in this increasingly secular age. Three central issues dominate the discussion here: the monarchy and the role of the monarch as Defender of the Faith; implications for the churches of the reform of the House of Lords; and gender- and sexual-equality and the question of the consecration of female and gay priests to the episcopate. Behind them all lies one pressing question: in a liberal, humanist, multicultural state in which involvement in all forms of organized religion is sharply decreasing, what possible role can a church established in only one part of the United Kingdom play? It cannot be coincidental that the instigators of the one-day conference from which these papers emerged are all historians, nor that they chose to invite another historian, holder of one of Oxford’s ‘established’ professorial chairs (carrying with it a canonry at Christ Church) to chair the conference and write this preface. Historical questions obviously surround the creation and the continuance of the Church of England as an established, national, state church. But are they not now merely historical questions? Has establishment genuinely preoccupied politicians, clergy or people at any time since the Prayer Book crisis of 1927–8? Matthew Grimley’s paper asks why, when in the rest of Europe the ties between Church and State became much weaker in the first half of the twentieth century, the same did not happen in England (although the Irish and Welsh churches are disestablished, and the Scottish church has de facto disestablished). McLean and Peterson perhaps go the furthest of all the writers here to argue that the Church of England should disestablish, and on the Scottish model. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, most of the papers argue the reverse: that xi

Preface establishment can and should be defended, and that the Church of England plays a significant national role which benefits not just Anglicans, or even Christians of other denominations, but arguably those of all faiths and none. They think it far from clear that a disestablished Church could fulfil the same function. As Philip Endean notes at the start of his gentle reflection from a Catholic perspective on the value for all of society of an established Anglican Church, the conference convened at a rather unsettling moment for the Church of England, immediately after Pope Benedict’s invitation to disaffected AngloCatholic priests to join a special ordinariate within the Catholic Church. At the time of the volume’s publication, the Catholic Church has received and re-ordained the first few bishops and priests, and the practical problems of what it might mean for an entire parish congregation to follow their priest to Rome have become starkly articulated. So far, this has been a trickle not a flood. What effect Synod’s eventual decision about women bishops will have on both the Anglo-Catholic and the evangelical wings of the Church remains, of course, to be seen. Judith Maltby’s paper demonstrates that parliament is likely to continue to play a significant role, as it did in the arguments about the ordination of women to the priesthood. Debates about the reform of the House of Lords show also the extent to which establishment raises critical questions not just for the Church, but also for the State. If disestablishment would mean also disendowment, moreover, the Church would struggle to maintain a presence in every community across the nation. Outside the Church, there are those who argue that establishment has had its day; they contend that the Church of England can no longer fulfil a genuinely national role when not even a majority of the population still shares its values and it cannot claim intimate involvement in all our lives. The Guardian newspaper, long an advocate of disestablishment, thundered in a leading article on the day on which the Archbishop of Canterbury blessed the union of Prince Charles and Camilla: ‘the case for antidisestablishmentarianism has never been more threadbare’ (9 April 2005). Yet, although some will try to argue about how devalued the trinity of Church, State and crown has become (and undeniably an element of disestablishment is

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Preface already happening by stealth), current debates around the Big Society have served to foreground the national role of the Church again. Few have questioned the intimate involvement of the Church of England in recent and forthcoming royal celebrations. One bishop so incautious as to speak out against the royal wedding was briefly suspended from public ministry. And the Church of England contributes much more than the pomp and splendour of these Church–State occasions. Martyn Percy and Elaine Graham both demonstrate the practical value of what Wesley Carr has called ‘earthed’ establishment, grounded day to day in parishes and working for entire communities, not just the Christians within them. Establishment. As Nigel Biggar argues, this emphasizes both the ambitions and the limitations of secularism. Non-conformists, David Carter shows, and members of minority religions, have all found benefits from Anglican establishment. Several writers quote Tariq Modood’s preference for the minimal nature of an Anglican establishment over triumphal secularism. William Whyte summarizes the argument of these essays: establishment requires the Church of England to serve the people of England; it also symbolically asserts the State’s spiritual dimension: ‘It thus compels both Church and state to confront issues that they would each probably rather ignore. This is certainly good for the Church. It is also probably good for the state.’ This volume makes a powerful case from a Christian perspective for the continued establishment of the Church of England. What the Church now needs is an equivalent collection of essays written by historians and constitutional lawyers about the problems, benefits and consequences of severing that historical bond.

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Why the ‘establishment’ of the Church of England is Good for a Liberal Society NIGEL BIGGAR

What follows is an argument in favour of the establishment or public privileging of the Church of England. Since ‘establishment’ can mean all manner of things – as a survey of European, indeed British, arrangements would quickly reveal – let me make clear right at the beginning what I have in mind. First there is the Coronation Service, in which the head of State, kneeling, receives authorization from above, not from below. Contrary to the populist orthodoxy that prevails among us, the moral legitimacy of government issues primarily from its faithfulness to the given principles of justice, and not from its reflection of popular will – as the fate of the Weimar Republic in the early 1930s should have taught us. In an era that finds it hard to think of political legitimacy except in terms of popular election, and which is therefore inclined to collapse a healthily mixed constitution into its democratic element, the Coronation Service makes an important and dramatic cautionary statement – and in our circumstances, a prophetic one. Second is the affirmation by the head of State of the established Church through the monarch’s special association with it. While the specific disqualification of Roman Catholics from succeeding to the throne should be removed, the requirement of communion with the Church of England should remain. If the Roman Catholic Church chooses to continue to prohibit its members from such communion, then that is a problem for Rome. Third comes the sitting of Anglican bishops in the Upper House of Parliament. An Upper House ought to give us an ‘aristocracy’ of expertise, perchance wisdom, and not a mirror-image of the Lower House. Therefore, its composition ought to guarantee the representation of civil society in all its variety – including the Church of England. Since direct elections cannot

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Why the ‘establishment’ of the Church of England is Good for a Liberal Society guarantee such representation, appointments will be necessary.1 It is true that support in the House of Commons for the recommendation by the Wakeham Commission (2000) of a predominantly appointed – rather than elected – Upper House has waned; but, given what is at stake, I see no reason simply to go with the flow. It is also true that, if seats in the Upper House were opened up to representatives of non-Anglican religious communities, it might be difficult to agree on a formula for distribution that would keep everyone’s nose entirely in joint.2 But since when in politics was there ever an agreement that made everyone entirely happy? Frustration is a routine feature of political life, and tolerating it is a definitive feature of liberal political mores. The fourth thing that I have in mind when I talk about ‘establishment’ is the Church of England’s privileged position in State education. This, therefore, is the establishment that I want to defend. Against it there are two main arguments, both of them moral, one emanating from secularists and the other from within the churches themselves. I shall deal with the latter first and briefly, since I do not think it cogent. The main Christian objection to establishment is that it corrupts the Church, constraining its freedom to speak the truth to power. To this I would respond that ‘establishment’ can mean all manner of things. Maybe in the past certain forms of it have spelt the Babylonian – or the Constantinian – captivity of the Church, but I cannot see that it does so now. Establishment did not prevent the Church of England from making head-on criticism of the Thatcher Government in Faith in the City in 1985. Nor did it prevent the Archbishop of Canterbury from publicly dissenting from Prime Minister Blair’s decision to go to war against Iraq in 2003. Nor has it stopped him from warning the current Coalition Government against using the ‘Big Society’ as a fig-leaf for dismantling welfare provision. 1

2

Meg Russell, Reforming the House of Lords. Lessons from Overseas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 304, 318. Russell’s concern here is with securing the presence of members of the House of Lords who are ‘independent’ of political party discipline. Representatives of fields of expertise or of civil society would be among these. Ibid., pp. 330–1. R. M. Morris follows Russell in R. M. Morris (ed.), Church and State in 21st Century Britain. The Future of Church Establishment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 45.

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Nigel Biggar Besides, the tying of its prophetic tongue is only one situation that the Church should strive to avoid. Another is following an uncharitable and moralistic media into a self-flattering cynicism about those who bear responsibility for governing. With regard to the latter, establishment in the form of episcopal participation in the work of the House of Lords helps to keep at least one major civil social body sensitive to the difficulties and complexities of the necessary tasks of government. And this is important when too many leaders in the churches are inclined by the liberal Zeitgeist in general, and Liberation Theology in particular, to take a relentlessly critical view of the State, and to assume that a Christian voice has only one, prophetic register. Or, rather, to assume that prophecy always comes from the Left. So much for criticism of establishment from within the churches themselves. Much more considerable, in my opinion, is the secularist critique. In a nutshell this is that, since we now live in a liberal, plural society, it is unfair for any one religion to be privileged; and that public institutions and rituals should therefore be ‘neutral’ with regard to rival views of the world. My response to this takes its cue from an unlikely quarter: namely, the thought of the pre-eminent theorist of liberal politics in recent times, the late John Rawls. Rawls’s later work is motivated by awareness that liberal values and the larger views that support them are not universally held, and that a liberal ethos is therefore contested and vulnerable. There will always be views that would suppress it – what he calls ‘unreasonable’ comprehensive doctrines – and there is no guarantee that these will not prevail,3 as they did in the case of the Weimar Republic.4 The virtues of tolerance, of being ready to meet others halfway, of reasonableness, and of fairness comprise political capital that can depreciate and constantly needs to be renewed.5 Consequently, Rawls tells us, ‘the problem of stability has been on our minds from the outset’.6

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John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 65. See also ibid., p. 126. Ibid., pp. lxi–lxii. Ibid., p. 157 and n.23. Ibid., p. 141.

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Why the ‘establishment’ of the Church of England is Good for a Liberal Society So a liberal point of view is not neutral. It is not a view from nowhere. Liberal space is not indefinite. It is bounded by certain moral convictions, which are expressive of a certain understanding of human beings. Some worldviews will not support a liberal ethos; and some will actually corrode it. So if a liberal ethos is to survive, supportive views have to be fostered by public institutions, and corrosive ones (somehow) suppressed: ‘The principles of any reasonable political conception’, writes Rawls, ‘must impose restrictions on permissible comprehensive views, and the basic institutions those principles require inevitably encourage some ways of life and discourage others, or even exclude them altogether.’7 At this point I need to make clear that there are different kinds of liberalism, and different kinds of liberal ethos. Some, like Rawls’s, are humanist, in that they presuppose a high notion of objective human dignity. The libertarian version is not humanist, I think, in that its logic collapses dignity into individual autonomy and ends up affirming consensual cannibalism of the kind that Armin Meiwes and his willing victim practised ten years ago in Germany.8 Rawls believes that a liberal view of human being and liberal values can find, and needs to find, support in a limited plurality of larger worldviews – what he calls ‘reasonable’ comprehensive doctrines. Among these are his own secular Kantianism, but also certain versions of Christianity and, indeed, of Islam. So unlike many British liberals – for example, Polly

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Ibid., p. 195. In 2001 Armin Meiwes advertised on the internet for a well-built male prepared to be slaughtered and consumed. Out of over eight hundred respondents he eventually selected a 43-year-old, whom he met and took to his home in Rotenburg, Germany; and there, apparently with the victim’s consent, he dismembered, killed, and ate him. In 2004 Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter; but in 2006, following a retrial, he was convicted of murder. The fact that Meiwes was judged guilty of a crime at all was only because German law had not endorsed a libertarian concept of autonomy. It had not endorsed the principle that individuals are the sole arbiters of the worth of their own lives, and of how and when they should end. Under German law (as under other Western legal systems), it is possible for someone to be guilty of treating their own lives too cheaply – even if they do so of their own free will – because the law is committed to an objective view of the worth of human life by which the decisions of individuals can be judged and contradicted.

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Nigel Biggar Toynbee – Rawls sees in certain kinds of religion, not enemies, but important allies. Nevertheless, Rawls believes that public discourse – the discourse of parliament and the law courts, and perhaps also of public rituals – should not involve religious references, but should be conducted in terms of ‘public reason’. Public reason comprises the set of liberal moral values and such anthropological tenets as are necessary to make sense of it, upon which various ‘reasonable’ comprehensive doctrines converge. That is to say, it comprises the ‘overlapping (moral and anthropological) consensus’, which he believes can be made to float free of the various larger theological and metaphysical views that sustain it. Here I part company with Rawls.9 While Kantian humanists and Christian humanists and Muslim humanists all affirm the liberal humanist value of human dignity, they do so in ways that are sometimes significantly different. Their common affirmation of human dignity does not prevent disagreement over, for example, how human fetuses should be treated or whether human beings should be permitted to control their dying by committing suicide. And these disagreements, these differences in interpretation, can be traced back into their deeper religious and philosophical worldviews. Public reason, therefore, is not entirely common. It is not neutral. It does not float free of the larger comprehensive humanist doctrines that support it. On the contrary, these larger doctrines give rise to significant disagreements within the common terms of public reason. Rawls himself implicitly recognized this, at least on the margins of his thought, where he acknowledged that public reason involves radical controversy as well as consensus. Why else would we need to have recourse, as Rawls acknowledges we do, to decision by majority vote? So, liberal humanist space is not indefinite. Nor should it be taken for granted; it is under threat from a variety of anti-humanisms. Liberal public institutions that would survive, then, cannot afford to take a neutral position on ethics and anthropology. Nor can they afford to be neutral with regard to

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For a fuller explanation of this point, see Nigel Biggar, ‘Not Translation, but Conversation: Theology in Public Debate about Euthanasia’, in Nigel Biggar and Linda Hogan (eds), Religious Voices in Public Places (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. pp. 178, 183–4.

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Why the ‘establishment’ of the Church of England is Good for a Liberal Society which larger views of the world dominate public culture, since some of these are positively subversive of liberal ethics and anthropology. Liberal public institutions therefore need to foster worldviews that commend the virtues necessary for liberal public discourse to flourish. They need to do this because, as Rawls rightly observed, there are illiberal barbarians inside the gates; and within living memory their number has been known to grow to democratically dominant proportions. But there is a problem; because, as Rawls also rightly observed, there is more than one humanist worldview that supports a liberal ethos. Presumably, a single set of public institutions and rituals cannot simultaneously affirm a variety of worldviews without sounding impossibly dissonant and incoherent. Rawls’s solution was to argue that they should affirm only the ‘overlapping consensus’ – whose content is mainly ethical and thinly anthropological – while keeping silent about any of the thicker metaphysical hinterlands. I have explained why I doubt that it is either possible or desirable for ‘public reason’ to keep silence in this way. So if liberal public institutions and rituals cannot limit their affirmation simply to a common ethic, then they must choose one supportive humanist worldview to represent. I say that they must choose one, because I assume that a single national set of public institutions and rituals cannot simultaneously affirm rival doctrines. So one must be chosen; but which? One candidate for public comprehensive doctrine is an atheist version of Kantianism, although it would need to become significantly more liberal and less dogmatically secularist toward religious believers than French republicanism. Or liberal institutions could choose an ecumenical monotheism, as the U.S. Constitution permits and American governments have in fact chosen.10 Or 10

The claim that American governments have established an ecumenical monotheism, notwithstanding the U.S. Constitution’s forbidding federal and state governments from establishing the Christian Church in general or any Christian Church in particular, might surprise. The claim is Michael Perry’s, although he does not use the word ‘established’. In support of this view he cites the theological references made by the Declaration of Independence, by Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg and Second Inaugural Addresses, by the Pledge of Allegiance, by the motto inscribed on U.S. coins and paper currency, by the prayers that attend the opening of sessions of state and federal legislatures, and by the invocation which precedes the business of the

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Nigel Biggar they could choose Trinitarian Christianity, as has the Republic of Ireland.11 Or they could choose Anglican Christianity, as in England. As an expression of orthodox Christianity, Anglicanism is structurally humanist in its credal affirmation of the special dignity of human being made in the image of God – a dignity intensified by God’s assumption of human flesh in the Incarnation. According to this high vision, human beings are not merely the random result of the blind operation of physical forces, nor their activity simply determined by genes or chemistry, nor their asserted significance just so much desperate whistling in the enveloping cosmic dark. No, in Christian eyes humans are the creatures of a benevolent divine intelligence, which has striven through natural evolution to bring about individuals who flourish in freely understanding and investing themselves in the truth about the world’s good. In such a vision, there is truth – be it sometimes complex and internally plural – to be understood: as the creation of the one wise God, the world possesses a given rationality that is there for rational beings to grasp. Since human beings are not only rational but finite and fallible, and since they are made to flourish in society, their reasoning needs to be social: they need to reason together. Conversation, therefore, is an important social endeavour. It is not properly an occasion for the egotistical display of wit, for the scoring

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Supreme Court (Michael J. Perry, Under God? Religious Faith and Liberal Democracy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], pp. 124–26). Perry’s view, of course, is controversial; but he is nevertheless a recognized authority on US constitutional law. The secularist narrative assumes that a republican constitution, in which no religion is established by the state, is requisite for a liberal society; and that a monarchical constitution, in which a particular religion is established, is essentially inimical to it. The histories of England and Ireland in the twentieth century tell a very different tale. Notwithstanding its formal separation of Church and State, the Irish Constitution as adopted in 1937 gave special recognition to the Roman Catholic Church as ‘the guardian of the faith professed by the majority of the citizens’. This statement was removed in 1972; but the Preamble to the Constitution still begins, ‘In the name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred, We, the people of Ireland …’ Further, Article 44 of the present Constitution starts by acknowledging ‘that the homage of public worship is due to Almighty God’. See Frank Cranmer, John Lucas and Bob Morris, Church and State: A Mapping Exercise (London: The Constitution Unit, University College London, 2006), p. 107.

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Why the ‘establishment’ of the Church of England is Good for a Liberal Society of clever points, for the assertion of superior rhetorical power, or for the domination of the weak by the strong. It is rather about the common searching out of the truth, and common deference to its authority. Believing as it does in the (complex) unity and rationality of things, Christian humanism endows human conversation with a serious moral significance. It also has the resources to grace it with generous, ‘liberal’ virtues: openness to being taught and corrected, since it sees humans as finite and fallible; readiness to confess conversational dishonesty, since it also sees them as sinners; respect for others as potential speakers of the truth, since it regards everyone as a potential medium of God’s Word; tolerance of strange and unwelcome views, since finitude and fallibility preclude the identity of the familiar and the true; patience with frustrations in understanding, since truth is as much self-revealing as grasped, and since faith sustains the hope that what is now seen through a glass darkly shall yet be seen face to face; and forgiveness as a reaction to conversational injustice, since all victims are perpetrators too. Surely, however, this account of Christianity and its Anglican expression is, as one critic of an early draft of this chapter put it, ‘a tad idealistic’. How does their vaunted liberal humanism square with Christianity’s actual history of authoritarianism and repression? And how does it square with the Church of England’s record of persecuting Roman Catholics and nonconformists, with its ownership of slaves in the West Indies, with its grudging admission of women to the priesthood and episcopacy, and with its persistent exclusion from these of practising homosexuals? The first thing to say in response is that no society can avoid asserting the authority of an orthodoxy against its heterodoxies, if necessary by means of coercive law. As we saw above, even John Rawls admitted as much of liberal societies; and as we shall see below, what Rawls admits, Martha Nussbaum unwittingly corroborates. ‘Liberal’ is a relative term. Only totalitarian societies are simply illiberal; others are more or less liberal. Even medieval Christendom – now a secularist byword for violent, authoritarian repression – allowed public space for disagreement and tolerated the expression of controversial views. If that were not so, then there would have been no scholastic disputations in the universities. The difference between pre-modern Christian societies and contemporary liberal ones is a matter of degree, not kind. Modern liberal societies have their heretics too: sexists, 8

Nigel Biggar racists, and homophobes, of course, but now also public critics of homosexual practice, as well as employees who express their religious faith in ‘secular’ institutions. If such societies do not execute dissidents, then that is largely because they can take for granted a far greater degree of social peace, thanks to unprecedented wealth, health, and political control. To be fair, it is also because Western societies have learned through gradual liberalization that social cohesion can survive a greater measure of plurality than was previously supposed. Note, however, that the issues of social cohesion and national identity in the face of cultural and moral diversity are still very much with us; and while traditionally the preoccupation of conservatives, they now disturb the sleep of post-multiculturalist liberals. Second, insofar as Christendom was unjustly repressive, that can only be confessed and repudiated. Does such failure undermine Christianity’s claim to a certain liberal humanism? Not necessarily. No human institution of longstanding can display an historical record that is entirely consistent with its anthropological and moral principles. Sin infects institutions – including churches – as well as individuals. Moreover, the fact that an institution from time to time betrays the principles that it daily affirms in its liturgy merely makes it inconsistent. It does not nullify its affirmation. Indeed, the institution deserves some credit for continuing to affirm the very principles by which its own conduct stands condemned. Inconsistency in virtue is surely better than consistency in vice. So, third, insofar as Anglican ownership of slaves involved a denial of their equal humanity, then such self-betrayal can only be lamented unreservedly. However, it was never the Church as a whole that owned them, but rather one of its missionary bodies, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG).12 It is true that the Archbishop of Canterbury was the Society’s President;13 but then two leading British abolitionists, Granville Sharp and William Wilberforce, were also 12

13

I thank Diarmaid Macculloch for pointing this out to me – and also for his comments on the history of the Church of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which have shaped what I have written in the paragraphs that follow. The responsibility for what appears there, of course, remains entirely mine. J. Harry Bennett, Bondsmen and Bishops: Slavery and Apprenticeship on the Codrington Plantation in Barbados, 1710–1838, University of California Publications in History, vol. LXII (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1958), p. 124.

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Why the ‘establishment’ of the Church of England is Good for a Liberal Society members.14 Further, in the judgement of one authority, the ‘blacks [on the SPG’s Codrington plantation] were treated with unusual humanity’.15 More generally, the leading historian of British abolition, Roger Anstey, ascribes to Anglican (latitudinarian) theology an important role in ‘producing a cast of mind prepared to contemplate reform’, by propagating the ideas of benevolence and of progressive revelation.16 In the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade Anglican clergy comprised the largest group of supporters after the Quakers.17 Moreover, according to Anstey, ‘[t]he record of the [Anglican] episcopal bench [in the House of Lords] … was in fact good’:18 ‘the bench of bishops voted virtually en bloc for abolition when the motion came [on 23 March 1807]’.19 Fourth, the Anglican establishment did not penalize Roman Catholics or non-conformists because it doubted their equal humanity, but because it feared their political subversiveness. Likewise, it has not discriminated against women or gays because it doubted their equal status before God. In the case of women it has doubted that equality before God implies social equality or, more fastidiously, fitness for the role of priest or bishop; and in the case of gays it has doubted the morality of homosexual practice. Even 14

15 16

17 18 19

Stiv Jakobsson, Am I Not a Man and a Brother? British Missions and the Abolition of the Slave Trade and Slavery in West Africa and the West Indies, 1786–1838, Studia Missionalia Upsaliensia XVII (Lund: Gleerup, 1972), pp. 62, 254. Bennett, Bondsmen and Bishops, p. 113. Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810, Cambridge Commonwealth Series (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 126 and Chapter 5 passim. Shortly after his death, David Brion Davis, himself a leading historian of American slavery, wrote of Anstey that ‘[n]o other historian on either side of the Atlantic has acquired a comparable mastery of … the politics of British abolition and emancipation’ (‘An Appreciation of Roger Anstey’, in Roger Anstey, Christine Bolt, and Seymour Drescher, Anti-Slavery, Religion, and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey [Folkestone: W. Dawson, 1980], p. 11). Over three decades later Anstey’s authority remains strong: in 2006 Jon Coffey wrote of The Atlantic Slave Trade that ‘this remains the finest academic account of British abolition’ (‘The Abolition of the Slave Trade: Christian Conscience and Political Action’, Cambridge Papers, 15/1 [Cambridge: Jubilee Centre, 2006], p. 9), at www.jubilee-centre.org/document.php?id=51 (accessed 10 November 2010). Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade, pp. 261–2. Ibid., p. 393 n. 10. Ibid., p. 393.

10

Nigel Biggar liberal establishments countenance discrimination against classes of people on the grounds of their ill-suitedness to roles or their immoral behaviour, without calling into question their equal humanity. Finally, the Church of England was originally conceived as a relatively liberal space, and, despite parts of itself, it has maintained a continuous liberal strand ever since. Determined to avoid importing continental-style civil bloodshed, Queen Elizabeth I ‘settled’ the Church as broadly Protestant. She refused Puritan pressure to make it strictly Calvinist, and she reluctantly ceded the active repression of English Roman Catholics only in the wake of military rebellion in 1569–70, and when it became clear that some were ready to follow the Pope’s 1570 call to assassinate her. It is true, sadly, that in the following twelve decades the political persecution of Catholics and non-conformists was intermittently brutal. Nevertheless, even during that long period of sectarian hostility, civil war, and government repression, the Church of England managed to generate and sustain a liberal tradition. I refer immediately to the intellectual community that the convivial Lucius Carey, second Viscount Falkland, gathered around himself at his Oxfordshire home in the politically tense 1630s. Alarmed at the rising stridency of rival certainties and appalled by the ensuing violence, this ‘Great Tew Circle’ championed the use of reason in matters of religion, followed Erasmus (and St Paul) in distinguishing between fundamenta and adiaphora, advocated tolerance on matters indifferent, and looked for the reunion of Christendom.20 The reasonable and pacific temper of this body of lay Anglicans is well expressed by Falkland himself in his discourse, Of the Infallibility of the Church of Rome: 20

The Great Tew Circle was accused of Socinian heterodoxy. In fact, they were Socinian only in the broad sense of advocating the use of reason in religion, not in the strict sense of being anti-trinitarian (Hugh Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans. Seventeenth Century Essays [London: Fontana, 1989], pp. 188–9). As Falkland’s close friend, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, wrote of him: he was Socinian only in ‘having read Socinus, and the commending that in him, which nobody can reasonably discommend in him, and the making use of that reason that God has given a man for the examining of that which is most properly to be examined by reason, and to avoid the weak arguments of some men … or to discover the fallacies of others …’ (Animadversions upon a book, intituled, Fanaticism fanatically imputed to the Catholic Church, by Dr Stillingfleet, and the imputation refuted and retorted by S.C., by a person of honour, 2nd edn [London: R. Royston, 1674], pp. 187–8).

11

Why the ‘establishment’ of the Church of England is Good for a Liberal Society

… it is plaine, that he [the emperor Constantine] thought punishing for opinions to be a mark, which might serve to know false opinions by … I am sure Christian Religions chiefest glory being, that it encreaseth by being persecuted; and … me thinks … everything is destroyed by the contrary to what settled and composed it … I desire recrimination may not be used; for though it be true, that Calvin had done it, and the Church of England, a little (which is a little too much) … yet she (confessing she may erre) is not so chargeable with any fault, as those which pretend they cannot, and so will be sure never to mend it … I confess this opinion of damning so many, and this custome of burning so many, this breeding up those, who knew nothing else in any point of religion, yet to be in a readinesse to cry, To the fire with him, to hell with him … These I say, in my opinion were chiefly the causes which made so many, so suddenly leave the Church of Rome … If any man vouchsafe to think, either this [discourse], or the authour of it, of value enough to confute the one, and informe the other, I shall desire him to do it … with that temper, which is fit to be used by men that are not so passionate, as to have the definition of reasonable creatures in vaine, remembering that truth in likelyhood is, where her author God was, in the still voice, and not the loud wind …21

And then, again, in Falkland’s remarkably gracious response to a Roman Catholic critic: I am also to thank you … for not mixing gall with your inke; since I have ever thought that there should bee as little bitterness in a treatise of controversie, as in a love-letter, and that the contrary way was void both of Christian charity, and humane wisedome, as serving onely … to fright away the game, and make their adversarie unwilling to take instruction from him, from whom they have received injuries, and making themselves unabler to discover the truth (which Saint Au[gu]stine sayes is hard for him to find who is calme, but impossible for him that is angry) …22

The Great Tew Circle was not an ephemeral anomaly. It stood selfconsciously in the tradition of Christian humanism, among whose patriarchs 21

22

Lucius Carey, Sir Lucius Cary, late Lord Viscount of Falkland, his Discourse of Infallibility, with an answer to it: and his Lordships reply. Never before published. Together with Mr. Walter Mountague’s letter concerning the changing his religion, ed. Thomas Triplet (London: Gartrude Dawson, 1651), pp. 14–15, 25. Lucius Carey, The Lord of Faulkland’s Reply, in ibid., pp. 51–2.

12

Nigel Biggar it counted Richard Hooker,23 who argued in his classic apology for the Elizabethan settlement that ‘we must acknowledge even heretics themselves to be, though a maimed part, yet a part of the visible Church’.24 Yes, the Circle was scattered and, in part, consumed by the Civil War: Falkland himself was killed at the battle of Newbury and his more famous confrère, William Chillingworth, died as a prisoner-of-war. Nevertheless other members of the Circle survived, not least Gilbert Sheldon, who as Archbishop of Canterbury from 1663–77 helped to make the postRestoration Anglican Church ‘rational in method, ecumenical in its ultimate aims … conciliatory, not authoritarian …’25 Moreover, Chillingworth’s work, especially The Religion of the Protestants (1638), ‘saw a renaissance following the Restoration … became dominant following the [Glorious] Revolution … [and] marked an epochal shift in English theology from dogmatic system to a greater emphasis on the role of reason …’26 Over two hundred years after the Restoration one eminent (Scottish) churchman judged that, while Falkland’s moderate party was apparently swallowed up by the Civil War: the principles with which it was identified, and the succession of illustrious men who belong to it, made a far more powerful impression on the national mind than has been commonly supposed. The clear evidence of this is the virtual 23

24 25 26

Martin Griffin, Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth Century Church of England, annotated by Richard Popkin, ed. Lila Freedman, Studies in Intellectual History, vol. 32 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), p. 89: ‘The characteristic thought of his [Falkland’s] circle was consciously and directly in the tradition of sixteenth century Christian Humanism, with its stress on free will, theological minimalism, charity in inessentials, and a concern for morality above creedal speculation’; Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans, pp. 189, 191, 194. Richard Hooker, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book III.i.11. Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans, pp. 218–19, 226, 228. Thomas C. Pfizenmaier, The Trinitarian Theology of Dr Samuel Clarke (1675–1729). Context, Sources, Controversy, Studies in the History of Christian Thought, ed. Heiko Oberman, vol. LXXV (London, New York, Köln: E. J. Brill, 1997), p. 43. Pfizenmaier cites Mandell Creighton, ‘Chillingworth, William’, in Leslie Stephen, ed., Dictionary of National Biography (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1886), vol. X, pp. 256–7. Creighton records that The Religion of Protestants, first published in two editions in 1638, was republished in 1664, 1674, 1684, 1687, and then – together with some other writings by Chillingworth – in 1704, 1719, 1722, 1727 and 1742.

13

Why the ‘establishment’ of the Church of England is Good for a Liberal Society triumph of these principles, rather than those of either of the extreme parties [Puritan and Laudian], at the Revolution of 1688 … The same principles, both in Church and State, have never since ceased to influence our national thought and life. Their development constitutes one of the strongest, and – as it appears to me – one of the soundest and best strands, in the great thread of our national history.27

A few years later, the great Victorian critic, Matthew Arnold, chose to devote an essay to Falkland, writing of him as an early champion of the political liberty that was coming to prevail in his own time: Shall we blame him for his lucidity of mind and largeness of temper? Shall we even pity him? By no means. They are his great title to veneration. They are what make him ours; what link him with the nineteenth century. He and his friends, by their heroic and hopeless stand against the inadequate ideals dominant in their time, kept open their communications with the future, lived with the future. Their battle is ours too; and that we pursue it with fairer hopes of success than they did, we owe to their having waged it, and fallen.28

Let us pause here to take stock. Thus far, the story that I have told is as follows: a liberal humanist ethos and its supporting humanist anthropology is a particular option, not a natural, default position; it is therefore subject to competition and vulnerable to being overwhelmed – as indeed it has been in living memory; accordingly public institutions that would stay liberal need actively to promote a liberal ethos, and the humanist view of human being that makes sense of it; they also need to affirm larger worldviews that make sense of its humanist anthropology; there are various possibilities, not all of which can be affirmed simultaneously by the same institutions or in the same public rituals; one, therefore, needs to be chosen; in England, Anglican Christianity is – notwithstanding the blemishes on its historical record – the sitting, and not unworthy, candidate. 27

28

John Tulloch, Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the 17th Century, 2 vols, Vol. I, ‘Liberal Churchmen’, 2nd edn (Edinburgh and London, 1874); reprinting (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966), pp. vi–vii. The most recent edition of the Dictionary of National Biography reckons this work ‘a still valuable analysis’ (T.W. Bayne, rev. H. C. G. Matthew, ‘Tulloch, John’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004–10]). Matthew Arnold, Mixed Essays (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1880), pp. 232–3.

14

Nigel Biggar One immediate retort to this would be that, while Anglicanism may be the sitting candidate, there is a better one standing. But is there? There are, of course, other, non-religious liberal humanisms. However, the extent to which these are intellectually viable apart from a theological basis is controversial; and it is controversial not only from the point of view of religious believers, but also in the eyes of some agnostic or atheist philosophers. Jürgen Habermas, for example, has admitted that religious traditions ‘have the distinction of a superior capacity for articulating our [liberal, humanist] moral sensibility’;29 and Raymond Gaita thinks that secular philosophical talk about inalienable human dignity and rights is just so much ‘whistling in the dark’, such notions having no secure home outside of religious traditions.30 Nevertheless, it is conceivable that England could become sufficiently confident in some secular version of liberal humanism as to opt for its establishment instead of Anglican Christianity’s. It could develop secularist public ceremonies to replace Christian ones – as has republican France. It could set about fostering liberal humanist virtues through secular equivalents of churches, liturgies, and Bible-study groups. This could happen, but there is little sign of a collective will to make it happen. What Edward Norman wrote in 2003 still seems true now: ‘There is no widely accepted theoretical or symbolical alternative to the Christian religion as the justification of public moral consciousness.’31 There is no obvious challenger to the sitting candidate. Another question that my argument obviously raises is this: Can the public privileging of a particular religion be compatible with the liberal right to religious freedom? Yes, it can; and in England it is. In the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the penalties for religious nonconformity in England were gradually lifted, and non-Anglicans were permitted entry to universities, the armed services, and public office. The result now is that there is no public office in England that determines either law or public policy, which may not be filled with non-Anglicans, or non-

29 30 31

Jürgen Habermas, ‘Habermas entre démocratie et génétique’, Le Monde, 20 December 2002, p. viii. Raymond Gaita, A Common Humanity (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 5. Edward Norman, Secularisation (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 109.

15

Why the ‘establishment’ of the Church of England is Good for a Liberal Society Christians, or unbelievers.32 Indeed, given a recent finding that 63 per cent of Americans would be less likely to vote for a candidate who does not believe in God,33 an agnostic or atheist today has a greater chance of becoming Prime Minister of the UK than President of the USA. Except on the point of a formal, institutional separation of Church and State, contemporary England meets Nicholas Wolterstorff’s criteria for a liberal democratic polity: namely, that ‘the state must not differentiate in its treatment of citizens on account of their religion or lack thereof, and there must be no differentiation among citizens in their right to voice in the conduct and personnel of the state on account of their religion or lack thereof’.34 Prima facie evidence that the Anglican establishment is compatible with religious freedom is furnished by the support that many members of minority faiths give it. Indeed, Tariq Modood claimed in 1994 that it is ‘a brute fact’ that not a single article or speech by any non-Christian faith in favour of disestablishment can be found;35 and he wrote that ‘the minimal nature of the Anglican establishment, its proven openness to other denominations and faiths seeking public space, and the fact that its very existence is an ongoing acknowledgement of the public character of religion, are all reasons why it may be far less intimidating to the minority faiths than a triumphal secularism’.36 In his polemic, Against Establishment, Theo Hobson argues against this, claiming that ‘[t]he Wakeham Commission [into the reform of the House of 32

33

34 35 36

The single remaining exception is that of the monarch, who may not be Roman Catholic. However, while the monarch remains the ultimate political authority in the British constitution, she neither formulates proposals for law or policy, nor does she determine whether such proposals are adopted. Brian Stiltner and Steven Michels, ‘Religion, Rhetoric, and Running for Office: Public Reason on the US Campaign Trail’, in Biggar and Hogan, Religious Voices in Public Places, p. 261. Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘Why Can’t We All Just Get Along with Each Other?’, in Biggar and Hogan, Religious Voices, p. 34. Tariq Modood, ‘Establishment, Multiculturalism, and British Citizenship’, Political Quarterly 65 (1994), p. 53. Ibid., pp. 72–3. Modood’s statement now needs slight modification, since, according to Paul Weller, the (tiny) Buddhist community has come out against the Church of England’s establishment (Paul Weller, Time for a Change: Reconfiguring Religion, State, and Society [London and New York: Continuum, 2005], p. 176).

16

Nigel Biggar Lords] canvassed the views of thirty faith communities on the question of religious representation in the Lords, and all who responded were opposed to the status quo – all except the Church of England and the Scottish Episcopal Church’.37 I have searched the Wakeham report for this datum, but in vain. Still, let us grant that it is there, or that the Commission chose not to report it. What Hobson does not tell us is whether the faith communities canvassed were objecting to the presence of Church of England bishops in the House of Lords as such, or whether they merely wanted nonAnglicans to be added to them. Given what Modood and others38 have written, there is good reason to assume the latter. And that, of course, does not amount to an objection to establishment per se at all. The claim that the establishment of the Church of England is compatible with the exercise of religious freedom receives prima facie corroboration from the support given it by adherents of minority faiths. According to Rex Ahdar, Professor of Law at the University of Otago, and Ian Leigh, Professor of Law at Durham University, it is also corroborated by international legal conventions and the case law of the European Convention on Human Rights.39 US First Amendment case law, which holds that the free exercise of religion can never be complete until Church and State are separated, is the global exception, not the rule.40 At least two eminent American scholars of law, Michael Perry and John Witte, agree. Witte writes of the ‘conspicuous absen[ce]’ in international legal norms of the more radical demands for separationism reified in the American metaphor of a wall of separation.41 Most US commentators, however, regard the establishment of a particular religion as entailing a necessary offence against the equal dignity of non-

37 38

39 40 41

Theo Hobson, Against Establishment: An Anglican Polemic (London: DLT, 2003), p. 44. E.g., Jonathan Sacks, Bhikhu Parekh, and Adrian Hastings as quoted in Morris, Church and State in 21st Century Britain, pp. 181–3. See also note 46 for Paul Weller’s reading of the prevalent view of the Anglican establishment among non-conformist Christians. Rex Ahdar and Ian Leigh, ‘Is Establishment Consistent with Religious Freedom?’, in Religious Freedom in the Liberal State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 127. Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., p. 134.

17

Why the ‘establishment’ of the Church of England is Good for a Liberal Society conformists.42 It implies a condescending tolerance, a ‘symbolic ostracism’.43 I myself do not find this point cogent. I can understand why public Christian theological affirmation might somewhat disturb non-Christian or nontheistic citizens. It might confront them with views with which they do not agree. It might contradict them. Yes, it might require them to tolerate a certain element of difference and foreignness in public institutions and rituals; but encounter with difference is a normal feature of social life, and tolerance is, after all, a classic liberal virtue. So why would it – as such and absent of any restriction of civil or political liberties – offend their dignity as equal citizens? As I see it, there can be no such thing as a public order that is morally, anthropologically, and metaphysically neutral. It must commit itself one way or another. In which case, it is inevitable that some members of any plural society will find themselves in a public order that affirms a worldview that is more or less different from their own; and will feel somewhat irritated by it. Secularist public institutions that refuse to make any theological affirmation need not be intentionally atheist; yet they are still not neutral. They cannot avoid implying that theological affirmation is unimportant for social health.44 Many theistic citizens – not least Muslims – will disagree strongly with this implication, and feel somewhat disturbed by the studiously agnostic silence of public space. This alone, however, does not

42

43 44

For a rare American argument in favour of the ‘partial’ or ‘constitutionally limited’ establishment of religion, see Graham Walker, ‘Illusory Pluralism, Inexorable Establishment’, in Nancy L. Rosenblum (ed.), Obligations of Citizenship and Demands of Faith. Religious Accommodation in Pluralist Democracies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). So Steven Smith in Ahdar and Leigh, Religious Freedom in the Liberal State, p. 130. Along very similar lines Graham Walker argues that American judges who rule that prayers in school are improper because of the impressionability of children ‘are strangely oblivious to the reverse implication of impressionability’, namely, that children ‘are deeply susceptible to the politically sanctioned absence of God’ and that banning school prayers disposes them to regard religion as only privately ‘true’ (‘Illusory Pluralism, Inexorable Establishment’, p. 112). ‘Whatever the mechanism,’ he writes, ‘the effect is that of a religious establishment: the state promotes a preferred religious message, whether of indifference, equivalence, or incommensurability’ (ibid., 114).

18

Nigel Biggar give them sufficient reason to feel that their dignity as equal citizens is being affronted. Not all contradiction amounts to objective offence. But what about the fact that one worldview is privileged with establishment, and that others are therefore not quite equal? Well, unequal treatment need not imply lack of due respect. As Ahdar and Leigh argue, an historic religion that is supported more or less actively by a majority of citizens, and which performs valuable social, educational and cultural functions, might deserve certain privileges.45 Unequal treatment may have cogent reasons that do not amount to an offence against the equal human dignity of citizens. Inequality can still be equitable.46 Although she is a proudly American opponent of religious establishment, Martha Nussbaum inadvertently corroborates this argument. On the one hand, she holds that, in affirming a particular religion as orthodox, a State necessarily reduces dissenters to second-class citizens, denying their basic equality47 and sanctioning ‘dignitary affronts in the symbolic realm’.48 ‘Our 45

46

47 48

Ahdar and Leigh, Religious Freedom in the Liberal State, p. 146. Ahdar and Leigh’s view here resonates with Charles Taylor’s ‘communitarian liberalism’, which affirms fundamental human liberties but allows other rights to be qualified by a public commitment to a certain vision of the good life (‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutman [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994]), esp. pp. 59, 61: ‘[In the eyes of Quebeckers] a society can be organized around a definition of the good life, without this being seen as a depreciation of those who do not personally share this definition … According to this conception, a liberal society singles itself out as such by the way in which it treats minorities, including those who do not share public definitions of the good, and above all by the rights it accords to all of its members … [T]hey distinguish these fundamental rights from the broad range of immunities and presumptions of uniform treatment that have sprung up in modern cultures of judicial review. They are willing to weigh the importance of certain forms of uniform treatment against the importance of cultural survival … I would endorse this model.’ I have borrowed this illuminating distinction from Paul Weller: ‘Arguably, in a society with a Christian inheritance and in which a comparatively large proportion of the population continues to identify [sic] in some way as Christian, a contextual and balanced understanding of “equity” is needed more than a formal “equality”’ (Time for a Change, p. 175). Martha Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2008), pp. 5, 67. Ibid., p. 21.

19

Why the ‘establishment’ of the Church of England is Good for a Liberal Society [American] “fixed star”’, she tells us, ‘is that no … [religious] orthodoxies are admissible’.49 Her solution is essentially Rawlsian:50 ‘The hope is that public institutions can be founded on principles that all can share, no matter what their religion. Of course these institutions will have an ethical content, prominently including the idea of equal respect itself. But they should not have a religious content.’ 51 This amounts to Rawls’ ‘overlapping consensus’, comprising a set of ‘free-standing’ moral principles endorsed by a variety of comprehensive doctrines.52 That is on the one hand. On the other hand, and without any visible embarrassment, Nussbaum admits that respect for individual conscience does not mean that every religion and worldview must be equally respected by government.53 ‘Extreme views’, which contradict or threaten the very foundations of the liberal constitutional order and the equality of citizens within it, must be resisted – certainly, if they seek to find practical embodiment, but even if their mere verbal expression becomes a threat. Such views ‘will not … be able to present their ideas in the political sphere on an equal basis with other ideas’.54 Nevertheless Nussbaum herself believes that in such a situation ‘people [as distinct from their menacing deeds and words] are all respected as equals’.55 What Nussbaum fails to notice is that her preferred liberal polity would itself establish an orthodoxy, from which dissenters – be they sexists or racists or xenophobes or simply religious believers who hold that the public acknowledgement of God is basic to political health – will feel alienated. Some of them might even feel that their dignity is being affronted. According to Nussbaum, however, they need not. Ironically, therefore, she confirms that an established orthodoxy of some sort is actually inevitable; that some are bound to find themselves more or less on the wrong side of it; 49 50

51 52 53 54 55

Ibid., p. 18. While she takes her bearings primarily from Roger Williams, the seventeenth-century founder of the colony of Rhode Island, Nussbaum finds that Williams’ position is well represented by Rawls (ibid., pp. 57–8). Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., pp. 64–5, 68, 361. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid. Ibid.

20

Nigel Biggar and that contradiction, even suppression, of dissent need not amount to an offence against equal dignity. The justification for endowing the Church of England with the privilege of establishment, which I have so far advanced, is threefold: first, that it represents a worldview that is supportive of a liberal humanist ethos; second, that its particular form of establishment has not involved civil and political penalties for non-Anglicans for well over a century;56 and third, that its public orthodoxy can contradict the worldviews of some citizens without offending against their equal dignity. A fourth ground, which I add now, is that the Anglican establishment is supported more or less actively by a majority of citizens. I add this simply because it would be politically difficult (although neither impossible nor irrational) to maintain establishment in the face of an actively hostile democratic majority.57 But is the Church of England in fact supported by a majority of English citizens? Surely Britain is a ‘secular’ country? Indeed, surely Britain is one of the most ‘secular’ European countries, since so few of its population attend places of worship? A Tearfund survey of seven thousand adults throughout the United Kingdom in 2006 revealed that only 15% attend a Christian Church of any kind at least once a month, with a further 10% attending somewhere between once a month and once a year.58 Churchgoing is therefore the sport of a minority – sizeable, perhaps, but still a clear minority. And Church-of-England-going is the sport of an even smaller minority. 56 57

58

Cranmer et al., Church and State, p. 41. Maintaining establishment in the face of a hostile democratic majority need not be impossible: after all, elected Members of Parliament have been ignoring the popular majority in favour of capital punishment for decades. Nor need it be rationally indefensible, since popular majorities have been known to get it seriously wrong – as when 44 per cent of the active German electorate voted the National Socialists into federal government in 1933. Jacinta Ashworth and Ian Farthing, Churchgoing in the UK (London: Tearfund, 2007), p. 6. These figures are very similar to those recorded by the British Social Attitudes Survey of 2004 (ibid., p. 41). It is true that, between February 2006 and September 2007, the Tearfund figures for both monthly and annual attendance declined to 13% and 21% respectively; but it is also true that between September 2007 and September 2008 they climbed again by 2% and 5%. www.tearfund.org/News/Press+rel eases/Church+is+where+the+heart+is.htm (accessed 2 May 2009).

21

Why the ‘establishment’ of the Church of England is Good for a Liberal Society On the other hand, 53% of those polled claimed affiliation with Christianity59 and there is reason to suppose that such claims express more than a merely nominal association. The UK Government’s Census of April 2001 returned 71.6% identifying themselves as Christian, which is a substantially larger proportion than that recorded by Tearfund. Why the discrepancy? The Tearfund report offers the following explanation. The Census’ question was ‘What is your religion?’, whereas Tearfund’s question was ‘Do you regard yourself as belonging to any particular religion?’. Affirmative answers to the former included some from people who would have baulked at confessing that that they ‘belonged’ to a religion, and whose affirmation was therefore simply nominal. What this implies is that affirmative answers to Tearfund’s question were expressive of a more substantial commitment.60 More recently, 50% of respondents to the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey of 2008 identified themselves as ‘belonging’ to the Christian religion; and 67% of respondents were classified as either ‘religious’ (i.e., identifying with a religion, believing in God, and attending religious services) or ‘fuzzy faithful’ (i.e., doing two out of those three).61 Moreover, there are empirical grounds for not assuming that nonchurchgoers are completely lacking in sympathy for religious beliefs and practice. Of those Britons who reported to the 2001 Opinion Business Research poll that they did not go to church, 41% nevertheless admitted to praying.62 Further still, of the one-third of respondents classified as ‘unreligious’ by the 2008 BSA survey, 49% agreed that religion is beneficial

59 60 61

62

Ashworth and Farthing, Churchgoing in the UK, p. 4. Ibid. Alison Park et al. (eds), British Social Attitudes: The 26th Report (London: Sage, 2010), pp. 67 (Table 4.1) and 71 (Table 4.6). The Report on the 2008 British Social Attitudes survey contains a slight discrepancy. According to Table 4.6, 26% are ‘religious’ (i.e., identify with a religion, believe in God, and attend services), 36% are ‘fuzzy faithful’ (i.e., do two out of the three things that characterize the ‘religious’), and 31% are ‘unreligious’ (i.e., do none of them). Later, however, these figures become 28% ‘religious’, 39% ‘fuzzy faithful’, and 33% ‘unreligious’ (ibid., p. 90). This is probably due to the removal of non-respondents in the summary on page 90. Ashworth and Farthing, Churchgoing in the UK, p. 1, citing the Opinion Business Research national poll of 2001.

22

Nigel Biggar in helping people find inner peace or happiness, 42% scored 3–4 on a fourteen-point scale of religiosity, and only 3% scored zero.63 It seems to me, therefore, that it cannot be presumed that a democratic majority of British people is currently impervious or hostile to religious beliefs, symbols, and practices, and unappreciative of their public affirmation; and since Christianity is the religion with which the vast majority of Britons is familiar, it cannot be presumed that a democratic majority is completely alienated from it. It is true, as R. M. Morris has argued,64 that, if current trends continue, remaining sympathy for religion will probably diminish. Yet since current trends run more on indifference than anticlericalism (as Morris himself notes), there is reason to hope that they could be reversed by alerting people to the fragility of liberal humanist culture and to the importance of the Christian Church to its prosperity. A commitment to humanity is one good reason for believing in God. British people who identify themselves as Christian or who are sympathetically disposed, of course, might still object to the public, institutional affirmation of any religion. There is evidence, however, that they do not object. In a BBC poll in February 2009 almost two-thirds (63%) of those questioned – and more or less equally across age-groups – said that the law ‘should respect and be influenced by UK religious values’. A similar proportion (62%) agreed that ‘religion has an important role to play in public life’, although here support was actually higher among the young than among the middle-aged and elderly.65 Moreover, 79% of Muslims polled, and almost as many Hindus (74%) and Sikhs (74%), affirmed the shaping of law by ‘UK religious values’.66 Now, support for the shaping of law by ‘UK religious values’ does not quite add up to support for the establishment of Anglican Christianity. However, given that most of those describing themselves as Christian would 63 64 65

66

Park, British Social Attitudes, pp. 72 (Table 4.7) and 92 (Figure 5.1). Morris, Church and State in 21st Century Britain, pp. 169–71. In response to the question, ‘Do you agree with the statement that religion has an important role to play in public life?’, affirmative answers were given by 77% of 18– 24-year-olds and 65% of 25–34-year-olds. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7783563.stm and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/79065i95.stm (accessed 2 May 2009). Ibid.

23

Why the ‘establishment’ of the Church of England is Good for a Liberal Society tick the ‘Church of England’ box, and given what we know about the predominantly supportive views of minority faith communities, of Roman Catholics,67 and of Protestant non-conformists,68 it is reasonable to infer support for establishment. I have reached the end of my argument in defence of the establishment of Christianity in its Anglican form. Before I close, however, let me summarize it. The establishment of the Church of England serves as a public affirmation of one worldview that sustains a humanist anthropology and a liberal ethos, in a world where humanist liberalism is under threat and in need of defence 67

68

My claim about the view of the Anglican establishment that prevails among Roman Catholics is perforce less than scientific. Nevertheless, in support I can cite three eminent English Roman Catholics. In an article in The Times newspaper on 30 March 2009 William Rees-Mogg stated that ‘[f]ew Catholics want to see the Church of England disestablished’ (‘Reform the Monarchy? Let’s Wait for a Century’). In his 2008 book, The Realm: An Unfashionable Essay on the Conversion of England (Oxford: Family Publications, 2008), Aidan Nichols, OP, wrote that ‘[o]ne does not have to be Anglican to be worried by the thought of disestablishment’, before proceeding to quote Edward Norman in its support (p. 78). And in his 1997 essay, ‘The Case for Retaining the Establishment’, the Roman Catholic historian Adrian Hastings reckoned that ‘a weak establishment may well be the best basis for the maintenance of a constructive dualism … [I]t remains in principle right, even wonderful, that … [the presence of Anglican bishops in the House of Lords should] be part of our constitution’ (in Tariq Modood, Church, State, and Religious Minorities [London: Policy Studies Institute, 1997], pp. 41–2, 46). R. M. Morris concedes only that contemporary nonconformists in England oppose the principle of establishment ‘without the stridency or vehemence of old’ (Church and State in 21st Century Britain). This, however, seems to be rather less than the whole truth. Paul Weller, at once social scientist and Baptist minister, observes that since the late nineteenth century the Free Churches have gradually moved away from calling for the abolition of the establishment to pressing for accommodation within it, seeing it as a bulwark against ideological secularism (Time for a Change, pp. 169, 184). The Methodist Church’s 2004 Report on Church, State, and Establishment confirms Weller’s reading. It observes that there is no single view of establishment among contemporary Methodists; and it does not observe that support for disestablishment predominates. Instead, it entertains a range of possible relationships between Church and State, which may be theologically valid according to the circumstances (ss.108, 111.v). These include an Anglican establishment that involves non-Anglican Christians in genuinely open ways that do not patronize (ss.113, 115, 116, 117).

24

Nigel Biggar and promotion. Such an establishment is compatible with the free exercise of religion and with the equal dignity of all citizens in a plural society. The secularist argument that liberty, equality and fairness in a plural society require, and are best served by, disestablishment is not cogent. I rest my case.

25

Opportunity Knocks: Church, Nationhood and Establishment1 MARTYN PERCY

There can be little doubt that times are changing, and with these changes, so are definitions and perceptions of ‘establishment’. Most hereditary peers have lost their automatic right of place in the House of Lords.2 The nation, as a whole, is markedly less deferential to what is collectively known as ‘the establishment’ and its culture. In turn, this has implications for a Church that is ‘established by law’, especially when it is only in one country (England), within a Union of countries that enjoy (increasingly) a degree of devolved power.3 Central to any enquiry relating to national churches is the use of the word ‘establishment’: the term normally highlights the intimate relationship between the Church – or particular churches – and individual nation states. That relationship is expressed in markedly different ways throughout Europe – an unsurprising result of geography, history (both ecclesiastical and secular) and the general cultural diversity of Europe. And yet behind the constitutional questions, there are also a cluster of theological issues connected to establishment (such as the relationship between the monarchy of God and the social legitimization of authority in power), not to mention the hegemonic structures present in any sociality, which might include class, race, gender, wealth and birthright. Quite simply, the agenda is enormous.

1

2 3

This is a revised and expanded version of an essay originally published in my Salt of the Earth: Religious Resilience in a Secular Age (London: T & T Clark, 2001). I am grateful to members of the ‘Sheffield Consultation’ (1990–97) for their help with earlier drafts. A number of seats are reserved for hereditary peers, with a smaller group elected from their number. The (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland has been the established Church in Scotland since the late Reformation period. The Anglican Church was disestablished in Ireland during the reign of Victoria, and disestablished in Wales in 1923.

26

Martyn Percy Yet the agenda needs to be addressed precisely because the very sense of the culture of establishment in the United Kingdom is now self-consciously subject to variables, and is of course beginning to unravel itself and be deconstructed at a faster rate than has hitherto been known. The gradual but ongoing reforms of the House of Lords, general public questions about the appropriateness of the Church of England colluding with such structures, not to mention more general questions about privileged positions and their relations to a democratic national state at the turn of the century, all play their part. It is not possible here to engage in a comparative discussion of other European member states and their Church/State relations; such a detailed exercise belongs to another discussion. But we should note that there is no European country that treats religion as purely a private matter; all address it constitutionally, in law.4 Equally, it must be stressed that a comparative survey of Europe does not present a neat balance sheet of establishment and disestablishment in member states. The issues, as we know only too well from England, Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom, are too complex, and interact in unexpected ways. For a start, there is an odd sense in which the legal position is often out of step with aspects of the actual practice. The hub of the wheel turns slower than the rim. If there is any doubt about this, consider for a moment the ‘normal’ arrangements surrounding the coronation of a new monarch. As soon as the king or queen has died, the Earl Marshall is supposed to collect the keys to Westminster Abbey from the Dean. The Abbey remains locked until the coronation service. Meanwhile, one of the Dean’s jobs is to visit the Royal Apothecary in Bond Street, to order the oils for the anointing of the head, hands and breast of the new monarch. The coronation service has at its heart Communion according to the Book of Common Prayer, attended by the crowned heads of Europe and hereditary peers of the realm. In today’s multi-faith nation, it is hard to imagine anything so apparently exclusive and elitist being repeated.

4

Cf. English Canon Law: Essays in Honour of Eric Kemp, ed. Norman Doe and Mark Hill (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998), p. 128. See also, Religions in European Union Law (Proceedings of the Colloquium, Luxembourg/Trier November 21–22 1996, Milan: Universita Degle Studi Di Milano, Guiffre Editore, 1998).

27

Opportunity Knocks And yet, just as one might think that ‘establishment’ is waning, events conspire to contradict us. The recent memorialization after the Queen Mother’s death revealed a nation that was relatively happy to shuffle off its disenchantment with monarchy, and put its faith in the virtues that it can embody: service, duty, representation, charity and continuity. No less significant were the recent celebrations for the Queen’s own golden jubilee. Over a million people crammed into the Mall leading up to Buckingham Palace in early June 2002. Thousands enjoyed a music festival inside the palace grounds. Millions watched the celebrations on television. The Queen expressed her pride in the nation; the nation reciprocated with street parties, beacons and almost unparalleled celebration. As for the modest ‘Republican’ movement in the United Kingdom, and those who would like to see the monarchy reformed or even scrapped altogether, there was the steady haemorrhage of support. Britons, it would seem, like their monarchy more than even they knew; better the devil you know. The tapestry we observe now – at royal funerals or at the jubilee – may be fragmentary in a pluralist and modern state, but the customs, rituals and protocols still provide some social cohesion in a picture that is as yet unfinished. It seems highly unlikely that England, or Britain, is ready to jettison the monarchy or the establishment. It sees its value, and its sees that it embodies values, freedoms and virtues that are not necessarily present within the democratic system, or readily apparent in consumerist cultures. There is some appetite for reform; yet this has been around for several centuries, and there is no reason to suppose that the current forms of establishment are entirely redundant in a modern democratic state. What seems striking about the current context is how little public call there is, either against the monarchy or Church establishment. The practice of establishment is, strictly speaking, a nest of contested issues and theories that is not easy to disentangle. Seen from various perspectives, an established Church can be a form of religious elitism; or, perhaps an acceptable mode of representation in which one church represents a wide variety of faith interests in political and national life; or an outdated hegemony that owes more to privilege and social capital than it does to faith; or a necessary and contingent part of the State that enables vital ethical questions and transcendent values to be referred to at most levels of society. But support for this relationship is by no means unanimous. 28

Martyn Percy Yet at present, there can be no doubt that the concept of ‘establishment’ – in its widest cultural meaning in Britain and the Commonwealth – is rapidly unravelling. The tapestry seems to be fraying. Respect for non-democratic forms of authority can no longer be counted upon (e.g. hereditary peerage). The governance of the Church of England itself, and its identity, is not immune from such prevalent cultural suspicion. Correspondingly, there are potential dangers for a national Church if its power and privilege are seen to flow from elitist forms of authority that are now regarded as outmoded. Europe offers several relevant case studies. Privilege within a devolved union of democratic countries is another key issue to reckon with in the current debate. The Church of England is the only Church – out of all the democratic countries in the world – to enjoy guaranteed representation within Parliament or its equivalents. But how necessary is the presence of bishops within the House of Lords to guarantee a truly national Church? Can English bishops ‘represent’ Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland? What is the justification for one denomination, or one faith, enjoying such a singular political and social privilege? Have Britons now reached the point when such privileges, within a self-consciously plural society and devolved Union, look culturally problematic to the majority of people? The main issue I therefore want to consider here is nationhood. Many more issues could be taken up, but space does not permit. This is an immensely complex arena for study and debate, where the social, political, cultural, theological, ecclesiological and national issues are intertwined, and virtually inseparable. As we shall now see, it is rarely possible to talk only about the nation without, at the same time, including the established Church, the constitution of the State, and indeed, God. So, let us examine the heart of the matter. Can one national or established Church be justified in a pluralist and multi-faith society? How can one Church represent the divergence of contemporary society? Does the very idea of establishment nurture elitism and privilege? Does the culture of ‘high’ establishment inhibit the national witness of the Church at local levels? And how can mono-establishment be reasonable and warranted within the emerging federalism of the European Union and the devolution of British nation states?

29

Opportunity Knocks The idea of a Christian Commonwealth – promoted by, amongst others, Coleridge, Arnold and Gladstone – seemed to have had little difficulty with particularities of unity in the midst of plurality.5 Granted, the nineteenth century was not as pluralist as the twenty-first, but the confidence of the Victorian and Edwardian theologians and politicians is worthy of attention, not least because it assumed that sociality needs ‘high’ symbols and ideals for the proper ordering of society. This partly accounts for why the separation of Church and State is argued against by such authors. For them, separation would have led to social anarchy, reflected in the European countries around them that were, so it seemed, permanently in the turmoil of revolution. Correspondingly, the idea of the Empire (and later the Commonwealth) was simply a socio-political and theological framework for settling pluralism. Establishment was therefore defended by Archbishop William Temple and others well into the twentieth century (mainly drawing on the works of Richard Hooker) in the interest of the common good.6 But where do citizens or subjects obtain their freedom? In part, it is acquired through democratic processes and other features of the emerging public sphere mentioned earlier; governance is chosen. Yet the notion of freedom is also underwritten by a reticulate system (e.g., law, monarchy, rights, religion, etc.) that is no less at the service of the nation. This ‘system’ is deeply inter- and intra-related to democracy, and yet it is also capable of standing slightly apart from it. Like democracy, ‘it’ declares itself to be under God, and at the service of the people. The link between sovereignty and freedom is similarly expressed, such that monarchy may be said to ‘represent’ metaphysical values in society that partly guarantee the rights and freedoms of individuals and communities. The socio-sacramental paradigm of monarchy can also embody civic virtues such as voluntarism and charity. As Bradley notes, coronation is sometimes referred to as ‘the eighth sacrament’.7 Yet at the same time, we must note that the sacral integrity of the monarchy is no longer something that monarchs can claim as of right. Where it 5 6

7

See D. Nicholls, Church and State in Britain Since 1820 (London: Routledge, 1967). Two interesting counter arguments from the period come from C. Dawson, Religion and the Modern State (London: Sheed & Ward, 1936) and J. N. Figgis, Churches in the Modern State (London: Longmans Green & Co. 1913). See Ian Bradley, God Save the Queen (London: DLT, 2002), pp. 73–93.

30

Martyn Percy exists in modern Europe, it is conferred by the Church rather than acclaimed by the people. In other words, the sacral relationship between the monarchy and the established Church is, increasingly, and certainly in England, something that looks like an obscure artefact, in which two outdated and formerly public and dominant institutions – Church and monarchy – prop each other up through a process of mutual legitimization. For many people, its only present justification is to identify the link as an embodiment of continuity, service and other civic virtues. But the more secular the monarchy becomes (as well as de-mythologized, popular, accessible, with less mystique and sacral charisma), the more problematic ‘established’ religion becomes, because the power of the crown is insufficient to sustain one Church in its hegemonic position. A link with the State, however, remains a viable avenue; but that is a national Church, not an established Church. And to be the latter, any Church, including the Church of England, could only justify and maintain its public role by being open, free and accessible to all peoples, at all social levels. At present the Church of England does fulfil this mandate – in effect, a National Spiritual Service. But to sustain this, it needs to guard against its own brand of congregationalism, caused by, amongst other things, evangelical or catholic sectarianism, and the pecuniary rationales that increasingly focus the funding and output of ministry upon congregations rather than parishes. I am not the first to claim this. Coleridge distinguished between ekklesia and enclasia, the latter being a description of those who are called into the world, and are to remain there for the common good.8 In view of this, I would argue that the function of a national Church – even one that is tied into an evolving monarchy – might still represent a viable form of Church–State relationship in a modern state. The idea of (Christian) establishment as an essential organic and living part of national identity that still has a valuable role to play in local, regional, national and international life has plenty of life left in it. Whilst pluralism, subsidiarity, devolution and other changes to the demographic, social and political culture of the nation do question the place of an established Church, the presence of an established religion within a reticulate and complex ecology of establishment ensures that questions of value, ethics and justice can be 8

On Coleridge, see Nicholls, Church and State, pp. 24–31.

31

Opportunity Knocks raised within the midst of the governance of Parliament, and in the very heart of a consumerist society. This prescient, mildly prophetic role is still valued (but like so many features of establishment, not elected by society), and is essential for the common good and social flourishing. In other words, freedom is guaranteed through sovereignty; sovereignty is a form of service, and not necessarily the obvious elitist hegemony that many assume it to be. As Werner Stark notes: … the societies in which monarchical religion flourished were, by and large, communities … they were unities rather than diversities; they were collective rather than individualistic … this primacy of the whole needed to be made visible, to be symbolised, and its visible image, its commanding symbols was the sacred monarch.9

So, to a point, a single concentrated (Christian) tradition may better represent and serve the interests of the many, than can other forms of democratic representation in which all have a voice. Or, put another way, sovereignty, rightly constituted as sacramental service (following Jesus), provides a paradigm for Church and monarch alike to continue being set aside to provide for the spiritual and civic needs of all the people. If monarchy – rather like a sacrament – points beyond itself to the majesty of God, the task of an established Church must be to witness to the eternal in the midst of the temporal and transient. The role of a national, established Church may therefore be primarily sacrificial and sacramental in character. Incarnate, it must live with its ambiguities, lack of definition, mystery, distinctiveness and power. It actively seeks intra- and inter-dependent social, political and constitutional relations for the sake of social flourishing, to bear witness to the incarnation, and to anticipate the Kingdom that is yet to come.10 So, I am suggesting that churches can only be the social form of the truth (or the social transcendent body) if they ensure that they remain public bodies. This form of engagement is of course a risk, but no more so than the incarnation itself. This is about being prepared to see truth being embodied 9 10

W. Stark, The Sociology of Religion: A Study (Volume 1) (London: Routledge, 1966), p. 60. On this see my Salt of the Earth: Religious Resilience in a Secular Age.

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Martyn Percy socially, contextually and temporally, in order that grace may abound. In such a situation, the Church cannot guarantee its own power absolutely, neither be sure of entirely protecting truth, nor be certain of the outcomes of its intercourse with society. But it can at least be there, and continue to speak as of right as a public body, and as a social incarnation of transcendence, mystery and morality. In a paper written some years ago for DEMOS, Bhikhu Parekh outlines a new paradigm for a relationship between religion and the State.11 First, he argues that instead of marginalizing religion (as many secularists might have), its distinct contribution to public life should be recognized, and faith given a stake in maintenance of a free and open society. He is aware that religion can sometimes do the opposite of this, but suggests that the more openly dialogical a religion becomes, the more it is able to foster moderation and respect within itself: society can ‘civilize’ the Church. Second, when religion enters politics, it has to accept the constraints of political life. This includes speaking in a ‘public’ language that is intelligible to all citizens, and accepting ‘the burden of public judgement’ which sometimes requires people to live with deep disagreements. Third, religion plays an important and direct role in moral life, and the community therefore has a deep and collective interest in the well-being of churches and their beliefs. For this reason, religion should be taught in school in the same way that children are politically educated. The teacher is neither to subvert or convert, but discuss beliefs in an open, respectful, comparative and analytical manner, recognizing that religion is a distinct form of human consciousness and experience. To give Parekh’s arguments a slightly different slant, I would argue that being a Christian in the twenty-first century cannot simply be about belonging to a church, but should rather be seen equally as consisting of being a certain type of citizen within society. ‘Civil religion’ therefore becomes more than the ‘social glue’ or ‘the spiritual dimension’ to society. Rather, it also becomes bound up in the actual aspirations of society which are related to the common good. Andrew Shanks takes this a stage further:

11

‘When Religion Meets Politics’, in Keeping the Faiths: The New Covenant Between Religious Belief and Secular Power (London: Demos, issue 11, 1997), pp. 7ff.

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Opportunity Knocks A genuinely ‘open’ church … would be an open forum: reproducing within itself, the full range of (thoughtful) moral conflict characteristic of the surrounding world; excluding nothing except intolerance; and differing from the world only in the exemplary manner in which it tried to process these conflicts …12

Shanks continues by arguing that the Church must move beyond simply providing pastoral remedies for personal sin, which he says can no longer make the Church, priest or pastor a focus for communal unity. Instead, the clergy needed to be gifted in tackling the phenomenon of structural sin on behalf of the community: they need to be issue-raisers, prophets and protagonists. In this respect, he sees the Christian spirit as being invested in a new form of mission: the stage which Christianity has now reached is to recognise that the churchphase of its development is over, and that the Christian Spirit has entered into its ethical, or political, maturity ... the innermost essence of Christianity drives it out beyond the Church; it has to seek embodiment in nothing less than the body which encompasses the entirety of human life, namely the state.13

Yet Shanks, like Parekh, knows that churches need to be maintained as distinctive bodies, independent of the State and the public, if they are to be the yeast and salt of the Kingdom of God. The Church is there to help fund civilizing strands within society. But it does not own society, and neither does it entirely own the moral strands which might guide and make sociality. As Coleridge suggested almost two centuries ago, the Church of the nation is not quite the same as the Church of Christ, yet it is there to secure and improve the moral cultivation of its people ‘without which the nation could be neither permanent nor progressive’.14 The Church is therefore not a world to come, but another world that now is, whose role is to combat political evil, not just institutional defects. In precisely this vein, the current government, like others before it, seems to be looking for a Church that provides vision, as well as a prescient social 12 13 14

Andrew Shanks, Civil Religion Civil Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 90. Ibid., p. 114. S. T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), p. 44 (originally published in 1823).

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Martyn Percy voice, and is socially rooted. To be ‘established’ cannot be simply about history and privilege. I, as an Anglican in England, must continually earn (not just own) the right to be the Church for all people. Anglicans must move from achieving this episodically – such as enabling and focusing the mourning and funeral for Princess Diana – to living it dispositionally. This does not necessarily entail compromise, but rather pursuing an agenda in which we strive to participate in the flux and flow of civil life at its very centre. This requires the Church to risk being deeply embedded in society. Rather than counting the potential cost of such social intercourse, one might want to ponder the gains, and be alive to the collective social and spiritual losses if we refuse to participate. This kind of agenda, by the way, also occupies the minds of other faiths. In his recent Islam and Liberal Citizenship, Andrew March asks how Muslims can be both good citizens of liberal democracies and good Muslims. He is mindful that some Muslims would argue that separation of religious loyalty and political loyalty is not part of the Islamic tradition, and therefore participation in an open and pluralist society is not possible. Other Muslims – perhaps more extreme – might argue that all believers should oppose nonIslamic forms of government, and strive to implement Islamic law.15 Yet using the theory of John Rawls,16 March argues that there is a tradition that is both consistent with orthodox Sunni Islam and also compatible with modern liberal citizenship, which is rooted in the idea of ‘overlapping consensus’. This, suggests March, might be found in the synergy between a public conception of justice and religious or ethical outlooks. Indeed, he argues that the more religious traditions are engaged with, the more likely it is that consensus with public concerns will be found. There can be, therefore, an alliance of interests between secular and sacred. Indeed, through engagement with public life, religious traditions may not

15 16

A. March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); and Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

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Opportunity Knocks only shape society: they may also discover some deeper truths on how they in turn are shaped.17 So what should the churches and faiths try to do about the current debate on Church and State, and religion contributing to the shaping of public life? A defence of the status quo is neither desirable nor practical, because there has always been change. An explanation of the organic, living, breathing nature of establishment is, however, highly desirable. It should be possible to articulate a modern type of establishment that ‘fits’ with the modernizing of the constitution, and yet preserves the values, freedoms and ideals that are already embodied in sacramental/sacrificial service to the nation at all levels, either through religion or through the monarchy. But an exercise of this kind has yet to be undertaken. However, Vernon Bogdanor hints at some intriguing possibilities in his analysis of the British constitution. He reminds us of the Prince of Wales’ oft quoted statement that he would like to be regarded as ‘Defender of Faiths’ and not ‘Defender of the Faith’. In other words, the Protestant monopoly on the crown would be broken, or perhaps freed up to become, once again, a socio-sacral and religious–civic focus for the plurality of faiths in modern Britain, and their voice within the public sphere.18 Bogdanor also defends the idea of a national Church (not an established one), in which the Church of England remains, for the non-religious, an ‘Apostleate of the Indevout’, valuing folk religion, rites of passage for all, and generally providing a National Spiritual Service.19 At the same time, Bogdanor notes that if the Church of England were to disestablish, the effect on the monarchy would be profound. Equally, if the monarchy becomes more secularized or more pluralized (e.g., repealing the Accession Oaths, which currently require the monarch to be an Anglican and not to marry a Roman Catholic), then the Church of England would lose its establishment, but might still have a claim to be a national Church.

17

18 19

For further discussion, see Martyn Percy, Engaging Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Shaping the Church (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) and The Ecclesial Canopy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). V. Bogdanor, The Monarchy and the Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 230. Ibid., p. 231.

36

Martyn Percy And yet, some rather stout defences of the status quo remain. Tariq Modood has argued that from the perspective of minority religions in Great Britain, ‘establishment’ remains a sign of hope: The real division of opinion is not between a conservative element in the Church of England versus the rest of the country, but between those that think religion has a place in secular public culture that religious communities are part of the state, and those who think not … the minimal nature of an Anglican Establishment, its proven openness to other denominations and faiths seeking public space, and the fact that its very existence is an ongoing recognition of the public character of religion, are all reasons why it may seem far less intimidating to the minority of faiths than a triumphal secularism.20

Here Modood shows that a practical argument for establishment remains powerful and reasonable, even for someone who doesn’t share ‘the faith of the nation’.21 And from older theological resources, there are some surprising advocates for the ‘tapestry’ of Church, State, nation and faith. For all the accusations of fideism and imperialism levelled at Karl Barth, he turns out, ironically, to be a rather doughty defender of the inter-weavings that some have come to dislike, or even mistrust: The only possibility that remains – and it suggests itself compellingly – is to regard the existence of the state as a parable, as a correspondence and an analogue to the Kingdom of God which the church preaches and believes in. Since the state forms the outer circle, within which the church, with its mystery of faith and gospel, is the inner circle, since it shares a common centre with the church, it is inevitable that, although its presuppositions and its tasks are its own and different, it is nevertheless capable of and reflecting indirectly the truth and reality which constitute the Christian community.22

All of which is another way of saying that the Church does have an interest in keeping a positive stake in the articulation of the social consensus, 20 21 22

T. Modood (ed.), ‘Introduction: Establishment, Reform and Multiculturalism’ in Church, State and Religious Minorities (London: Policy Studies Institute, 1997), p. 4. See also A. Hastings, ‘The Case for Retaining Establishment’, in Modood (ed.), Church, State and Religious Minorities, p. 41. Karl Barth, ‘The Christian Community and the Civil Community’, in Against the Stream (London: SCM, 1954), section 14.

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Opportunity Knocks and that any neutrality towards the State is undesirable. However, any partnership with the State sometimes comes at a cost – perhaps even, temporarily, to that of being the Church of the nation.23 So high and low forms of establishment, together, for all the potential and actual flaws, may be a better arrangement than the alternatives. Perhaps it is for this reason that writers such as Jeffrey Stout describe the current situation as a kind of ‘moral bricolage’ – a kind of miscible state of being in which we accept a blend of consensus, compromise and pragmatism in our Church-Statenation-monarchy tapestry – but only because the alternatives are probably worse.24 So, if a monarch could choose their faith – and this is not so very far from what Prince Charles appeared to be suggesting some while ago – then one established Church could, conceivably, give way to a new kind of national Church, in which representation in Parliament may not be guaranteed, while at the same time the State would have less to say in the affairs of the Church. It would seem, then, that constitutional reform and the gradual secularization of the monarchy (something that Blanning claims began in the seventeenth century)25 may have more of a say on the evolution and reform of Church–State relations than the Church itself. This remains to be seen. The future beckons; and an opportunity knocks.

23

24 25

On this, see Oliver O’Donovan’s The Desire of Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). O’Donovan contends that, to pass beyond suspicion and the totalized criticism of politics, and to achieve a positive reconstruction of thought, theology must reach back behind the modern tradition, achieving a fuller, less selective reading of scripture, and learning from an older politico-theological discourse which flourished in the patristic, medieval and reformation periods. Central to that discourse was a series of questions about authority, generated by Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God. Jeffrey Stout, Ethics After Babel (Cambridge, MA: James Clarke, 1988). See T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); see also R. Hazell (ed.), Constitutional Futures: A History of the Next Ten Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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The Dog that Didn’t Bark: the Failure of Disestablishment since 1927 MATTHEW GRIMLEY

Introduction When the House of Commons was considering the revised Prayer Book for the second time in June 1928, Winston Churchill warned that by defeating the book again, it would ‘inaugurate a period of chaos which could only be corrected by disestablishment.’1 Churchill was not alone in predicting disestablishment during the Prayer Book crisis, but not for the first or last time, he turned out to be wrong. Parliament did veto the book, but the cataclysm that he had predicted did not occur. In 1929, the Bishops simply agreed to authorize the use of the revised Prayer Book, even though it did not have parliamentary sanction. As a Free Church observer put it, ‘an umpire … had given his decision, but the decision was to be ignored’.2 The Bishop of Durham, Hensley Henson, embarked on a quixotic personal crusade for disestablishment, but it was a complete debacle, gaining almost no support. His book on Disestablishment sold only 273 copies to the general public, as against the 489 copies the Bishop had bought for himself.3 By the outbreak of war a decade later, he had given up on his campaign, concluding that ‘disestablishment has for the time being fallen out of practical politics’.4 The established Church, memorably described by

1 2 3 4

Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 5th series, vol. 218, 14 June 1928, col. 1270. P. Carnegie Simpson, Recollections: Mainly Ecclesiastical but Sometimes Human (London: Nisbet and Co., 1943), p. 88. Dean and Chapter Library, Durham Cathedral, Hensley Henson diaries, xlviii (1 October 1929). Henson, ‘The Church and the Nation’ (1933), in The Church of England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), p. xiii.

39

The Dog that Didn’t Bark Henson as a ‘magnificent roof ravaged by the death-watch beetle’, is still just about holding up over three-quarters of a century later.5 The Prayer Book crisis was the last moment when the disestablishment of the Church of England was a real possibility.6 It did not happen, and because it did not happen, historians have tended to assume that this was an inevitable result. But like the dog that didn’t bark in the Conan Doyle story, the non-occurrence of disestablishment is itself a ‘curious incident’. It seems particularly curious when seen in a comparative perspective. By 1927, disestablishment had already occurred in Ireland and Wales, and what many regarded as de facto disestablishment in Scotland.7 In many other major European nation-states, the ties between Church and State were cut in the course of the twentieth century, beginning with France in 1905 and ending with Sweden in 2000.8 So why did the same thing not happen in England? This chapter will explore why there was so little enthusiasm for disestablishment, both during the crisis of 1927–8, and also over the following eighty years. What happened in 1927–8 cast a long shadow, leaving what Gavin White has called ‘unfinished business’ that was not 5 6

7

8

Henson, Bishoprick Papers (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 47. The best and most detailed account of the Prayer Book crisis is John Maiden, National Religion and the Prayer Book Controversy, 1927–1928 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009). For other accounts, see Robert Currie, ‘Power and Principle: The Anglican Prayer Book Controversy, 1927–1930’, Church History 33 (1964), pp. 192– 205; G. I. T. Machin, ‘Reservation under pressure: Ritual in the Prayer Book Crisis, 1927–28’, in R. N. Swanson (ed.), Continuity and Change in Christian Worship (Studies in Church History, 35) (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1999) pp. 447–463; G. I. T. Machin, ‘Parliament, the Church of England and the Prayer Book Crisis, 1927–28,’ in J. P. Parry and Stephen Taylor (eds), Parliament and the Church, 1529–1960 (Parliamentary History, vol. 19) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press for the Parliamentary History Yearbook Trust, 2000), pp. 131–147; Matthew Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England: Liberal Anglican Theories of the State between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), ch. 4; Donald Gray, The 1927–8 Prayer Book Crisis, 2 vols (Joint Liturgical Studies, 60–1), (Norwich: SCM Canterbury Press, 2005–6). For a comparative ‘British Isles’ approach, see Scot M. Peterson, ‘The establishment and disestablishment of religion in Great Britain, 1906–1936: a comparative historical study’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 2009). For a comparison of British and Scandinavian experience, see R. M. Morris (ed.), Church and State in 21st Century Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2009), ch. 9.

40

Matthew Grimley concluded until the 1970s, and Owen Chadwick could still claim even in 1983 that ‘the problem of today stems from December 1927’.9 But at no point was there any powerful lobby within the Church for disestablishment, and arguments for retaining establishment continued (and continue) to be advanced. As we shall see, ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’ was not just a very long word; it was also a very long-running phenomenon in twentiethcentury England. The Prayer Book Crisis, 1927–9 During his ill-fated campaign, Hensley Henson advanced two main arguments against continuing with establishment. The first was that it infringed the rights of the Church. Parliament was no longer entitled to control the Church’s worship and doctrine, because the reforms of the previous century meant that it was no longer a purely Anglican assembly. Henson was outraged by the prominent role played by non-Anglican MPs in defeating the book. ‘Ought a Christian Church to allow the forms of its worship, and its sacramental administration, to be voted upon by the Theosophist, the Agnostic, the Sectary, the Atheist and the Parsee?’ he asked rhetorically, referring inter alia to two leading parliamentary opponents, the Labour MP and theosophist Roslyn Mitchell and the Communist MP and Parsee, Shapurji Saklatvala.10 Most Anglicans, though, turned out to be unreceptive to Henson’s argument. They argued that the unrepresentativeness of parliament had already been addressed in the 1919 Enabling Act, which granted a measure of Church self-government via the Church Assembly (which Henson had conspicuously opposed). Henson’s argument that an established Church was unfree was also undermined by the fact that the Prayer Book was quietly introduced by the back door in 1929. This suggested that the Church was free to control its own liturgy and doctrine in fact, if not in law. There was little enthusiasm, either for a

9

10

Gavin White, ‘“No-one is free from Parliament”: The Worship and Doctrine Measure in Parliament, 1974’, ed. Stuart Mews, Religion and National Identity, (Studies in Church History, 18, Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), p. 557; Owen Chadwick, ‘The Link between Church and State’, in Donald Reeves (ed.), The Church and the State, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1983), p. 39. Henson, Church and State in England (London: SPCK, 1930), p. 39.

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The Dog that Didn’t Bark measure along the lines of the 1921 Church of Scotland Act, which had given the Kirk full self-government within a very vestigial establishment, or for disestablishment itself. The Commission on Church and State set up by the two Archbishops in 1930 was packed with moderate supporters of establishment, and it was no surprise that its report five years later backed its continuance. While it conceded that ‘the case for disestablishment is strong’, the Report rejected it, arguing that it would not deliver the freedom promised by its supporters, and that it might also entail disendowment.11 Henson’s second argument for disestablishment was that secularization and religious pluralism meant that the established Church could no longer be said to represent the nation. ‘When the mass of people lies outside the membership of the Christian society in any of its organized sections, and no religious conditions whatever attach to civic rights, establishment is incapable of defence’, he argued in 1929.12 At the time, this argument failed to convince Anglicans and non-Anglicans alike. This failure was down to the strong belief in the 1920s that the Church did represent the nation, and that it was an essential component of the English national character. ‘National character’ was a key point of reference for all sides in the crisis. Bertram Pollock, the leading episcopal opponent of the book, defended parliament’s vote on the grounds that the Prayer Book was an important determinant of ‘national character’.13 William Temple, a supporter of the book, also extolled the national character of the Church during the debate, saying that ‘we have no cause to regret or to apologize for the national character of our national Church’, adding that, whatever the Church had been in the past, ‘it had never failed to be utterly, completely, provokingly, adorably English’.14 When the Church and State Commission heard evidence, some Nonconformists like the Moderator of the Free Church Federal Council, Patrick Carnegie Simpson, were willing to defend the Church of England as an embodiment of national religion or national 11 12 13 14

Church and State: Report of the Archbishops’ Commission on the Relations between Church and State (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1935), 2 vols, vol. 1, pp. 51–2. Henson, Disestablishment (London: Macmillan, 1929), p. 105. Bertram Pollock, The Nation and the Nation’s Worship: A Proposal by the Bishop of Norwich (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1933), p. 20. William Temple, The Genius of the Church of England (London: Westminster, 1928), pp. 5–8.

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Matthew Grimley character.15 Simpson had supported Prayer Book revision, but as John Maiden has pointed out, Nonconformist opponents of revision also based their arguments on the premise that the Church of England had a special role in the nation; there were virtually no Nonconformist demands for disestablishment during the crisis.16 Both opponents and proponents of the book, then – and not just Anglicans – saw the Church as an expression of national character; their attachment to this notion was what stopped many of them joining Henson’s campaign. The reluctance of Nonconformists to rally to Henson’s colours in 1927–8 was a product of the more general rapprochement of Church and chapel that had begun before the Great War and had been assisted by the implementation of Welsh disestablishment. With some notable exceptions, Nonconformists in the first quarter of the twentieth century were increasingly keen to project themselves as integral, rather than peripheral, to the English nation.17 Although reunion negotiations between the Free Churches and the Church of England at the end of the First World War had swiftly proved abortive, it is striking that the sticking point had been episcopacy and the sacraments, not disestablishment.18 Sated by the horsd’oeuvre of Welsh disestablishment, Nonconformists had little appetite left for the English main-course of which they had once hungrily dreamed. As the former Liberal minister Augustine Birrell pointed out in an article in 1929, pressure for disestablishment had markedly abated in the years before the Prayer Book crisis, and the Liberation Society, which had led campaigns for English disestablishment since the 1840s, was a shadow of its former self.19

15 16 17

18

19

Church and State (1935), vol. 2, p. 189. Maiden, National Religion and the Prayer Book Controversy, ch. 4. For a fuller discussion, see Matthew Grimley, ‘The Religion of Englishness: Puritanism, Providentialism and “National Character”, 1918–1945’, Journal of British Studies 46 (October 2007), pp. 884–906. Alan Turberfield, John Scott Lidgett: Archbishop of British Methodism (London: Epworth, 2003), pts. 5–6; John Newton, `Protestant Nonconformists and Ecumenism’, in Alan P. F. Sell and Anthony R. Cross (eds), Protestant Nonconformity in the Twentieth Century (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2003), p. 362–4. Augustine Birrell, ‘Disestablishment by Consent’, The Nation, 9 February 1929, pp. 645–6.

43

The Dog that Didn’t Bark New arguments for Establishment, 1929–1945 In the decade after the Prayer Book crisis, support for establishment remained solid, but two new justifications for it came to the fore, prompted by national and international events. The first was the argument that the popularity of royal occasions demonstrated the popular attachment to a loose form of national religion, which was expressed through the established Church. This argument was advanced in the report of the Archbishops’ Commission, which was completed in 1935, the year of George V’s Silver Jubilee: No one who remembers occasions of great national emotion will question the sincerity of the crowds which on such occasions throng the cathedrals and churches of the establishment. It is impossible to estimate the precise amount of value which should be attributed to the national recognition of Christianity, so expressed, from the standpoint of the Church, commissioned to call the nation into allegiance to Christ, or the extent to which its existence depends on the fact of establishment. But we are persuaded that its value is great, and that if it were lost, Christian faith would count for less in the national and civic life of England and in the minds of our fellow countrymen overseas.20

This analysis was confirmed by the reaction to the King’s death, which occurred in the same week that the report was published, in January 1936. Ralph Inge, Dean of St Paul’s, remarked of George’s funeral that ‘on January 28, we realized that we are a Christian country and that the Church of England should at all times act as the national Church’.21 Two subsequent royal events, the coronation of George VI, and, more surprisingly, the Abdication of Edward VIII that precipitated it, prompted similar reactions. At the start of the Abdication crisis, the Church Times had predicted that the Church would end up as the ‘whipping boy’, and would be disestablished.22 But by revealing an apparent public consensus in favour of Christian values in public life, the Abdication actually shored up support for establishment even further. A disconsolate Henson wrote in his diary on New Year’s Eve 1936 that ‘it becomes increasingly apparent that there is no considerable

20 21 22

Church and State (1935), vol. 1, pp. 49–50. W. R. Inge, A Rustic Moralist (London: Putnam, 1937), p. 82. Church Times, 11 December 1936, p. 689.

44

Matthew Grimley support for disestablishment in any quarter’.23 In The Idea of a Christian Society in 1939, T. S. Eliot made a link between establishment and the events of December 1936, when he warned that disestablishment would itself be an ‘abdication’.24 The Church Times remarked of the Coronation of George VI in May 1937 that ‘at a moment like this the true heart of the nation stands revealed, manifesting a deep instinct of service and a genuine, if often confused, feeling after God’ and concluded that ‘the people of England is perhaps more Christian than it knows’.25 The second justification for establishment advanced in the 1930s was that it was one of the things protecting the British State against totalitarianism. A national Church, it was argued, was one of the institutions that guaranteed political stability and liberty. The old radical cry of ‘a free Church in a free State’ was inverted; a State Church was now seen as one of the guarantees of a free State. In rejecting disestablishment, the 1935 Church and State Report warned of its potential global implications. ‘If England, by disestablishment, should seem to be neutral in the fight between faith and unfaith in Christianity, that would be a calamity for our own people, and, indeed for the whole world.’26 Supporting the report in the Church Assembly in June 1936, Cyril Garbett, Bishop of Winchester, warned that ‘at a moment when Europe was in a restless condition, and anti-Christian movements were rife, it would be a very grave matter if the connection between Church and State were broken, because the world at large would interpret it as a national repudiation of Christianity’.27 Writing in 1939, Henson regretfully noted that ‘the strange revolt against Christianity, which has swept over a great part of the continent, has created a natural reluctance in English minds to take any action which might have the appearance of hostility to Christianity ... Its immediate effect has been to provide a popular apology for the establishment.’28 Both the national ritual and anti-totalitarian defences of establishment continued to be deployed during the Second World War. Henson’s claim 23 24 25 26 27 28

Henson, diaries, lxviii, 31 December 1936. T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), p. 48. Church Times, 14 May 1936, pp. 580–1. Church and State (1935), vol. 1, p. 49. Church Times, 26 June 1936, p. 306. Henson, The Church of England (London: Cambridge University Press), p. 184.

45

The Dog that Didn’t Bark that national Christianity was a sham was confounded by its invocation of Christianity in Churchillian rhetoric, by the symbolism of blitzed churches, by religious rituals like the revived National Days of Prayer – and even by Henson’s own brief appointment by Churchill as a sort of special preacher to the nation at Westminster Abbey. Henson’s other argument, that the Church needed to be freed from State control, did not seem plausible at a time when State control was being widely extended. It would have gone against the 1940s zeitgeist to advocate privatizing the Church at a time when nationalization was en vogue. The benignly maternal welfare state also perhaps made an unconvincing villain of the piece for proponents of disestablishment. As Simon Green has pointed out, the 1944 Education Act further bolstered the position of the established Church, both by making Anglican schools financially viable, and by instituting a daily act of worship in all schools.29 Establishment after the Second World War Broad support for establishment continued after the War, as could be seen in the 1952 Moberly report on Church and State. The Church Assembly had instigated this inquiry in 1949 at the behest of an opponent of establishment called G.W. Currie, but its membership was heavily stacked in favour of the defenders of establishment. Among its members were the liberal Anglican and university administrator Walter Moberly (its chairman), the AngloCatholic Bishop of Exeter, Robert Mortimer, and the evangelical Lancelot Joynson-Hicks, son of the 1920s Conservative Home Secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks, (‘Jix’), who had led opposition to the Prayer Book in the Commons in 1927–8). Although it also included Lord Selborne, who (as Lord Wolmer) had campaigned for Church self-government during the Prayer Book crisis, it did not include any declared opponents of establishment. The committee did not take any evidence of its own, instead recycling the evidence – and many of the arguments – of the 1935 report.

29

S. J. D. Green, ‘The 1944 Education Act: A Church–State Perspective’, in J. P. Parry and Stephen Taylor (eds), Parliament and the Church, 1529–1960 (Parliamentary History, vol. 19) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press for the Parliamentary History Yearbook Trust, 2000), pp. 148–164.

46

Matthew Grimley Though its report briefly rehearsed the main arguments for disestablishment, it did so perfunctorily, in order to knock them down. The report followed its predecessor in basing its main arguments for establishment on appeals to English national character. Like the 1935 report, it argued that it was not possible to emulate the Scottish precedent because of ‘the great dissimilarity in the historic conditions of England and Scotland’.30 It defended the continuance of Prime Ministerial appointment of bishops on the grounds that it was ‘in accord with the English temperament and tradition’.31 Like its predecessor, it argued that the illogicality of establishment suited the national genius for improvization and muddle. ‘The “establishment” of the Church presupposes a mutual confidence between Church and State which flourishes most when not too precisely defined’, it concluded. ‘This accords with the English tradition, which has neither the clear-cut logic of the Latin nor the systematic comprehensiveness of the Teutonic mind, but rests on our inveterate national habit of spontaneous conformity.’32 These vapidities exasperated some readers. When the Church Assembly discussed the report in 1952, Canon A. P. Shepherd of Worcester complained that ‘when he read the Report one of the things that caused him a certain irritation was that, whenever an argument was built up logically in favour of disestablishment and he wondered what was going to be the logical conclusion, it was brushed aside by the simple statement that the Englishman didn’t like logic, because he had a muddled mind’.33 The Anglo-Catholic canon law expert (and later Bishop of Chichester), Eric Kemp, an advocate of self-government and critic of the report, lamented in 1961 that ‘there seems since the War to have been some movement backwards rather than forwards’.34 Nor did things get any better for critics of establishment in the 1960s. Simon Green has argued that the ‘cultural and moral revolution of that era actually left the ecclesiastical Establishment in some ways stronger than ever 30 31 32 33 34

Church and State: Being the Report of a Commission Appointed by the Church Assembly in June 1949 (London: The Church Assembly, 1952), p. 27. Church and State (1952), p. 44. Church and State (1952), p. 68. Church Assembly, Report of Proceeding, XXIX, 1, 18 June 1952, p. 86. Eric Kemp, Counsel and Consent: aspects of the government of the Church as exemplified in the history of the English provincial synods (London: SPCK, 1961), p. 207.

47

The Dog that Didn’t Bark before’.35 It is true that, as Mark Chapman’s chapter shows, there were radical Anglo-Catholics who proclaimed that a truly counter-cultural Church needed to be shorn of compromising ties with the State. There were also young radicals of diverse church parties, like those associated with Timothy Beaumont’s journal Prism, who agitated for disestablishment.36 But many older 1960s radicals defended establishment as a platform for social criticism and a connection (via the parochial system) with the poorest parts of society. Anglican campaigns on moral issues like homosexual law reform were predicated on the Church’s established position.37 In a symposium on the future of the Church of England in 1966, the progressive Dean of Manchester, Alfred Jowett, could write that on the ‘often merely vestigial remains’ of establishment, ‘a new series of links at the local level of society … may be created’.38 In Soundings in 1962, Alec Vidler defended establishment because ‘it helps to keep the Church aware of its obligation to serve the whole people in all areas of their need’.39 Like their predecessors in the 1830s, the liberal Anglicans of the 1960s also saw establishment as a defence against the temptations of sectarianism and clericalism. John Robinson defended it in Honest to God on the grounds that ‘anything that helps to keep its frontiers open to the world as the Church of the nation should be strengthened and reformed; anything that turns it in upon itself as a religious organization or Episcopalian sect I

35

36

37

38 39

S. J. D. Green, ‘Survival and Autonomy: On the strange fortunes and peculiar legacy of ecclesiastical establishment in the modern British State, c1920 to the present day,’ in S. J. D. Green and R. C. Whiting (eds), The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 315. See e.g., Humphrey Green, ‘Erastus rebutted – or, the Obstacle of Establishment,’ Prism (April 1958), pp. 8–18; ‘Disestablishment and Unity’, Prism (January 1959); Editorial, Prism (June 1959), p. 1. See Matthew Grimley, ‘Law, Morality and Secularisation: The Church of England and the Wolfenden Report, 1954–1967’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 60, 4 (October 2009), pp. 725–741. Alfred Jowett, ‘The Church in the Local Situation’, in Leslie Hunter (ed.), The English Church: A New Look (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 95. Alec Vidler, ‘Religion and the National Church’, in idem, Soundings: Essays Concerning Christian Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), pp. 261–2.

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Matthew Grimley suspect and deplore’.40 Reviewing Nick Earle’s book What’s Wrong with the Church? in 1964, Robinson complained that disestablishment was a red herring. ‘I am as anxious as anyone to reform the structure of the Church for its mission in the world but I cannot believe that the current fashion of tilting at the Establishment really represents the best use of time and energy ... The fault is not in the Establishment, but in ourselves. We are introvert [sic]; we have substituted survival for ministry.’41 An anti-institutional movement like Robinson’s ‘South Bank theology’, with its demand for ‘religionless Christianity’, had no interest in fusty 1920s demands for institutional autonomy.42 But support for establishment was not universal in the post-war Church. There were still a number of Anglicans (mainly on the Anglo-Catholic side) who, while they did not campaign for outright disestablishment, were so uncomfortable with establishment that they wished that it be reformed or ended. Events since 1927 had increased their unease. They had been alarmed by the 1937 Matrimonial Causes Act, which, by liberalizing the divorce law, seemed to portend the separation of English law from Christian morality. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia provided terrible warnings of how totalitarian states could destroy the autonomy of churches. Cyril Garbett, Archbishop of York, highlighted this danger in his book on Church and State in England, published in 1950, which offered a blueprint for a reformed establishment.43 Garbett’s successor at York, Michael Ramsey, shared many of these misgivings. Ramsey’s own ministry had been framed by the events of the Prayer Book crisis, as he told the General Synod in February 1974. ‘I was ordained deacon in the year 1928, and those of us who were ordained round about that time will never forget the deep sense of

40 41 42

43

John Robinson, Honest to God (London: SCM Press, 1963), p. 141. Robinson, review of Nick Earle, What’s wrong with the Church?, Time and Tide (5 October 1964), p. 1667. Mark D. Chapman, ‘Theology in the Public Arena: The Case of South Bank Religion’, in Jane Garnett et al. (eds), Redefining Christian Britain (London: SCM Press, 2007), pp. 92–105. Cyril Garbett, Church and State in England (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1950).

49

The Dog that Didn’t Bark frustration with which we entered upon our ministry ... The frustration was due to the sense of impasse in the Church’s life and freedom.’44 The force of these Archbishops’ complaints was blunted by their reluctance to advocate full disestablishment; like earlier campaigners for selfgovernment, they seemed to be willing the end but not the means. Underlying this hesitancy was the realization that establishment remained, for the most part, popular with the clerical and lay rank-and-file. Garbett wrote in 1950 that the Church ‘should not ask for disestablishment; most Church people do not want it; if it comes it should be at the initiative of the state’.45 Ramsey likewise told Time and Tide magazine in 1961 that ‘you mustn’t campaign for disestablishment. I wish rather that the Church of England would become worthy of it, would be so annoying to the State that it had disestablishment forced upon it.’46 Similar mixed signals were given out by Eric Kemp in that year’s Bampton Lectures on Counsel and Consent: It is not my intention here to advocate disestablishment. I believe that both Church and State benefit by establishment, and that the disestablishment of the Church of England would be detrimental to the English people and to the cause of Christianity throughout the world. I believe that in modern days the terms of establishment have become in several respects unreasonable, harmful, and offensive, and that the Church should be allowed a freedom of ordering its own faith, life, and worship analogous to that possessed by the other established church in these islands.47

As Archbishop of Canterbury, Ramsey was in a position to provide what Kemp demanded, and to complete the unfinished business of 1927–8. He implemented a programme of measures, beginning with the creation of the General Synod in 1970, setting up the Chadwick Commission on Church and State which reported in 1970, and culminating in the 1974 Church of England (Worship and Doctrine) Measure, which passed in his last months as Archbishop. The Worship and Doctrine Measure was particularly important because it represented the acceptance by parliament of what it had 44 45 46 47

Quoted in Owen Chadwick, Michael Ramsey: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 194. Garbett, Church and State in England, p. 315. Time and Tide (20 January 1961), p. 84. Kemp, Counsel and Consent, p. 207, n. 1.

50

Matthew Grimley denied in 1927–8 – the Church’s right to control its own liturgy and doctrine. Other legislation, recommended by the Chadwick Report in 1970 and implemented by Ramsey’s successor Donald Coggan in 1977, gave the Church more influence over the appointment of bishops via the Crown Appointments Commission, though Downing Street retained the final say. The Chadwick Report itself conceded that ‘a significant number of thinking people in this country would accept the proposition that the Church of England ought to stand further apart from the State than it now does’, a position taken by Valerie Pitt, a Chadwick Commission member, and former enfant terrible of the Prism group, in her celebrated Memorandum of Dissent advocating disestablishment. But Chadwick’s majority report rejected disestablishment on the familiar grounds that ‘the people of England still want to feel that religion has a place in the land to which they can turn on the too rare occasions when they think that they need it; and they are unlikely to be pleased by legislation which might suggest that the English people as a whole were going unchristian’. It also echoed the argument of earlier reports that a Scottish-style establishment was not possible in England, because of historic differences between the two nations. 48 For Ramsey, and for others who had grown up before the Second World War, the 1970s reforms finally offered closure of the trauma of 1927. Adrian Hastings commented on these reforms that ‘the last serious objections to establishment were thereby removed’, and while this was an overstatement, it is true that they substantially weakened Henson’s argument that the Church was not free.49 As the leading advocate of disestablishment, Colin Buchanan, put it, many in the Church were now happy with ‘the captivity of a goat on a very long chain’, and that chain was eventually further extended by Gordon Brown’s renunciation of prime ministerial patronage in 2007.50 The Prayer Book crisis was in any case passing out of public memory by the 1980s. The generation that remembered 1927 was dying off; the liturgical reforms that culminated in the 1980 Alternative Service Book meant that the 48 49 50

Church and State: Report of the Archbishops’ Commission (London: Church Information Office, 1970), pp. 65–6. Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity 1920–1990 (London: SCM Press, 1991), p. 547. Colin Buchanan, ‘Disestablishment’, in Mark Mills-Powell (ed.), Setting the Church of England Free (Alresford: John Hunt, 2003).

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The Dog that Didn’t Bark Prayer Book had itself ceased to be a point of national reference and resonance. Some clergy remained convinced that the Church was contaminated by its association with the State. Particular policies increased this sense of defilement. For Donald MacKinnon, in a 1968 lecture, it was nuclear weapons. ‘Where England is concerned, the passing of Establishment as we have known it would surely lead to a day in which episcopal lawn sleeves would cease to flutter in the breeze as their wearer bestowed the diocesan benediction upon the latest Polaris submarine. Here we should find gain without any loss at all.’51 Others, influenced by liberation theology, felt that the Church’s duty to be among the poor demanded separation from a State that was implementing neo-liberal policies. For Eric James, writing in 1983, ‘the disestablishment of the Church of England is now an important step towards getting into a position to be able to help the world that Marx sought to help; the world of God’s poor’.52 But the disestablishment predicted by some in the early 1980s never came. It was the divisive and tumultuous controversies about gender and sexuality, not Church–State relations, which were to divide the Church of England in the 1990s and 2000s. Support for establishment among the clergy seems to have remained remarkably solid in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Clive Field’s study of 22 opinion surveys conducted between 1979 and 2004 found that around three-fifths of clergy consistently supported establishment. Only about a third supported disestablishment, though an increasing proportion believed that the monarch should not be Supreme Governor of the Church (a change attributed by Field to the controversy over Prince Charles’ relationship with Camilla Parker-Bowles).53 Although evidence on lay opinion is sparse, it appears that laypeople were even more attached to establishment than clergy.54 Clergy increasingly conceived of establishment as providing a national pulpit from which to criticize government policy. A poll in 1982 found that 88% of them disagreed with the proposition that the 51 52 53 54

Donald MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars (London: Collins Fontana, 1969), p. 32. Eric James, ‘In the Global Village’, in Reeves (ed.), The Church and the State, p. 94. Clive Field, ‘Rendering Unto Caesar? The Politics of Church of England Clergy since 1980’, Journal of Anglican Studies 5 (2007), p. 92. Field, ‘Rendering unto Caesar?’, p. 102–3.

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Matthew Grimley established Church should not publicly differ with the government on any policy issue.55 John Habgood, Archbishop of York, argued in 1983 that ‘only the Church of England could have insisted on counter-balancing the nationalistic thrust of the Falklands celebrations, precisely because of its relationship with the nation’.56 The idea that the established Church had a unique vantage point from which to attack government policy was not new, of course (as the Bishops’ intervention in the 1926 General Strike and George Bell’s criticisms of saturation bombing in 1944 had demonstrated), but it was articulated more fully and more frequently in the 1980s. There remained one other possible route to disestablishment, but this too was a ‘road not taken’. It could have been implemented from without, as part of a wider constitutional reform. But here, too, there were obstacles. Extricating itself from establishment would have been extremely timeconsuming, even paralysing, for any government that attempted it. It would also have had implications for the monarchy, which Queen Elizabeth II, as a devout Anglican, would have opposed. It is true that a major reform of the House of Lords might have effected a sort of partial disestablishment by removing the bishops from the legislature. But this reform never happened, because nobody could agree on the composition of a replacement chamber. In 1950, Cyril Garbett had predicted that ‘the day may come when the State with an advanced left-wing government will take the initiative in ending the connection of the State with the Church’, but as Ross McKibbin has recently pointed out, successive Labour governments were markedly reluctant to undermine any of the traditionally privileged national institutions, the established Church included.57 Disestablishment had little resonance for constitutional reform campaigners either. It was not mentioned in Charter 88, the constitutional reform blueprint drawn up in 1988.58 Its main advocates were those three relicts of Victorian voluntaryism, the National Secular Society, the Liberal Democrats, and Tony Benn. 55 56 57 58

Opinion Research Centre Poll of 500 clergy, September 1982, cited in Field, ‘Rendering Unto Caesar?’, p. 97. John Habgood, Church and Nation in a Secular Age (London: DLT, 1983), p. 110. Garbett, Church and State in England, p. 151; Ross McKibbin, Parties and People: England 1914–51 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Original text of Charter of 88, http://www.unlockdemocracy.org.uk/?page_id=551 (accessed 26 July 2010).

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The Dog that Didn’t Bark It is striking that demands for disestablishment did not come from nonChristian religions. While it is true that Muslims demanded, and gained, the extension of some of the traditional privileges of the Church of England (for example in the provision of state-aided Muslim schooling and the replacement of the old blasphemy law with the 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act covering all religions), they showed no interest in disestablishment. As Tariq Modood has argued, ‘the minimal nature of an Anglican establishment, its proven openness to other denominations and faiths seeking public space, and the fact that its very existence is an ongoing acknowledgement of the public character of religion, are all reasons why it may seem far less intimidating to the minority faiths than a triumphal secularism’.59 Although Prince Charles appeared to be questioning his role in a traditional establishment when he said in 1994 that he wished to be ‘defender of faith’ rather than ‘defender of the faith’, it could be argued that the Church of England itself was increasingly assuming a new role as ‘defender of faith’ in a pluralist society.60 Conclusion The survival of establishment in England can partly be explained by two aspects of British political culture after 1918. The first of these was the virtual disappearance of confessional politics, which meant that establishment was no longer a bone of political contention. What had sustained the campaign for English disestablishment in the nineteenth century had been its position within a nexus of other mutually sustaining grievances – about the other State Churches in the United Kingdom, about Church rates, about education. With the passing of Welsh disestablishment, nothing was left of that nexus; left as the last item in the shop window, English disestablishment had little appeal. The second factor was the stability of British institutions in the twentieth century. Once universal suffrage was finally granted in 1928 (the year of the second defeat of the Prayer Book) there were no other major constitutional changes in mainland 59 60

Tariq Modood, ‘Establishment, Multiculturalism and British Citizenship’, Political Quarterly (1994), pp. 72–3. Jonathan Dimbleby, The Prince of Wales: A Biography (London: Little, Brown, 1994), p. 528.

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Matthew Grimley Britain until Scottish and Welsh devolution began in 1997. What reforms there were, such as the 1958 Life Peerages Act, were incremental and smallscale; the 1970s changes to Church government can be seen as part of this cautious and limited approach to constitutional reform. In their reluctance to countenance more drastic constitutional reordering, religious leaders were at one with the wider governing class. A further reason for establishment’s survival was its plasticity. It could variously be defended as the embodiment of Protestantism, of a loose undogmatic Christianity, of religious or spiritual values in general, and of English national character. It could be an instrument of patriotism, or a licensed critic of government policy. For these reasons, it was able to withstand England’s transformation into a multicultural society, as it had withstood earlier manifestations of religious pluralism in the past.

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‘A Free Church in a Free State’: Anglo-Catholicism and Establishment MARK D. CHAPMAN

The Oxford Movement was profoundly political: as Peter Nockles put it in his seminal work, The Oxford Movement in Context: ‘Political concerns, albeit infused by deeper religious principles, underlay the very genesis of the Movement.’ The passion and fervour which resulted in Tractarianism were ignited as a group of earnest young men set about resisting what seemed to be the destruction of the Church of England by those very forces which had traditionally existed to defend it. In particular it was the repudiation of Robert Peel – Member of Parliament for the University of Oxford – over his support for Catholic Emancipation that served to bring together the ‘future Tractarian constellation on the basis of political discontent infused with moral principle’.1 Keble’s famous Assize Sermon of 14 July 1833, which Newman later regarded as the symbolic beginning of the Oxford Movement,2 offers a good summary of the political issues: expounding a text from 1 Samuel 12.23, he sought to identify the symptoms by which one might judge whether a nation was ‘becoming alienated from God and Christ’.3 Just as in ancient Israel, he claimed, so in the present, those entrusted with protecting the faith had failed in their task: Under the guise of charity and toleration we are come almost to this pass; that no difference, in matters of faith, is to disqualify for our approbation and confidence, whether in public or domestic life. Can we conceal it from ourselves, that every year the practice is becoming more common, of trusting men unreservedly in the most delicate and important matters, without one

1 2 3

Peter Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 69. Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua (London: Everyman, 1912), p. 42. John Keble, National Apostasy (Steventon: Rocket Press, 1983), pp. 14–15.

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Mark D. Chapman serious inquiry, whether they do not hold principles which make it impossible for them to be loyal to their Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier?4

While its different leaders adopted different approaches to Establishment, what is key to understanding Tractarianism is an acknowledgement that it was a response to constitutional changes which created a completely new situation for the Church.5 The theological ideology of the eighteenth century in all its different guises was challenged as the Tractarians began to draw out the ecclesiastical implications of the full citizenship of non-conformists and Roman Catholics. Keble’s ‘ancestral Protestantism’,6 with its myths of sacral kingship which characterized the ancien régime, was dealt a series of decisive blows in the 1820s and 1830s.7 Indeed, as Nockles suggests, the Oxford Movement was a ‘response to the collapse of the ancien régime and heralded a new beginning’.8 While Keble used the word ‘toleration’ in his Assize Sermon, the implications were far more profound than mere toleration of other forms of Christianity: at least potentially, the ruling elite in parliament might no longer be Anglican. This meant that the organic order of Hooker, where Church and State were effectively one, could in practice no longer be maintained with any degree of credibility, however desirable it might be in

4 5

6

7 8

Ibid., p. 18. See Peter Nockles, ‘“Lost causes … and impossible loyalties”: the Oxford Movement and the University’, in M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (eds), The History of the University of Oxford, vol. vi, Nineteenth Century, Part 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 195–267. J. R. Griffin, John Keble. Saint of Anglicanism (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1987), p. 79. See also J. H. L. Rowlands, Church, State and Society: The Attitudes of John Keble, Richard Hurrell Froude and John Henry Newman 1827–1845 (Worthing: Churchman, 1989), pp. 27–77 and Cyril K. Gloyn, The Church in the Social Order. A Study of Anglican Social Theory from Coleridge to Maurice (Forest Grove, Oregon: Pacific University, 1942), pp. 45–84. J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice During the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Peter Nockles, ‘Newman and Early Tractarian Politics’, in V. Alan McClelland (ed.), By Whose Authority? Newman, Manning and the Magisterium (Bath: Downside Abbey, 1996), pp. 79–111, here p. 100.

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‘A Free Church in a Free State’: Anglo-Catholicism and Establishment theory.9 Indeed, for Keble, at least in this period, it was clear that, as Paul Avis put it, ‘The ancient Anglican ideology of kings as the nursing fathers of the Church was a dead letter.’10 Keble undoubtedly would have preferred something else, and after his appointment to Hursley vicarage it did not take long for him to take refuge again in his beloved Richard Hooker,11 but at least in 1833 he recognized that new situations required radical solutions. As Newman wrote to Hurrell Froude in August 1833: ‘I think we should puff Keble as our head … I have never till the last month or two thought Keble would go lengths: but I hope now he will. I think he is unchained.’12 Keble, it has to be admitted, is hardly the epitome of a wild man, and it would be completely wrong to regard him as a political radical, as J. R. Griffin does.13 After all, he remained deeply conservative throughout his life, and, as Simon Skinner has shown, he veered towards theocracy in Hursley.14 Nevertheless, at this early stage, he recognized the constraints which had been imposed on the Church by the political changes. Two years before the Assize Sermon he had written to J. T. Coleridge: ‘What will be the effects of this new institution [i.e., the reformed parliament] upon the Church of England? … I do not think the privileges of the establishment can possibly out-last another parliament.’ Indeed, he even prophesied that English institutions would dissolve if ‘shopkeeping orators [i.e., the newly enfranchised middle-classes] … are allowed 9 10 11

12

13

14

Nockles, Oxford Movement in Context, p. 71. See also Nockles, ‘Newman and Early Tractarian Politics’, esp. p. 85. Paul Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1989), p. 160. See for instance his sermon on Church and State in Sermons, Academical and Occasional (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1848), pp. 149–72. On this see Rowlands, Church, State and Society, pp. 46–62. Newman to Froude, 1 August 1833, in Newman, Letters and Diaries, iv, pp. 17–18. W. P. Palmer, A narrative of events connected with the publication of the Tracts for the Times (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1843), p. 5. ‘For a period of about six years Keble was a political Radical, as he understood that term. That is, he looked forward to the separation of the Church of England from the State and every other lay controlling force, a gesture that he believed was the first object of the Radical party’ (John R. Griffin, ‘John Keble: Radical’ in Anglican Theological Review 53:3 (1971), pp. 167-173, here p. 169). S. A. Skinner, Tractarians and the ‘Condition of England’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 138. See esp. ch. 2.

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Mark D. Chapman to reform us at their will’.15 The following year Keble wrote again to Coleridge, this time making a more explicit call for the separation of Church and State: I am more and more inclined to think, that the sooner we come to an open separation from these people, the better for ourselves and our flocks: and this is some comfort as one watches the progress of Revolution in which the said separation will, I expect, be a very early step.16

Logically, this meant that an independent corporate identity for the Church – in other words, a separation from the State – was the only viable way forward for the protection of the Church. Indeed, as Hurrell Froude wrote to A. P. Perceval in the summer of 1833, ‘Keble … thinks the Union of Church and State as it is now understood, actually sinful.’17 In the year after the Assize Sermon, Keble wrote an article in the British Critic where he drew out the implications of the political changes for the Church of England. He noted how the late changes in the Constitution affect the rights of Parliament to legislate for the Church. Many considerate persons think, that the changes are so vital, so wrought into the very ground of the system, as to amount to a virtual breach of the terms of union between Church and State. So that, in their judgment, the governors of the Church are at liberty, whenever in their consciences they shall deem it most expedient, to decline submitting themselves to the ecclesiastical laws of the Parliament. For the two societies are no longer identical, according to the theory of Hooker and the practice of the days of Queen Elizabeth.18

Although here Keble is simply noting the possibility of disobedience, rather than actively extolling it, he can nevertheless be seen to be paving the way for what might be regarded as the Anglo-Catholic ambivalence towards 15 16 17 18

Keble to Coleridge, 31 March 1831, cited in John R. Griffin, ‘John Keble: Radical’, p. 172. 8 May 1832, cited in John R. Griffin, ‘John Keble: Radical’, p. 172. 18 August 1833, cited in John Griffin, ‘John Keble: Radical’, p. 170. Response to the Bishop of Leighlin and Merns in a letter to the editor of the British Magazine in John Keble, The State in its Relations with the Church, ed. Henry Liddon (Oxford: Parker, 1869), appendix, pp. 55–63, here p. 61.

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‘A Free Church in a Free State’: Anglo-Catholicism and Establishment establishment and more generally towards political authority. This can be summarized quite simply: where the State no longer protected the Church or upheld its values, the Church had a duty to protect itself, even when this might appear seditious. Since the Church could no longer rely on parliament and monarch it had to rely on different sources of authority. As is well known, the Tractarians emphasized the independence of the Church’s authority, grounding it in the doctrine of apostolicity as expressed in the institution of episcopacy. The grounds of authority were no longer to be found in the political settlement under a divinely anointed monarch, but in what was called the ‘Apostolical Church’, and its episcopal successors into the present. Indeed, this became the key aspect of the Tractarian understanding of the Church.19 As Newman asked in the first of the Tracts, published in September 1833: ‘Should the government and country so far forget their God as to cast off the Church, to deprive it of its temporal honours and substance, on what will you rest the claim of respect and attention which you make upon your flocks?’ His answer was unambiguous: the real ground upon ‘which our authority is built [is] OUR APOSTOLICAL DESCENT’.20 It was only in such a way that there could be protection for the truths of the Church, as well as its apostolic structures and its liturgy. After 1833 the plea for independence was coupled with the return to apostolicity and seriousness which accompanied the rediscovery of the absolute authority of the Church. Thus Keble remarked: ‘We had rather be a Church in earnest separate from the State, than a counterfeit Church in professed Union with the State.’21 Shortly after preaching the Assize Sermon Keble wrote to a friend outlining his aims for a group to defend the Church. The new association was to ‘circulate primitive notions regarding the Apostolical Succession, & c.; and secondly the protection of the Prayer-book against profane innovation’.22 The external threat to the Church thereby elevated the life of the Church and would lead to a renunciation of mere external 19 20 21 22

See Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, pp. 44–103. Thoughts on the Ministerial Commission, respectfully addressed to the Clergy (London: Rivington, 1833). John Keble, Occasional Papers and Reviews (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1877), p. 226. 26 August 1833, cited in J. T. Coleridge, A Memoir of the Rev. John Keble (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1870), 2 vols, vol. i, p. 220.

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Mark D. Chapman conformity. Again this can be seen as stemming from the problem of toleration of other versions of Christianity which simply forced a greater seriousness on the life of the Church. As J. N. Figgis observed in his classic defence of the independence of the Church in the pluralist State in Churches in the Modern State: ‘From the Christian standpoint the great advantage of toleration is that it elevates automatically the life of the Church … [Toleration] acts automatically on the purity of religious bodies and the reality of their faith.’23 What was even sometimes perceived as persecution could lead to religious renewal and the preparedness for sacrifice: while there may have been no devouring lions in 1833 there was undoubtedly a sense of danger.24 By focusing on the internal purity of the Church, Keble paved the way for the future recognition of a plurality of different groups within the State, all of which were to be protected, but none of which was to be officially sponsored. The logic was straightforward: given the nature of the reformed parliament, and however much one might clamour for something else, the truth was that the Church of England would be better off not as a national Church, but as what Keble himself termed a ‘sect’. Hence in the ‘Advertisement’ to the published version of the Assize Sermon Keble could write: The Legislature of England and Ireland (the members of which are not even bound to profess belief in the Atonement), this body has virtually usurped the commission of those whom our Saviour entrusted with at least one voice in making ecclesiastical laws, on matters wholly or partially spiritual. The same Legislature has also ratified, to its full extent, this principle; – that the Apostolic Church is only to stand, in the eye of the State, as one sect among many, depending, for any preeminence she may still appear to retain, merely upon the accident of her having a strong party in the country.25

On such a sectarian model, because there was no longer any all-embracing unified vision of a society where Church and State could be regarded as two aspects of the one divinely constituted whole, it proved inevitable that there 23 24 25

J. N. Figgis, Churches in the Modern State (London: Longmans, 1914), p. 119. See John Keble, The State in its Relations with the Church, p. 46. Advertisement to first edition in National Apostasy, p. 11. Italics in original.

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‘A Free Church in a Free State’: Anglo-Catholicism and Establishment would be a diffusion and disintegration both in society and Church. As Figgis put it: ‘It was the competing claims of religious bodies, and the inability of any single one to destroy the others, which finally secured liberty.’26 Figgis here enunciates the logic of Keble’s position: in a situation where pluralism was practised, the authority claimed by the Church inevitably had to be redefined. Although there was likely to be a proclamation of an exclusive truth by any Church or sect – and Keble certainly hoped that the Church of England might be able to exert some control over the morals of the nation27 – there was at the same time always the further presupposition of the possibility of other competing claims from other churches which inevitably forced the situation. The Logic of Tractarianism Central for the theme of this lecture is the notion of the independence of the Church: the logic of Tractarianism leads towards some form of selfgovernment and a degree of disestablishment (even if few advocated a complete separation between Church and State). This was noted in a fascinating essay on the politics of the Oxford Movement, written during the First World War, by Harold Laski, a leading political thinker and a future Chairman of the Labour Party National Executive Committee.28 Laski claimed that Tractarianism was a ‘tremendous and brilliant plea for ecclesiastical freedom that is clearly born from the passionate sense of a corporate Church’.29 As a secular Jew, it was perhaps surprising that he should have expended his energies investigating the Church, which was not

26 27 28

29

J. N. Figgis, Churches in the Modern State (London: Longmans, second edition, 1914), p. 101. Skinner, Tractarians, chapter 2. On Laski’s early thought see Bernard Zylstra, From Pluralism to Collectivism: The Development of Harold Laski’s Political Thought (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1968), esp. pp. 15–43; and Marc Stears, Progressive, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State: Ideologies of Reform in the United States and Britain: 1909–1926 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chapter 3. H. J. Laski, ‘The Political Theory of the Oxford Movement’, in Authority in the Modern State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919), p. 94.

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Mark D. Chapman restricted to the Oxford Movement.30 His purpose, however, as one commentator notes, was to justify his ‘opposition to tyranny in the final confrontation between the individual and the demands of the State’.31 The freedom of the Church was used as an example of the freedom of groups to make their own rules as unmolested by the State as possible. What Laski called the ‘unconscious theory of the state’ of the Oxford Movement was derived from the degree of liberty which had to be conferred on the different constituent groups which made up the State when there was no longer wholehearted support offered to the traditional institutions by the secular powers. Catholic Emancipation and the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts marked a de facto recognition of the need for ecclesiastical freedom. Thus Laski maintained: In its essence, Tractarianism is essentially a plea of the corporate body which is distinct from the state to a separate and free existence. It is a denial that the members of the Church are as its members no more than individuals, living under the all-inclusive sovereignty of the Crown.32

For the Tractarians, according to Laski, the dominant question was that of sovereignty: rolling back the power of the State became necessary when the reformed parliament had begun to use its unbounded sovereignty to threaten the spiritual society. The Church consequently needed to erect barriers and defend itself through its own alternative theory of sovereignty. Thus Laski wrote: It was a definition of the Church that the Tractarians attempted, and they found almost immediately that to define its ideality was to assert its exclusiveness. If it was created by God it could not be controlled by man; if it was erected by God, it was not subject to the ordinances of a man-created institution like the state.33

According to Laski’s view of the Tractarians, the right to exist as an independent corporation was all that could be hoped for by the Church. 30 31 32 33

Laski, Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917) and Authority in the Modern State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919). Zylstra, From Pluralism to Collectivism, p. 43. H. J. Laski, ‘The Political Theory of the Oxford Movement’, pp. 108–9. Ibid., p. 114.

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‘A Free Church in a Free State’: Anglo-Catholicism and Establishment Thus although Keble might have continued to pray for his rulers, such rulers were no longer to be allowed to claim sovereignty over the Church, at least in its spiritual affairs. Laski called such an approach the ‘Guelfic attitude’ to the State: Marsilio of Padua’s claim that the Church is no more than an institution within the State, was exactly the expression of the Whig Government’s attitude. With him it would have said that the ecclesiastical sovereign was to be the body of the faithful, just as he would, with their approval, identify the faithful with the nation as a whole.34

The Marsilian theory, which had been so important in the formation of the English Settlement from the 1530s, had been defeated by the fact of religious pluralism. Consequently, Laski wrote: ‘The whole foundation of Tractarianism lies in the fact that [the identity of the faithful with the nation] had ceased to be the case.’35 The Tractarian single-minded devotion to the independence of the Church, so clearly demonstrated by the early Keble, pointed towards a model of Church and State which saw separation as inevitable, and perhaps even desirable. Self-regulation was to be the best way forward. According to Laski, ‘The tribunals of the State’ will leave the Church free to work out, as best she may, the grave and complex problems that confront her … And the state will understand that the degree of her freedom will be the measure of her progress. In the event the tragedies of Oxford will not have been in vain.36

A Free Church in a Free State Tractarianism, then, contained a strongly anti-establishment streak: an organization which claimed to possess something of the authority of the Holy Spirit could hardly submit to an apostate nation. This tradition has 34 35

36

Ibid., pp. 114–15. Ibid., ‘The Politics of the Oxford Movement’, p. 115. Keble himself noted this in 1834. See ‘Letter to the editor of the British Magazine’, in John Keble, The State in its Relations with the Church, appendix, pp. 55–63, here p. 61. Laski, ‘The Politics of the Oxford Movement’, p. 119.

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Mark D. Chapman continued to find its champions through the history of Anglo-Catholicism. In words reminiscent of Laski, Charles Gore, who was the most important leader of the Anglo-Catholics at the turn of the twentieth century, regarded the Oxford Movement as fulfilling the function of reviving the idea of the Church as possessing by divine commission an essential and necessary freedom of self-government and self-judgment in spiritual matters. No doubt the ‘Free Churches’ would deny to us ‘State-enslaved’ Anglicans the right to hold this doctrine; and Anglicans would deny to the Free Churches the right to claim the idea of the Catholic Church as theirs while they repudiate its Catholic constitution. But at least the idea is alive again in full force in both these portions of the religious world, while among Romanists it has never been obscured. And the idea has come to stay.37

Given the democratic make-up of modern Britain, according to Gore, it was quite clear that liberty was the only viable option for the Church. ‘The logic of history works slowly’, Gore claimed, ‘but it works exceedingly surely.’ There was simply no alternative: After all sorts of relations between Church and State have been tried through the Christian ages it becomes increasingly apparent, from the point of view alike of Church and State, that ‘a free Church in a free State’ is in some way the only political ideal, at least for a democratically governed country like England.38

Gore regarded ‘the decay of moral discipline in our own Church’ as a product of ‘the peculiar relation in which the Church stands to the State’.39 Indeed, in the pluralist situation of modern Britain the Church could expect little from any government. During the First World War in the run-up to the Enabling Act which paved the way for a considerable degree of selfgovernment in the Church and which set up the Church Assembly, he wrote: 37 38 39

Charles Gore, ‘The English Church Union Declaration’, Contemporary Review 75 (April 1899), pp. 457–69, here p. 459. Ibid., p. 464. Charles Gore, The Mission of the Church: Four Lectures delivered in June, 1892, in the Cathedral Church of St Asaph (London: John Murray, 1892), p. 127. On Gore and establishment, see James Carpenter, Gore: A Study in Liberal Catholic Thought (London: Faith Press, 1960), pp. 261–5.

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‘A Free Church in a Free State’: Anglo-Catholicism and Establishment

Now in England we have reverted to a condition of things in which it is manifest that the State must be impartial in religious matters. Nobody proposes that the State should enforce the rules of the Church upon the whole nation. The Church of England only represents a portion of the nation.40

Despite his long service as a bishop, Gore remained ambivalent: it was, he suggested, ‘exceedingly difficult to make up one’s mind on establishment’.41 Nevertheless, he regarded it as undermining what he called ‘real’ Christianity. The Church was a voluntary community and as such needed to impose its own rules which alone would lead to a ‘revival of Christian discipline’.42 Indeed, as the debates surrounding education had revealed, the Church of England had become a denomination.43 Its rules were not dependent on the laws of the State but on the higher law of God. Thus for Gore it was quite clear that ‘not all the parliaments of kings on earth can alter the law of the Lord’.44 In his 1892 lecture on the Sermon on the Mount he claimed: Amongst ourselves, the disastrous identification of Church and State, which has allowed the Church to lose its free legislative functions within its own sphere, has altogether obscured, among ordinary church-people, the sense that there is a social law binding upon their consciences – as in matters of matrimony or of commercial dealings – which is distinct from, and which goes beyond, the law of the State … We must get genuine Christians together to think out for themselves, and formulate for their own guidance, the moral law of Christ, as applied to modern conditions.45

For Gore true Christianity was by its very nature something that found it impossible to accommodate itself to the ways of the world. Its distinctive

40 41 42 43 44 45

Charles Gore, Self-Government for the Church (London: SPCK for the Church SelfGovernment Association, n.d. [1916]), p. 6. Advent Sermons on Church Reform (London: Longmans, 1898), pp. 211–12. The Mission of the Church, p. 131. Charles Gore, ‘General Principles of Church Reform’, in Gore (ed.), Essays in Aid of the Reform of the Church (London: John Murray, 1898), pp. 1–29, here p. 5. The Sermon on the Mount, p. 69. The Social Doctrine of the Sermon on the Mount, p. 4. See also p. 13.

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Mark D. Chapman way was not the way of expediency or political influence. Instead the Christian has to be prepared to stand alone, or at any rate to go against the majority … [I]n following [his own duty] he will have to bear the burden of going with the few and watching the spectacle, so depressing or staggering to the imagination, of the multitude running to do evil.46

In short, real Christianity was not something that would ever be popular.47 Gore consequently regarded the theory of the union between Church and State, which had reached its ‘noblest expression in the pages of Hooker’, as ‘an ideal on which subsequent events have cast a sinister light’. He continued: To how small an extent can it be said that the English monarchy or nation has held itself bound by the principles of the Church. We live now under democratic influences. The law of the State depends on the will of the majority of the nation. What likelihood is there that the will of the majority should submit to the law of Christ? And if it be unlikely, what right has the Church to hamper her liberty to express and enforce by moral discipline on her own members the unchanging law of Christ?48

In fact, according to Gore, it had come about that the laws of the English State, for example, the Divorce Act, which made it difficult for clergy to refuse to re-marry divorcees in Church, had transgressed the law of Christ. On this matter Gore preached disobedience: as Christians they are bound to obey another law, the law of the Church; and it is no excuse for them, as Christians, that the law of the State does not enforce the law of Christ. They will be judged as Christians by the Christian law. It is, then, at the present moment one main duty of the English Church to recall to the mind of her own members, and so to the minds of others, that there is an authority committed to her which is fundamentally independent of the functions and authority of the State.49

46 47 48 49

The Sermon on the Mount, pp. 176–7. See Carpenter, Gore, pp. 258, 265. The Mission of the Church, pp. 128–9. Ibid., p. 130; see also ‘The English Church Union Declaration’, p. 461.

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‘A Free Church in a Free State’: Anglo-Catholicism and Establishment

Gore thus campaigned for a free Church which was able to exercise its authority over those who freely chose to submit themselves to its authority. In his introduction to a series of essays on Church reform, Gore called for self-government in the Church as a means of reviving what he called its ‘corporate consciousness’.50 Archbishop Benson’s judgement in the trial of Edward King had revealed that ‘a decision of ecclesiastical controversies could be more hopefully looked for from within than from without the Church’.51 This was primarily because the Church, as a voluntary body, had the duty to legislate for itself. Indeed, according to Gore, No self-respecting society, civil or religious, from a great nation or church down to a debating society, can be asked to allow a right of controlling its affairs to those who are not showing allegiance to its principles by the permanence of elementary duties of members.52

Membership in the Church carried with it certain obligations and rights which had to be taken seriously. Thus he claimed that although the Church should not refuse its ministrations to anybody, active ‘Membership in any vigorous and progressive religious society must involve recognized obligations, and the refusal of obligation must at last involve loss of membership.’53 Voluntarism might have been imposed on the Church, but it allowed it to be what it had always claimed to be: a group of disciples seeking to follow Christ.

Recent Examples This strand of thinking was deeply influential on the introduction of selfgovernment after the First World War, and many Anglo-Catholics continued to follow the lead of their illustrious forebears in their support of disestablishment. But, despite increasing pluralism, and the decline of the Church of England, as well as of the other denominations, the ideas of 50 51 52 53

Charles Gore, ‘General Principles of Church Reform’, p. 4. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., pp. 23–4. The War and the Church (Oxford: Mowbray, 1914), p. 101.

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Mark D. Chapman complete independence and self-government have been unacceptable for many. For instance, the fundamental assumption underlying Faith in the City: A Call for Action by Church and Nation, as the subtitle suggests, hardly differs in kind from what was presented by some of the great Victorian writers on Church and State, who developed Hooker’s ideal. For example, Thomas Arnold wrote: ‘I would gladly … include in the Church all nominal Christians, and by so doing we should greatly increase its efficacy, and it might be raised gradually.’54 More recently Paul Avis has maintained something similar: he emphasises a national Church as a bulwark against congregationalism and as a witness to the holistic mission of the Church of England which exists for all people regardless of their background or levels of belief. Indeed, Avis suggests, ‘it is the catholicity and apostolicity of the Christian Church, not any prejudice or sentiment about nationality, that drives its mission to the whole of a people, a nation’.55 The logical extension of this understanding, he suggests, is establishment, or what he calls ‘the cream on the cake’. Establishment is ‘the recognition of the contribution of Christian ministry to the health of civil society [that] can provide a basis for the pastoral responsibility of the Church at large’.56 Even those from other faith backgrounds, he claims, are likely to favour the continued historic establishment of the Church of England as a defender of national morality and English virtues against the evils of secularism.57 Paul Avis does not take matters much further than what was suggested in Henry Chadwick’s report of 1970, Church and State, which recommended (and basically achieved) a gentle reform of establishment which would continue to tie the Church of England to the State, while also allowing it a significant amount of independence. As a justification the Commissioners suggested: The people of England still want to feel that religion has a place in the land to which they can turn on the too rare occasions when they think that they need it;

54 55 56 57

Thomas Arnold in David Nicholls, Church and State in Britain since 1820 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 38. Paul Avis, Church, State and Establishment (London: SPCK, 2001), p. 17. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., ch. 8.

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‘A Free Church in a Free State’: Anglo-Catholicism and Establishment and they are not likely to be pleased by legislation which might suggest that the English people as a whole were going unChristian.58

There was little space here for what Gore would have called real Christianity. This was noted by Valerie Pitt (1925–1999), in her extraordinary ‘Memorandum of Dissent’. While there were other criticisms of the specific recommendations,59 Pitt was concerned with the fundamentals of Christianity. Throughout her life Pitt, who was a lecturer in English at what became the University of Greenwich, was frequently a lone prophetic Anglo-Catholic voice speaking the unspeakable, often from the chamber of General Synod. In her Memorandum added to the Report, she outlined the understanding of the Church which she thought had been adopted throughout the Report. She felt that in many ways it was evidence of a kind of wishful thinking, or longing for a time long since past when established religion was part of the cultural fabric of the nation and every English person was ‘deep down C. of E.’. She went on: ‘The fact that he also expresses views totally at variance with any form of historic Christianity is a minor difficulty: what matters is the continuance and preservation of this “folk religion”.’60 Pitt goes on to ask a simple question: ‘But is it true?’ ‘It would be surprising,’ she continues, ‘or rather culturally impossible, if after so many centuries, the nation had taken no imprint in the forms and its moral style from its association with the Church.’ And yet she was unconvinced that this sort of Christianity was alive in any real way in the parishes, particularly those in the ‘urban conurbations’ which had experienced a long deChristianization. Indeed, being Christian in many parts of the country was counter-cultural: The encounter with the third generation of urban indifference, documented right back to the Victorian Church, gives a slightly different picture of the place of the Church in English life. In this a man who involves himself with the Church, who practises his faith does so not with but against the conventions of

58 59 60

Church and State: Report of the Archbishop’s Commission (London: Church Information Office, 1970), p. 65. See Peter Cornwell, Church and Nation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). Church and State, pp. 72–3.

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Mark D. Chapman society and increasingly against the grain of his cultural inheritance. He is forced to make a choice and that, I believe, is no desperate ill. For in fact Christianity is not a folk or a tribal religion, it is not bred into us by the traditions of our ancestors. It is a gospel, a revealed religon, demanding an active and personal assent. To be a Christian a man must himself answer – Jesus is Lord. Writing ‘C. of E.’ on a form is not quite enough.61

The principal issue here is over the nature of Christianity: for Valerie Pitt there is a profound difference between the residual Christianity embodied in the historic constitutional settlement maintained by the Church and State report where there was a modest adjustment to the changed and more plural conditions of the present, but where Christianity was still established both in key areas of the constitution, and the real religion of what might be called ‘traditioned belonging’. Indeed it is possible to see the Church and State report as representing a kind of longing for a dying Christendom: Pitt sees such nostalgia as characterized by ‘folk memories of life in small, close-knit local communities – ways of life now outside the experience of millions’.62 In a fascinating article in the journal Prism, which functioned as the house journal of the so-called South Bank Theology, Valerie Pitt offered a trenchant criticism of what she called its ‘delusions of a past grandeur’ which had been displayed by so many of those who sought to find Christ in the secular man. This amounted to little more than a hope against hope: ‘Pop liturgies, discussion groups, team ministries, public relations’ – something would restore the Church. But this was to ignore the facts. ‘If that past and this present are to be redeemed’, she claimed, ‘we have to carry this cross, to live with the situation as in fact it is.’63 For Pitt, the facts of the situation meant that all the experiments of the 1960s with their religionless Christianity and liturgical renewal were ultimately doomed to fail. Quite simply, she held, real Christianity was not a universal religion, but a religion for a minority of disciples: Religion was not a vague intrinsic or folk feeling but instead required commitment and belonging. For Pitt – and for other

61 62 63

Ibid., pp. 73–4. Ibid., p. 74. Prism 99 (July 1965), pp. 18–19.

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‘A Free Church in a Free State’: Anglo-Catholicism and Establishment like-minded Anglo-Catholics64 – the Church came first rather than a vague more or less religious form of nostalgic piety. Here a comparison might be made with a more recent exponent of AngloCatholicism. In his lecture at the Royal Courts of Justice in February of 200865 Rowan Williams discussed how Islamic communities and lawyers might be able to exercise a limited and specified jurisdiction in certain matters relating to family law: they would do so within the overarching legal framework of the State. In part, this discussion was provoked by his conviction, which is rare in a Church of England bishop, that Christianity itself is a minority religion. While Christians might not be able to impose their will on the rest of society, there was a sense in which their first concern was with their vocation to live within their communities of discipleship as a witness to an alternative form of life. And this might mean conflict with the established norms, for instance, about abortion or euthanasia or indeed gay adoption.66 It is important to note that this understanding by Williams of Christianity as a minority religion is no recent development: his political theology was shaped by the Jubilee Group of which Valerie Pitt was a prominent member. It derives directly from that tradition initiated by Keble and shaped in a more radical direction by Charles Gore (and Williams’ favourite, J. N. Figgis). What she seems to have in mind as the locus of authentic Christianity is the idea of a Church struggling against the odds to live up to its calling. Indeed those called out to form a Church were inevitably a minority. For Valerie Pitt, and much later for Rowan Williams, it was pointless to suppose that there was much alternative to minority status. And here the influence of Donald MacKinnon is strong. At his most prophetic MacKinnon, the disestablished Anglican from the Episcopal Church of 64

65

66

On Pitt’s understanding of Anglo-Catholicism, see her essay, ‘The Oxford Movement: a case of cultural distortion?’, in Leech and Williams, Essays Catholic and Radical, pp. 205–223, here p. 223. ‘Civil and Religious Law in England: a Religious Perspective’, Royal Courts of Justice, 7 February 2008. Text at: http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/1575 (accessed 1 November 2010). See ‘The Judgement of the World’, in On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 35.

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Mark D. Chapman Scotland, claimed in his 1968 Gore lecture that Christians who focus on their churches will inevitably be ‘flirting with obscurity’.67 Indeed, churches may well be pushed to the margins, or even into the ghetto. Where some lamented, however, MacKinnon rejoiced: this was precisely where the Church should be. As he put it with typical hyperbole: ‘I would ask, but what of the Warsaw ghetto? That was a place of suffering certainly, but one surely nearer the centre than the periphery of the world’s travail.’68 It is in the ghetto that new life begins. According to MacKinnon, however, where the Church so often cultivated a status of invulnerability by siding with the ruling powers or seeing itself as indispensable for the good functioning of society, it inevitably succumbed to the way of Caiaphas.69 It compromised with power, ‘issuing in a devotion to the structures that preserve it’.70 Yet, he claimed, in its new situation where it has been robbed of inherited status the Church is exposed to life, ‘stripped of the kind of security that tradition, whether ecclesiological or institutional, easily bestows’.71 For MacKinnon such a stripping away of security was demanded by the doctrine of Christ, who similarly laid bare the masquerade of human power.72 Just like Charles Gore, this is where he located real Christianity.

Conclusion For all these figures – from John Keble to Rowan Williams – there is a sense in which becoming a minority is part of obedience to the Gospel: it is the implication of earnest and serious religion. In the contemporary context, as Gore recognized a hundred years ago, the question of the rights of minority religion stems less from any legal protection than from an inevitability which 67 68 69 70 71 72

Donald MacKinnon, ‘Kenosis and Establishment’, in The Stripping of the Altars (London: Fontana, 1969), pp. 13–40, here p. 34. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 29; cf. ‘Authority and Freedom in the Church’, in The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 51–61, here p. 53. MacKinnon, ‘Kenosis and Establishment’, p. 33. Ibid., p. 34. Cf. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology (London: Lutterworth, 1968), p. 50. See also Rowan Williams, ‘Incarnation and the Renewal of Community’, in On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 225–38, esp. p. 234.

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‘A Free Church in a Free State’: Anglo-Catholicism and Establishment is perhaps inherent in the very notion of discipleship itself. The early twentyfirst century may be revealing to us the painful truth that it is simply wrong to believe that Christianity will be anything other than a minority religion – and establishment does little more than conceal this truth. This does not imply that those who are not Christians are inevitably destined to eternal perdition nor alternatively that mission should cease. Instead it shows, at least in this strand of Anglo-Catholicism, that Christianity is a very serious thing and needs to obey its own laws wherever these might lead. Again Valerie Pitt, writing in 1965, noted the difference between what she regarded as the implications of a form of establishment that watered down the demands of Christianity ‘in the Parish Communion Culture of the twentieth century Church’, and real Christianity which forced the Church to rethink its priorities and to engage in serious thought about the Gospel. With typical hyperbole, she wrote: To undo the terrifying effects of the Anglican synthesis, all of us have, really, to withdraw into the Church’s society, into the cosy circle of the household of faith – which is not in the least like the High Table at King’s. Indeed, I daresay for a while it will be dreadfully provincial – like the Lord’s life in Galilee.73

The logic of some forms of Tractarianism leads inexorably in the direction of the radical religion of the minority: perhaps rather fortunately for the rest of the Church of England, however, most Anglo-Catholics have spent their time on other pursuits (and some may soon be received into a disestablished Church). Real Christianity is probably rather too demanding for most of us.

73

Prism 99 (July 1965), pp. 19–20.

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Gospel Opportunity or Unbiblical Relic? The Established Church through Anglican Evangelical Eyes ANDREW ATHERSTONE

The National Evangelical Anglican Congresses (NEACs), held periodically since the 1960s, provide a helpful barometer of the changing nature of theological opinion within the Anglican evangelical movement. The first congress (NEAC 1) met at Keele University in April 1967 under the chairmanship of John Stott and attracted a thousand delegates from across the Church of England.1 It published a wide-ranging statement on doctrinal and ethical issues, but on the topic of establishment was brief and cautious, perhaps not wishing to pre-empt the conclusions of the Archbishops’ Commission on Church and State recently constituted under the chairmanship of Professor Owen Chadwick. The Keele Congress simply affirmed, uncontroversially, ‘We recognize afresh that the National Church which we have inherited presents us with pastoral advantages and as such gives us opportunities to serve the nation.’2 The draft statement was bolder, proclaiming that there was ‘wide and to some extent justifiable dissatisfaction’ concerning parliament’s control of worship and the crown’s appointment of bishops, but this was deleted presumably because it was seen as too divisive by the delegates.3 A decade later, the 1977 Nottingham Congress (NEAC 2) revealed increasingly sharp disagreements within the Anglican evangelical move1

2 3

Andrew Atherstone, ‘The Keele Congress of 1967: A Paradigm Shift in Anglican Evangelical Attitudes’, Journal of Anglican Studies (forthcoming). I am grateful to Colin Buchanan, John Maiden and Judith Maltby for their comments on a draft of this chapter. Keele ’67: The National Evangelical Anglican Congress Statement, ed. Philip Crowe (London: Falcon, 1967), paragraph 59. Keele Congress Draft Statement (April 1967), Saward MSS (in possession of Andrew Atherstone).

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Gospel Opportunity or Unbiblical Relic? ment, not least concerning biblical interpretation, Roman Catholicism and charismatic renewal. Compared with these explosive topics, establishment aroused little emotion, but bifurcation was nevertheless apparent. One of the speakers, Timothy Dudley-Smith (Archdeacon of Norwich, and later Bishop of Thetford), argued that it was ‘the pragmatic duty of the Church of England to preserve what is most valuable in the State connection’ for the sake of mission.4 This was reiterated by the congress statement, in a section drafted by Dudley-Smith: We hope that our church will not seek to renounce, but to share with other Protestant churches the ancient constitutional ties that establish her as the church of this realm. We value these, not for privilege but for service, not for the church but for the nation. We look beyond the secularism of the present to a day when the English people shall again seek the substance as well as the name of the Christian faith.5

Subsequent evangelical defenders of establishment have been quick to quote this part of the Nottingham Statement as evidence of majority evangelical opinion, without acknowledging a divergent strand of thought on display at the congress.6 The very next section of the statement was drafted by Colin Buchanan (vice-principal of St John’s College, Nottingham, and later Bishop of Woolwich) who argued that State control of the Church of England was a barrier to ecumenism.7 Although not in explicit contradiction to DudleySmith’s positive affirmations, the mood was strikingly different and the final version read as follows:

4

5 6

7

Timothy Dudley-Smith, ‘The Church as Institution’, in Ian Cundy (ed.), Obeying Christ in a Changing World, volume 2, The People of God (Glasgow: Collins, 1977), pp. 102–3. The Nottingham Statement (London: Falcon, 1977), paragraph K7. Those who point to paragraph K7 of the Nottingham Statement include O. R. Johnston, Nationhood: Towards a Christian Perspective (Oxford: Latimer House, 1980), p. 2; foreword to Max Warren, The Functions of a National Church (Oxford: Latimer House, 1984), p. 3; Timothy Hoare, ‘Established to Serve the Nation’, in Gavin Reid (ed.), Hope for the Church of England? (Eastbourne: Kingsway, 1986), p. 62; Timothy Yates, ‘Should We Disestablish?’, Anvil 19 (2002), p. 45. Colin Buchanan, ‘The Unity of the Church’, in Cundy, Obeying Christ, pp. 123–4.

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Andrew Atherstone While we value the historic responsibility given to the Church of England, we renounce any superiority complex of which we are guilty. We deplore the tacit triumphalism that marks so much of the Church of England’s public institutional life, and we wish to see this cease. We recognise that our historic constitutional links with the State, while valued by many of us, are a cause of concern to others and that we have often been insensitive to the offence they have caused to some non-Anglicans.8

Buchanan went even further in his original draft, denouncing establishment as ‘not only unhelpful to mission, but also prejudicial to healthy reunion’.9 This sentence was struck out as more than the Nottingham delegates could bear, although Buchanan later developed the thesis at length in his synodical speeches and polemical writings. He became the most vocal campaigner against establishment on the floor of General Synod, but was always voted down by what he viewed as ‘institutional irrationality and purblindness’.10 His treatise Cut the Connection (1994) remains one the most sustained assaults on establishment published in the last half century.11 This chapter seeks to map the divergent Anglican evangelical attitudes to establishment since the 1970s. Evangelical proponents are now found on all sides of the argument and one author admits: ‘There are sound evangelical cases to be made both for and against establishment … our attitude will be conditioned as much by our personal philosophy and temperament as by theology, however hard one tries to read the Bible objectively!’12 Recent evangelical commentators acknowledge that there is no scriptural ‘blueprint’ for the relationship of Church and State, so they are permitted to argue on the basis of ‘pragmatic’ contemporary realities rather than biblical ideals.13 This naked pragmatism is seen, for example, in Professor Oliver O’Donovan’s conclusion about the present arrangements: ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix

8 9 10 11 12 13

Nottingham Statement, paragraph L3. ‘Obeying Christ in a Changing World: Draft Statement’ (April 1977), Saward MSS. Colin Buchanan, Taking the Long View: Three and a Half Decades of General Synod (London: CHP, 2006), p. 225. Colin Buchanan, Cut the Connection: Disestablishment and the Church of England (London: DLT, 1994). Timothy Hoare, Establishment (Oxford: Latimer House, 1994). Hoare, ‘Established to Serve the Nation’, pp. 61, 67.

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Gospel Opportunity or Unbiblical Relic? it!’14 In the absence of biblical imperatives, evangelicals have been ready to adopt conflicting viewpoints which cut across theological traditions, stimulating some surprising alliances. For example, evangelical defenders of establishment happily conscript non-evangelical literature to bolster their own position, quoting freely from authors such as F. D. Maurice, T. S. Eliot, Enoch Powell, Adrian Hastings and Archbishop John Habgood.15 They have proved themselves keen to defend the reformed nature of the Church of England, to promote its spiritual vitality, and to reach men and women throughout the nation with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This chapter will focus on evangelical arguments about whether these priorities are furthered or obstructed by establishment. A Protestant Bulwark The Prayer Book crisis of 1927–8 left a profound impression upon the Anglican evangelical movement. It seemed to many that parliament had rescued the Church from the dangerous inroads of catholicism and liberalism, and that MPs were more trustworthy as guardians of the Gospel than either the Church Assembly or the episcopal bench.16 Buchanan has argued that the debacle left Anglican evangelicals ‘subtly entrapped’ for several generations into identifying parliament as ‘a kind of apotheosis’, divinely ordained protectors of the Church of England’s reformation formularies.17 As late as 1964 evangelicals were lobbying MPs to vote against the Clerical Vestments Measure which legalized mass vestments for the first time since the Elizabethan Settlement.18 When the Measure was passed by an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons, the English Churchman mourned that 14 15

16 17 18

Oliver O’Donovan, ‘Establishment’ (submitted to the Evangelical Alliance Commission of Enquiry on Faith and Nation, 2006), p. 6. See, for example, Arthur Pollard, The Failure of the Church of England? The Church, the Nation and the Anglican Communion (Oxford: Latimer House, 1994), p. 10; Yates, ‘Should We Disestablish?’, pp. 45–50. John Maiden, National Religion and the Prayer Book Controversy, 1927–1928 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009). Buchanan, Cut the Connection, pp. 40, 210. John Maiden and Peter Webster, ‘Parliament, the Church of England and the Last Gasp of Political Protestantism 1961–64’ (forthcoming).

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Andrew Atherstone

Parliament has proved to be a broken reed. Even those who are staunch upholders of the establishment must wonder what its value is, and if it can be supported from Scripture, when the vast majority of members of Parliament do not uphold the Reformed character of the national church over against those who would carry it back to the bondage of Rome.19

Likewise one young clergyman, Michael Saward, concluded from this resounding parliamentary defeat that evangelicals must ‘withdraw their trust from princes and politicians and set their sights on the Church Assembly – for on this showing it is there that the voice of the laity will be heard. There, not in Parliament, lie what vestiges of hope are left.’20 According to Buchanan, Anglican evangelicalism’s previous reliance upon parliament betrayed the movement’s ‘defensive’ mindset. He maintains that the more evangelicals have grown in confidence since the Keele Congress, the less they have needed to preserve their links with the State.21 Certainly this period marks a shift away from their consistent defence of the establishment status quo in earlier generations. Nevertheless, even in recent decades, some evangelicals have continued to appeal to parliament and the monarchy as a bulwark of traditional Protestantism. Valerie Pitt’s ‘Memorandum of Dissent’ to the 1970 Chadwick Report is justly famous as a trenchant summary of the radical disestablishmentarian agenda. Less well known is the ‘note of dissent’ from the only evangelical member of the commission, Sir Timothy Hoare, a prominent layman and member of St Helen’s Bishopsgate in the City of London. He declared that in fact the commission had gone too far in loosening the ties between Church and State. The Chadwick recommendations resulted in the 1974 Church of England (Worship and Doctrine) Measure which gave General Synod increased powers over liturgy and theology, and ensured that parliament’s intervention of the late 1920s would never be repeated. Yet Hoare warned that the Synod was

19 20 21

‘A Grievous Loss’, English Churchman, 27 November 1964, p. 6. Michael Saward, ‘Vested Interests’, Church of England Newspaper, 7 August 1964, p. 1. Colin Buchanan, ‘Surely We Should Disestablish?’, Anvil 19 (2002), pp. 285–6.

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Gospel Opportunity or Unbiblical Relic? unrepresentative of local congregations and could not always be trusted to act wisely, so parliament must retain its veto.22 The Chadwick Report also led to the creation of the Crown Appointments Commission (CAC) and to General Synod’s famous insistence in July 1974 that the Church must have ‘the decisive voice’ in choosing its bishops. Once again, some evangelicals were nervous about this shift in power. Hoare thought it carried ‘very real dangers’ and was a wedge to force open the door to disestablishment. He believed there were already sufficient safeguards, regardless of whether the prime minister was ‘Christian, atheist, democrat, Marxist or fascist’.23 Likewise Hugh Craig (a prominent evangelical layman) worried that the CAC would be no better than ‘a glorious old boy’s network’ controlled from Church House and lacking the confidence of local congregations.24 Dudley-Smith prophesied that future historians might look back on Downing Street’s episcopal appointments as better than those of the Church.25 As recently as 1998 evangelicals had cause to celebrate Tony Blair’s unprecedented use of his prime ministerial powers when he rejected both names suggested by the CAC for the vacant see of Liverpool.26 The subsequent nomination of James Jones, an evangelical rising star, was viewed by some as vindication of the State’s ability to overrule the mistakes of the Church. When Hoare and Craig called General Synod and the CAC ‘unrepresentative’, by implication they meant that evangelicals, though dominant in the parishes, were excluded from the corridors of ecclesiastical power. This has long been an evangelical lament. Therefore the inclination has been to look to parliament to give the evangelical minority a voice. According to the 1952 Church and State Commission, ‘the House of Commons represents the mind of the inarticulate mass of laymen more closely than does the House of Laity’.27 Similar views were expressed by 22 23 24 25 26 27

Timothy Hoare, ‘Note of Dissent’, Church and State: Report of the Archbishops’ Commission (Chadwick Report) (London: CIO, 1970), pp. 85–7. General Synod Report of Proceedings [GSRP] 5 (July 1974), pp. 342–3. GSRP 5 (July 1974), p. 331. Dudley-Smith, ‘Church as Institution’, p. 102. Kenneth Medhurst, ‘The Church of England: A Progress Report’, Parliamentary Affairs 52 (April 1999), p. 285. Quoted in Hoare, ‘Note of Dissent’, p. 86.

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Andrew Atherstone Michael Alison, long-serving Tory MP and the Second Church Estates Commissioner from 1987 to 1997. He trained at Ridley Hall, Cambridge in the 1950s, intending ordination, but soon switched to politics. Alison was churchwarden of Holy Trinity, Brompton, an advocate of the Alpha Course, and closely involved in the evangelical conversion of Jonathan Aitken.28 When Buchanan told General Synod that parliament was not competent to take decisions for the Church since it was ‘an alien, disconnected body … not formed from our members, not participating in our debates, not Christian, not theological, not accountable’, Alison retorted that there were at least as many communicant Anglicans in the House of Commons as in the House of Laity. He protested that it was simply untrue to pretend MPs were ‘a bunch of uncaring atheists’ and hinted that General Synod itself was sometimes theologically incompetent.29 On another occasion Alison argued that since the authority of Emperor Nero was ‘ordained of God’ (Rom. 13.1) how much more so was that of Margaret Thatcher? Buchanan replied that, of course, Nero was not expected to appoint the apostles!30 When General Synod passed the Priests (Ordination of Women) Measure in November 1992, some evangelical opponents again appealed to the doctrine of establishment to defend their minority position. For example, David Samuel (Director of the Church Society 1983–91) argued that the Queen had a solemn duty to prevent the ordination of women priests since she had promised in her coronation oath to ‘maintain and preserve inviolably’ the worship, doctrine, discipline and government of the Church of England ‘as by law established’. He believed that in a constitutional monarchy, parliament also had a ‘sacred duty’ to reject the Measure in the name of the crown.31 When Samuel’s pleas were ignored, he left the Church of England and became first presiding bishop in the ‘Church of England (Continuing)’.

28 29 30 31

Jonathan Aitken, Prayers for People under Pressure (London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 3– 8. GSRP 25 (July 1994), pp. 306, 309. Buchanan, Cut the Connection, p. 75. David Samuel, ‘The Significance of the Coronation Oath in the Present Crisis’, in Michael Watts (ed.), Through a Glass Darkly: A Crisis Considered (Leominster: Gracewing, 1993), pp. 164–6.

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Gospel Opportunity or Unbiblical Relic? Meanwhile the Church Society took legal action in October 1993, contending in court that the issue at stake was not the ordination of women but the establishment of the national Church.32 They maintained that the power devolved from parliament to the Church Assembly by the 1919 Enabling Act was intentionally limited to prohibit fundamental doctrinal change. Therefore, their lawyers insisted, the General Synod Measure allowing the ordination of women was ultra vires and the Ecclesiastical Committee of Parliament’s decision to deem that Measure expedient should be quashed. They argued that if the Church of England wished to push ahead with the ordination of women, the only legal way to do so was by parliamentary act not by synodical measure. The society’s new director, David Streater, declared in a sworn affidavit that to allow the fundamental polity of the national Church to be altered by General Synod amounted to ‘disestablishment by stealth’.33 Although the Church Society was granted a judicial review, their case was dismissed. Having already spent £103,500 on lawyers’ bills, they declined to pursue the question further in the Court of Appeal or the House of Lords. During this controversy there was some common cause between evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics. Stephen Trott (Rector of Pitsford near Northampton and a prominent Anglo-Catholic spokesman) argued in Churchman that the ordination of women to the priesthood required nothing less than the recasting of the entire Elizabethan Settlement, which was far beyond the powers of General Synod. He lamented that ‘partial disestablishment’ in the form of self-government had enabled liberalism to take control of the Synod and to exclude traditionalists from high office. Trott wrote: Parliament, which stands as guarantor of the rights of all parties in the Church to a continued full share in its life, ought not to approve such a Measure while the Church remains Established. Such a Church belongs to all its members, and is not at the disposal of a General Synod. The only legitimate course, if General Synod desires to purge the Church of opponents to women priests, is for the

32

33

Malcolm Barker, ‘“The Word of the Oath”: Church Society’s Application for Judicial Review of General Synod’s Vote of 1992 Permitting the Ordination of Women to the Priesthood’, Churchman 108 (1994), pp. 154–80, 247–64. Barker, ‘Word of the Oath’, p. 173.

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Andrew Atherstone Church to be disestablished, and its endowments shared between the parties. The General Synod of the new Church of England will then be free to order its own life entirely according to its own wishes.34

Buchanan (a long-time advocate of the ordination of women) poured scorn upon these attempts to keep General Synod answerable to parliament. He rebuked the Church Society’s judicial challenge as an ‘absurd’ attempt ‘to hamper the living Church by the rusty shackles of appeals to law’. He mocked the society as a ‘coelacanthine institution’ living in ‘a world of constitutional unrealities’. Buchanan dismissed their action as ‘sheer madness’ which would return the Church of England to the notorious era of parliamentary control exemplified by the 1874 Public Worship Regulation Act.35 That Act was widely welcomed, of course, by Victorian evangelicals as a necessary defence of the reformation formularies against ritualist innovation.36 A Christian Nation Evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic champion the concept of a ‘Christian nation’, arguing on the basis of Old Testament paradigms that countries as corporate entities are able to embody religious faith and render political obedience to God.37 In England, many Anglican evangelicals are involved in pressure groups like the Christian Institute and Christian Concern for our Nation (CCFON) which frequently lobby the government to uphold biblical standards in parliamentary legislation. Meanwhile a ‘Christian nation’ theology has been advocated with varying degrees of sophistication by authors such as Raymond Johnston (director of the

34

35 36 37

Stephen Trott, ‘The Function of the Ecclesiastical Committee of Parliament with particular reference to the Priests (Ordination of Women) Measure 1992’, Churchman 107 (1993), p. 15. Buchanan, Cut the Connection, pp. 40, 211. James Bentley, Ritualism and Politics in Victorian Britain: The Attempt to Legislate for Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). For a survey of viewpoints, see Faith and Nation: Report of a Commission of Enquiry to the UK Evangelical Alliance (London: Evangelical Alliance, 2006). For a recent critique, see Jonathan Chaplin, ‘Can Nations be “Christian”?’, Theology 112 (November 2009), pp. 410–24.

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Gospel Opportunity or Unbiblical Relic? Nationwide Festival of Light 1974–85), David Holloway, Oliver O’Donovan and Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali.38 Amongst Anglican apologists, a ‘Christian nation’ perspective is often allied with defence of the establishment. For example, when responding to the Chadwick Report the editor of Churchman, Gervase Duffield, declared that the vital question was whether England is to remain a Christian country. To listen to some Christians talk, one might imagine that there is virtue in turning the national church into a denomination, uninterested in its national mission, inward-looking, and dismissing the rest of the nation as heathen or baptised pagans. This may sound convincing superficially, but it is very short sighted. If England continues its drift from Christian standards, our Christian heritage may last a while, but the time will come when the capital will run out, and then evangelistic outreach may be a lot harder than some now think.39

This theme was developed further by Bishop R. R. Williams of Leicester (a member of the Chadwick commission and a former chaplain at Ridley Hall) who argued for a close identification between nation and Church: It is true that almost every village has its little Bethel chapel, but who can doubt, as he journeys through England, and sees every village built round its ancient church, often as old as the village itself, that our Church is still the Church of England? Urban England is very different, but rural England is still in its blood.40

The bishop concluded:

38

39 40

Johnston, Nationhood; David Holloway, Church and State in the New Millennium: Issues of Belief and Morality for the 21st Century (London: HarperCollins, 2000); David Holloway, Re-establishing the Christian Faith and the Public Theology Deficit (London: Latimer Trust, 2010); Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Michael Nazir-Ali, ‘Breaking Faith with Britain’, Standpoint 1 (June 2008), pp. 45–7. Churchman 82 (Summer 1971), p. 83. R. R. Williams, ‘Richard Hooker on the Church and State Report’, Churchman 82 (Summer 1971), p. 99.

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Andrew Atherstone I wish to retain the clear picture of our Church as the Church of England, and not to let it be blotted out by ‘The Anglican Church in England’. There are many within and without our Church who are working either to reduce (or, as they think, to elevate) our Church to that. I believe we shall do most for the evangelisation of our country, and contribute most to oecumenical Christianity, if we secure our own base, and keep our country Christian in name, and as far as possible in fact. Then we can still keep the Cross of St George as the basis of our national flag.41

A similar emphasis is seen in the writings of John Stott (Rector of All Souls, Langham Place in central London 1950–75), the leader par excellence of Anglican evangelicalism in the second half of the twentieth century. For Stott, one of the great attractions of Anglican ministry was that the Church of England is ‘entrusted with a national mission’. It is ‘neither a sect nor a denomination, but the Church of the nation, with a responsibility to be the nation’s conscience, to serve the nation and to bring Christ to the nation’.42 He welcomed the ties of establishment as an official recognition by the State ‘of Christian truth, values and standards’.43 Likewise Bishop Stephen Neill (who spent his final years as ‘grandfather in residence’ at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford 1975–84) observed that the endurance of the absurdities and limitations of establishment is a duty that the Church owes to the nation in order that from time to time the nation may have the privilege of manifesting itself before the world as a nation that still in some sense desires to be Christian.44

Hoare agreed that so long as the Church remains established, the State ‘cannot be neutral towards the claims of Christianity’.45 This partnership, he argued, is ‘a constant reminder that materialism is not everything’.46 41 42

43 44 45 46

Williams, ‘Richard Hooker’, pp. 103–4. John Stott, ‘I Believe in the Church of England’, in Reid, Hope for the Church, pp. 19– 20; John Stott, ‘Pursuing Truth and Unity’, in Caroline Chartres (ed.), Why I Am Still an Anglican (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 9–10. John Stott, ‘Should the Church of England be Disestablished?’, All Souls parish magazine (September 1972), p. 28 (copy at Lambeth Palace Library). Stephen Neill, Anglicanism (new edition, Oxford: Mowbray, 1977), p. 254. Hoare, ‘Established to Serve the Nation’, p. 66. GSRP 5 (July 1974), p. 343.

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Gospel Opportunity or Unbiblical Relic? Philip Giddings (lecturer in politics at Reading University and a leading evangelical spokesman) warns that to cut the Church’s connection with parliament would make the State wholly secular. He told General Synod in 1994: The vice of liberal democracy is that it tends to make a god out of the ballot box. It makes a god out of the State. Our society, particularly today surely, needs to be constantly reminded that governments, parliaments, Prime Ministers, princes, even electorates, are not accountable only to themselves: they need to account also to God. The Church’s links with the State that it has today are untidy, illogical, inefficient. Like most aspects of the Church of England, if we were starting from scratch we would not have devised this. However, they provide an essential continuing reminder at the heart of Government that there is an additional dimension to accountability. We need to remind our society, our country, our politicians, that man shall not live by votes alone.47

Similarly, Archbishop George Carey pronounced: ‘Removing the spiritual underpinning of the State would inevitably tend to cast religion as a purely private matter; one of a range of life-style options, like buying organic food or living in the country, of no greater public or communal import perhaps than, say, stamp collecting or bird-watching.’48 Eddy Stride (Rector of Christ Church, Spitalfields 1970–89) went further, warning in the early 1990s that disestablishment would lead to a ‘religious vacuum’, likely to be filled by militant Islam.49 On this reading, the alternative to a Christian nation is not secularism or pluralism but a Muslim nation. Ever since the revivals of the eighteenth century, evangelicals have been famous for upholding a sharp distinction between true ‘born-again’ Christians and unconverted ‘nominal’ Christians. Indeed an emphasis on the necessity of spiritual rebirth is a key badge of evangelical identity.50 It is heard also in Valerie Pitt’s protest, which has a remarkably evangelical ring:

47 48 49 50

GSRP 25 (July 1994), p. 327. George Carey, ‘Holding Together: Church and Nation in the Twenty-First Century’, Lecture at Lambeth Palace, St George’s Day 2002 (copy at Bodleian Library). Eddy Stride, Do We Need a National Church? (London: Church Society, 1993). David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), ch. 1; Ian Randall, What A Friend We Have In

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Christianity is not a folk or a tribal religion, it is not bred into us by the traditions of our ancestors. It is a gospel, a revealed religion, demanding an active and personal assent. To be a Christian a man must himself answer – Jesus is Lord. Writing ‘C. of E.’ on a form is not quite enough.51

However, when Anglican evangelicals defend establishment, such theological distinctions are often temporarily abandoned in favour of sociological generalities which magnify England’s ‘Christian’ credentials. For example, Hoare pointed to Faith in the Countryside (1990) for evidence that Anglican rites of passage were still in high demand in rural communities. He quoted with approval Habgood’s verdict that ‘active churchgoers form the tip of a huge religious iceberg. They are simply the most visible and articulate part of a much more widespread phenomenon.’52 Likewise Craig asserted: True, only a minority are dedicated Church-goers … But the majority still call themselves ‘C. of E.’ … They still look to the Church for a lead that they nowadays rarely find. They still hanker for a faith that they could see as relevant to the life they have to live. They still argue, however uncertainly, the ethical problems of life on the basis of the Christian ethic. And they still recognize as the authentic Christian Gospel the historic faith of the Church of England, and wish they could hear it again from the majority of our pulpits.53

Indeed, Craig seems to imply that England’s nominal Christians are mostly closet evangelicals, just waiting for the true gospel to be preached before they flock back to Anglicanism in their droves. In his pamphlet Do We Need a National Church?, Stride also welcomed the endurance of ‘folk religion’ as exemplified by the popularity of Land of Hope and Glory at the Last Night of the Proms.54 Meanwhile both David Holloway and Tom Wright point to

51 52 53 54

Jesus: The Evangelical Tradition (London: DLT, 2005), ch. 2; Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Valerie Pitt, ‘Memorandum of Dissent’, Church and State (Chadwick Report), p. 74. Hoare, Establishment, quoting John Habgood, Church and Nation in a Secular Age (London: DLT, 1983), p. 78. Hugh Craig, Selecting Good Shepherds (London: Church Society, 1990), pp. 6–7. Stride, Do We Need a National Church?

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Gospel Opportunity or Unbiblical Relic? religious surveys or census returns for proof that over 71 per cent of the population consider themselves to be Christian.55 In a lecture at Westminster Abbey in 2003, within the shadow of the Houses of Parliament, Wright explained: The word ‘establishment’, granted, is a millstone around our necks. It has heavy and negative overtones. But the reality is very different. Away from the sneering world of the journalists, out in the country where it counts, the Church of England is still looked to by all kinds of people, from Lords Lieutenant to town councillors to groups of gypsies, not only to preach the gospel and minister the sacraments, but to be an honest broker, to hold the ring, to provide stability, focus and hope. Some sneer at ‘implicit religion’ and the inarticulate faith which, for instance, turns up at an Advent Carol Service but can’t say why. I don’t sneer at it; I want to work with it and nurture it, to take every spark of faith and help it, in its own time, to become a flame. Establishment means, among other things, that the church is there for everybody. Of course that sometimes means that nobody bothers, it also means that much of the society regards the church as its own. To cut the link, to insist that the church is only there for the fully paid up members, would be to send a signal to the rest of our world that we were pulling up the drawbridge, that we were no longer there for them … Let us not capitulate to the tired, flatland world of secularism and modernism.56

Other Anglican evangelicals interpret the sociological evidence in the opposite direction. Buchanan, for instance, argues that England has shifted ‘from Christendom to pagandom … The echoes of God have almost gone from the land’.57 He points instead to a widening gulf between the Church and the world, and the urgent need to distinguish clearly between these separate domains. He warns that establishment means conniving with the ‘world’ as though it were the Church … it unites church and state by simply abolishing the Church. The Church is only reidentified as the pilgrim people of God as it strives to shake free of the state, and to live its own 55

56 57

Holloway, Church and State, pp. 42, 218; Holloway, Re-establishing the Christian Faith, p. 14; Tom Wright, ‘God and Caesar, Then and Now’, in Martyn Percy and Stephen Lowe (eds), The Character of Wisdom: Essays in Honour of Wesley Carr (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 170. Wright, ‘God and Caesar’, pp. 169, 171. Buchanan, Cut the Connection, pp. 57–8.

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Andrew Atherstone life, answerable only to its Lord … let no boundaries be drawn, and there is catastrophe.58

Nevertheless, when Buchanan asked General Synod in 2002 to exclude Downing Street from episcopal appointments, he was defeated on the grounds that it is wrong to draw such a sharp distinction between believers and unbelievers. Kenneth Stevenson (Bishop of Portsmouth) declared: I also believe passionately that people who do not go to church should not be excluded from the selection of their bishops. That is part of our mission. I sense a creeping move in this motion towards the Church of England as a kind of holy ghetto of the doctrinally sound: a desperately unattractive group of like-minded ecclesiastical minds. I urge the Synod to have a wider and messier vision of the Church …59

Similarly Christopher Herbert (Bishop of St Albans) cautioned that there was ‘more than a hint of puritanism’ in Buchanan’s ecclesiology.60 Peter Townley (Archdeacon of Pontefract from 2008) asked, ‘what makes us think that the Prime Minister, Downing Street or the monarch are any less open to the Spirit of God than this Synod or our Church? We are the Church of England, not a Protestant sect.’61 Likewise Colin Slee (Dean of Southwark) maintained that ‘The Church of England is a national and a communitybased Church, not a congregational Church.’ He warned that Buchanan’s polity would lead to the rampant and exclusive evangelicalism typical of Sydney diocese in Australia.62 Buchanan’s insistence that ‘national’ is not the same as ‘established’ fell on deaf ears. Slee is correct that the radical ecclesiology of Sydney evangelicalism is flourishing in the Church of England, especially among younger clergymen connected with Reform and the Proclamation Trust. They affirm that the New Testament word ekklesia means ‘a gathering’ or ‘an assembly’ and 58

59 60 61 62

Colin Buchanan, ‘Mission and Establishment’, in Philip Turner and Frank Sugeno (eds), Crossroads Are For Meeting: Essays on the Mission and Common Life of the Church in a Global Society (Sewanee, Tennessee: SPCK, 1986), pp. 200–2. GSRP 33 (July 2002), p. 327. GSRP 33 (July 2002), p. 322. GSRP 32 (November 2001), p. 88. GSRP 33 (July 2002), p. 334.

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Gospel Opportunity or Unbiblical Relic? therefore it is unbiblical to speak of ‘the Church of England’ since it is a national body which cannot be gathered. This ecclesiology was pioneered soon after the Second World War by Alan Stibbs (vice-principal of Oak Hill College in north London 1938–65) and later by D. Broughton Knox (principal of Moore College, Sydney 1959–85).63 It has blossomed in recent decades despite the efforts of senior evangelicals like Bishop Donald Allister to restrain these congregational or connexional tendencies as ‘not authentically Anglican’.64 It is possible to conceive of a national Church which is not established (the Buchanan model). It is less easy to see how establishment can be sustained once the very concept of a national Church is exploded. Buchanan maintains that anyone who believes England is still a Christian nation is living in ‘a haunting dream’ or, worse, ‘a supreme megalomaniac fantasy’.65 He mocks establishmentarians for their ‘ostrich-like’ tendency to hide from the facts – their arguments ‘reek of sustained pretence’ and it is time for the ‘dawning of reality’.66 Indeed in 2003 he proclaimed that the greatest benefit of disestablishment would be ‘deliverance from fantasy’ and recovery of the Church’s integrity: The Church of England loves to live by fantasy, it loves to imagine the whole nation of England as Christian and Anglican, to imagine that Parliament is hanging on its words, to imagine that the future must (by divine decree?) be like the past, that any change in the status quo would be a disaster, and that disestablishment would make the Church a ‘sect’. I long to see an engagement with reality, a view of the nation and the Church of England as God sees them, with the Church engaging in a prophetic confrontation with the ills of society. Here indeed are areas where ‘the arm of flesh will fail you’, where reliance upon being ‘on the inside’ of a secularised nation deceives, and where the lingering

63

64 65 66

See especially Andrew Atherstone (ed.), Such a Great Salvation: The Collected Essays of Alan Stibbs (Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor, 2008), chs 15–16; ‘The Church, the Churches and the Denominations of the Churches’, in Kirsten Birkett (ed.), D. Broughton Knox: Selected Works, volume 2, Church and Ministry (Sydney: Matthias Media, 2003), ch. 10. Donald Allister, ‘The Anglican Understanding of Church’, Churchman 115 (2001), p. 201. Buchanan, Cut the Connection, p. 211; Buchanan, Taking the Long View, p. 218. Buchanan, Cut the Connection, p. 59.

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Andrew Atherstone illusion of power conceals the truth. Establishment has all the qualities of Laodicea – most notably self-deceit.67

In recent years, the alleged ‘marginalization’ of Christians in Britain has become a prominent refrain in evangelical discourse, lending weight to Buchanan’s ‘fantasy’ thesis. In the mid-1980s Johnston was able boldly to dismiss the notion that the State placed any restrictions on Christian freedom. In a booklet published by Latimer House, an Anglican evangelical research institute in Oxford, he asserted: If we are faithless to Scripture, it is not the Commons, the Lords or the law of England that has made us so. If we neglect to pray, it is not the Parliament of the land which has caused this omission. If we move away from the Protestant faith of the Sovereign, of the Thirty-nine Articles and of the Book of Common Prayer, it is not the state that has seduced us. If we fail to preach the Gospel, it is not because the police have imprisoned us to prevent our evangelism, or because the mob has lynched our evangelists … If at any future time the secularisation process should accelerate, if the state were to pass laws preventing or hindering the spread of the Gospel, or espoused a value-system which deliberately denied and attempted to eclipse the Christian moral vision, then the time for considering disestablishment would have come. It has not come yet.68

It is doubtful, however, that any evangelical commentator could write with such confidence today. The confiscation of evangelistic tracts and the detention of evangelical street-preachers for ‘homophobic hatred’ are well documented, as are the cases of Christians reprimanded or sacked for speaking of their faith in the workplace. Alleged discrimination by the media, police, local councils, public funding bodies and employers has become a growing scandal in evangelical circles, often blamed upon ‘equality and diversity’ legislation introduced by the Labour government.69 When the State is seen as hostile to the Gospel, evangelicals inevitably begin 67

68 69

Colin Buchanan, ‘Disestablishment – The Straightforward Case’, in Mark MillsPowell (ed.), Setting the Church of England Free (Alresford, Hants: John Hunt, 2003), p. 163. Introduction to Warren, Functions of a National Church, p. 14. For a catalogue of alleged discrimination, see Marginalising Christians: Instances of Christians being Sidelined in Modern Britain (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Christian Institute, 2009).

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Gospel Opportunity or Unbiblical Relic? to view themselves not as citizens of a godly kingdom but as a beleaguered remnant living in exile, identified with Old Testament figures like Daniel rather than King David. Soon parliamentary control of the Church is also reinterpreted, no longer as the blessing of Christian nationhood but now as the bondage of Babylonian captivity. A Gospel Platform Evangelical establishmentarians frequently argue that the Church of England’s links with the State offer unrivalled opportunities for mission and service. For example, Stride wrote: ‘as a national Gospel Church we are particularly well placed to evangelize the nation’.70 Hoare agreed that establishment provides ‘a good boat to fish from’. He argued: ‘The parson in his parish, the bishop in the Lords, the chaplain in university, regiment or hospital, carry enhanced authority because of the Church of England’s recognition by the State.’71 Likewise Johnston claimed that establishment ensures that ‘men and women are regularly reached for Christ who might otherwise never have heard the Gospel of redemption’.72 In July 1994 Buchanan brought to General Synod a Private Members’ Motion seeking the removal of State control over episcopal appointments and Church legislation. He was soundly defeated after a bevy of bishops spoke passionately of the ‘vast opportunities’ provided by establishment.73 Carey, for example, hailed the Church of England’s unique status as neither a privilege nor an imposition but ‘an opportunity to serve the nation … The connections are there to be used for the glory of God and for the sake of others.’74 David Edwards (Provost of Southwark) cautioned against Buchanan’s proposal as ‘a unilateral declaration of ecclesiastical isolation’.75 Even to dare question the status quo was seen as a hindrance to the Church’s mission. Michael Alison warned that if the subject was raised in the House of Commons it would lead to ‘rowdy, scurrilous and unsavoury debate’

70 71 72 73 74 75

Stride, Do We Need a National Church? Hoare, Establishment. Introduction to Warren, Functions of a National Church, p. 10. GSRP 25 (July 1994), p. 458. GSRP 25 (July 1994), pp. 447–8. GSRP 25 (July 1994), p. 312.

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Andrew Atherstone from which the Church would inevitably emerge ‘tarnished, damaged and divided’.76 Another speaker dismissed Buchanan’s motion as ‘an enormous red herring’ which would sidetrack the Church and leave Satan rejoicing!77 Carey agreed that the whole question was an unfortunate distraction: It is desperately important that we hang on to the priorities of this Decade of Evangelism – mission, outreach and social action – as we carry the love of the Lord into our society. Please, can we not embark on years – and it will be years – of constitutional navel-gazing?78

Likewise Richard Lewis (Dean of Wells) cautioned: ‘Why convulse the Church? The greater task is surely the conversion of a nation.’79 When Buchanan grasped the nettle again in General Synod eight years later, he met with similar protests. This time Giddings reiterated that establishment provides ‘opportunities for service to the nation’, enabling Anglicans ‘to take the maximum advantage … to minister to a nation which is in such great need’.80 Likewise Michael Turnbull (Bishop of Durham) celebrated that ‘the lion’s share’ of Christian ministry in prisons, hospitals and the armed forces belongs to the Church of England. He welcomed the establishment connection because it provides opportunities for mission, taking us into areas of need and influence which otherwise are by no means guaranteed. The alternative is increasing marginalization, the shrinking of faith communities into religious ghettos, the privatization of religion. It means colluding with advancing secularization in society.81

Bishop Herbert warned in the Synod debate that if the State links were severed the Church of England would end up ‘talking loudly to itself and defining such talk as “mission”. Occasionally we shall shout ecclesiastical slogans … through synodical-sized megaphones, and then congratulate 76 77 78 79 80 81

GSRP 25 (July 1994), p. 310. GSRP 25 (July 1994), p. 317. GSRP 25 (July 1994), p. 447. GSRP 25 (July 1994), p. 455. GSRP 32 (November 2001), p. 83. GSRP 33 (July 2002), p. 318.

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Gospel Opportunity or Unbiblical Relic? ourselves for being evangelists.’82 Elsewhere Tim Bradshaw protested that disestablishment would be ‘a highly negative gesture … amounting to a pulling out of social responsibilities in order to adopt a more strident and judgemental attitude’.83 More positively, Tom Wright wrote in 2009 that establishment gives Anglicans ‘a voice at the table’, allowing them to speak on behalf of other denominations and faith communities.84 Yet Buchanan consistently rejects this type of altruistic rhetoric as ‘dangerous nonsense’ which ‘betrays an ecclesiastical megalomania masquerading as “service”’.85 He insists that Anglicans ‘ought to be embarrassed’ to enjoy privileges denied to other Christians.86 The argumentation has not all been in one direction. The prominent evangelical sociologist, Elaine Storkey (executive director of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity 1990–8), observed that the Church of England’s opportunities for mission and service do not depend on episcopal seats in the House of Lords. In support of Buchanan’s 1994 motion, she reminded General Synod: These opportunities do not depend on Establishment. The Baptist Union, the United Reformed Church, the Evangelical Alliance, the Methodist Church, even the house church fellowships, all have their own links with Members of Parliament, with House of Lords people, Euro-MPs and so on. I myself am not a bishop, you may have noticed. I was not appointed to anything by John Major. Yet I too have spoken to veterinary surgeons, the BMA, single parent families, endless media consultations, educational institutions, universities, incest survivors, multi-faith conventions, retirement homes, hospices and so on in the past year. Why? Because of my links with the State? No, because I love Jesus Christ and the people of our country whose lives are significant and of eternal significance to God.87

82 83 84

85 86 87

GSRP 33 (July 2002), p. 323. Tim Bradshaw, The Olive Branch: An Evangelical Anglican Doctrine of the Church (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1992), p. 276. Tom Wright, ‘Neither Anarchy nor Tyranny: Government and the New Testament’, in Nick Spencer and Jonathan Chaplin (eds), God and Government (London: SPCK, 2009), p. 78. Buchanan, ‘Surely We Should Disestablish?’, p. 289. Buchanan, ‘Disestablishment – The Straightforward Case’, p. 162. GSRP 25 (July 1994), p. 462.

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Andrew Atherstone xxxLikewise Christina Baxter (principal of St John’s College, Nottingham) wryly remarked that freedom from the State did not seem to hinder the ministries of Robin Eames (Archbishop of Armagh) or Rowan Williams (then Archbishop of Wales).88 However, Dudley-Smith points to Ireland and Wales, where Anglican evangelicalism is notoriously weak, as proof that disestablishment does not ‘automatically release a surge of spiritual enthusiasm and gospel power’.89 While establishmentarians speak of service and mission, the keynotes of Buchanan’s polemic are slavery and maturity. He derides establishment as ‘a shameful captivity’.90 One of his favourite analogies for the Church of England is of ‘a goat on a very long chain’, free to graze but nonetheless a prisoner.91 He protests that the Church is ‘still held on a Parliamentary leash’ and must ‘strike off the shackles’.92 Buchanan lambasts the State’s control of the Church as ‘obnoxious’, ‘blasphemous’, ‘ludicrous’, ‘absurd’, ‘screamingly inappropriate’ and (because Erastian) simply ‘heretical’.93 Archbishop Carey maintains that the Church’s deep involvement in national life enables it to speak out against government policy constructively and without constraint.94 Yet Buchanan retorts that ‘to be truly prophetic is to stand absolutely apart from the Government and owe it no favours’.95 He warns that if other Anglican provinces were similarly captive to the secular power then Desmond Tutu would never have become Archbishop of Cape 88 89 90 91

92 93

94 95

GSRP 32 (November 2001), p. 88. Dudley-Smith, ‘Church as Institution’, p. 102. Colin Buchanan, Is the Church of England Biblical? An Anglican Ecclesiology (London: DLT, 1998), p. 349. Buchanan, Is the Church of England Biblical?, pp. 349–50; Buchanan, ‘Disestablishment – The Straightforward Case’, p. 158; Buchanan, Taking the Long View, p. 221; ‘Fighting to Free the Church’, Church of England Newspaper, 27 November 1998, p. 24. Buchanan, Cut the Connection, p. 46; Buchanan, ‘Surely We Should Disestablish?’, p. 289. Buchanan, Cut the Connection, pp. 81, 122; Buchanan, ‘Surely We Should Disestablish?’, p. 290; Buchanan, ‘Disestablishment – The Straightforward Case’, p. 161; Buchanan, Taking the Long View, p. 228; Buchanan, ‘Keep Downing Street Away from Canterbury’, Tablet, 29 June 2002, p. 5. Carey, ‘Holding Together’. Buchanan, ‘Disestablishment – The Straightforward Case’, p. 162.

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Gospel Opportunity or Unbiblical Relic? Town during the apartheid regime, nor would David Gitari have been Archbishop of Kenya under President Daniel arap Moi.96 Buchanan likens the Church of England to a colonized African nation which deserves independence from the patronizing, if benign, colonial power so that it can ‘take full responsibility for its own laws, its own appointments, its own life’.97 He told General Synod in 2001 that it was time to grow out of the ancient Tudor legislation and ‘install an adult process of our own without the nannying figures of Prime Minister and monarch’.98 Buchanan announced: This is really an issue about God. Are we to be free before God to choose our own leaders and fathers-in-God? Are we taking ourselves seriously as a divine society owing duties first of all to God? Are we also grown-up or do we still need a paternalistic, governmental, secular hand to take care of us?99

Elsewhere he wrote: ‘It is treating ourselves as no longer children, but grown up and needing independence from nurse – as no longer content to be a colony, but bound instead to call for de-colonization.’100 Likewise Baxter insists that the Church of England is now ‘mature enough to make our own decisions’.101 Here Buchanan and Baxter echo Valerie Pitt’s famous protest that ‘The Church has long ago reached voting age: it is time it had the key of its own door.’102 Conclusion As this analysis has demonstrated, Anglican evangelicals over the last generation have taken up a variety of conflicting positions concerning the relationship between Church and State. Gone is the monolithic evangelical defence of establishment typical of the period before 1970. Their reasoning usually starts not with fixed biblical ideals but with pragmatic contemporary 96 97 98 99 100 101 102

Buchanan, ‘Surely We Should Disestablish?’, p. 288. GSRP 25 (July 1994), p. 308. GSRP 32 (November 2001), p. 79. GSRP 32 (November 2001), p. 82. Buchanan, Cut the Connection, p. 80. GSRP 32 (November 2001), p. 89. Pitt, ‘Memorandum of Dissent’, p. 68.

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Andrew Atherstone realities, so their conclusions are prone to shift as England’s political and cultural context continues to develop. The oscillating self-confidence of the evangelical movement has also shaped their conclusions. Optimism in some quarters about evangelicalism’s growing influence within the Church of England has removed the historic need for a defensive alliance with parliament. At the same time, alarm at evangelicalism’s growing marginalization within society at large has fostered a desire to throw off State control. Sometimes both contrasting moods are held together, as seen in Buchanan’s polemic. Furthermore the recent spread of a congregational ecclesiology within the Church of England tends to undermine the concept of a national Church, and therefore of establishment itself. As has been seen, the absence of biblical injunctions on Church and State relations has allowed divergent evangelical viewpoints to flourish, and led to the formation of some surprising coalitions across the theological traditions. Nevertheless, what evangelical campaigners of all stripes hold in common is an urgent desire to see men and women won for Jesus Christ. The retention or abolition of establishment is only a means to that end.

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Gender and Establishment: Parliament, ‘Erastianism’ and the Ordination of Women 1993–2010 JUDITH MALTBY

Introduction In July 2010, following the May general election, the General Synod of the Church of England welcomed a new ex-officio member, the long-serving Conservative MP for North Oxfordshire, Tony Baldry, as the Second Church Estates Commissioner. One of the responsibilities of this office in the larger British parliamentary eco-system is to steer through the lower house legislation approved by Synod. The Commissioner is also to answer questions from Members of the House of Commons on matters concerning the established Church. The membership of the Second Church Estates Commissioner both in the Commons and General Synod is one concrete expression of the relationship between parliament and the Church of England. In his maiden Synod speech in July 2010 Baldry reminded the Church of England’s bishops and elected representatives of the importance of that relationship to the debate about the consecration of women to the episcopate. After declaring his unqualified support for the consecration of women as bishops, Baldry reminded Synod that, whatever form the synodical measure eventually took, it would need parliamentary approval to become law: ‘Church legislation is considered in the Commons on a free vote, which means the views of individual MPs matter.’ He commented further that the mind-set of parliament, and the country, had changed considerably since the 1993 parliamentary vote to ordain women as priests, stressing that ‘the equality agenda has strong support across all main parties’; he continued, ‘I have to advise Synod that it would be a difficult enough task in this new context to explain why the Church has thought it necessary to make provision for those with theological difficulties about women’s ordination.’ He did not wish to imply that such a task was 98

Judith Maltby impossible, and emphasized the importance of the Church of England as a ‘broad Church’, but it should ‘be under no illusion about one thing: a difficult task could well become impossible if I had to steer through the House of Commons any Measure which left a scintilla of a suggestion that women bishops were in some way to be second-class bishops’. He saw the debate faced by Synod that July and in the next few years as less about first principles and more about the constraints and conditions under which women bishops might exercise episcopal ministry in the established Church. Anticipating the eventual arrival of a synodical measure for parliamentary approval, Baldry added ‘whatever future changes Synod does or does not make to the draft legislation, therefore, in my view it is crucial that it confers the same legal authority and responsibilities on women diocesan bishops as on their male counterparts’.1 The Second Church Estates Commissioner was being a critical friend to Synod and gently reminded it of some recent history. Parliament is not and has not been a ‘rubber stamp’ for Church affairs and his reference to the changed culture over the ‘equality agenda’ from the early 1990s was a coded way of saying that the same ‘Erastianism’ that brought about greater concessions to opponents of women priests in 1993, would now in the 2010s manifest itself in parliamentary support for legislation which was genderneutral on the subject of women bishops. In other words, the process by which a Church measure becomes an act of parliament has not changed: just as MPs had played a major role in securing greater concessions for opponents to women’s ordination in 1993, now the majority of MPs of all main parties would baulk at voting into the law of the land legislation which differentiated between bishops of the established Church on the basis of their sex. The same Erastian relationship which had helped to launch Flying Bishops in the early 1990s, might very well be brought to bear to ground them for good in the 2010s. Baldry’s maiden speech was informed and nuanced – not so some responses to it. Making his final speech to Synod before resigning as Bishop

1

10 July 2010. Report of the Proceedings General Synod, July 2010 Group of Sessions, (hereafter RPGS), vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 1, 98–9. I am grateful to Jane Freeman, Linda Kirk, Simon Sarmiento and especially Gill Sutherland and William Whyte for their comments on this essay.

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Gender and Establishment of Durham, Dr Tom Wright specifically singled out the new Second Church Estates Commissioner for criticism: ‘I certainly do not agree with him [Baldry] when he said “The political wind is blowing this way. Therefore we had better get in line”.’ Baldry had said nothing of the kind and it was a misrepresentation, whether deliberate or not, of his point that what had changed were the views of parliamentarians on equality issues – what had not changed was parliament’s constitutional role in Church governance.2 Yet Synod greeted the bishop’s remarks with applause and gave Wright even greater applause for his final rhetorical flourish: ‘The day the Church ceases to be able to say that we must obey God rather than human authority will be the day it ceases to be the Church.’3 At one level, this is a statement impossible for any Christian to disagree with. At another level, it indicates a degree of ignorance of the historic relationship between Church and State that is a little breath-taking. There is no need to refer back to the Elizabethan Settlement, the repeal of the Test Acts, or even the Prayer Book crisis of 1928–9 to see this. The reality of parliament’s influence in the affairs of what remains the established Church is well illustrated by an examination of its considerable role in the ordination of women over the past two decades. Wright’s caricature of Baldry’s remarks that the Church ‘had better get in line’ with the State reflects a current recourse among Church of England leaders to selective anti-erastianism. It has been a feature in recent years whenever the Church’s lack of sympathy, let alone compliance, with the values underpinning equality or employment legislation, or the ‘notion’ of human rights, has been used as a critique of the Church’s own behaviour. The term ‘Erastian’ is loosely used now as a way to describe a belief in a State-dominated Church, and is a long way from its intellectual father Thomas Erastus and its Reformation roots. In the Reformed tradition of the sixteenth century, the issue concerned the location of the ultimate authority to excommunicate erring members of the Church. Erastus, friend of Henrich Bullinger and based in Zurich, favoured the civil magistrate. John Calvin, 2 3

10 July 2010. RPGS, 41:2, p. 99. Baldry was an MP in 1993 and voted for the ordination of women as priests in late October 1993. Hansard, HC, 29 October 1993. 12 July 2010. RPGS, 41:2, pp. 1, pp. 276–7. Wright’s speech and Synod’s reaction is available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUIgVHScayo&feature=player_embedded (Accessed 1 February 2011). I am grateful to Simon Sarmiento and Hilary Cotton for these references.

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Judith Maltby fighting hard in Geneva for the Church’s independence from the civil authorities, placed the power with the Church’s consistory courts. In this sense, even the Tudor Church of England is not ‘Erastian’, as the Church courts retained authority over excommunication.4 There is, however, a tradition of episodic anti-erastianism in the Church of England, largely, though not exclusively, from the Oxford Movement in the 1830s onwards. In his 2010 Synod speech, Bishop Wright presented the relationship between the established Church and parliament as a contest between ‘human authority’, which in this case is presumably parliament represented by the Member for North Oxfordshire and ‘God’ – by which, one supposes, the bishop meant General Synod, or perhaps more likely the House of Bishops. For all Churches, but for an established Church in particular, the location of the border crossing between human and divine authority is a thing difficult to discern with any precision and in many ways represents a flawed ecclesiological paradigm. As Bishop Peter Selby has remarked of English Anglican criticisms of the American Episcopal Church, ‘the fact is that we who criticise T[he] E[piscopal] C[hurch] for collusion with its surrounding culture represent one of the most successfully enculturated churches in Christendom’.5 The extent of parliamentary involvement in the ordination of women in recent decades is one indicator of that enculturation. This chapter seeks to make a contribution to our understanding of establishment by using the recent history of the ordination of women as a case study to explore the relationship between parliament and the Church of England over the past two decades.6

4 5

6

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490–1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), pp. 355–6. Peter Selby, ‘When the word on the street is resist’, lecture given on 7 October 2009 and available at http://www.inpaintings.com/When-the-Word-on-the-Street-isResist-Peter-Selby-7b0f1dc. The ordination of women in the Church of England has a considerable history before the 1970s and was actively discussed and debated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See Brian Heeney, Women’s Movement in the Church of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Sheila Fletcher, Maude Royden (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

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Gender and Establishment The Ecclesiastical Committee and the 1993 Act of Synod In November 1992 the measure to ordain women to the priesthood achieved a two-thirds majority in all three houses of the General Synod.7 It was the culmination of nearly twenty years of work, which included referral to the grass-roots of church government in deanery and diocesan synods. In 1990, 38 out of 44 dioceses voted in favour of the ordination of women as priests. It is important to be clear about the precise contents of the 1992 Measure and its subsidiary financial compensation Measure and what was not. In 1992 the main provisions of the Measures (henceforth the Measure) were as follows: 1. The ordination of women as priests but not on the same basis as men. 2. The explicit exemption of women clergy from any protection in law provided by the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act. 3. Resolutions A and B, giving parochial church councils (PCCs) the right to prohibit the appointment of a woman priest to a benefice and to forbid any female priest from providing any sacramental ministry in that benefice whatsoever. 4. The explicit exclusion of the ordination of women to the episcopate. 5. A guarantee that no bishop opposed to the ordination of women would be forced to conduct such a service. 6. Financial provision for clergy who felt they must leave the priesthood because of their conscientious objection to the ordination of women, a provision which could be taken up at any time during the next ten years.8 It is notable that there is no mention whatsoever of Provincial Episcopal Visitors, or ‘Flying Bishops’, as they became known. That is because PEVs 7

8

The voting figures were 75% (bishops), 70.4% (clergy) and 67.3% (laity). Margaret Webster, A New Strength, A New Song: the Journey to Women’s Priesthood (London: Mowbray, 1994), p. 212. Despite these figures, some commentators still insist on describing the two-thirds majority in each house as a ‘narrow margin’, e.g. Colin Podmore in Aspects of Anglican Identity (London: Church House Publishing, 2005), p. 133, an official Church of England publication. A fuller description and analysis can be found in my ‘One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, but Two Integrities?’, in Monica Furlong (ed.), Act of Synod – Act of Folly?: the Episcopal Ministry Act 1993 (London: SCM Press, 1998), pp. 42–58.

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Judith Maltby were not part of the original package of provision for opponents of the ordination of women hammered out in a process which lasted from 1975 to 1992. The system of PEVs was not subject to the same scrutiny and testing: it was produced in under twelve months – a rare example of the speed at which Synod could move when something was felt to be of sufficient importance. Manchester Statement January 1993 After the passage of the Measure, the House of Bishops met in Manchester in January 1993 to ponder its implications. Meanwhile, the Ecclesiastical Committee of both Houses of Parliament met in the spring to assess whether it was ‘expedient’ to send the Measure to both Houses for debate and a vote. In my earlier analysis of the 1993 Act of Synod, I saw the House of Bishops as principally responsible for the invention of Flying Bishops.9 As this chapter will demonstrate, the story is more complicated but the view that the Act was a product of a process largely internal to the Church remains one widely held. In a collection of essays published in 2004, contributors with differing views on the ordination of women, but all supporters of the Act of Synod, paid virtually no attention to the influence of parliament. Mary Tanner, Paul Avis and Christopher Hill saw the creation of the Act as largely internal to the Church. In Tanner’s analysis, the delay provided by the deliberations of the Ecclesiastical Committee was chiefly useful because it provided the bishops with more time for reflection and the refinement of the January Manchester Statement.10 Examination of the records 9 10

Maltby, ‘One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, but Two Integrities?’, pp. 51–8. See the contributions by Mary Tanner, ‘The Episcopal Ministry Act of Synod in Context’, Paul Avis, ‘Episcopal Ministry Act of Synod 1993: a “Bearable Anomaly”?’, and Christopher Hill, ‘Reception and the Act of Synod’, in Paul Avis (ed.), Seeking the Truth of Change in the Church: Reception, Communion and the Ordination of Women (London: T & T Clark, 2004). Tanner noted that pressure from the Ecclesiastical Committee did have some consequences, but her narrative puts the House of Bishops in the driving seat (p. 68). Hill discusses the theological idea of reception without any reference to the particular circumstances of establishment or the participation of parliament. Colin Podmore’s narrative of the events surrounding the ordination of women to priesthood omits entirely any mention of the Ecclesiastical Committee and barely refers to parliament at all. Podmore, Aspects of Anglican Identity, pp. 124–33. An exception was the Rev. Stephen Trott, an ardent

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Gender and Establishment of the parliamentary side of the story, however, shows that the Ecclesiastical Committee played a major role in constructing the final package of provision for opponents of the ordination of women. The events of 1993 illustrate the interrelation of the ‘human authority’ of the UK’s parliament and England’s established Church. In January the House of Bishops met in Manchester and its members appear to have been collectively shell-shocked by the significance of the decision made by Synod two months before. Despite strong support for the ordination of women among the majority of bishops, the mood apparently was fretful and fearful and the discussion focused largely on the pastoral care of those opposed to women in the priesthood and the survival of collegial relations within the English episcopate. The Roman Catholic commentator Clifford Longley offered the following assessment: The majority of bishops do genuinely regard the approving of women priests as one of the best things the Church has done this century. But while the debate was on, they minimised their enthusiasm so as not to antagonise their opponents, including those among their fellow bishops. Their temptation now, out of habit, is to minimise what happened on 11 November [1992], when in truth the time has come to maximise it. There is no risk that they might further alienate the traditionalists, who are now well beyond being placated by mere words.11

Even so, the House of Bishops decided to try to minimize rather than maximize the opportunities presented by Synod’s decision. The first Manchester Statement in January (a second would follow in June) by the House of Bishops had unanimous consent. The process by

11

opponent of the ordination of women. He argued for direct parliamentary intervention to make greater provision for those opposed, including the setting up of a Royal Commission to redistribute church property. See his ‘The Function of the Ecclesiastical Committee of parliament with particular reference to the Priests (Ordination of Women) Measure 1992’, Churchman 107 (1993), pp. 6–23, here pp. 13, 15, 20–3. Jean Mayland noted pressure from the Ecclesiastical Committee for further concessions but describes an almost fatalistic mood among the bishops following the 1992 vote in favour of women priests. Jean Mayland, ‘Act of Betrayal’, in Monica Furlong (ed.), Act of Synod – Act of Folly, pp. 59–75, here p. 67. Clifford Longley in the Daily Telegraph (1 January 1993) cited in Webster, New Strength, p. 192.

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Judith Maltby which vocations to the priesthood of women deacons were to be discerned was explained. It appears that many bishops were concerned to avoid putting women deacons (some with experience of accredited and ordained ministry going back decades) through a humiliating and expensive selection process and with ensuring that no diocese in the Church of England would not have at least a few women priests working within it. There was further clarification on additional provision for opponents of women’s ordination and an explicit statement that opposition to the ordination of women would not be a bar to ordination in the future. The dominant characteristic of this first Manchester Statement was the concern of the bishops with themselves as a ‘college’. How were opposed clergy to be treated in a diocese with a ‘pro’ bishop; how were women deacons and priests to be treated in a diocese with an ‘anti’ bishop? And even more importantly in the minds of the bishops: how was collegiality to be maintained once the ordination of women as priests moved from the theoretical to the actual? The Measure made provision for ‘no-go’ parishes for women clergy; the bishops were clearly concerned to avoid the de facto creation of ‘no-go’ dioceses. It seems reasonable to conclude that part of the bargaining that went on behind the scenes in January 1993 concerned securing the agreement of opposed bishops to allow women priests to function in their dioceses, even if the ordination of these women had to take place outside diocesan boundaries or be conducted by another bishop acting under the diocesan’s commission.12 With this grew the notion that ‘pro’ bishops would ensure that opposed clergy would have access to episcopal pastoral care from a bishop of their own ‘integrity’. The Manchester Statement was responsible for mainstreaming the idea of ‘two integrities’ inside one church. The consensus at this point, however, seems to have been that such pastoral arrangements would be largely provided by existing suffragans and neighbouring diocesan bishops, and not by the creation of ‘bespoke’ bishops whose sole purpose for existence was the sacramental and pastoral care of opponents of women priests. The possibility was raised in the January

12

Such arrangements were made. In Sheffield Cathedral in 1994, for example, the ordinations of women priests were conducted by the retired Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, while the diocesan bishop was present but did not take part.

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Gender and Establishment Manchester Statement of using Provincial Episcopal Visitors appointed by the archbishops but the clear preference in the document was for diocesan bishops to make their own provision on a regional basis; the bishops suggested that PEVs should come from existing suffragans who would continue to serve the wider diocese and not simply a special interest group within it. Yet despite the emphasis on the pastoral needs of the opponents to women priests, the bishops collectively, and officially, gave no consideration to the idea that the pastoral relationship between a priest who is a woman and a bishop who thinks she is nothing of the kind might also be problematic in terms of pastoral care.13 The Role of the Ecclesiastical Committee March–July 1993 It is often said that parliament is not a ‘rubber stamp’ in church matters and few things illustrate that as well as the fact that the nearly thirty strong Ecclesiastical Committee met eleven times to deal with the two Measures sent from Synod in the first half of 1993: the first concerned the primary issue of the ordination of women as priests and the second addressed the financial compensation package for male clergy who wished to resign on the grounds of conscience. Four of those meetings were with representatives from the General Synod and a fifth (5 July 1993) also included testimony from both archbishops. The Commons members were all men; the members from the Lords included three female peers. In April and May, the then Bishop of Guildford, Michael Adie and Professor David McClean of the House of Laity, as the prime movers of the Measure, were interrogated with remarkable aggression by the Committee. The Committee also took the unusual step of inviting witnesses opposed to the Measure – a departure from normal practice. No women clergy were invited to appear before the 13

Webster, New Strength, pp. 192–3; the text of the January 1993 Manchester Statement is reproduced in Reports of the Ecclesiastical Committee upon the Priests (Ordination of Women) Measure and the Ordination of Women (Financial Provisions) Measure, Ecclesiastical Committee 203rd and 204th Reports, HC 895 (27 July 1993), pp. 21–3. See especially §8–13. In retrospect, the statement: ‘In making such provision we do not and we cannot accept the theological reasoning behind the view that in some way those bishops and priests who participate in the ordination of women to the priesthood, thereby invalidate their sacramental ministry’, looks over-optimistic (§11).

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Judith Maltby Committee to assist its deliberations and on only one occasion, the lay theologian, Dr Christina Baxter, did a woman appear at all before a committee considering the ordination of women.14 The proceedings of the Ecclesiastical Committee show that the bulk of its attention was focused on safeguards for the opponents of women priests. The Labour MP Frank Field was adamant that it was part of their ‘function as parliamentarians ... to protect the interests of constituents who may be adversely affected by a [Church] Measure .... we are quite rightly ... much concerned with, and will no doubt spend much time on, how the position of minorities is protected’.15 The Conservative John Selwyn Gummer was concerned that no man in the future could agree to be bishop of a diocese ‘in circumstances where ... an ordination took place which he believed to be faulty’.16 There was much concern expressed by parliamentarians that the promotion prospects of men opposed to women priests would be impaired. The Rev. John Broadhurst, appearing to represent those opposed to the Measure, agreed with Gummer about the difficulties facing such an individual: An [episcopal] opponent of the ordination of women to the priesthood has to be willing either himself or by his licence to appoint and to ordain [a woman priest] otherwise he will contravene the law. It is rather like saying there is nothing to stop a vegetarian provided he is willing to eat meat. I think there are no rights, for anybody opposed to the ordination of women, to preferment unless they are willing to act either first or second hand.17

The Liberal Democrat Simon Hughes, like Field a supporter of the ordination of women, reminded Broadhurst that there was no ‘right’ to preferment, but reassured him that the Measure made it explicit that it ‘will not be illegal for there to be sex discrimination against a woman in respect of 14

15 16 17

The Rev. John Broadhurst and Mr Peter Bruinvels, members of General Synod, appeared to speak against the main Measure. Baxter appeared before the Committee on 5 July 1993. Reports of the Ecclesiastical Committee, pp. 63–4, 134–5. Reports of the Ecclesiastical Committee, p. 64 (19 April 1993). Ibid., p. 68 (19 April 1993). Ibid., p. 87 (11 May 1993). Broadhurst later became the Bishop of Fulham, a type of PEV for London Diocese. In 2010 he resigned his Anglican orders in order to join the Ordinariate initiative of Benedict XVI. Daily Telegraph (1 January 2011).

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Gender and Establishment her ordination, giving of a licence or permission to serve or officiate’.18 Baroness Seear, who made almost the only mention by a Committee member in the entire set of meetings of the cost and pain that would have been incurred if the Measure had been defeated in Synod, was also concerned to protect the feelings of opponents.19 It was this focus on the protection of the opposed minority, almost to the exclusion of everything else, which helps make sense of events. In the first meeting with witnesses on 19 April, the idea of an Act of Synod, absent from the Manchester Statement but alluded to briefly by the Bishop of Guildford at the end of his statement to the Committee, was leapt upon by Lord Holderness.20 The January Manchester Statement was simply not enough: ‘a pious declaration with no force of law’ declared the Conservative MP Patrick Cormack; further protection was needed in the form of an Act of Synod.21 The message was getting through to the Church representatives, and Professor David McClean began his second day of testimony by dangling the prospect of an Act of Synod before the Ecclesiastical Committee.22 PEVs were discussed and the legal status of an Act of Synod – that it would not need to come to parliament for approval – was explained by McClean.23 By its meeting on 17 May, obtaining an Act of Synod, with additional protection for opponents beyond the provision made by Synod in November 1992, had become the main concern of the Committee. Field pressed McClean and Philip Mawer, the General Secretary of the General Synod, on the progress being made on such an Act by the House of Bishops. Mawer informed the Committee that a draft Act of Synod, which would include the creation of Provincial Episcopal Visitors (PEVs), would be presented to the House of Bishops meeting in June, although he made it clear that PEVs would function only under the authority of the diocesan

18 19 20 21 22 23

Ibid., p. 87 (11 May 1993). Ibid., pp. 70–1 (19 April 1993). Ibid., pp. 67, 70 (19 April 1993). Ibid., p. 76 (19 April 1993). Ibid., p. 83 (11 May 1993). Ibid., pp. 85, 88 (11 May 1993).

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Judith Maltby bishop.24 Both Field and Gummer were adamant that simply being a male priest or bishop was not enough to minister to opponents. Parishes which had passed Resolutions forbidding the appointment of a woman priest, remarked Field, must be protected against a bishop who would ‘wear them down by presenting a male priest who was actually in favour of the Measure’.25 On 24 May, the Committee turned its attention to the second synodical Measure, providing financial compensation for clergy opposed to the ordination of women. The Measure was to have a life of ten years – sufficient time for clergymen to decide whether their consciences were compromised so severely by the existence of women priests that they needed to resign from the Anglican priesthood. The ten-year period was an attempt by Synod to give clergymen unhappy about the 1992 vote time to experience ministry in a Church of England with women priests. The proceedings for 24 May suggest that certain parliamentarians were convinced of the General Synod’s inability to get anything right. On one hand, they maintained the financial package was not generous enough; it did not compensate nonstipendiary clergy, sector ministry clergy (e.g. NHS chaplains, HM Forces chaplains), ordinands in training, or lay employees of the Church such as organists unable to play at a Eucharist celebrated by a female priest. On the other hand, it was argued that the provision was too generous and, with figures being aired of up to 4,000 clergy leaving over women priests (a figure provided by opponents, as Professor McClean noted), the Committee was agitated that it would bankrupt the Church and impair its ministry to the country. The then Second Church Estates Commissioner, Michael Alison MP, apparently driven by exasperation into irony, pointed out the considerable short-term savings on stipends that the resignations of 4,000 clergymen would bring.26 McClean and Mawer were forced to admit that no one knew what the final bill would be because no one yet knew how many 24

25

26

Ibid., pp. 103, 104 (17 May 1993). See also pp. 105–6. The text of the June Manchester Statement of the House of Bishops, including the ‘Bonds of Peace’ and the ‘Draft Episcopal Ministry Act of Synod 1993’, can be found in ibid., pp. 24–32. Ibid., p. 103 (17 May 1993). Gummer made the same point about bishops wearing down Resolution parishes by appointing men in favour of the ordination of women (Ibid., p. 107 (17 May 1993)). Ibid., p. 113 (24 May 1993).

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Gender and Establishment would take up the package.27 Patrick Cormack, who maintained both that the financial provision was not generous enough and was also going to bankrupt the Church, remarked: ‘So the person in the pew will pay for the woman in the pulpit and the man on the dole then?’ To which McClean retorted, ‘and of course the person in the pew voted in favour of this Measure’.28 By the time the Ecclesiastical Committee met again in July to vote on the two Measures, the House of Bishops had produced a second Manchester Statement, known as the ‘Bonds of Peace’ which detailed an Act of Synod with the provision of a new ‘Resolution C’, allowing parishes to opt out of the pastoral care of their diocesan bishop and put themselves under a PEV. Archbishop George Carey assured the Committee that the Act would pass Synod at its meeting in November 1993 and that the House of Bishops had ‘gained a great deal from the discussion which has already gone on in your Committee, which has helped us in the House of Bishops ... to understand a little more some of the dilemma of people [sic]’.29 The Ecclesiastical Committee voted on 12 July 1993 that both Measures were ‘expedient’ and should be sent to parliament.30 The House of Commons Debate, October 1993 When the Measure finally made its way to the Commons in late October 1993, a cross-party group of male MPs could not contain themselves from informing the House of the role they had played in ensuring that bishops 27

28

29

30

The total payout has been estimated at £27.5 million and involved roughly 440 stipendiary clergy, with possibly as many as 70 retired and non-stipendiary clergy. Around 70 men returned to the Anglican ministry. On this, see: http://www.cofe.anglican.org/info/statistics/churchstats2003/leaversowl.pdf (accessed 21 October 2010). I am grateful to the Rev. Preb. Lynda Barley for this reference. Reports of the Ecclesiastical Committee, p. 122 (24 May 1993). There is a puzzling remark from Broadhurst about office expenses augmenting the income of clergy in addition to the stipend. Cormack responded ‘I think MPs would have sympathy with that point of view’ (Ibid., p. 122 (24 May 1993)). Ibid., pp. 133, 127 (5 July 1993). Only one member of the House of Bishops dissented from the June Manchester Statement, John Austin Baker, Bishop of Salisbury. Webster, A New Strength, p. 194. For the main Measure, the vote was 16 to 11; on the secondary financial provision Measure, the vote was 17 to 10. Reports of the Ecclesiastical Committee, pp. 55–6.

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Judith Maltby untainted by association with women clergy would be provided by the Church. Frank Field, Simon Hughes (supporters of the ordination of women) and Patrick Cormack (an opponent) all told the Commons of the key role they had played through the Ecclesiastical Committee in ensuring that additional provision for opponents of women priests was secured from the Church beyond that already in the Measure. As we have seen from the examination of the proceedings of the Ecclesiastical Committee above, the concessions in the Measure, such as resolutions A and B and the explicit exclusion of women from the episcopate, were not enough for these advocates of minority rights. Field told the House: ‘The Ecclesiastical Committee ... spent most of its time considering how that group [of opponents] should be protected.’ Field found the Church of England uncooperative: ‘the information that Synod [could] pass such a measure [like the Act of Synod] had to be extracted from Synod witnesses and it was almost like getting blood out of stone’. He added: The starting point for enshrining the rights of the minority did not, therefore, kick off in the best possible terms. I hope that the House will consider carefully what further measures may be necessary at some later date to protect the right of the minority who disagree with the Measure [to ordain women].31

The Liberal Democrat, Simon Hughes, also declared that the ‘Committee insisted on extra protection for those who will be in a minority in the Church if the Measure is passed’.32 And continuing this example of crossparty harmony, Patrick Cormack told the House that the Ecclesiastical Committee had decided that ‘while we would recognise the theological differences, we would not become bogged down in them, but would concentrate on the safeguards issue’. He continued: We did precisely that. It is partly, if not largely, a result of cross-examination in that Committee that we had the promise of the Act of Synod. That it was incorporated in the second Manchester statement, which came to be known as ‘Bonds of Peace’.33

31 32 33

Hansard, HC, 29 October 1993, 1098, my emphasis. Ibid., 29 October 1993, 1115. Ibid., 1129, my emphasis.

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The language of ‘protection’ and ‘safeguarding’ was carried from the proceedings of the Ecclesiastical Committee to the floor of the Commons. To this, Tony Benn responded: There is one other matter that I find offensive ... I found it offensive to be told that the House need not worry because there will be safeguards for male priests against ordained women coming into their parishes. Safeguards? My God! – what sort of man wants a safeguard in case a woman gives communion in his parish?34

Nearly twenty years later, in the changed culture over issues of equality, it seems worth asking how Field and Hughes now regard their championing of some male clergy as needing ‘protection’ and ‘safeguarding’ from priests who are women. There is less uncertainty about the position of Patrick Cormack. Speaking in June 2006, Sir Patrick was adamant that Synod should always have the first say in church law. ‘The Synod’, he said, ‘should decide what Measures it wishes to introduce without any shackles or interference.’ Nonetheless he went on to say: During my 36 years in this place – for 35 of which I have served on the Ecclesiastical Committee – Measures introduced by the Church of England have on occasion been contentious. One thinks of the Churchwardens Measure 2001, in respect of which the House played an important and constructive part and of the Priests (Ordination of Women) Measure 1993, where as a result of what the Ecclesiastical Committee said, safeguards were built into the Church of England’s legislation to protect traditionalists: the Act of Synod. So there is a very real role for the Ecclesiastical Committee and for this House.35

34 35

Ibid., 1110. The debate in the Lords took place on 2 November 1993. The main Measure passed the Commons 10:1 and 7:1 in the Lords. ‘Third Standing Committee on Delegated Legislation’, Hansard, HC, 27 June 2006, my emphasis. The Churchwardens Measure would have given bishops the right to deprive a churchwarden of his or her office ‘apparently at will’. As Monica Furlong observed ‘just occasionally a bit of state interference can offer a useful intervention’. Monica Furlong, CofE: the State It’s In (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2000), p. 256.

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Judith Maltby The proceedings of the Ecclesiastical Committee bear out the interpretation of the influence of parliament in church affairs given by Field, Hughes and Cormack to the House of Commons. This parliamentary committee, a mere ‘human authority’, had a direct effect on the shape of the provision made by the Church. It illustrates nicely that no one wishes to be called an Erastian but many are willing to be Erastian to achieve a desired outcome.

Parliament and Women Bishops 2002–2010 Having established that parliament played a crucial role in ensuring that greater provision was made for the opponents of women’s ordination than had been approved by Synod in 1992, it is time to revisit Tony Baldry’s remarks to Synod in July 2010 about a changed parliamentary context in terms of the ‘equality agenda’.36 What evidence is there to support the claim of the new Second Church Estates Commissioner? Given the standard rhetoric about ‘secular Britain’ we should be surprised to find MPs and Peers expressing any interest at all in Church affairs.37 However, a search through Hansard from 2002 to 2010 produces on average several results per year for the term ‘women bishops’. In the first decade of the century, the subject was approached chiefly through Early Day Motions (EDMs), a failed Ten Minute Bill in 2006, and was a recurrent topic in Commons questions to the Second Church Estates Commissioner. It is striking too, given the presence of the spiritual peers in the House of Lords, that questions and comments about women’s ordination in the last decade occurred overwhelmingly in the lower house. This may reflect the fact that MPs unlike Peers have constituencies and that these contain women clergy serving local communities within them. In 1993, Frank Field stressed the duty of MPs to protect their constituents unhappy with the prospect of women priests; ten years later MPs are much more concerned with their

36 37

See above, pp. 98–9. The ‘secular Britain’ thesis is nicely criticized in the introduction to Jane Garnett, Matthew Grimley, Alana Harris, William Whyte and Sarah Williams (eds), Redefining Christian Britain: post 1945 Perspectives (London: SCM Press, 2006), pp. 1– 18.

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Gender and Establishment responsibility to support women clergy, sometimes serving in deprived localities, within their constituencies.38 Early Day Motions (EDMs) Early Day Motions are formal motions submitted for debate in the Commons. In fact, very few EDMs ever get debated. Chiefly, they publicize an MP’s interest in a particular issue or campaign and provide evidence of parliamentary support for the issue raised.39 In 2006 and 2008, women bishops were the subject of a number of EDMs. In June, July and November 2006, a series of EDMs congratulated the Episcopal Church in America for electing the Bishop of Nevada, Dr Katharine Jefferts Schori, as its Presiding Bishop. Jefferts Schori’s election provided the opportunity for MPs to draw the contrast between an Anglican Church which had just elected the first female primate and the exclusion of women entirely from episcopal office in the Church of England, noting ‘that ECUSA is the first Church in the Anglican Communion to elect a woman archbishop; and [parliament] looks forward to the day when the Church of England consecrates women bishops and archbishops’.40 General Synod debated the consecration of women bishops in July 2008 and in the period leading up to the Synod debate, there was another series of EDMs to highlight the issue and to demonstrate support more widely in the country. The following EDM gave notice: That this House calls on the Church of England to remove all legal obstacles which at present prevent women from becoming bishops; and asks the Church to end this unacceptable form of discrimination against women clergy.41

Following the favourable vote in General Synod to take the next step on the laborious process towards women bishops in the established Church in early July 2008, a cross-party group of MPs put forward this EDM a few days later: 38 39 40 41

See Andy Reed’s remarks below, pp. 118–19. See http://www.parliament.uk/about/how/business/edms/ (accessed 15 December 2010). EDM no. 2392, 28 June 2006. EDM no. 1825, 17 June 2008.

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That this House welcomes the vote at the General Synod of the Church of England in York in favour of the consecration of women bishops; and looks forward to its implementation as soon as possible.42

The following year (January 2009), EDMs shifted emphasis and became, in a sense, more directive towards the Church: ‘That this House declares that candidates for the office of bishop should be considered on merit; and that sex is not a merit.’43 The language that candidates for appointment as bishops by the crown should be on merit has been much favoured by MPs in the last few years.

Debates The place of women in the established Church has cropped up at times in debates about other issues in the House of Commons. In February 2002, the Liberal Democrat MP Sandra Gidley (Romsey) tabled an EDM about the Church’s exemption from the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act.44 A month later she referred to her EDM in a debate on the status of women and human rights. After describing the case of a woman sentenced to be stoned to death in Nigeria for having a child out of wedlock, she went on to talk about the Church of England. Gidley reminded the House what her EDM had said: This House notes the Church of England is exempted from the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 due to the attitudes and activities of a minority who are in disagreement with the ordination of women; affirms the need to strengthen and forward the movement against discrimination on the grounds of gender, [and] trusts the Church will thus be encouraged to catch up speedily with the vast majority of institutions.45

She expressed the hope that the next Archbishop of Canterbury (Dr Williams was enthroned in February 2003) would ‘provide the perfect opportunity to forge leadership which would unite the Church of England 42 43 44 45

EDM no 1978, 8 July 2008. EDM no 133, 14 January 2009. ‘Gender and Equality in the Church of England’ EDM, 14 February 2002. Hansard, HC, 14 March 2002, 1085.

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Gender and Establishment behind justice for women and end the unfortunate and embarrassing need for “flying bishops”’.46 She went on describe to the House a young woman’s experience at a selection conference for ordination at which she was closely questioned on her childcare arrangements. The Member for Romsey wondered, rhetorically, whether young men were questioned about childcare arrangements at Church of England selection conferences. The woman was not recommended and it was felt it was due to the view of the selectors that she could not cope with children and the responsibilities of being a parish priest.47 The following year, in a debate about violence against women, the Labour MP Ann Cryer (Keighley) related the story of an honour killing of an Asian woman in Bradford. She continued, ‘so that it is not thought that I always go on about Asian women and never speak about white women’ and went on to talk about the Church of England. Cryer reminded the House of her EDM tabled on 25 February, which paid tribute to the life of the writer and Church feminist campaigner Monica Furlong, urged the government to amend the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act to remove the exemption of religious bodies, and called ‘on the established church to cease forthwith its present discrimination against women priests and accept the need for women bishops’.48 The Conservative Robert Key (Salisbury), of whom more a little later, expressed strong sympathy with Cryer’s views but said that the Church was presently addressing that issue, and that it would be best for it to come to the House from Synod via the Ecclesiastical Committee.49

Parliamentary Questions The subject of women bishops has also featured in parliamentary questions to Baldry’s predecessor as Second Church Estates Commissioner, the MP for Middlesbrough, Sir Stuart Bell. MPs have often prefaced their questions on the timetable for women bishops with questions about the ratio of men to 46 47

48 49

Ibid. Ibid. The Ecclesiastical Committee in 1993 had a lengthy discussion as to whether a woman vicar with children could properly fulfil her obligations as a parish priest. Reports of the Proceedings, pp. 107–8 (17 May 1993). Hansard, HC, 6 March 2003, 1006. Ibid., 1006.

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Judith Maltby women in training for the Anglican ministry. The expected answer comes – that there are more or less equal numbers of men and women in training. MPs active in using parliamentary questions in this way in the last five years have been cross-party and include Chris Bryant (Labour), Robert Key (Conservative), Sally Keeble (Labour) and Tony Baldry (Conservative).50 The Liberal Democrat MPs Sandra Gidley and Simon Hughes have also spoken in support of women bishops.51 In the course of the past decade, parliamentary questions have conveyed an increasing sense of exasperation from MPs over the slow progress being made by the established Church on consecrating women to the episcopate. In December 2005, Robert Key, his patience perhaps running thinner since he had urged his colleague Ann Cryer in 2003 to let the synodical system take its course, asked the Second Church Estates Commissioner what Flying Bishops cost the Church (answer: £249,659 in 2004). Key acknowledged that deeply held views could not be reduced to financial figures, but hoped that the time had come for the move on women bishops. Bell, who was usually circumspect in his answers, reminded the House that there was a long synodical process (his favourite phrase when responding on this topic has been that the mills of God grind slow but fine), but added that ‘I am always happy to refer to the Archbishop what I think is a strong wind behind that in the House’.52 Over time, the language used by MPs has become increasingly sharp. Chris Bryant asked Bell in 2006 to tell Synod ‘on behalf of this House that we want women bishops as soon as is humanly possible and, for that matter, as is divinely possible’. And in reference to various schemes circulating at the time to constrict the ministries of women bishops, he added: Will he [Bell] point out to the bishops that, although every one of them voted with the archbishops for the ludicrous apartheid system, seven of them have subsequently written personal, private letters to me saying that they will not

50 51 52

E.g. Hansard, HC, 13 June 2005, 2 February 2006, 5 June 2007, 20 March 2008. EDM, 14 February 2002; Hansard, HC, 14 July 2008, 26. Hughes’ comments were part of debate on the reform of the House of Lords. Hansard, HC, 19 Dececember 2005, 1557.

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Gender and Establishment support those measures? Can we make sure that there is no apartheid on this issue and that women are treated equally in the Church?53

Further evidence of the erosion of patience comes from Key’s question to Bell in 2008 concerning the number of women holding crown parochial appointments (answer: 103 out of 650). Key responded, ‘There is clearly some way to go. Does the hon. Gentleman agree with me that it really is time that the Church of England stopped discriminating against 50 per cent of the human race when it comes to episcopal appointments?’ Key added, ‘Can he imagine this House finding it expedient to agree to any Measure from Synod that sought to discriminate against women, in the hope that it was going to allow women bishops in the Church of England – but not at any price?’54 Key also promoted a debate on sex discrimination and religious organizations on 11 November 2009 on the seventeenth anniversary of Synod’s vote to ordain women as priests. He reminded the House that parliamentary approval was necessary before women could become bishops. That is, their votes matter as the Measure ‘will have the force of statute law’ and therefore the content of the Measure was very much the concern of the House.55 Following the most recent synodical vote on women bishops in July 2010, Tony Baldry answered questions in the Commons from MPs eager to see the Church move on the matter. He informed the House what he had told General Synod: ‘I made it clear in York at the General Synod that I did not think I could get through this House any legislation in which there was a scintilla of a suggestion of women bishops in any way being second-class bishops.’56 The parliamentary context for receiving a synodical measure on the ministry of women in the established Church had indeed changed significantly from 1993.

A Ten Minute Bill 2006 On 21 March 2006, the Labour MP for Loughborough, Andy Reed, introduced a Ten Minute Bill to amend the 1993 legislation for women 53 54 55 56

Ibid., 5 June 2006, 20. Ibid., 8 May 2008, 833. Ibid., 11 November 2009, 76WH. Ibid., 27 July 2010, 865.

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Judith Maltby priests to encompass women bishops.57 The bill would circumvent the synodical process and bring the issue directly to parliament for approval. It had started life in the hands of the high-profile MP Chris Bryant who withdrew his sponsorship upon becoming a minister. It had no chance of getting off the ground, but like EDMs, it was an indicator of parliamentary mood and a way of putting down a marker on the matter. Reed was well informed about the history of women’s ordination and his speech was a very Anglican combination of pragmatism and theology.58 Reed cited the great growth in women ordinands since the Synod vote in 1992. He reminded honourable members that every one of them would have women clergy as constituents, emphasizing the role they played in working with the vulnerable and needy in their constituencies. Reed claimed the high ground for his model of the parish priest, as he claimed it for the constituency MP: a responsibility to everyone in the parish or constituency regardless of whether they are ‘your own’ or not.59 For the purposes of the argument being developed here two points – apart from the fact that this Ten Minute Bill happened at all – are important. First, Reed emphasized that the Church of England exists to serve not simply its own members but the wider society, a sentiment he has not been alone in expressing. The contribution of the established Church to the larger local community is a defence of establishment often put forward by Church of England leaders themselves. Second, Reed’s speech presented a complex set of positions on the relationship between parliament and the Church – more complex than Tom Wright’s dichotomy between human and divine authority. Reed told his fellow MPs that they might be thinking that it was none of their business who the Church did or did not consecrate; he added that they probably thought that parliamentary questions to Sir Stuart Bell on behalf of the Commissioners were ‘a quaint and irritating anachronism’. But he pointed out that such provision had allowed the House to question the 57

58 59

Ibid., 21 March 2006, 170–3; Ann Treneman, ‘Parliamentary Sketch’, The Times (22 March 2006). Like EDMs, Ten Minute Rule Bills ‘are often an opportunity for Members to voice an opinion on a subject or aspect of existing legislation, rather than a serious attempt to get a Bill passed’. See http://www.parliament.uk/about/how/laws/bills/private-members/ (accessed 15 December 2010). Hansard, HC, 21 March 2006. Ibid., 170–3. See Professor Elaine Graham’s contribution to this collection.

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Gender and Establishment Commissioners on ‘their outrageous sale to the highest bidder of the Octavia Hill estate’ in Vauxhall. He speculated that most Members probably did not think that they should tell the Church what to do on this issue.60 Up to a point, Reed agreed with them, but he saw the bill as ‘a mechanism before us to make our views known in full’. Reed declared himself in favour of disestablishment but argued, as many did in the 1993 Commons debate on women priests, that as long as the Church is established, Members of Parliament have responsibilities that they simply cannot ignore. Since 1992, he reminded them, parliament had voted on no fewer than seventeen Church of England Measures. In short, Reed argued that parliament was not there unduly to interfere in the Church’s decision-making processes, but neither was it a passive partner. As an illustration, he referred to the role of the Ecclesiastical Committee in 1993 in influencing the shape of the final settlement on the ordination of women priests – the same point made by Tony Baldry at the beginning of this chapter.61 The authorized organs of the Church of England did not like Reed’s Ten Minute Bill one bit and an official statement remarked that ‘The proposed Bill would be contrary to the long-standing constitutional convention that parliament does not initiate legislation on such matters’.62 This official church view was queried by the then Bishop of Worcester, Peter Selby. Should Synod ever reach the point of passing a Measure to permit the consecration of women as bishops in the established Church, Selby commented: Those opposed will certainly take their fight to the Ecclesiastical Committee if they don’t like the Measure that comes from General Synod, and it is therefore very important that the Commons should have indicated its view for the [Ecclesiastical] Committee’s guidance.63

60 61 62

63

Ibid., 170–3. Ibid., 170–3. Church Times (10 March 2006). The MP Sir Patrick Cormack quoted a letter from the Bishop of Fulham ‘who is the chairman of the very respected Anglican organization Forward in Faith’ who wrote to him to ask him ‘to be present in the Chamber to vote no’ (Church Times (24 March 2006)). Church Times (24 March 2006). Also quoted in Reed’s 2006 speech.

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Judith Maltby Selby was expressing anxiety about the role and influence of the Ecclesiastical Committee in determining the final shape of Church legislation. Robert Key, emerging in 2006 as the leading supporter in the Commons of women bishops without elaborate provision for their opponents, shared Selby’s anxiety and raised the matter with Sir Stuart Bell in the ‘quaint and irritating anachronism’ of a parliamentary question. On 30 January of that year, Key asked Bell: ‘What proposed measures from the General Synod of the Church of England have been rejected by the Ecclesiastical Committee as not expedient since 1981; and if he will make a statement.’ Bell replied: Since the Synodical Government Measure 1969, the Ecclesiastical Committee has not expressed the view to Synod that a Measure is inexpedient. In relation to a statement, there have been a number of occasions when the Committee has objected to aspects of a Measure, leading to the withdrawal and subsequent resubmission in a different form of the Measure in question.

The exchange is worth quoting in full. [Key:] Does not that suggest that, when a two-thirds majority in Synod produces a request for legislation, the Ecclesiastical Committee’s record is take it with a light touch and to respect the will of the majority in Synod, as might happen, for example, with the coming Measure on women bishops? [Bell:] As a member of the Ecclesiastical Committee, the hon. Gentleman knows that we are a long way from women bishops. Although it is true we have not declared any Measure inexpedient, two Measures – the Churchwardens Measure 2001 and the Church of England (Pensions) Measure 2003 – were sent back from Committee and returned in amended form. In 1984, the Appointment of Bishops Measure was actually turned down by the House after the Committee deemed it expedient.64

Selby and Key have both expressed concerns about the role of the Ecclesiastical Committee in influencing the final shape of church legislation, especially in matters to do with women’s ordination.

64

Hansard, HC, 30 January 2006, 15, my emphasis.

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Gender and Establishment Conclusion Two of the most striking things about the events explored in this chapter, are first, that they happened at all and, second, the absence of any significant engagement with the parliamentary role in narratives of the ordination of women. The Ecclesiastical Committee’s strenuous, at times aggressive, interrogation of the Bishop of Guildford and Professor David McClean in 1993 and the occasional but persistent interest by MPs in the ordination of women as priests and bishops in the past decade indicate that the links between parliament and the Church are far from ‘residual’ at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Perhaps the presence of the bishops in the House of Lords has meant that attention is more often focused on the Church’s role in the affairs of the State – obscuring the State’s role in the affairs of the Church.65 In terms of attitudes towards the ‘equality agenda’, the culture of the House of Commons, as in the country, has shifted considerably since 1993. To some church leaders, such as the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord George Carey and the Bishop of Winchester, the Rt Rev. Michael ScottJoynt, the promotion of ‘“tolerance, equality and fairness”’ has come ‘at a cost of eroding Christianity as the foundation of British culture and society’.66 However an alternative view could be that MPs, across the main parties, are taking their responsibilities seriously by stating that they will not vote into the law of the land discriminatory legislation about women bishops. MPs have consciences too and Christian clergy should be precisely the people to encourage them to use them. It is striking that a set of busy MPs clearly think the Church of England is worth taking an interest in; that they think it matters who its priests and bishops are; and that establishment is chiefly seen in terms of the Church’s important role in local communities expressed through the parochial system and diocesan structures. What could be a matter for rejoicing from an Anglican perspective has led to cries of Erastianism from within the established Church. Yet the relationship has not

65

66

It is odd that the fact that the bishops’ seats in the national legislature can only be occupied by men is largely absent from criticisms of the existence of the spiritual peers in the Lords. See R. N. Morris (ed.), Church and State in 21st Century Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2009), p. 221. Daily Telegraph (30 December 2010).

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Judith Maltby suddenly become Erastian. There is nothing new, as this chapter has demonstrated, in parliamentary influence in the matter of women’s ordination. When such relationship works for a desired outcome, it is regarded as ‘good’ Erastianism; when it does not, it is ‘bad’ Erastianism. What it is not, is anything new in the long, complicated relationship between parliament and the established Church of England.

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The Establishment, Multiculturalism and Social Cohesion ELAINE GRAHAM

The debate about the role of religion in British public life has acquired new currency in recent years. What should our conceptual framework be for understanding the relationship between religious identity and the State in the UK? Whilst a range of settlements between Church and State actually pertain within the different nations in the British Isles (itself an indication of a kind of ‘multicultural’ polity), attention typically focuses on the question of the establishment of the Church of England. The English model of Church–State relations is the constitutional framework within which the relationship between religion and citizenship and national identity and social cohesion is discussed. Many of these issues are familiar: Should the Church of England be disestablished? Can the monarch be ‘Defender of the Faith’ in a religiously plural society? Are the human rights of Catholics violated because of the constitutional ban on their succession to the throne? Are the parliamentary privileges of the Church of England compatible with an increasingly secular British society where even the buses announce the death of God? In this chapter, the focus of my attention will be the implications of religious and cultural pluralism for the future of Establishment. One of the challenges for our thinking about the future, I will argue, is that sociologically speaking, British society is best described as a ‘diverse multifaith society with a substantial secular element’:1 in other words, we witness the co-existence of both growing religious pluralism and continuing trends of secularization. For some commentators, this is increasingly characterized as heralding a ‘post-secular’ condition,2 a conceptual framework not easily 1 2

Norman Bonney, ‘The Monarchy, the State and Religion: Modernising the Relationships’, The Political Quarterly 81:2 (April–June 2010), pp. 199–200. William Keenan, ‘Post-Secular Sociology: Effusions of Religion in Late Modern Settings’, European Journal of Social Theory 5 (2002), pp. 279–290; Jürgen Habermas, ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’, European Journal of Philosophy 14:1 (2006), pp. 1–25.

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Elaine Graham accommodated within conventional sociological narratives of secularization, and which certainly serves to complicate our thinking about the position of religion in a liberal democracy. Religious pluralism and the increasing politicisation of religion – partly as a result of the impact on domestic politics of global geo-political trends – suggest that Church–State relations must move towards a greater plurality of religious representation. Yet to raise the constitutional profile of faith is resisted by those who oppose any privilege or concession to organized religion within a liberal democracy. However, one of the issues I will be examining is whether ‘multiculturalism’ as pursued in public policy over the past generation can adequately accommodate ‘post-secular’ constructions of identity, citizenship and community cohesion. Debates about religion as a form of ‘social capital’, especially in relation to local activism, suggest that we do need to acknowledge the potential of faith-based contributions to civil society; and I will argue that it is at the local level that discussions about the future of Establishment and the changing relationship of religion and society may need to focus. Yet multiculturalism as a dominant paradigm may also fail to incorporate positive indigenous ‘White’ communities into any account of national identity. It is all too easy to equate multiculturalism with the impact of immigration from the new Commonwealth countries after 1945 and the ‘problem’ of Black and south Asian assimilation into British models of citizenship, and to neglect its implications for white British, or ‘English’ identity. In particular, the recent attempts by Right-wing parties to portray themselves as the defenders of White, Christian (and therefore non-Muslim) communities expose the paucity of thinking about the nature of English identity, with dangerous consequences. Similarly, whilst concerns about the threats to social cohesion of radical Islam are uppermost in government policy, arguably the rise of the extreme Right, in the form of groups such as the British National Party and English Defence League, is as great a threat to our democracy. A recent collection of essays combines the two phenomena, arguing in part that radical Islam and White racism are both symptoms of the deficiencies of multicultural policies.3 I want to think against the grain in relation to multicultural Britain, therefore, and 3

Roger Eatwell and Matthew J. Goodwin (eds), The New Extremism in 21st Century Britain (London: Routledge, 2010).

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The Establishment, Multiculturalism and Social Cohesion concentrate on the ‘problem’ of White Christians; and in relation to the Church of England, the question is whether Establishment, and the preeminence of a particular expression of Christianity as the national religion, helps or hinders the debate about British or English identity and citizenship in a multicultural society. Nigel Biggar’s four marks of Establishment (elsewhere in this volume) rest in their national and constitutional dimensions, such as the role of the monarch as defender of the faith and head of the Church, on church schools and of representation in the House of Lords. However, whilst these reflect what Bob Morris terms the ‘higher architecture’ of Church and State,4 I will argue that the re-emergence of religion as a political force and attendant debates about its potential as a form of ‘social capital’ must direct our attention to the local nature of much of the interaction between religion and the public sphere. My two case studies in multiculturalism and the future of the Church of England focus on its continuing local and contextual significance; and by taking Wesley Carr’s distinction between ‘high’ and ‘earthed’ Establishment, I consider whether in the future, national and local expressions of religion and public life may have to move in different directions. ‘Multiculturalism’ Normally, we think about the implications of multiculturalism in terms of the growing ethnic and cultural diversity in Britain following the significant levels of immigration after 1945, especially that from the New Commonwealth countries. Tariq Modood has defined multiculturalism as ‘the recognition of group difference within the public sphere of laws, policies, democratic discourses and the terms of citizenship and national identity’.5 It seems important to differentiate between Britain as a multicultural society, therefore, and the adoption of policies of multiculturalism as implying a particular ‘normative response’6 to the facts of

4 5 6

Robert M. Morris (ed.), Church and State in 21st Century Britain: The Future of Church Establishment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 193–211. Tariq Modood, Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 2. Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural diversity and political theory (2nd edition, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 6.

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Elaine Graham ethnic and cultural difference. Diversity is upheld and celebrated, but in a way which adopts a highly pragmatic and non-prescriptive approach towards the implications of difference.7 Yet recently, critics have voiced concerns about the impact of multiculturalism on social cohesion. Most famously, perhaps, the Cantle Report on the urban disturbances that occurred in three northern English towns in the summer of 2001 pointed to the fragmentation of many urban communities, living ‘parallel lives’ characterized by high degrees of separation along ethnic and religious lines.8 Multiculturalism has also been criticized as essentially a form of liberalism, in which religious dimensions of identity are suppressed. Yet evidence suggests that many groups – supremely, British Muslims, but as we shall see later, white Christians – are identifying themselves primarily in terms of allegiance to a specific faith-tradition and faith-community, rather than to a ‘secular’ or even ethnic identity.9 What we have is a twofold critique, therefore: on the one hand multiculturalism is regarded as promoting segregation rather than integration; and on the other, it is seen as conceptually inadequate for the articulation of the complex – but increasingly, faith-infused – nature of personal and communal identity. This picture of the shortcomings of multiculturalism raises several further important issues, and offers us the beginnings of a new, but challenging anatomy of British society and the role of religion in public life. On the one hand, we see the forceful re-emergence (if, indeed, it ever really went away) of religious faith not only as a global geo-political reality, but as a focus for community mobilization and civic identity. No longer privatized, separated behind a liberal Rawlsian ‘firewall’, but active and dynamic in providing resources, values and networks for all manner of forms of engagement in politics, social care, education and campaigning. This also challenges many of the precepts of the secularization thesis, of course, an issue that has been 7

8 9

Maqsood Ahmed, Ted Cantle and Dilwar Hussain, ‘Faith, multiculturalism and community cohesion: a policy conversation’, in Adam Dinham, Rob Furbey and Vivien Lowndes (eds), Faith in the Public Realm: Controversies, Policies and Practices (Bristol: Policy Press, 2009), p. 84. Ted Cantle, Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team (London: Home Office, 2001). Dilwar Hussain, in Ahmed, Cantle and Hussain, ‘Faith, multiculturalism and community cohesion’, p. 86.

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The Establishment, Multiculturalism and Social Cohesion widely discussed elsewhere. It would certainly appear that Europe in its secularism is the exception, not the rule.10 Once Western intellectuals were confident that the Occidentalist narrative about the progressive disappearance of religion from public space would inevitably be extrapolated into a universal trend, but by the beginning of the twenty-first century, as Jürgen Habermas has noted, ‘the normal model for the future of all other cultures suddenly becomes a special-case scenario’.11 Yet the re-emergence of religion in Western public life should not be considered to be anything like a religious revival, at least not in the fortunes of the ‘mainstream’ Christian denominations, whose memberships and formal affiliations continue to decline. And nor is it a simple reversal of secularization (as, for example, suggested by Peter Berger’s use of the term ‘desecularization’12), since much of the logic of secularism endures, in the shape of those who continue to question the very legitimacy of religion to shape public debate and social policy – an issue sharpened, of course, by the very renewed prominence of faith in the public sphere. Such voices continue to hold to the view that any expression of religious belief or exercise of religious authority is a reversion to an archaic, pre-modern and authoritarian restriction on personal freedom and is an affront to reason. So the cultural situation in relation to religion, public policy and the State facing the Established Church is one of complexity, even paradox: the coexistence of resurgent and dynamic religion in public, and the persistence of political philosophies that continue to defend the separation, not just of Church and State, but all forms of faith and public life. Hence the terminology of the ‘post-secular’ condition.13 The question now must be, how might ‘Establishment’ fare in such circumstances? There are those, of course, who continue to believe that adherence to the demands of a particular theology represents a denial of liberal values and a retreat into a more pernicious form of segregation. But given the greater 10 11 12 13

Grace Davie, Europe: The Exceptional Case. Parameters of Faith in the Modern World (London: DLT, 2002). Habermas, ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’, p. 2. Peter Berger, The Desecularisation of the World (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999). Keenan, ‘Post-Secular Sociology’; Luke Bretherton, Christianity and Contemporary Politics (Oxford: Wiley–Blackwell, 2010), pp. 10–16.

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Elaine Graham public profile of faith-based groups as active participants in civil society, there has been growing attention to the question of the public role of religion in a multicultural society. It generally focuses on the potential of faith groups to participate in programmes of social, cultural and economic renewal, and even, on the margins of mainstream political party policy, to take up certain aspects of welfare provision. So we have begun to see how so-called ‘faith communities’ are being brought into processes of governance and participation and are being used as catalysts for the ‘Big Society’: as sources of capacity-building in local communities; as the vanguards of programmes to engage with so-called ‘hard to reach’ groups; as constructive agents in programmes of social cohesion and the prevention of religious and political extremism. There are questions about how such faith groups might be consulted and represented in relation to sources of public funding or community participation, which once again take us to the issue of formal representation at different levels, and traditional models of Establishment need in some way to be radically overhauled to reflect that greater degree of diversity, in order to give nonChristian, non-Anglican participants a place at the table.14 This greater recognition of the role of faith-based organization in the public realm is often linked to theories of ‘social capital’, which suggest that religious groups are exceptionally effective in mobilizing volunteer capacity, of translating values of altruism and public service into action and thus of oiling the wheels of civil society. Robert Putnam’s theory of ‘social capital’ has proved particularly effective as a framework.15 Putnam argues that a healthy civil society rests on people’s capacity to be active citizens and to contribute to their communities, and that this depends on the skills, values and resources at their disposal that will enable them to get involved, to form relationships both within and between immediate communities of interest – essentially, to make things happen. It is often further noted that religious people and organizations are particularly rich in sources of social capital, because they have strong values, a clear collective identity, possess buildings 14

15

Adam Dinham and Vivien Lowndes, ‘Faith and the Public Realm’, in Adam Dinham, Rob Furbey and Vivien Lowndes (eds), Faith in the Public Realm: Controversies, Policies and Practices (Bristol: Policy Press, 2009), pp. 1–5. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

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The Establishment, Multiculturalism and Social Cohesion and physical resources that offer good facilities, and are well-connected to local, national and global expressions of their faith. I will return to the question of social, or ‘religious’ or ‘faithful’ capital and its significance for the public role of faith groups in relation to local civil society, later in this chapter. Religion in the Post-Secular City A useful illustration of religion in the multicultural, post-secular society can be found in Harris and Garnett’s portrait of the many faith-communities located on one main street in East Ham, in London.16 A virtual walk down the Barking Road provides a vivid series of snap-shots into just the very kind of melting-pot of cultures typical of many urban communities in our towns and cities. What is also remarkable, however, is the high public profile of faith in the shape of sacred spaces, hybrid identities and social capital, providing an exemplary anatomy of emergent post-secular sensibilities: A walk down the Barking Road which connects these two parishes [of St Margaret’s and St Bart’s] within the Borough of Newham provides a spatial counter-narrative to histories, sociological studies and theologies which describe Christianity vacating the public arena and moving to the privatized margins of society.17

Here we encounter a variety of sacred spaces, both institutional and domestic. St Bartholomew’s Anglican Church, reordered during the 1980s, embodies a classic parochial ministry committed to the whole community, its architecture consciously modelling an openness and hospitality to those of all faiths and none: St Bart’s ... looks like a health centre (and in fact incorporates a surgery), and opens directly onto the main road. The busy street activity is visible through a long window to the right of the altar. The font is the only element incorporated from the old church. This emphasises spatially (and theologically) the

16 17

Alana Harris and Jane Garnett, ‘Sources of the Sacred: Migration, Modernity and Religious Identity’, Oxford Historian VII (2009), pp. 18–22. Ibid., p. 18.

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Elaine Graham continuity of the church community and creates a link between sacred and secular, bringing the street into the church and the church into the street.18

Those who make use of the Church and its facilities reflect the diversity of the community at large: The Anglican church has become the sacred space of choice for the celebration of weddings between people of different faiths – a West African Catholic with a Sikh; an Orthodox Armenian with a Hindu. Catholic Poles and Orthodox Ukrainians converge on Anglicanism as a way of escaping historical tensions which would come to the surface in a Catholic context. And Muslim women come to discuss pastoral issues with the female vicar.19

Yet in true post-secular style, sacred space is also (literally) taking place in new ways, often retrieved from, or juxtaposed with, commercial or residential buildings. Newer evangelical Christian groups, often from the African diaspora, have taken over premises which range from a former cinema to a disused gym, as well as accommodation above shops and pubs. They are reclaiming secular space for sacred purposes, and in the process are establishing a new prominence within the market-place itself: ‘Numerous shop-fronts along the Barking Road attest to the brand-currency that Christianity retains along this busy arterial road.’20 In individual homes, further evidence of multicultural, hybrid identities can be found in the material objects with which people furnish their rooms, as well as in the family structures and global affinities such artefacts represent: A Trinidadian woman in her mid-sixties who arrived in Plaistow 47 years ago gathers her extended family of children and grandchildren (many of whom are no longer practising Catholics) in her house once a month for a family prayermeeting, bible reading and communal meal. Her front room is dense with 18

19 20

Ibid., p. 19. See also Elaine Graham and Stephen Lowe, What Makes a Good City? Public Theology and the Urban Church (London: DLT, 2009), pp. 7–138. Stephen Lowe was Team Rector of East Ham between 1975 and 1988 during the period of St Bart’s reordering. Jane Garnett and Alana Harris, ‘Sources of the Sacred: Migration, Modernity and Religious Identity’, The Oxford Historian VII (2009), pp. 18–22, here p. p. 18. Ibid., p. 19.

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The Establishment, Multiculturalism and Social Cohesion Catholic and familial imagery: a Sacred Heart tapestry, bought on a trip to visit her sister in America; medallions from Lourdes; the flag of Guyana (where her husband comes from); numerous family photos, crucifixes; statues and images of Mary and the Divine Mercy.21

Meanwhile, at the Roman Catholic Church, St Margaret’s, over forty ethnic groups participate in public worship; and parish involvement extends into broad-based organizing in the shape of London Citizens, in which local church groups find common cause with trade unions, mosques, gurdwaras and other civic institutions, ‘modelled on the Chicago-based tradition of community organising which launched Obama into civic engagement’.22 This is a perfect example of the life of a worshipping community furnishing a rich stock of religious social capital for wider civil society. Through London Citizens, members of St Margaret’s have campaigned for a living wage for low-paid workers at Canary Wharf; petitioned the Mayor of London on the impact of the 2012 Olympics on local residents; and lobbied a local business on the environmental impact of a nearby factory. Meanwhile, the (woman) vicar of St Bart’s is Chair of Governors of a local school, of whom less than 3% are white, and the majority are Muslim. As a member of an ‘established’ (and not-for-profit) institution [the vicar of St Bart’s] is seen to be able to act in an inclusive way, non-identifiable with particular interest or ethnic groupings. Her colleague in the neighbouring parish has interpreted this community engagement differently in acting as a local government councillor as well as cleric.23

These two local representatives of a national Church are finding new expressions of Establishment within a post-secular, multicultural context in their assumption of positions of leadership and facilitation, not only in relation to the voluntary sector but in partnership with the market and the State. As Harris and Garnett remark, ‘The traditional parochial role of Anglicanism is being reinvented in a new idiom.’24

21 22 23 24

Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 19–20. Ibid., p. 18.

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Elaine Graham ‘Religion’ here is both old and new, orthodox and heterodox, personal and institutional; it endures in long-established forms of ‘established’ Christianity as well as finding new expressions, often influenced by the forces of globalization and migration. Perhaps the most significant features of Harris and Garnett’s account are, on the one hand, the ways in which the global and the local fuse to create uniquely contextual forms of belief, practice and identity; and, on the other, how the formal legacy of ‘Establishment’ can still find a vitality and relevance amidst the multicultural, pluralist, globalized community. In its exercise of hospitality, in its embodiment of local social capital (bonding, bridging and linking), it represents a compelling argument for the efficacy of religion as a public good, and of the local impact of vestiges of Establishment that is committed to ministering to the community in its entirety, regardless of formal affiliation. Right-wing Extremism, Christianity and the Problem of ‘Britishness’ But does this re-emergence of faith as part of a ‘thick description’ of modern citizenship actually exclude some elements of the population? Ted Cantle has argued that ‘the majority population have always felt unrepresented by the notion [of multiculturalism]’25. He continues, ‘if you ask white people, for example, if they have an ethnicity, they don’t seem to appreciate that they have ... They also see ‘diversity’ as something that is only relevant to minorities. Similarly, most [white] people see faith as another dimension which doesn’t include them – the British tradition has been built upon the submerging of faith differences in the public sphere.’26 So there are ways in which ‘multiculturalism’, if not failing the indigenous white British population, has exposed a certain paucity of identity or self-understanding to match that of others. To what extent are Right-wing extremist groups exploiting that vacuum? There is certainly evidence to suggest that Right-wing extremist groups and movements are shifting their rhetoric increasingly towards Islamophobic statements and actions. For example, the mobilization of the English 25 26

Ahmed, Cantle and Hussain, ‘Faith, multiculturalism and community cohesion’, p. 93. Ibid., p. 93.

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The Establishment, Multiculturalism and Social Cohesion Defence League to demonstrate against what it terms ‘Islamic extremism’ in places such as Luton, Rochdale, Birmingham and Manchester.27 Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, has described Islam as a ‘cancer’ that required ‘chemotherapy ... to save civilization’.28 What is intriguing is the attempt by many of these groups to hijack a ‘Christian’ identity around which they hope to rally indigenous White support that perceives itself as having been disenfranchised by the ideology of multiculturalism. For example, the BNP used an image of Jesus on a poster for the European elections in June 2009, with a quotation from John 15.20, reading, ‘If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you’, and the commentary, ‘What would Jesus Do? – Vote BNP’.29 In response, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York issued a joint statement, together with a letter to be read in all parishes, repudiating these connections, saying: Christians have been deeply disturbed by the conscious adoption by the BNP of the language of our faith when the effect of those policies is not to promote those values but to foster fear and division within communities, especially between people of different faiths or racial background.30

We may ask whether this is any more than incidental ignorance on the part of a tiny minority of extremists. After all, many of the ‘mainstream’ Christian denominations (including the Church of England) with significant presence in urban communities are only able to survive because of the presence of Christians whose personal or family histories originate in Africa, the Caribbean and, increasingly, in Eastern Europe; not to mention the growing numerical strength (and political visibility) of independent Blackmajority denominations.31 And at one level, the mere fact of the Church as 27 28 29

30

31

Searchlight, August 2009, pp. 8–9. Ibid., p. 10. Pat Ashworth, ‘BNP Puts Jesus on its Poster’, Church Times (online, April 3 2009), available at: http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=72708 (accessed 21 October 2009). Church of England ‘Joint Statement from the Archbishop of York and Archbishop of Canterbury’, (online, 24 May 2009). This is available at: http://www.cofe.anglican. org/news/prabcaby.html (accessed 21 October 2009). Cf. Harris and Garnett, ‘Sources of the Sacred’. See also statistics which suggest that Black churchgoers in London constituted over 40% of congregations by the middle of

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Elaine Graham ‘multicultural’ is a powerful symbolic counter-measure to this equation of Christianity with ‘White’ identity. As Chris Shanahan comments in relation to his own fieldwork in inner-city Birmingham – echoing Harris and Garnett’s study of East London – ‘Twenty-first century urbanism is defined, not only by normative diversity, but by translocal diasporan communities within which new forms of fluid ethnicity are constantly emerging.’32 At another level, however, this use of religion – or at least a discourse of a particular construal of religion – does exploit something of a vacuum around understandings of ‘Englishness’ and how we are to cope with the emergence of religion as a strong thread of corporate and personal identity. And the political impact of the far Right does endanger social cohesion and democracy, given that two BNP candidates, Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons, sit as elected members of the European Parliament for the NorthWest and Yorkshire and Humberside regions respectively. Indications are that the BNP’s electoral strongholds seem to be in predominantly white working-class communities with higher than average levels of unemployment and economic decline: former industrial areas or large social housing developments.33 Much of the success of the BNP in the 2009 Euroelections was due to the slump in the Labour vote, resulting in part from the MPs’ expenses scandal; but evidence also suggests that the far Right is exploiting people’s disaffection with mainstream politics – including policies of multiculturalism that are perceived as unfairly favouring ethnic minorities – which is exacerbating a serious problem of voter disengagement, a ‘democratic deficit’ that, coupled with this vacuum of White British/English identity, is producing a dangerous groundswell of political support.34

32 33

34

the first decade of the twenty–first century, as cited by Morris, (ed.), Church and State in 21st Century Britain, p. 157. Chris Shanahan, ‘Babel or Pentecost?’, International Journal of Public Theology 1 (2007), p. 374. Robert Ford, ‘Who might vote for the BNP? Survey evidence on the electoral potential of the extreme right in Britain’, in Roger Eatwell and Matthew J. Goodwin (eds), The New Extremism in 21st Century Britain (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 145– 168. Robert Ford, ‘Who might vote for the BNP? Survey evidence on the electoral potential of the extreme right in Britain’, in Roger Eatwell and Matthew J. Goodwin (eds), The New Extremism in 21st Century Britain (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 145– 168.

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The Establishment, Multiculturalism and Social Cohesion So is there anything in the notion of Establishment that can address this? I want briefly to sketch out another local case study, drawn this time from the north-west of England, which illustrates one way in which the heritage and resources of the Church of England’s Established status has been used to articulate a highly successful engagement with the political situation. Here, we can see how local and national combine, and how the ‘social capital’ of the Church in terms of physical, human and reputational resources places it in a unique position to animate a broad-based political intervention. In advance of the June elections to the European Parliament, it was known that the BNP were statistically close to winning some seats, so a broad-based alliance called HOPE not Hate was founded, sponsored by trade unions, anti-fascist groups and the investigative journal Searchlight. Faith groups, including and especially Anglican Church leaders and staff, were also prominent. In the north-west of England, for example, the HOPE not Hate campaigns for the 2009 European and 2010 General Elections were launched at Manchester Cathedral, and on both occasions the resources of the diocesan Board for Ministry and Society lent their support. Nick Lowles, editor of Searchlight, writing in advance of the Euro elections, used the classic model of faith groups as invaluable repositories of social capital, when he said this about the campaign, which continues into the new parliamentary term: Faith groups will be crucial. They have a credibility and authority in many of the communities where local politicians have disengaged. In Greater Manchester alone, the Anglican Church has over 500 full-time employees and a similar number of part-time workers, and the church as a whole has the largest community outreach project in the country. Give these people the arguments and tools to take the message to their congregations and we are really beginning to motor.35

Yet there are still uncomfortable questions about the extreme Right’s equation of ‘Christian’, ‘White’ and ‘British’ or ‘English’ identity. Is 35

Nick Lowles, ‘Editorial’, Searchlight (April 2009), p. 5. See also Roger Eatwell, ‘Responses to the extreme right in Britain’, in Roger Eatwell and Matthew J. Goodwin (eds), The New Extremism in 21st Century Britain (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 224–7 on broad-based campaigns which mobilize Muslim, Christian and Jewish constituencies.

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Elaine Graham Establishment an impediment to a genuinely inclusive, multicultural and pluralist democracy if it is easily hijacked as embodying a retrograde and exclusive national identity, rooted not in the kind of twenty-first-century cosmopolitanism evident in many of our urban centres – such as East London and the north-west of England – but in a nostalgic or xenophobic appeal to Christians as a beleaguered minority ‘swamped’ by immigration? Yet the reality is that hard-pressed indigenous communities seek security in resistance to cultural, ethnic and religious difference; and the challenge for the Christian Churches in their ministry to White communities must be to ensure that they are not made complicit with any depiction of Christianity as a ‘defence’ against the threat of difference and seek ways actively to address such fears. This is the other dimension of the churches’ changing role within a multicultural society, therefore. As Chris Shanahan argues, ‘responses to difference must become central themes within contemporary public theology’.36 Conclusion In a post-secular society, the liberal democratic state cannot afford not to acknowledge communal religious identities, not least in terms of their undoubted importance – positively and negatively – for wider community cohesion and their contribution to local civil society. As Tariq Modood argues, whilst liberal democracy is characterized by respect for the freedom to believe and not to believe, and appropriate mechanisms for the mediation of religious truth-claims into the public sphere must be observed, it is nevertheless true that religion cannot be excluded from exercising a role in the cultivation of good citizens and the good society.37 Yet in turn, faith communities themselves need to develop strong accounts of their own civic responsibilities. As our model of Establishment evolves – as surely it must – it may still be necessary for there to be a degree of political recognition by the State of religion from above, in which the State confers official acknowledgement of the fact of religious pluralism and within that, the institutional rights and responsibilities of particular religious communities. 36 37

Shanahan, ‘Babel or Pentecost?’, p. 365. Tariq Modood, ‘Moderate Secularism, Religion as Identity and Respect for Religion’, p. 6.

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The Establishment, Multiculturalism and Social Cohesion Equally, however – and this is where the strengths of localism under present arrangements of the establishment of the Church of England are still strongly in evidence – there must be recognition of the liberal democratic State on the part of religion from below, where faith communities themselves work actively to foster the practices of active citizenship in their own neighbourhoods and networks. Both forms of recognition are necessary if we are to enjoy in Britain a pluralist public sphere that effectively acknowledges the co-existence of emergent religious pluralisms and claims on the public sphere with the critical and democratic traditions of freedom both to believe and not to believe. Maybe it is too much to hope that each local expression of Church is capable of modelling an alternative embodiment of the Church as itself ethnically diverse, hospitable, tolerant and inclusive. Certainly the Church must resist any turn to a kind of Christian ‘identity politics’ that presents itself as a beleaguered and disenfranchised minority; but more positively, especially in the face of Right-wing extremism, it must also take its share of responsibility for the task of rebuilding a functioning democracy founded on a truly multicultural national identity. Of course, it is not the case that the sole mission of the Church is to underwrite a healthy civil society. But whatever shape it may take, the purpose of Establishment as one dimension of the life of the Church may actually be about that: to provide a kind of institutional continuity or publicly acknowledged affirmation of the theological value of the public, and the significance of good governance and active citizenship as temporal expressions of the Church’s vision of the heavenly city. It’s not just the mobilization of a particular denominational social capital into local civil society, but upholding and promoting the ‘common good’: a public theology that seeks the ‘welfare of the city’ over ‘the interests of the Church’.38 The problem in Britain today is the balance of public recognition between a relatively strong constitutional position at national level of one particular Church, the established Church of England, coupled with a much weaker recognition of the potential of local faith communities in fostering active citizenship in relation to a flourishing civil society and the democratic 38

Duncan Forrester, ‘The Scope of Public Theology’, Studies in Christian Ethics 17:2 (2004), p. 5.

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Elaine Graham process. I would argue that we need the opposite situation to prevail if there is to be a healthy relationship between religious institutions and wider communities, and much stronger incentive for religious bodies to realize their civic responsibilities in relation to the State. One way of thinking this through, for instance, might be to make use of Wesley Carr’s distinction between ‘high’ and ‘earthed’ Establishment.39 Echoing other writers on Establishment, Carr argues that the term is complex and has evolved over time. Carr characterizes two chief models of establishment: ‘high’ and ‘earthed’, in which the former refers to the formal, constitutional or ceremonial relationships between Church and State, whereas the latter is concerned with the everyday, more local, points of contact between Church and people – some of which will be to do with occasional offices, but also through the very kinds of civic engagement to which I have been referring, and which of course are enshrined for the Church of England in the parish system. Carr would argue that the two need to co-exist in dynamic relationship; and while my experience as a member of the Commission for Urban Life and Faith and latterly in thinking further about the role of the urban Church would endorse that, 40 my suggestion would be that perhaps the balance between the two does need some recalibration in favour of the local (and civil) over the national (as in political). However, this is not in order to attenuate, but rather to broaden and enrich, the range of faith-based interventions in the public sphere. And it is at local and neighbourhood level that these characteristics are most in evidence and where faith is most effective in mobilizing effective forms of active citizenship. Establishment keeps religion ‘public’, as many non-Christian commentators have been quick to observe;41 and any retreat into congregationalism or Christian identity politics on the part of the Church of England would fail to do justice 39 40

41

Wesley Carr, ‘A Developing Establishment’, in Theology 102 (1999), pp. 2–10. See E. Graham and S. Lowe, What Makes a Good City? (London, DLT, 2009). I have always argued that this commitment to local neighbourhoods was what gave Faith in the City its power, and lay at the heart of its ability to challenge central government for withdrawing public services from those most in need – a powerful blend of ‘high’ and ‘earthed’ Establishment. See Elaine Graham, ‘Theology in the City: Ten Years after Faith in the City’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Research Institute 78:1 (1996), pp. 179–97. Modood, ‘Moderate Secularism, Religion as Identity and Respect for Religion’.

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The Establishment, Multiculturalism and Social Cohesion to the realities of religion as global and local, diverse and eclectic – but above all, central to the constitution of civil society and conduct of the public domain. Focusing on the relationship between faith, identity and citizenship from above and below, rather than simply on the mechanics of establishment and disestablishment, is perhaps a more productive way of conceptualizing and debating these questions of social cohesion, religious pluralism and multiculturalism in relation to religion and the State. There are, of course, many further questions and problems with this approach. How does the State determine which faith communities – and whose leadership or representation within them – to recognize? What happens when the claims of autonomous religious communities to govern their own affairs clash with the provision of human rights legislation around factors such as gender, sexuality and generation? How do we balance the localism of faith-based social action as effective within local neighbourhoods, with the international affinities of global religions? These are the kinds of issues that must be addressed further as we consider the future of Establishment in a multicultural society.

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A Uniform British Establishment1 IAIN MCLEAN AND SCOT PETERSON

Introduction Although both Scotland and England have established Churches, Scottish traditions of religious freedom have made establishment sustainable there in a way it is not in England. While we do not here object to establishment, per se, we believe that at a minimum British religious establishment is currently incoherent and needs to be repaired. We also believe that resistance to that repair has come from an unwillingness to take Scottish establishment seriously.2 English establishment, as it currently stands, is unstable and inconsistent with modern liberal democratic values. Adopting a Scottish model of establishment would make the Church of England more credible as part of the liberal, democratic British constitution, without abandoning the moral basis upon which that constitution has rested since 1707. At the beginning of the twentieth century, parliament adjusted the constitutional positions of the Church of England and the Church of Scotland. The Church of England Assembly (Powers) Act 1919 (known as the Enabling Act), devolved legislative power to the Church of England National Assembly, although parliament retained a veto.3 At the same time, the Church of Scotland entrenched its autonomy from judicial interference (its General Assembly had always been able to pass legislation). The legislation ‘declared’ that it was legal to restate the constitutional position of the Church in the following terms:4 1 2 3 4

The authors thank Simon Skinner and Janette Wilson for information used in this chapter. Iain McLean and Benjamin Linsley, The Church of England and the State: Reforming Establishment for a Multi-Faith Britain (London: New Politics Network, 2004). 9 & 10 Geo. 5 c. 76. 11 & 12 Geo. 5 c. 29, Schedule, Article IV. It was crucial to the Church that those terms were not ‘enacted’ by parliament.

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A Uniform British Establishment This Church receives from [Jesus Christ], its Divine King and Head, and from Him alone, the right and power subject to no civil authority to legislate, and to adjudicate finally, in all matters of doctrine, worship, government, and discipline in the Church, including the right to determine all questions concerning membership and office in the Church, the constitution and membership of its Courts, and the mode of election of its office-bearers, and to define the boundaries of the spheres of labour of its ministers and other officebearers.

The statute also repealed ‘such statutes and laws in so far as they are inconsistent with the Declaratory Articles’.5 The effect these statutes had on prior legislation, and especially the effect of the Scottish Act, is a subject for legal debate, which we discuss briefly below.6 History shows, however, that while the Church of Scotland Act was principally a compromise negotiated between sub-groups in two, merging Churches,7 the Enabling Act was the product of negotiations between the Church and the government,8 and its proponents would have preferred something much closer to the status of the Church of Scotland.9 In response to suggestions that the Scottish solution was viable for the Church of England, the Rt Rev. Hensley Henson, Bishop of Durham, wrote in 1930, ‘The principal factor in [the Church of Scotland’s] successful achievement of “autonomy” in “establishment” is the political insignificance of Scotland. De Minimis non curat Parliamentum. Who cares what is done or said in the Scottish Churches?’10 Henson was, at the time, in the process of 5 6 7 8

9

10

Ibid., section 1. Francis Lyall, Of Presbyters and Kings: Church and State in the Law of Scotland (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1980). Douglas M. Murray, Rebuilding the Kirk: Presbyterian Reunion in Scotland, 1909–1929 (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 2000). David M. Thompson, ‘The Politics of the Enabling Act’, in Church, Society and Politics, ed. D. Baker, Studies in Church History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Favourable comparisons of the autonomy of the Church of Scotland to that of the Church of England date from at least the 1870s. G. I. T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain 1869 to 1921 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 84. Journals, vol. 41 (7 September 1930) quoted in Matthew Grimley, Citizenship, Community, and the Church of England: Liberal Anglican Theories of the State between the Wars, Oxford Historical Monographs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), p. 153.

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Iain McLean and Scot Peterson turning his coat from uncompromising support for the establishment to its vehement criticism.11 His changes of position make it difficult to give his explanation for either position much credibility. This problem is an instance of a more general one reflected in an exchange between John Stuart Blackie, the nineteenth-century Scottish classicist who had attacked Oxford pronunciation rules as ‘case-hardened in ignorance, prejudice and pedantry’ and who said to Benjamin Jowett, ‘I hope you in Oxford don’t think we hate you’, to which Jowett responded, ‘We don’t think about you.’12 It is our aim here to initiate some thought about Scotland. Commissions on Church and State The Scottish model has not been uniformly dismissed in the English Church. In the early twentieth century many Church leaders focused on the advantages that the Church of Scotland enjoyed.13 This admiration, carefully qualified, is included in the reports of the Archbishops’ Commissions on Church and State published in 1916, 1935 and 1952, referred to by the names of their respective chairs: the Selborne Report, the Cecil Report and the Moberly Report.14 The Selborne Report of 1916 says, 11

12

13

14

Compare Herbert Hensley Henson, The Church of England, English Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939); Herbert Hensley Henson, The Real Aspect of Disestablishment, an Open Letter to Samuel Smith, in Reply to ‘the Religious Aspect of Disestablishment’ (London: 1895). Christopher Harvie, Scotland and Nationalism: Scottish Society and Politics, 1707 to the Present, 4th edn (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 81–2. See also E. Kerr Borthwick, ‘Blackie, John Stuart (1809–1895)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online edn, October 2009. In his chapter in this volume, Matthew Grimley argues that there was ‘little enthusiasm’ for a Scottish solution to the problem of religious establishment in the early twentieth century. Any difference between his point and ours is one of degree, not kind. The Scottish alternative was carefully considered by all three commissions discussed in this section, even though the solution was not adopted at the time. Church of England Archbishops’ Commission on Church and State, Church and State: Being the Report of a Commission Appointed by the Church Assembly in June 1949 (London: Church Information Board of the Church Assembly, 1952); Church of England Archbishops’ Commission on the relations between Church and State, Church & State: Report of the Archbishops’ Commission on the Relations between Church and State 1935, 2 vols (London: The Press & Publications Board of the Church Assembly, 1935); Church of England Archbishops’ Committee on Church and State, The

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A Uniform British Establishment [The Church of Scotland] has been able for more than 200 years to maintain itself in its position of free establishment without danger to, and indeed with great benefit to, the State. This in itself constitutes a refutation of the view that establishment and liberty are incompatible, or that establishment is in principle an unsound foundation for any religious institution.15

The report goes on to quote, at length, an early draft of the Declaratory Articles quoted above, and it contains a lengthy appendix describing the history, institutions and constitutional status of the Scottish Church. The Historical Introduction in the Cecil Report identifies a judicial case originating in Scotland as trigger for the movement for greater autonomy in the English Church. General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland v. Overtoun16 was a case involving non-established churches in Scotland, but the report holds, ‘[A]fter 1904, when the case was decided, “the Scottish Solution” was being proclaimed with more and more insistence in influential quarters as in principle the English solution also of the problems with which the Church of England in its relations with the State was plainly confronted.’17 Following an extended discussion of the Scottish solution, the Cecil Report concludes, however, ‘We do not believe that the Scottish settlement could be an exact model for what should be done in England.’18 The papers of the Cecil Commission reflect a more pro-Scottish perspective than the report. William Temple, then Archbishop of York and future Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote that the Scottish solution was ‘the ideal to be aimed at’.19 E. F. Jacob, professor of Medieval History at the University of Manchester, wrote, ‘If we want spiritual autonomy, let us go all out for the Scottish plan, and let there be a hullabeloo [sic], if there is to be one ... [O]ur advocacy, as the only tolerable measure, [should be] of a

15 16 17

18 19

Archbishops’ Committee on Church and State: Report with Appendices (London: SPCK, 1916). Church of England Archbishops’ Committee on Church and State, The Archbishops’ Committee on Church and State: Report with Appendices, p. 35. [1904] A.C. 516. Church of England Archbishops’ Commission on the relations between Church and State, Church & State: Report of the Archbishops’ Commission on the Relations between Church and State 1935, p. 23. Ibid., p. 55. Papers of Lord Cecil of Chelwood, British Library, Add. 51155:71.

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Iain McLean and Scot Peterson scheme on the lines of that which is working with so much success in Scotland.’20 The Moberly Report expressed the same understanding: ‘we find it hard to believe that an autonomy which is right for the Church of Scotland is in principle wrong for the Church of England. It would seem unnatural for an English Churchman to set less store by the rights and spiritual authority of the Church than did the Scots.’21 But the report continues, ‘Some of us hold that to gain a similar status should be the ultimate goal of the Church’s longterm policy. But we are all agreed … that as a policy for the immediate, or any near, future, this is impracticable owing to the great dissimilarity in the historic conditions of England and Scotland.’ What kept all of these commissions from pursuing what they all seem to acknowledge – at least implicitly – as the first-best, as opposed to the secondbest, solution? The Moberly Commission identifies five factors, which it claims militate against change. First, the Church of Scotland includes a greater proportion of Scottish Christians than does the Church of England; second, the Church of Scotland is less divided by issues of doctrine and ritualism; third, the division between clergy and laity is less well defined in Scotland than in England; fourth, the General Assembly has more prestige and public confidence than its English equivalent; and fifth, because the Articles Declaratory were a restatement of the existing state of affairs rather than an innovation in Scottish ecclesiology: the ‘English are a precedentloving people, more deeply moved by precedent than by logic’.22 We believe that most of these arguments are no longer persuasive (if they ever were). First, the smaller the proportion of Christians that belong to an

20 21

22

Ibid., 51155:78. Church of England Archbishops’ Commission on Church and State, Church and State: Being the Report of a Commission Appointed by the Church Assembly in June 1949, p. 27. The Chadwick Commission, the last twentieth-century report on Church and State, virtually ignored the Church of Scotland, except that it did include the standard appendix explaining that the Church of Scotland was different. Church of England Archbishops’ Commission, Church and State (London: Church Information Office, 1970). Church of England Archbishops’ Commission on Church and State, Church and State: Being the Report of a Commission Appointed by the Church Assembly in June 1949, p. 28.

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A Uniform British Establishment established Church, the less legitimacy it can claim as a state-sponsored institution; in other words: the commission had it backward. Second, the divisions in the Church of Scotland, as we will show below, have depended on exactly the issue that was addressed – the relationship between Church and State – and no rearticulation of the English establishment need include a collective decision on the most divisive issues that confront the English Church, whether they be doctrine and ritual, as they were in 1952, or women clergy and bishops or the status of gay men and lesbians, as they are today. The third point about clergy is only relevant with respect to the Lords Spiritual, which we discuss in detail below; the fourth point no longer holds, as the Church of England Synod now has enough history that its prestige and public confidence are as high as they ever will be. And it is no less possible for the Church of England to arrive at a statement of what it does believe, than it was for two denominations with opposing views on establishment to do so in the early part of the last century, although such a statement is not a prerequisite for our proposal. The Scottish solution is relevant to English establishment and has been viewed favourably by Church leaders in the past. Most reasons given for not adopting it either do not apply now or never have. But something must have kept the English Church from moving in the Scottish direction. We believe that the historical and institutional differences between the English and Scottish Churches make a difference, but the difference is not so great that a Scottish solution remains inappropriate for England. Spiritual Independence Scotland’s spiritual independence was hard-won over more than two hundred years. The original, Reformation-era conception of Church–State relations there was best expressed by Andrew Melvill, the real founder of the Church of Scotland, who famously tugged on James VI and I’s sleeve, called him God’s sillie vassal,23 and told him, [T]hair is twa [two] Kings and twa Kingdomes in Scotland. Thair is Chryst Jesus the King, and his kingdome the Kirk [Church], whase [whose] subject

23

‘Sillie’: weak, lowly, deserving of compassion. Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edn, 1989) (online edition accessed 4 March 2010).

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Iain McLean and Scot Peterson King James the Saxt [Sixth] is, and of whase kingdome nocht [not] a king, nor a lord, nor a heid [head], bot a member!24

At the time of the union of the two parliaments of Scotland and England in 1707, Scotland’s ratification of the treaty was conditional upon the Church of Scotland remaining ‘the … true Protestant Religion and the Worship, Discipline and Government of this Church [continuing] without any Alteration to the People of this Land in all succeeding Generations’.25 The new parliament of Great Britain breached this obligation in 1711–12 when it passed both the Scottish Episcopalians Act 1711, which ended the presbyterian monopoly, and the Church Patronage (Scotland) Act, 1712, which reintroduced lay patronage, abolished there in 1690.26 Divisions resulted, including eventually the Disruption of 1843, when over one-third of the clergy and between one-third and one-half of the Church’s members seceded to form the Free Church of Scotland.27 Like many other controversies about British religious establishment, the Scottish Episcopalians Act was a West Lothian Question:28 it was opposed by Scots MPs 14–13 but passed by the House of Commons.29 The Disruption was 24 25

26 27 28

29

James Melvill, The Autobiography and Diary of James Melvill, with a Continuation of the Diary, ed. R. Pitcairn (Edinburgh: Wodrow Society, 1842), 296. Act ratifying and approving the treaty of union of the two kingdoms of Scotland and England, Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, xi 406, c. 7 (Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707, available online at http://www.rps.ac.uk/, at 1706/10/257; accessed 12 July 2010). 10 Ann. c. 10 and c. 21. Related legislation also forced the Scottish Courts to recess on Christmas Day. Stewart J. Brown, The National Churches of England, Ireland, and Scotland, 1801–46 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 142. A West Lothian (or English) Question is one where the proposed legislation affects only one nation of the United Kingdom, but the MPs from that nation are outvoted by other MPs. Other instances include the Prayer Book controversy, 1927–8 and financial legislation concerning the Church in Wales. John G. Maiden, National Religion and the Prayer Book Controversy, 1927–1928 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009); Scot Peterson and Iain McLean, ‘Of Wheat, the Church in Wales and the West Lothian Question’, The Welsh History Review/Cylchgrawn Hanes Cymru 23, no. 3 (2007) pp. 151–74. Division list prepared for the historian William Wodrow, Wodrow Papers, National Library of Scotland, Wodrow Lett. Qu. VI:65.

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A Uniform British Establishment brought about by, among other things, the Home Secretary Sir James Graham’s failure to understand principled Scottish grievances against patronage.30 Reunion negotiations, of the kind toward which the 1921 Act was directed, took place periodically in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when there were Liberal, anti-establishment majorities in the House of Commons. The last series of discussions began in 1907 and continued until reunion took place in 1929. Thus, they had a dual basis: first, resistance of disestablishment and, second, reunion with the largest anti-establishment denomination of Scottish presbyterians, namely the United Presbyterians, who formed a large component of the United Free Church of Scotland after 1900.31 They could also be contextualized in the continuing struggle for Scottish religious freedom and given historical roots in the Reformation and the Disruption. No similar rhetoric is available for the Church of England, which must connect claims about legitimacy or change to its place in the English constitution. While the Church of England has endured crises, they have (at least since 1660) been internal to the Church. Until 1911 the Conservative majority in the House of Lords (including twenty-six bishops) and its absolute veto made any political threat of disestablishment what economists call ‘cheap talk’ (a statement with little or no cost to the speaker and little or no potential effect on any political outcome: the opposite of a ‘credible threat’ or a ‘credible commitment’).32 After that, a combination of skilful constitutional engineering (including the Enabling Act) and the careful management of dangerous questions like tithe kept disestablishment off the political agenda. The only exception to this general rule is the Prayer Book Crisis, and even that was as much a product of internal divisions in the

30

31 32

James Graham, Life and Letters of Sir James Graham, 1792–1861, ed. Charles Stuart Parker (London: John Murray, 1907), vol. 1, pp. 370–96. We are grateful to Simon Skinner for this reference. John H. S. Burleigh, A Church History of Scotland (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 399. See Joseph Farrell and Matthew Rabin, ‘Cheap Talk’, The Journal of Economic Perspectives 10, no. 3 (1996) p. 103.

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Iain McLean and Scot Peterson Church as it was of external anti-Roman Catholicism (and antiestablishmentarianism).33 Historically, the security of the Church of England’s established status has depended upon the absence of credible external threats. It was forced to promote the Enabling Act in order to be able to avoid parliamentary interference and to make some adaptation of its institutional structure possible. But externally imposed crises and threats have not dogged it as they have done the other national Churches in Ireland, Wales and Scotland. The national Churches in Ireland and Wales commanded the loyalty of smaller proportions of the population (particularly the Christian population) than those in either England or Scotland, and disestablishment was a natural, predictable phenomenon there. The Need for Change Nevertheless, clouds are on the horizon. At present a number of issues confront the Church of England, which may create a strong enough incentive for its members, and particularly its bishops, to consider the wisdom of the establishment. These include the role of women clergy (especially the question of women bishops), the status of gay men and lesbians and the impact of equality legislation on the Church.34 To flesh out this point, we will use the last of these issues as a case study to show what may go wrong. In a speech made in January 2010 opposing a refined definition of religious employment, which in turn defined the scope of an exemption from equality legislation for religious organizations, John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, argued: Noble Lords may believe that Roman Catholics should allow priests to be married; they may think that the Church of England should hurry up and allow women to become bishops … But if religious freedom means anything, it must 33

34

Maiden, National Religion and the Prayer Book Controversy, 1927–1928. On the latter point, see for example the speech of the Rev. James Barr (Labour, Motherwell) at HC Parl. Debs (series 5) vol. 218 col. 1270 (14 June 1928). Judith Maltby’s chapter in this volume offers other instances of current parliamentary intervention in Church affairs, particularly in the ordination of women priests and the consecration of women bishops.

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A Uniform British Establishment mean that those are matters for the churches and other religious organizations to determine in accordance with their own convictions.35

In the same debate, Michael Scott-Joynt, the Bishop of Winchester, objected that the introduction of a proportionality requirement as the basis for the exemption would unacceptably ‘require the courts to inquire into the precise nature of the particular religious doctrines in order to discover what is the minimum necessary to comply with them’.36 He continued, ‘I have a lay assistant, not a chaplain, who represents me in a whole range of ways … Is it not entirely reasonable that he should be a Christian of good standing whose life tallies with his Christian profession … not someone living in some quite other way so as to make his representation impossible and to undermine my own activity?’37 Respecting an amendment earlier that same day, however, when the Labour Peer Lord Alli proposed on behalf of three religious denominations that they be allowed to conduct civil partnership ceremonies on their premises, the Bishop of Winchester had argued against exactly the religious freedom he and the Archbishop of York relied on later. He said, [The amendment would] ‘blur the characteristics of the civil partnership as distinct from marriage ... [and presented] the likelihood of a steady and continuing pressure on, if not a forcing of, the churches, the Church of England among them, to compromise on our convictions that marriage has a character that is distinct from that of a civil partnership. Churches of all sorts really should not reduce or fudge, let alone deny, that distinction.38

The problem is that the Unitarians, Liberal Jews and Quakers are just as entitled to reduce, fudge or even deny that distinction as a matter of freedom of religion as the Church of England is to try to maintain it. Lord Alli’s amendment was withdrawn but was eventually reintroduced in a modified form, in which it was approved by the House of Lords.39 The earlier 35 36 37 38 39

HL Parl. Debs (series 6) vol. 716 col. 1217 (25 January 2010). Ibid. at col. 1227. Ibid. at col. 1228. Ibid. at col. 1202 (emphasis supplied). Ibid. at vol. 718 col. 1425–41 (2 March 2010). The amendment passed 95–21, despite the fact that it was not supported by either front bench. The Bishop of Bradford,

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Iain McLean and Scot Peterson amendment, defining the scope of religious exemption, had passed in a government defeat by a vote of 177–172, with eight bishops voting in favour. Had the bishops not voted, the government proposals would have carried unamended. The anomaly here should be apparent. Representatives of a religious denomination that is established in only one of four of the nations that make up the United Kingdom sit ex officio in the upper house of the legislature, and their votes can be decisive on legislation affecting their Church. Concomitantly, both houses of that legislature, made up of representatives of all four nations and of all faiths and none, must debate and vote on internal policies affecting only that Church. Neither of these two facts is true of any other nation in the world, as far as we are aware. The Wakeham Commission, which reported on reform of the House of Lords in 2000, recommended solving this problem by replacing the Lords Spiritual, as the episcopal legislators are known, with at least five non-Christian representatives, along with five Christian representatives from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and 21 representatives of Christian denominations in England, of whom sixteen should be allocated to the Church of England.40 The proposed solution is still unworkable, however. For example, consistent with its position on the proper relationship between Church and State, the Church of Scotland’s evidence to the commission referred to the ‘tension’ which arises from the fact that [W]hile the Church of Scotland is a National Church, whose life is, and has been for centuries, bound up with the life of the nation, it is also a Church

40

David James, opposed the amendment; Martin Wharton, the Bishop of Newcastle, supported it, as did the retired Bishop of Oxford, Lord Harries of Pentregarth. See also HL Parl. Debs (series 6) vol. 718 col. 866 (23 March 2010), where further minor amendments were made on Third Reading, where it passed unopposed. It now forms s.202 of the Equality Act 2010. The official explanation of its effect is in the notes on sections at: http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2010/en/ukpgaen_20100015_en.pdf (p. 134, accessed 12 November 2010). Royal Commission on the Reform of the House of Lords, A House for the Future (London: HMSO, 2000) (Cm 4534).

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A Uniform British Establishment which asserts its spiritual independence of the State, an independence which, moreover, the State recognises and guarantees by statute.41

Accordingly, the Scottish Church resisted the suggestion that it might be formally represented in the legislature. The objection to clerical representation in the legislature is a long-standing one. In 1706 Scottish opponents of the union had petitioned their parliament, ‘[I]t is contrary to our known principles and covenants that any churchmen should bear civil offices, or have power in the Commonwealth.’42 Many other denominations lack the formal structure that would make it possible for them to select their own representatives, and nearly all oppose continued ex officio religious representation in the Lords. When the Wakeham Commission solicited evidence, thirty-one responses addressed religious representation.43 Of those thirty-one, twelve expressed no opinion, sixteen opposed continued religious representation, and only three (the Church of England, the Episcopal Church of Scotland and the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks) supported it. Finally, although the commission recommended that upper-house membership from England be based on the number of baptized members of each denomination, history shows how badly this can go wrong. In 1906, in connection with efforts to disestablish the Church of England in Wales and Monmouthshire, Royal Commissioners attempted to assess the ‘membership’ of various Welsh denominations in order to determine whether the Church of England should be disestablished there. They spent four years producing a report which, in the end, was supported without reservation by only the chair and one other member out of a total of nine, based in large part on disagreements about how to count members.44 The membership of religious organizations is too

41

42 43 44

Written Evidence submitted to the Royal Commission on the Reform of the House of Lords by the Rev. Finlay Macdonald, MA BD PhD, General Secretary of the Church of Scotland, para. 7.2 (CD-Rom, accompanying Cm 4534). D. Szechi, George Lockhart of Carnwath, 1681–1731: A Study in Jacobitism (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002), p. 154. McLean and Linsley, The Church of England and the State: Reforming Establishment for a Multi-Faith Britain, pp. 13–14. Report of the Royal Commission on the Church of England and Other Religious Bodies in Wales and Monmouthshire, P.P. 1910 xiv p. 1.

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Iain McLean and Scot Peterson fluid and indeterminate to provide a sound basis for social policy, much less for determining who should make that policy. By assuming a representative function with respect to religion that it has failed to fulfil in the House of Lords, at least with respect to Unitarians, Liberal Jews and Quakers, the Church of England has forced itself to take incoherent political positions supporting and opposing ‘religious freedom’, depending on the issue involved. By allowing the government to select its bishops and parliament to veto its legislation, it presents an incoherent face to the nation, as we will discuss below. We believe that the solution to this problem is to eliminate what might be called the efficient parts of establishment, while allowing the other, dignified, parts to remain. In this way, England, and more broadly Britain, can retain its existing commitment to religion but can also move on to a more coherent level of political and religious autonomy. The Price of Change In his recent book on the future of religious establishment, Robert Morris argued that repeal of the Enabling Act is too complicated to achieve without outright disestablishment.45 Repeal of the Enabling Act, by itself, would return the Church of England to its position before 1919, when all Church legislation had to be approved by parliament; instead, according to Morris, repeal would have to be accompanied by a complex legislative process both within and outside the Church of England. However, the legislative issues involved in Welsh disestablishment (as opposed to disendowment) were relatively simple. A single section, with four subsections, converted ecclesiastical law in Wales from statute to a contract.46 What had formerly been the statutory framework for the Church became an agreement amongst its members that the Church’s internal decision-making bodies could modify. The difficulty, of course, is what legislation would be repealed. The Church in Wales received, in section 3(4) of the Welsh Church Act, the power ‘of altering and modifying [ecclesiastical law] so far as it is embodied 45 46

Robert Morris (ed.), Church and State in 21st Century Britain: The Future of Church Establishment (London: Palgrave, 2009), pp. 228–9. Welsh Church Act, 4 & 5 Geo. 5 c. 91 at section 3. The Irish Church Act, 1869, 32 & 33 Vict. c. 42, contains a similar provision at section 20.

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A Uniform British Establishment in the Church Discipline Act, 1840, the Public Worship Regulation Act, 1874, the Clergy Discipline Act, 1892, or the Ecclesiastical Dilapidations Acts, 1871 and 1872, or any other Act of Parliament’ (emphasis added). Similarly the Church of Scotland Act contains a blanket repeal of ‘statutes and laws in so far as they are inconsistent with the Declaratory Articles’ (which it is within the power of the General Assembly to amend).47 In both of these cases, the enabling bills left the status quo, including any remnants of Reformation-era legislation, in place but granted the Church broad powers to modify it as necessary or desirable in the future. We propose that a relatively simple bill could be proposed, which would (1) remove the bishops from the House of Lords; (2) abolish lay patronage, as was done in Ireland in 1869, in Scotland in 1874 and in Wales in 1920, authorizing the Church to select its own clergy and dignitaries as its provinces do in other nations of the United Kingdom and throughout the world; (3) repeal the Enabling Act and authorize the Church of England to pass measures without reference to parliament, so long as those measures did not affect the status of the crown as its Supreme Governor or the other dignified parts of the establishment (to be determined); and (4) abolish the nineteenth-century offices of Church Estates Commissioners, replacing them with trustees responsible for all assets of the Church and placing oversight entirely in the hands of the Charity Commission. These changes would put the Church of England on a virtually identical footing to the Church of Scotland, so that both would be spiritually independent and autonomous, while retaining their place in the constitution of the United Kingdom. The reason that these changes have not been made before now is that there has been little incentive to do so. Unlike the Church of Scotland, the Church of England has not been the subject of repeated, unwanted interference from the civil power. Although occasional incursions, like the Prayer Book Crisis, have sometimes made it difficult for the English Church to carry out its mission, the Church of Scotland and other Scottish churches have more frequently suffered from government intervention and with more serious consequences: first, following the Treaty of Union, whose abrogation caused internal strife, and then stemming from the judicial decisions that led to the Disruption in 1843; and, finally, following General Assembly of the Free 47

Church of Scotland Act, note 4 above, at section 1.

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Iain McLean and Scot Peterson Church of Scotland v. Lord Overtoun. To reduce the potential for such interference and to remain consistent with the two-kingdoms theology articulated by Melvill, the Church of Scotland has explicitly distanced itself from the machinery of government. The potential for such interference continues to exist in England. In response to a question about women bishops in the House of Commons, the Second Church Estates Commissioner, Tony Baldry (Conservative, North Oxfordshire), recently responded, ‘[I]t is … very important that the Church hears the voices of this House about how we see those matters, because ultimately the issue will have to come back to this House.’48 In exactly this same context, the consecration of women bishops, MP Chris Bryant (Labour, Rhondda) urged fast action by the Church (‘I ask the hon. Gentleman to be a little more impatient about the issue of women bishops …’) but at the same time questioned why legislation on the subject had to come to the House of Commons: ‘Surely the Church of England should be freed from the shackles of bringing its legislation here …’49 The Archbishop of York may believe that the speed with which the Church of England consecrates bishops is a matter for the Church alone; Bryant, a former member of the clergy of the Church of England, feels comfortable making it the subject of parliamentary comment and proposes that the system be changed. The institutional relationship between the Church of England and parliament increases the likelihood that people will behave strategically. Rather than confining decisions to their proper arena, where those most affected and most interested can make policy, the legislature retains a veto, and any losing party can appeal to the legislature to override legitimate decisions made within the Church. The cost of this to the Church is that its internal decision procedures lack legitimacy, because decisions are made anticipating the potential for a legislative veto.50 If policy is not made in the Church of England, neither its deliberative assemblies nor its leaders can take ultimate responsibility for those policies. Praise and blame for political 48 49 50

Parl. Debs (series 6) vol. 512 col. 159 (22 June 2010). Parl. Debs (series 6) vol. 514 col. 865 (27 July 2010). Bryant also pointed out that the House of Commons would not be satisfied if women were ‘second-class’ bishops. Judith Maltby’s discussion of the Priests (Ordination of Women) Measure 1993 in this volume provides vivid evidence of this anticipatory process.

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A Uniform British Establishment decisions can be externalized both ways, with Members of Parliament taking credit for decisions of the Church they agree with and threatening to veto policies they do not; likewise, Church leaders can justify any failure to bring about change based upon the potential for a parliamentary veto, either because the change goes too far or because it does not go far enough. The Church of Scotland does not suffer under such a disability, and adoption of the Scottish model in the Church of England would improve both its effective functioning and its institutional credibility. Financial autonomy, which Scotland has enjoyed since the 1920s and 1930s,51 is also important. In 1936 parliament abolished tithes in England, substituting for the Church’s income a subvention of £57.7 million in government securities (today’s equivalent would be £2.5 billion).52 Episodes of mismanagement, including most infamously those of the late 1980s and early 1990s, have limited the growth of these assets.53 In 1953 Sir Malcolm Trustram Eve, Third Church Estates Commissioner, confided in Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, that he was ‘a little alarmed’, because the Church Commissioners were the second-largest holders of investments in the country, exceeded only by The Prudential, and that they were the biggest single landholder.54 Recently, however, the commissioners have had to obtain waivers from parliament, based upon the fact that their income was inadequate to meet their pension obligations, and they had to resort to spending capital. In 2009 the Church Commissioners paid out £187.3 million on all of its programmes, of which £111 million was paid in clergy pensions, and £81 million of that amount was paid from capital rather than income, based on these waivers.55 We contend that the principal problem

51 52 53

54 55

Church of Scotland (Property and Endowments) Act, 1925, 15 & 16 Geo. 5 c. 33; Church of Scotland (Property and Endowments) Act, 1933, 23 & 24 Geo. 5 c. 44. Tithe Act, 1936, 26 Geo. 5 and 1 Edw. 8 c. 43. See Andrew Chandler, The Church of England in the Twentieth Century: The Church Commissioners and the Politics of Reform, 1948–1998 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), chapters 13–15. Memorandum by Geoffrey Fisher dated 12 February 1953, Fisher Papers, Lambeth Palace Library, 121:186. Church Commissioners for England Financial Statements 2009, available online at http://www.cofe.anglican.org/about/churchcommissioners/annualreport/2009repo rt.pdf (accessed 20 July 2010).

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Iain McLean and Scot Peterson here is not incompetent management (although that may have been present too), but the absence of a standard regulatory format of the kind shared by all other charities in England. The appearance of independence, manifest in the Church Estates Commissioners, is idiosyncratic and inefficient. More standardized regulation would, we believe, have prevented the financial catastrophes and poor business decisions that have impoverished the Church. The Church of Scotland has never been treated differently from other religious organizations there, for purposes of financial regulation, and it has not suffered from the kind of misfortune that has weakened the Church of England. Conclusion Religious establishment may be a good thing, but it can be a bad one when the institutional relationships are outdated and operate as constraints on government, through outdated, unfair representative functions in the legislature, and on the Church, by inhibiting legitimate change and growth (or promoting change and growth of a perverse kind). The Church of Scotland, for historical reasons, has more actively sought spiritual independence from the State than has the Church of England. Early in the last century English Church leaders looked with envy at their neighbours across the border but because of political reality had to make do with a second-best option. Political reality has changed, and none of the reasons for limiting the freedom of the Church of England is now persuasive. A Scottish model is a viable one for English establishment, and provided that its bishops are willing to make material sacrifices, through a loss of political power and of some measure of prestige, and its leaders are willing to play by internal rules, rather than by threatening recourse to the legislature, then the advantages of this proposed change outweigh any disadvantages. We believe that the best avenue for the future of establishment is one that is modelled on the relationship between the Church of Scotland and the State.

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Methodism and Establishment DAVID CARTER

Methodism has never had a single, universally agreed stance on the question of the establishment of religion, either generally or in specific reference to the Church of England. A diversity of approach is inherent in the ambiguities of Methodist history. John Wesley was deeply critical of many aspects of the contemporary Church of England, yet determined, despite his own breaches of its rules, to remain within it, living and dying, as he put it, a member of the Church of England. Despite his severe criticism of its empirical deficiencies, he continued to venerate it as ‘the most scriptural national church in the world’.1 Certainly, he hoped that his movement would bring new life to the established Church. He defined his preachers as ‘extraordinary ministers, designed to provoke the ordinary ministers of the Church to jealousy’. His problem was that they provoked not to emulation in many cases but to enmity and his hopes for revival within the Established Church, with the movement as catalyst, were dashed. Methodism after Wesley In many respects, Wesleyan Methodism remained a movement even after the date of 1795, traditionally given as the date of separation.2 Its societary nature explains the behaviour of many of its members in continuing to frequent the services of the Established Church for the next couple of generations. The aim was to co-operate both with members of ‘the old church’ and with evangelical dissenters in evangelizing the country. Wesleyan Methodism stressed the virtues of its own missionary 1 2

Cited in J. M. Turner, Conflict and Reconciliation–Studies in Methodism and Ecumenism in England, 1740–1982 (London: Epworth, 1985), p.13. Due to the decision of the Conference in that year to allow the celebration of the sacraments by the travelling preachers where the majority of trustees and leaders agreed. This clearly was a breach of Anglican discipline as all but a handful of the preachers were not ordained Anglican priests.

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David Carter connexionalism but did not regard them as in any way ecclesiologically normative for others. It understood that, empirically, the Establishment, with a presence in every parish, had resources that neither it nor the other churches could match, though they could certainly considerably complement them. In the first generation after 1795, the Wesleyans had two additional negative reasons for failing to challenge the Establishment. The first was that Methodism was widely seen, during the revolutionary and Napoleonic period, as socially subversive. In 1811 Lord Sidmouth proposed a bill that would have greatly curtailed the activity of all lay preachers from outside of the Establishment. After considerable public opposition, in which the Wesleyans joined, the bill was withdrawn.3 Their success in defeating the bill did not however change the attitude of the Wesleyan leadership to the Establishment or its own missionary priorities. They continued to keep their heads down, anxious not to provoke any reaction that might limit their freedom to evangelize. The Conference had already established the ‘no politics’ rule out of loyalty to Wesley’s own instruction to the preachers that they had ‘nothing to do but save souls’. They allowed just one exception to this rule. Ministers and members alike could support the anti-slavery movement, protesting against what Wesley himself had regarded as the greatest villainy in human history.4 Even after the 1832 Reform Bill, when the traditional evangelical dissenters began to demand the abolition of such privileges as church rates and university tests, some even demanding disestablishment as such, the Wesleyan leaders continued to support the concept of Establishment. They denied that they were dissenters and accepted that they had broken from the Establishment on grounds of missionary necessity but they did not contest the legitimacy either of Establishment per se or of the episcopal and liturgical form that it took in the Church of England. They regarded the Established Church as playing an indispensable role in the life of the country. In 1834, Thomas Jackson, one of the most eminent preachers, wrote ‘No attacks on the Church as a national establishment have ever been countenanced by us … the country cannot do without an establishment, 3 4

Turner, Conflict and Reconciliation, pp. 83–4, 123–6. Ibid., pp. 98–100.

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Methodism and Establishment either in resisting Popery, Socinianism and infidelity or in the maintenance of Christian godliness and public virtue.’ Such sentiments were often linked with a very real appreciation of aspects of the life of the Church of England. In 1842, Jackson added: ‘For the Church as a whole and a Protestant establishment, I have long entertained a just and sincere respect. Some of the best hours of my life have been spent in the use of her sublime and evangelical liturgy.’5 The Wesleyans naturally did not deny the value of the voluntary efforts of the other churches but they saw them as intended to complement the work of the Established Church. This was the position of most of the leading preachers. It was not, however, the position of all the Wesleyan laity, let alone that of the other Methodist connexions that developed from 1797 onwards. The kindly sentiments of their ministers did not always find an echo in the faithful, particularly the local preachers who often faced the disdain and informal persecution of squire and parson alike. A substantial proportion of the Wesleyan laity became increasingly unhappy with the official stance and disappointed that their leaders would not join the old dissenters in calling for disestablishment.6 From 1797, alternative Methodist connexions developed both in reaction to the ministerial domination of the old Connexion and a feeling that it was becoming too respectable and losing its evangelistic élan. One group, consisting of the Methodist New Connexion, the Protestant Methodists, the Wesleyan Association and the Free Methodists, stemmed from schisms from the parent body. They all adopted polities that gave far more autonomy to local chapels and circuits and a much greater role in governance to the laity.7 A second group of evangelistic connexions arose independently, claiming to restore the fervour and practices of the original Methodists, which they regarded as over-diluted in the Wesleyan connexion. The two most prominent bodies concerned were the Primitive Methodists and the Bible Christians. They both suffered a particular degree of resistance to their efforts from the clergy and associated landowners and magistrates. 5 6 7

Cited in ibid., pp. 161–2. M. Selen, The Oxford Movement and Methodism. A Study in Religious Conflict (Lund: Lund University Press, 1992), p. 240. For a good account of these schisms, see J. Kent, Jabez Bunting, The Last Wesleyan (London: Epworth, 1955).

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David Carter Understandably, they took a much less tolerant view of the Establishment than the leading Wesleyan preachers. Nevertheless, they did not necessarily act on such feelings. They also had the ‘no politics’ rule and did not until much later in the century take any significant part in the disestablishment campaign launched by the Liberation Society.8 Things were, however, to change considerably by the 1840s, even among the Wesleyans. Two key factors were involved: the development of the Oxford Movement and the increasing enfranchisement of the male population which encouraged stronger resistance to a society and official Church still dominated by the upper classes. The Oxford Movement was particularly significant in cooling Wesleyan enthusiasm for the Establishment. In 1868, Jackson warned that an Establishment that could not control the growth of popery and imperilled its own historic Protestantism could no longer rely on Wesleyan support.9 Nevertheless, relatively few Wesleyans were strongly involved in campaigns for disestablishment and, by complete contrast, a few even maintained the legitimacy of church rates right up to their abolition in 1868. The first Wesleyan layman ever to be ennobled, Lord Wolverhampton, opposed disestablishment and continued to value the liturgical heritage of the Church of England.10 One key point to note, particularly important between 1870 and 1914, was the emergence of the related question of what one might call concurrent 8 9

10

For the no politics rule in the non-Wesleyan churches, see J. Kent, The Age of Disunity (London: Epworth, 1966), pp. 129–131. T. Jackson, Recollections of My Own Life and Times (London: Wesleyan Conference Office, 1874), pp. 448–46, where he comments on the rise of popery and scepticism as threatening the friendly regard in which Wesleyans had previously held the Church of England. Note esp. p. 451: ‘my respect for the Church of England in its legal, orthodox and Protestant character was unalterable; but if the evils complained of were allowed to spread unchecked … it would prove impossible to preserve a friendly relation between the Church and John Wesley’s sons in the gospel’. Sir Henry Fowler (1830–1911), a son of the manse, a Liberal MP from 1880 and in the Cabinet from 1892. For the points above, see the biography by his daughter, Edith (Mrs R. Hamilton), The Life of Lord Wolverhampton (London: Hutchinson, 1912), pp. 134, 564. Like Shrewsbury, he regarded Methodism as occupying the middle ground between the Church of England and Dissent and called for it to be ‘the friend of all and the enemy of none’ (ibid., p. 536).

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Methodism and Establishment elementary educational establishment. This had its origins in 1833 with the Whig government’s decision to offer grants towards the voluntary schools maintained respectively by the Anglican National Society and the (largely Nonconformist) British Schools Society. The issue of how state-aided education should develop and the role of churches, established and voluntary, within it first became seriously controversial when a Factory Bill in 1843 proposed to establish schools for children in factories that would be under exclusively Anglican control. The Wesleyans were unhappy with this partly because they were beginning to be shaken by the intransigent attitudes of the tractarians.11 The matter became even more controversial after 1870 with elementary education becoming compulsory. Since the resources of the National Society were larger than those of other bodies and since the 1870 Act only allowed denominationally neutral board schools to be set up when there were insufficient places in existing voluntary schools, there were bound to be many areas, particularly rural, where the only school was a Church (Anglican) school.12 This was resented by all Nonconformists, including Methodists, who were particularly antagonized by any discrimination against their children and, where it existed, decidedly ‘popish’ tractarian teaching. Discontent reached a height in the first decade of the twentieth century with the 1902 Education Act, which gave aid from the rates to church schools, and with the subsequent obstruction by the House of Lords of two attempts by the 1906 Liberal government to redress the balance. It should be noted though that the Wesleyans, unlike the other free churches, had their own schools, about 900 in 1900. A large Wesleyan minority preferred schools with a definitely Christian character to board schools even despite fears of popery. Two contrasting Methodist attitudes At this point, one can illustrate the diversity of Methodist reactions to the Established Church from two key sources. The first is William Shrewsbury’s 11 12

Turner, Conflict and Reconciliation, p. 141. This was particularly the case in the diocese of Salisbury. When Bishop Wordsworth arrived in 1885, there was a national school in every parish and no board schools though there were a few other voluntary schools, most probably Wesleyan. E. W. Watson, Life of Bishop John Wordsworth (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1915), p. 202.

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David Carter Scriptural Account of the Wesleyan Methodist Polity of 1840.13 Shrewsbury was the most irenic of the Wesleyan leaders of the time, calling upon his fellow Wesleyans not to respond in like kind to the calumnies that were heaped upon them by others, whether dissenters or Anglicans. He did not even want to blame the Anglican authorities of the 1790s for the split of that era arguing that there was ‘both a thrusting out of the Establishment and a gradual withdrawment from it’.14 He vigorously supported the concept of Establishment, arguing that it was scriptural and based on the subsequent applicability of the paradigm of the union of Church and State, as witnessed to in the Old Testament, to all countries that had received the Bible and had a Christian ruler. He accepted that the Establishment was not perfect and hinted that reforms might be acceptable within the context of a continuingly ‘friendly disposition’ towards the Established Church and continuing maintenance of the principle of establishment per se. Interestingly, Shrewsbury maintained that the degeneration of established churches in the post-Constantinian era was to be blamed on the worldliness of the clergy rather than on the secular rulers of the time.15 He argued that there was no contradiction between acceptance of the principle of Establishment and the concurrent existence of separate voluntary churches. He asserted that it was particularly appropriate that the Sovereign should continue to be a member of the Church of England as ‘the most ancient and influential church in the country’ and, like the Church in 13

14 15

William Shrewsbury, 1785–1866. His early years in the ministry were spent on the mission field, first in South Africa, then in the West Indies. Returning home in 1839, he was horrified both by the internal tensions within Wesleyan Methodism and by some Methodist attitudes to the dissenters and to the old Church. His book was written to recall his fellow Methodists to what he regarded as the authentic Wesleyan spirit, one which always sought co-operation with other Protestant churches and always sought to speak affirmatively of them and their leaders. His irenic thought bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the later Roman Catholic ecumenical pioneer, Abbé Paul Couturier and I have studied this resemblance in an article ‘The Ecumenical Principles of William James Shrewsbury’, One in Christ 35 (2000), pp. 365–377 and in my contribution, ‘Two Ecumenical Pioneers’, in M.Woodruff (ed.), The Unity of Christians: The Ecumenical Vision of the Abbé Paul Couturier (London: Catholic League, 2004), pp. 64–75. Shrewsbury, Scriptural Account, p. 145. Shrewsbury, Scriptural Account, pp. 137–8.

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Methodism and Establishment Jerusalem, ‘the mother of us all’ (Gal. 4.26). Though he accepted that ‘uncharitable censures may be occasionally inflicted’ (i.e. by churchmen), he added that ‘alienation of heart’ could never be justified by these and that ‘in aversion to the Establishment, we so far deviate from the purity and simplicity of Wesleyan principles, and also forget the divine precept of our religion, no less applicable to communities than to individuals:- “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good” (Rom. 12.21)’.16 Shrewsbury, probably in reference to the controversial question of church rates, argued, ‘Nor is unsuitable to the holiness and dignity of a Christian to contribute, not only without demur but with cheerfulness, towards the support of a National Protestant establishment, though he be not immediately a member of it.’17 The most distinctive note in his approach is summed up in this concluding paragraph. Let none then envy the dominant church, her superiority or her privileges; and let not that Church be arrogant and lordly in her carriage towards other churches; but let all combine in their several spheres, and in unison as often as they can, to promote ‘glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, goodwill toward men’.18

Shrewsbury maintained the characteristic early Wesleyan affection for the Church of England, regarding its contribution as vital to the total Christian mission in England. He was also deeply influenced by the understanding of catholicity exemplified in John Wesley’s sermon On the Catholic Spirit, in Charles Wesley’s hymn ‘Christ from whom all blessings flow’19 and in the injunction of the Liverpool Conference of 1820, reminding the Methodists that they did ‘not exist for the sake of party’ and exhorting them to ‘ever maintain the kind and catholic spirit of primitive Methodism towards all

16 17

18 19

Shrewsbury, Scriptural Account, p. 100. Shrewsbury, Scriptural Account, pp. 141–2. Church rates were levied on all the ratepayers of a parish for necessary repairs to the church fabric. Naturally, they were resented and from the 1830s Nonconformists agitated for their abolition. Shrewsbury, Scriptural Account, pp. 142–3. It contains the couplet ‘Names and sects and parties fall. Thou, O Christ, art all in all’.

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David Carter denominations of Christians holding the Head’.20 Perhaps his uniqueness and his most enduring contribution to the Universal Church lay in his stress that the virtues of humility, kindness and preferring in honour apply just as much to corporate denominational relationships as they do to those of individuals. Before the ink was dry on Shrewsbury’s pages, Wesleyan views of the Establishment were, as already noted, beginning to become less favourable, though his legacy, if unrecognized and unacknowledged, can still be seen in those recommendations of the Methodist Faith and Order Committee in its 2004 report when it counselled taking account of Anglican views of Establishment.21 When we turn to our second source, we are in a different world. Just forty years later, in 1880, Methodism as a whole was drawing much closer to the other free churches, partly as a result of the Oxford Movement. The increasingly confident free churches were asserting the values of ‘a free church in a free state’, though not all, even among the old dissenters, called for disestablishment as such. The urban working man now had the vote, soon to be followed by most rural workers. The Liberal party under Gladstone had become the vehicle of the aspirations of large sections of the middle and working classes that were impatient to end much of the old social order. The second source is a paper by Alexander McKechnie, delivered in 1880 to the ministers of the Leeds Primitive Methodist District.22 It was a clarion call to all Methodists to back the Liberation Society and disestablishment. It trenchantly opposed establishment of any sort, under any conditions, arguing that ‘all State church establishments are unscriptural, that the Church established by Christ and the Apostles knew nothing of government patronage, protection, control or enforcement but was a voluntary church, dependent on voluntary faith and the free contributions of a willing people’. 20 21

22

Cited in J. S. Simon, A Summary of Methodist Law and Discipline (London: Wesleyan Conference Office,1923), pp. 268–9. It did this in its report Church, State, Establishment, presented to Conference that year, para. 111. The Report is printed in the Conference Agenda and also in Over To You– Reports from the Methodist Conference 2004 (Peterborough: Methodist Publishing House, 2004), pp. 38–69. Primitive Methodist Quarterly Review (PMQR) 10 (1880), pp. 44–56.

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Methodism and Establishment It was for the Holy Spirit, not the State, to appoint ministers and leaders. Methodists must be taught that the State had no role in religion other than protection of its free exercise.23 Such was the language of the Liberation Society, previously rarely used so forcefully by any Methodist, a point admitted by the speaker as he upbraided his fellow Methodists for leaving the cause largely to the Baptists and Independents. McKechnie also rebuked the Primitive Methodists for failing to air the issue in their Conference, maintaining that the ‘no politics’ rule ought not to apply in this case. In ironic tones, he praised those ritualistic clergy who were suffering persecution under the Public Worship Act of 1874 whilst simultaneously calling on the Methodist people to take ‘intelligent action in the great struggle between church authority and private judgement, priestly arrogance and individual independency, ecclesiastical privilege and religious equality’.24 Over the succeeding generation, McKechnie’s call was certainly heeded by some Methodists, particularly in the non-Wesleyan churches. Relations between most grass-roots free church people and the Established Church were affected by the introduction of elected councils in the countryside and, particularly, by the education issue. For many the possibility of freeing the rural poor from subservience to squire and parson and reversing the privileged position of the Establishment in education raised hopes which included disestablishment, sometimes even with a swingeing form of disendowment.25 One prominent Primitive Methodist minister of the fin de siècle generation who heeded McKechnie’s call was Arthur Guttery, who displayed a political activism that had previously been rare in his own denomination despite the fact that most of its members identified with the contemporary Liberal party. His biographer describes him as ‘in the thick of the political fray almost from the beginning of his ministerial life’ in 1883.26 23 24 25 26

PMQR, p. 44. PMQR, pp. 48, 44. See e.g. Joseph Ritson, ‘An Essay on the Condition of Agricultural Labourers in Relation to Morals and Religion’, in Primitive Methodist Magazine (1893) pp. 447–62. J. Bowran, The Life of Arthur Thomas Guttery, DD (London: Holborn Publishing House, 1921), p. 35. Guttery (1862–1920) was one of the most prominent Primitive Methodist ministers of his generation, becoming General Missionary Secretary from 1908–13 and then President of the Conference in 1913.

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David Carter He was ‘a foe of all privilege whether in Church and State … he hated landlordism and priestcraft, the drink traffic and the sweater … he was convinced that he was furthering the Kingdom of God by helping on the people’s enfranchisement’. Not all within his own denomination would have favoured such a degree of direct political involvement by a minister, though many contemporary free churchmen were conscious of a growing social and political influence as more of them climbed to positions of local and even national power. Particularly among the Wesleyans, there were those who still, on irenic and other principles, held back from outright opposition to the Establishment, however much they might regret aspects of it, to say nothing of the advance of tractarianism. Hugh Price Hughes, the most influential Wesleyan leader from 1890 till his death, no more held back from expressing strong political views than Guttery but he used his influence in the new National Council of Evangelical Free Churches to oppose any motion in favour of disestablishment. Strong advocate as he was of free church unity, he wanted to see a national free church with a strong sense of responsibility for the nation and its social and moral welfare. He wanted the free churches to become a sort of informal establishment in the best sense, laying aside any remaining sectarianism from their past when they had endured a secondclass status.27 Hughes was also an ecumenical pioneer, sponsoring the first informal ecumenical talks with Anglicans at the Grindelwald Conversations. Like some earlier Methodists, he appreciated the Anglican liturgy and was not opposed on principle to episcopacy. Some other prominent Methodists were also opposed to stirring up the establishment question. Wolverhampton asserted that he was theoretically opposed to the concept of establishment but that also, as a good Methodist, he wanted relations with the Church of England to be ‘as kindly as possible’.28 His views, according to his daughter, differed from those of many liberal Methodists who did want disestablishment. Richard Green argued for ‘our freedom in our constitution from anything that would place

27

28

C. Oldstone-Moore, Hugh Price Hughes (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), pp. 238–240; Dorothea Hughes, The Life of Hugh Price Hughes (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1904), pp. 481–507. Hamilton, Lord Wolverhampton, pp. 108, 553.

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Methodism and Establishment us in antagonism to other churches’, a very Shrewsburian sentiment. He further stated that though Methodism did not object on principle to church establishments, individual Methodists were of course free to hold and teach their own views on the subject.29 Methodism and Establishment in the Twentieth Century After the initial Edwardian spats, closely linked to the controversies following the introduction of the 1902 Education Bill, the establishment issue went largely quiet for the rest of the twentieth century. The Great War, followed by the economic problems of the inter-war era and the rise of the Labour Party, focused political attention and energy elsewhere. As far as the free churches in general were concerned, secularization and numerical decline, at first gentle but later more rapid, had an effect on their desire and ability to confront the establishment of the Church of England. The development of the Ecumenical Movement also drew much of the sting. As far as Methodism was concerned, attention between the wars was particularly focused on the completion of Methodist Union, achieved in 1932, and its subsequent outworking.30 The Prayer Book crisis was notable more in terms of Anglican questioning of the contemporary form of relationship with parliament than for Methodist or other critiques.31 Reticence at the official level and that of key opinion formers did not mean that resentment of the Establishment and its social power failed to 29 30

31

R. Green, The Mission of Methodism (London: C. H. Kelly, 1890), pp. 206–7. This was the annual Fernley lecture for that year, an official Wesleyan Conference lecture. In 1932 the three main Methodist churches, Wesleyan, Primitive and United, came together as the Methodist Church after a prolonged series of negotiations that had begun just before the Great War. Two very small bodies, the Wesleyan Reform Union and the Independent Methodists, stayed aloof. A point noted in the Methodist Report of 2004, para 85. Curiously, it otherwise overlooks the fact that many contemporary Anglicans favour disestablishment, e.g. Bishop Colin Buchanan in his Cut the Connection. Disestablishment and the Church of England (London: DLT, 1994). The recent study of the Prayer Book crisis by John Maiden shows that Wesleyan opinion on the revision was divided, John Scott Lidgett and the Methodist Times supporting it and Wesleyan MPs being divided when it came to the Commons votes. The Primitive and United Methodists mainly opposed the revision. See John Maiden, National Religion and the Prayer Book Controversy 1927–8 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009), pp. 109, 120, 123–4, 158–9.

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David Carter continue amongst ordinary Methodists. Popular memory can be long and notoriously out of date. During the negotiations at the very turn of the millennium leading to the Anglican–Methodist Covenant, there were still those who feared Anglican popery, apparently oblivious both of the decline of traditional Anglo-Catholicism and of the resurgence of Anglican evangelicalism over the previous generation. Some talked of prelacy, again not realizing that, today, My Lord of Bristol is and behaves very much as plain Bishop Mike. The Anglican–Methodist Conversations of the 1950s and early 1960s, culminating in proposals for a two-stage organic union of the two churches, might have been expected to cause a livelier debate on the subject of establishment. Instead, the 1963 initial report rather tamely referred to past hurts experienced by non-Anglicans and to present difficulties felt by Methodists and, indeed, many Anglicans over the role of parliament in ecclesiastical legislation and of the crown in appointments. It was vague on the ultimate future, merely asserting that ‘it is to be assumed that the united Church will be free to settle its own forms of doctrine, worship and discipline, to appoint its own officers and to settle its disputes with the same degree of freedom from state control as is now possessed by the Church of Scotland’. In the subsequent 1968 report, necessitated by the need for a slightly different proposal following the defeat of the original one in the Church Assembly, an anodyne comment was made to the effect that there could be a truly national church with responsibility to minister to the whole community, a rather Arnoldian proposal, as Munsey Turner observes.32 Some of the popular Methodist mistrust referred to previously surfaced in the subsequent debates over the proposals, particularly among those from traditionally strongly Methodist areas such as Cornwall and parts of the industrial North who opposed the scheme. The pomposity, as seen by some Methodists, of much Anglican ceremonial and state interference in senior church appointments was denounced. There is no doubt that nontheological factors related to establishment played their role in Methodist opposition to the unity proposals.

32

Turner, Conflict and Reconciliation, p. 211; G. Thompson Brake, Policy and Politics in British Methodism 1932–1982 (London: Edsall, 1984), p. 122.

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Methodism and Establishment The Conference Report of 2004 Official Methodism finally broke its post-union silence on the question of Establishment at the Conference of 2004 when it commended for study, including to its ecumenical partners, a report entitled Church, State and Establishment from its Faith and Order Committee.33 This report faithfully reflected the varied history of Methodist attitudes towards Establishment with particular reference to the Church of England.34 It accepted that Methodists were not of one mind on the issue and that some valued establishment, arguing that it ‘is seen as a gift to all the churches and even to all faith communities. It is as if the Church of England fulfils a role as “broker” or “host” between state and faith communities, opening the way for others’.35 It gave considerable attention to stories, in many cases of negative Methodist experiences of establishment and Anglican behaviour, admitting, however, that there had also been some very positive experiences of close co-operation within local ecumenical partnerships.36 It made a whole series of suggestions as to how Establishment might be modified in order to make it more acceptable to non-Anglicans in general and enhance co-operation in mission. It did not call for disestablishment and recognized that any process towards it would be immensely complicated. It repudiated, however, many of the traditional pre-critical scriptural arguments adduced from the Old Testament in favour of establishment.37 The context was, of course, the Anglican–Methodist Covenant of 2003 and its commitment to closer co-operation in mission with the ultimate aim of fully interchangeable ministry and membership. In such a situation, due

33

34 35 36 37

Published in the 2004 Conference Agenda; also in Over To You. Reports from the Methodist Conference (Peterborough: Methodist Publishing House,2004), pp. 38–69. Note that it is ‘commended for study’ rather than affirmed as an official Conference statement. The Conference also directed the Methodist members of the Joint Implementation Committee to see that it was discussed there. I am grateful to the Rev. Ken Howcroft, assistant secretary to the Conference, for granting me permission, on behalf of the Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes, to quote from the Report. In a shorter section than might have been expected. Church, State and Establishment, paras 83–8. Ibid., para 100. Ibid., para 46. Ibid., paras 53–70.

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David Carter attention had to be given to Anglican sensitivities as well as to the views and desires of the Methodist people, a point the Report duly made.38 Particular attention was given to the theme of mission as central in Methodist eyes and thus one of the tests of the desirability, or otherwise, of establishment. It was recognized that what some see as a hindrance to mission is seen as a help by others … What is interpreted by some as a problematic identification of the Church of England with state authorities is read by others as an engagement which makes demands on the Church to be prophetic and in fact is the only place from which the prophetic voice can really be heard.39

In its Reflections, the Report addressed the Church of England’s sense of responsibility for the nation, so often stressed today as a key outcome and benefit of its established status. It reminded the Church of England that Methodism is not a gathered church but that it also has a sense of responsibility towards the wider community. It argued that the Anglican sense of national responsibility should be shared with other churches. One might add that this makes particular sense in an era of acute secularization when none of the traditional churches has anything like the strength in person-power that it had even fifty years ago. Amongst the Methodist hurts noted was resentment of the way in which in some places Anglican incumbents still dominated and set the terms of other churches’ participation in civic services.40 Also noted was a tendency for Anglicans to be privileged by secular governing authorities in consultations – not, of course, a constitutional requirement per se – but obviously a practice that could only be explained within the context of establishment.41 Linked to this was also the question of the territorial claims of the Church of England which, one knows from personal and anecdotal experience, are frequently a source of resentment amongst ministers of other churches when 38 39 40 41

Ibid., para. 111. Ibid., para. 91. Ibid., para. 21. Ibid., para. 19, which specifically refers to the fact that when Cornwall was granted Objective One Status by the EU, it was the Church of England that took the lead in the process rather than Methodism which had been the historically dominant folk church in the county.

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Methodism and Establishment they hear Anglican incumbents talking about their parishes in an exclusive way. Neither the 2004 report nor An Anglican–Methodist Covenant addressed the very real difference between the historic Church of England concept of parson’s freehold and the Methodist concept of the presbyter as stationed in a circuit by the Conference, to work as assigned by the superintendent minister.42 The Report noted several key recent changes in context that had affected the discussion. There were important changes in the nature of the State, with the development of Welsh and Scottish devolution, important elements of regionalization, and changes in the European Union. The Welsh and Scottish positions were particularly relevant since the British Methodist Connexion covers England, Wales and Scotland. The development of major non-Christian faith communities was noted and, one might add, had paradoxically both weakened and strengthened the case for establishment. Against the feeling that the establishment of a particular Christian Church had become even more anomalous, one could set, as the Report indeed did, the fact that many from other faiths now valued the symbolic importance of the establishment of the Church of England as pointing to a state recognition of the importance of faith and faith communities.43 The change in ecumenical context might have been more clearly indicated. When, in Edwardian times, the issue of establishment had last been so vigorously debated, the Ecumenical Movement, despite the work of important pioneers and forerunners, had scarcely begun, let alone penetrated popular consciousness in the churches. By 2000, and despite the disappointments of the 1960s and 1982, it was generally accepted, if by some reluctantly, that inter-church co-operation in Christian service and mission was desirable. Both Methodism and the Church of England were committed to all-round ecumenism and to the ecumenical structures created in 1990, 42

43

Thus, a Methodist minister is never, officially, the minister of the congregations over which he or she is assigned pastoral charge. He or she remains a minister stationed within the circuit and assigned duties by the superintendent, though always these days in consultation with the congregations and minister concerned. Nevertheless, as An Anglican–Methodist Covenant notes, there is essential agreement as to the nature and function of presbyteral ministry per se and these functions, of course, predate either parson’s freehold or Methodist stationing! Church State and Establishment, para. 9.

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David Carter Churches Together in England and Churches Together in Britain and Ireland. This common commitment was, of course, further reinforced by the very specific mutual commitments of the Covenant, in particular that to ‘listen to each other and to take account of each other’s concerns, especially in areas that affect our relationship as churches’.44 Finally, under the heading of context, one notes the observation that present day Methodist questioning of the Establishment may owe more to a current ethos critical of all forms of authority than to historic or even present hurts.45 In general, the Report was faithful to the Covenant commitment. Though it urged Anglicans to take serious account of the Methodist perspectives, difficulties and hurts that it outlined, it also reminded the Methodist people that they must take account of Anglican perspectives and sensitivities. They should also remember that ‘people often recall their bad experiences more quickly than the good, even when the bad experiences were the exception’.46 It admitted that Methodist assessments were no more neutral and objective than those of the Church of England and argued that in relation to the Church of England Methodists were capable of simultaneously suffering from both feelings of inferiority and superiority, having both ‘a sense of lack of privilege, even at times of jealousy, as well as a pride at being intentionally nonconformist and outside the system’.47 The Report ended with a series of carefully nuanced suggestions. It argued that Methodist memories of past hurts must not be ‘lightly dismissed’ but treated in the context of the healing of memories. It recognized that any call for disestablishment would have to recognize the sheer complexity of the legal ties between the Church of England and the State but went on to add: The Methodist Church could seek changes in the current form of establishment of the Church of England. While there has been much change in the form of establishment, the Committee believes that further changes would better enable

44 45

46 47

An Anglican–Methodist Covenant (London/Peterborough: MPH/CHP, 2001), p. 61. Church, State and Establishment, paras 27, 28, where it is noted that Methodists can also be very critical of their own ‘connexional’ establishment as can be witnessed from the correspondence columns of the Recorder. Ibid., para. 23. Ibid., para. 26.

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Methodism and Establishment our growing together in Christian witness in England. In particular, the Methodist Church might ask the Church of England to do more to share its opportunities and its responsibilities with its ecumenical partner churches.48

Methodists would also ask the Church of England ‘invariably to draw to the attention of the Government the need to consult other denominations directly in any case where it appears only to have consulted with the Church of England when seeking a Christian input’.49 As far as the nomination of bishops was concerned, it was suggested that the State might continue to ‘affirm’ these ‘if the process of nomination was transparently and solely in the Church’s hands’. The Church of England was invited to re-think its current defence of the number of episcopal seats in the Lords and engage in a serious debate with other churches and faith traditions as to how the full range might be better heard there.50

Conclusion In conclusion, I would add that a gradual move, gradual because of the complexity of the changes that would need to be made, towards the form of Establishment enjoyed by the Church of Scotland might prove widely acceptable within Methodism and other churches and faith communities. In recognition of English history and tradition, the Sovereign might affirm episcopal appointments in the Church of England in the same way in which she signs acts of parliament, in both cases without infringing the liberty and final say of the body concerned. Methodism and the other churches would recognize the particular heritage and unique presence of the Church of England in every corner of the land while co-operating with her on equal terms of mutual accountability. The other faith communities could perhaps see in this an affirmation of the country’s continuing respect for all faiths and their contribution to and voice in its life. Such a development would be in accordance with the vision for Anglican, Methodist and other Nonconformist co-operation originally envisaged by Shrewsbury but would, of course, reach far further than he could ever have envisaged, to the Roman 48 49 50

Ibid., para. 114. Ibid., para. 116. Ibid., paras 117–18.

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David Carter Catholic, Orthodox and black-led churches. It would also, hopefully, contribute to good inter-faith relationships and a more harmonious and inclusive society.

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Anglican Establishment, Roman Catholics and Receptive Ecumenism PHILIP ENDEAN SJ

The establishment of the Church of England remains what it has long been: a matter of learned argument at many levels. It was out of interest and friendship that I attended the conference at which first versions of many of the papers in this volume were given. I have neither the expertise nor the empathy to be able to contribute directly to the scholarly discussions on their own terms. But it was good to be there. There was a sense of friends reinforcing each other at a difficult moment. The atmosphere of the conference was shaped significantly by a recent event. A few days before, there had been an announcement of a papal initiative whereby communities of Anglicans might be received into the Church of Rome in such a way that they could maintain some elements of the tradition in which their Christianity had initially been nurtured. For Catholic-minded Anglicans, and indeed for ecumenically committed Roman Catholics, the questions this initiative raises are difficult. On the one hand, the Church of Rome is showing a prophetic generosity: a recognition that Roman ways of doing things are not necessarily the only way things have to be done by churches in communion with Rome. On the other, Rome’s failure to consult seriously with Anglican authority, combined with the suspicion in the air that Anglophone Roman Catholic bishops had also been caught on the hop, exemplified the high-handedness on the part of Roman central authority that can seem so exasperating both to Roman Catholics themselves, and to other Christians in whom the hope of (re)union with Rome is a living reality. In Ut unum sint, John Paul II had recognized that the manner of Rome’s exercise of primacy was itself a significant obstacle to Christian unity, and had recognized, however carefully, the need for some kind of change in what he acknowledged was a new situation of religious diversity. What became Anglicanorum coetibus seems a regrettable step back.

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Philip Endean There are difficult questions to be faced about how, this side of the eschaton, a Church committed to Catholic unity appropriately exercises authority – questions that go far beyond the scope of this present volume. My aim here is simply to note – to some extent out of personal experience – how Anglican establishment, in its present chastened configurations, has been, and can continue to be, a gift to Roman Catholicism, at least in the English-speaking world. Anglican origins may appear to some as problematic, as rooted in an Elizabethan settlement that was political and Erastian in character, rather than theologically thought through. They were closely connected to a repressiveness that can only be regretted. Some issues surely remain matters of disagreement between Roman Catholics and Anglicans. In the end, Roman Catholics are committed to a polity centred on visible institutional communion with the Bishop of Rome, despite the problems to which this leads – a commitment which Protestant or Anglican Christians, almost by definition, do not share. Nevertheless, the kind of gracious, humble approach to establishment, illustrated in contributions to this volume such as those of Nigel Biggar or Elaine Graham, has in some important ways nurtured Roman Catholicism over the past generations, since Vatican II provoked a significant shift in Roman Catholic engagement with the wider world, including the wider Church. Moreover, establishment has led Anglicanism to model a sacramental ecclesiology: the maintenance of ecclesial structures as a symbolic expression of God’s grace within the wider human community. Church and Kingdom may be closely related, but they are not identical. A religiously authoritarian imagination finds it hard to maintain that distinction; if we relativize our authority, we are somehow being unfaithful to the gift we have received. Roman Catholicism needs help in moving beyond this anxiety. We need to find a humbler, and therefore richer, vision of fidelity to our own tradition, one that leaves real conceptual, moral and spiritual room for us to affirm a self-evident truth: that a faithful and true Christian is always, precisely as such, growing towards God, becoming converted more deeply. An ecclesiology of a perfect society effectively excludes this truth.

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Anglican Establishment, Roman Catholics and Receptive Ecumenism I am invoking here what has recently been termed ‘receptive ecumenism’.1 The ecumenical path seems longer and more tortuous than we had imagined when the ARCIC dialogues first got under way, and organic, institutional (re)union appears an unrealistic goal, humanly speaking. But Christians of one tradition can be enriched in their own commitments by taking on board good practices developed and cultivated in another tradition. My suggestion is that Anglican establishment – even granted that Roman Catholics are not Anglicans, that some Roman Catholics find Anglicanism seriously deficient, and that there may be problems with how establishment implies an overlap between ecclesial and civil authority – has enabled the Anglican communion to model a style of public presence at once authoritative and open. Roman Catholics have benefited from this; Roman Catholics may still learn from this. Let me be personal. I am in the first generation of Roman Catholics to have studied theology within the standard university system of the UK, rather than in an autonomously Roman Catholic institution. Historically shaped by Anglicanism, this system was able to welcome and incorporate our tradition, drawing on instincts, intellectual habits and institutional provisions it had developed as a way of responding to Anglicanism’s own internal inclusiveness. A system used to dealing with the range of the Church of England could treat Roman Catholicism as another style of what used to be called churchmanship. Moreover, it could acknowledge to some extent how Roman Catholics found such treatment problematic, and let us push the boundaries: within six years of its move into the University of London, Heythrop College introduced the first undergraduate course in the UK expressly addressing questions of ecclesiology – questions which, for its own reasons, Anglicanism itself preferred to leave underexplored. The advantage for Roman Catholics was how Anglicanism’s internal ecumenism enabled us to explore intellectual questions with a freedom that in a more confessional system authority was always tempted to constrain. The challenges to theology in UK universities have, of course, increased in the intervening generation. The days are long past when a theology degree was seen exclusively as a preparation for ordained ministry; not all 1

See Paul D. Murray (ed.), Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Catholic Learning: Exploring a Way for Contemporary Ecumenism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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Philip Endean Christians find the churches credible, and not all religious or religiously interested people in our society are Christians. Theology shares in the travails of other humanities departments as university funding contracts; it also has its own distinctive issues to face regarding the cultural hegemony that Anglican Christianity exerted in the past, and arguably still exerts. But there is at least hope that the liberal inclusiveness characteristic of the Anglican tradition at its best can be transposed in such a way as to generate what we need now and into the future. It is easy, of course, for such inclusiveness to be dismissed as simply a matter of shoddy political compromise. But it is possible to read it more positively: as a settled collective habit, embodying a recognition that one’s own take on the truth at any one time is partial, susceptible to correction, and indeed patient of expansion as a result of insights that others have contributed. A document such as Dominus Jesus, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 2000 declaration ‘on the unicity and salvific universality of Jesus Christ and the Church’, is cast in relentlessly binary terms. There is the full Catholic Church, already existing; other bodies are, as such, deficient, and of value only in so far as we can see a hidden bond with the visible Church of Rome. The sense here of Christianity as a reality given to us, unnegotiably so, is one that should not be lost. But it needs to be tempered. The Church is the sacrament of a grace given to the whole human race. The Church is not a sect of the perfectly believing. Establishment has enabled the Church of England to negotiate the tension between committed identity and an inclusiveness open to the culture as a whole. We Roman Catholics may properly draw on the habits of mind and heart that establishment has nourished in order to speak more credibly and more appropriately to all people of good will.

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What Future for Establishment? WILLIAM WHYTE

On 27 June 2007, Tony Blair attended his last Prime Minister’s Question Time. It was an extraordinary occasion – part elegy, part celebration. He paid tribute to the armed services, to parliament itself, to colleagues, and his political opponents. He answered questions about crime, foreign policy, education, and the economy. He was also asked about the established Church. ‘What advice would the Prime Minister give his successor on the relationship between faith and state, in particular with regard to his successor’s reported views on the disestablishment of the Church of England?’, enquired the Liberal Democrat MP Richard Younger-Ross. To laughter, Tony Blair replied, ‘I am really not bothered about that one’, and then swiftly moved on to answer another question about the environment.1 In many ways, this response was unsurprising, reflecting the fact that Blair consistently avoided talking about religion throughout his premiership. Yet, for a man who was teetering on the verge of conversion to Roman Catholicism and who has subsequently observed that ‘I have always been more interested in religion than politics’, this refusal to engage with the issue was noteworthy nonetheless.2 What Blair’s silence – and the laughter in the House of Commons – each exposed was a more general sense among the political class that establishment is not really worth debating. Similar motivations undoubtedly undermined the appeal of Early Day Motion 666 in January 2008. Like so many Early Day Motions,3 this ominously numbered call for the disestablishment of the Church of England failed to attract any great popular

1 2 3

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/cm070627/ debtext/70627-0003.htm (accessed 20 September 2010). Tony Blair, A Journey (London: Hutchinson, 2010), p. 690. See Judith Maltby’s chapter for further examples of EDMs.

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William Whyte support. Indeed, fewer than two-dozen MPs signed it.4 Despite his advocacy of disestablishment, even Richard Younger-Ross could not be persuaded to add his name.5 More interestingly still, the 2010 Liberal Democrat manifesto dropped the party’s commitment to reforming the relationship between Church and State. For the first time in nearly twenty years, therefore, the issue of establishment was not even a footnote in the events of the election. And of course, even when it was mentioned, it was scarcely a vital votewinner. Indeed, it seems likely that the last time debates about establishment played any real role in British politics was in the election that followed the Prayer Book Controversy of 1928–9.6 As Matthew Grimley has already shown, the bite has gone out of the disestablishment debate. To write about establishment is consequently to deal with an issue that has become politically marginal, to say the least. Naturally, some elements of the relationship between Church and State have come under question. The prohibition on the monarch either marrying a Roman Catholic or converting to Roman Catholicism, for example, has been the subject of sporadic debate – with politicians of all parties expressing some dissatisfaction with the status quo.7 In the first few months of 2009, it was reported that Gordon Brown was sympathetic to the Private Member’s Bill proposed by Evan Harris MP, which would have removed the prohibition on marrying a Catholic.8 The fact that Gordon Brown is no longer Prime Minister and Evan Harris is no longer an MP does not mean that this issue has been resolved.9 Nor, for that matter, is the role of the Bishops in the House of Lords entirely uncontroversial – although, here again, the picture is mixed. 4 5 6 7

8 9

http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx?EDMID=34819 (accessed 20 September 2010). http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/may/31/religion.monarchy (accessed 20 September 2010). Ross McKibbin, Parties and People: England 1914–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 65. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/sep/26/constitution.anglicanism http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/27/act-of-settlement-monarchy-catholic (both accessed 21 September 2010). http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/27/monarchy-catholicism-constitutional -reform (accessed 21 September 2010). See Robert Blackburn, King & Country: Monarchy and the Future King Charles III (London: Politico’s, 2006).

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What Future for Establishment? The 2007 White Paper on the reform of the upper house proposed the retention of a smaller number of Lords Spiritual, while the House of Commons voted for an entirely elected chamber, in which there would be no place for the Bishops.10 No vote, however, was taken on the specific question of ecclesiastical representation – and the Commons debate scarcely mentioned it.11 It remains to be seen what the current government will propose for its own constitutional changes: a reduction in the number or a wholesale removal of the Bishops from the Lords certainly seems likely, though it is not inevitable. In any event, it is remarkable that in a multicultural, multi-faith country this theme is not more widely debated. Still more strikingly, despite the well-publicized rise of an aggressive, energetic, and fashionable secularism, the issue of formal, legal links between Church and State has yet to be taken up by the so-called ‘new atheists’. Whilst high-profile writers, like the popular scientist Richard Dawkins, fulminate against faith schools and teaching of anti-scientific theories like Creationism, they are almost silent on the establishment.12 A review of the New Humanist magazine – the house organ of secularist revivalism – suggests it has not published a single article on the subject for at least a decade. In the United States, the relationship between Church and State has become ever more politicized.13 In France, the overwhelming – and, some say, overweening – claims of the secular state have become the focus of intense scrutiny, especially because of recent legislation to ban the wearing of traditional Islamic clothing.14 Yet in England, the continuing link between Church and State has not, in recent years, proved to be a significant source of discontent for secularists. In part, this surprising silence about what was once a major issue in political life is the product of politicians’ unwillingness to be drawn into complex constitutional questions. The nature of the establishment is now 10 11 12 13 14

The House of Lords: Reform 2007 (cm 7027), 9.26–9. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/cm070306/ debindx/70306-x.htm (accessed 21 September 2010). ‘Faith School Menace?’, Channel Four, 18 August 2010. Philip Hamburger, The Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 2002). Sophie Heine, ‘The Hijab Controversy and French Republicanism: critical analysis and normative propositions’, French Politics 7 (2009), pp. 167–93.

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William Whyte extremely hard to define. What was in the eighteenth century a clear and apparently indivisible link between Church and State – one that excluded Nonconformists, Roman Catholics, and atheists from direct political participation and which subjected the Church of England to control from Westminster – collapsed in the 1820 and 1830s.15 Catholic Emancipation, the repeal of legislation that discriminated against Dissenters, and the Great Reform Act of 1832 all undermined this confessional state. They ushered in what Jeremy Morris has rather convincingly termed the era of ‘Partial Disestablishment’, in which the Church and State have increasingly separated – with the Church losing many of its privileges but at the same time gaining increasing autonomy.16 By the 1840s, politicians like the enthusiastic young Tory High Churchman William Gladstone were forced to accept that the comfortable clarity of the old Establishment was gone for good.17 Now – after a century and a half of further change – it has become very difficult to define exactly what the establishment amounts to. Does it reside in the relationship between the monarch and the Church? Is it bound up with the presence of Bishops in the House of Lords? What does it have to do with the parish system, or the preservation of church buildings? Given that some have argued that the disestablished Church in Wales still functions effectively as an established Church, then what is the core of establishment?18 Wesley Carr’s useful distinction between ‘high’ establishment (the nexus of crown and Church that puts Bishops in parliament and makes the monarch an Anglican) and ‘earthed’ establishment (the day-to-day working out of the parochial system) has

15

16

17 18

For the most assertive account of this process, see J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), ch. 6. See also Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), ch. 6. Jeremy Morris, ‘The Future of Church and State’, in Duncan Dormor, Jack McDonald and Jeremy Caddick (eds), Anglicanism: The Answer to Modernity (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), pp. 161–85, p. 166. H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1898 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 73. Simon J. Taylor, ‘Disestablished Establishment: high and earthed establishment in the Church in Wales’, Journal of Contemporary Religion 18:2 (2003), pp. 227–40.

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What Future for Establishment? proved attractive to clerics, as Elaine Graham’s and Martyn Percy’s chapters in this volume both reveal.19 But it describes an ever-evolving and somewhat intractable concept – and is, frankly, of little use to practical politicians. More importantly still, the absence of political interest in establishment reflects its lack of political valence. Although, as Judith Maltby has shown in her chapter, parliament still exercises some influence on the Church, the Church exercises very little influence on parliament. The Bishops are very rarely present in the House of Lords and never have a decisive effect on votes there.20 True enough, Church matters are debated in the Commons, but compared to the constitutional crises that accompanied Catholic Emancipation, Irish and Welsh disestablishment, or the conflict over Prayer Book revision in 1920s, the discussions about even such key ecclesiastical issues as the consecration of women bishops are tame affairs indeed. Nor are those who tend to participate in these debates by any means front rank politicians. William Gladstone was a rising star when he wrote his The State in its Relations with the Church (1838) and a cabinet minister when he resigned from the government over its support for non-Anglican education. The Labour MP Andy Reed, who actually introduced a bill to create women bishops in the last parliament, was neither of these things. Indeed, he never held a ministerial position and lost his seat in 2010. Whilst it would be pleasing to be able to report that it was his disestablishmentarianism that alienated the voters of Loughborough, this is clearly not the case.21 The reality is that Reed’s views on the Church did not matter – in any sense. Religion simply does not have the political purchase that it used to, and the question of establishment motivates few, if any, voters. Although this means that the Church of England is rarely pressed to defend its relationship with the State, it would be wrong to assume that this implies that establishment is an unproblematic issue, or that political leaders are comfortable in embracing it as it now exists. When it comes to the establishment, as R. M. Morris writes, ‘The reluctance of governments to act is not to be seen merely as polite, benign passivity, or an unwillingness to 19 20 21

Wesley Carr, ‘A Developing Establishment’, Theology 102 (1999), pp. 2–10. See Anna Harlow, Frank Cranmer and Norman Doe, ‘Bishops in the House of Lords: a critical analysis’, Public Law (2008), pp. 490–509. In fact, the 5 per cent swing from Labour to Conservative exactly mirrored the national trend.

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William Whyte shoulder a tricky burden. It also at a deeper level betokens indifference to the Church of England’s fate.’22 It is easy to imagine the circumstances in which a government might find the relationship between Church and State embarrassing, unwanted, or both. The death of the current queen and the accession of the Prince of Wales, for example, look set to expose the establishment to renewed scrutiny – not least given Charles’ apparent ambition to be ‘Defender of Faith’ rather than ‘Defender of the Faith’.23 A serious attempt at House of Lords reform would also almost certainly prompt questions about the place of Bishops there. The speed and relative ease with which the Law Lords were excluded from the upper chamber in the last parliament suggest that an equivalent move to sideline the Lords Spiritual would not be all that difficult.24 More than this, the growing dominance of what the political philosopher Raymond Plant (amongst others) has characterized as a ‘liberal polity’ places the formal links between Church and State increasingly under pressure. Within this polity, he argues, the public sphere is increasingly seen as wholly secular and religion is regarded as a matter of purely private concern.25 If he is right, then the establishment will be hard to maintain in future. This sense of a growing gap between a secular state and an increasingly autonomous Church has led some Anglicans to propose that a sort of unilateral declaration of independence is the only sensible way forward. Naturally, their conclusions are also shaped by their theological position. As Andrew Atherstone and Mark Chapman have shown, for ostensibly different reasons many Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics have actually reached the same conclusion. In seeking to defend the Church’s prophetic role, both the Evangelical Bishop Colin Buchanan and the Anglo-Catholic Marxist Kenneth Leech have called on Anglicans to ‘cut the connection and 22 23 24 25

R. M. Morris, Church and State in 21st century Britain: the future of church establishment (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), p. 204. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/theroyalfamily/3454271/PrinceCharles-to-be-known-as-Defender-of-Faith.html (accessed 23 September 2010). Sue Prince, ‘The Law and Politics: upsetting the judicial applecart’, Parliamentary Affairs 57:2 (2007), pp. 288–200. Raymond Plant, ‘Liberalism, Religion, and the Public Sphere’, in Jane Garnett, Matthew Grimley, Alana Harris, William Whyte and Sarah Williams (eds), Redefining Christian Britain: post–1945 perspectives (London: SCM), pp. 254–66.

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What Future for Establishment? “let the Church of England be free”’.26 In recent years, some Liberals have also joined this call. For the journalist Theo Hobson, for example, establishment has become a very real barrier to the work of the Church. Because it implicates the Church in the actions of the State, he contends, it associates the Church with policies it cannot and should not support. Establishment is, in other words, nothing more than a comfortable Babylonian captivity for the Church. ‘The basic argument for disestablishment’, he goes on, is that ‘an established Church gives its blessing, which is Christ’s blessing, to the dirty little productions of the state. It therefore becomes hampered in its one and only task: to communicate the authority of God in Jesus Christ.’27 Hobson’s critique is worth exploring further. Like many other calls for disestablishment, it has a historical and sociological as well as theological underpinning. The argument – which is echoed in this volume’s contribution by Iain McLean and Scot Peterson – goes as follows. Although establishment was never an ideal relationship between Church and State, it was one that worked for a time. Now, however, it can no longer be defended. Worse still, attempts to sustain it are actually damaging. ‘The Church’, writes Hobson, ‘is locked into a terrible, terminal dilemma. It has always depended on establishment for its unity, its coherence, its order, its identity. But establishment is gradually draining it of vitality, of credibility.’28 This contention rests upon an analysis of both the modern age and previous periods. It assumes that we live in a secular society – or, at any rate, a society in which Church and State have drifted apart. And it also assumes that in the past Church and State were more happily united. Both these beliefs are open to question.29 For some writers, the argument that this is a secular age is highly problematic. Sociologists like Grace Davie have argued for the strength of what she terms ‘vicarious religion’, in which an apparently uninterested public actually relies on the Church to provide spiritual sustenance in 26

27 28 29

Colin Buchanan, Cut the Connection: Disestablishment and the Church of England (London: DLT, 1994), p. 208; Kenneth Leech (ed.), Setting the Church of England Free: the Case for Disestablishment (London: Ekklesia, 2005). Theo Hobson, Against Establishment: An Anglican Polemic (London: DLT, 2003), p. 53. Hobson, Against Establishment, p. xiii. Generally, on this see Garnett et al., Redefining Christian Britain.

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William Whyte moments of crisis. As evidence of this, she points to the ways in which parish churches were used by the public after the death of Diana and the centrality of Soham church in the weeks that followed the murder of the two Cambridgeshire schoolgirls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.30 In Wesley Carr’s terms, here was the ‘earthed establishment’ at work. For other writers, the problem with this sort of critique is not that it posits a growing gap between Church and State, but that it assumes this gap cannot – or should not – be bridged. Anglican theologians like Paul Avis and the former Archbishop of York, John Habgood, each accept that modern society is secular. Nonetheless, they do not accept that this implies that establishment is now outdated. For Avis, the problem is that secularization has destroyed the language with which the relationship between Church and State used to be articulated. This does not, however, mean that the need for establishment itself has also been destroyed. It is, in his view, a Christian obligation to associate the Church and state – because a secular state is a contradiction in terms.31 Habgood would agree. Indeed, he argues that if the Church rejects establishment simply because of secularization it is doing nothing more than running away from its responsibilities.32 Each of these arguments deserves investigation. It is particularly hard not to be sympathetic to Davie’s account of modern British believing – especially given the remarkably high levels of Christian self-identification that have been found not just in the 2001 census, but also the recent integrated household survey. As more than 70 per cent of people still claim to be Christian, something more complicated than classical secularization is evidently underway.33 Yet it is Hobson’s historical perspective that demands the most attention. His claim that establishment has failed because it is no longer fit for purpose seems to presume that it was once workable, even if not very desirable. For theologians like Stanley Hauerwas, of course, this 30

31 32 33

Grace Davie, ‘Vicarious Religion: a methodological challenge’, in Nancy Ammerman (ed.), Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 21–36. Paul Avis, Church, State, and Establishment (London: SPCK, 2001). John Habgood, Church and Nation in a Secular Age (London: DLT, 1983). http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget.asp?ID=954&Pos=3&ColRank=2&Rank =1000 (accessed 27 September 2010); http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/ theme_social/IHS/ihs-guide-complete.pdf (accessed 27 September 2010).

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What Future for Establishment? itself is an error. Echoing Bonhoeffer and Yoder, he points to the creation of a state Church under Constantine as a critical moment in which Christianity lost both its way and its prophetic voice.34 For a historian, however, Hobson’s apparent belief that establishment worked and Hauerwas’ argument that it corrupted the Church are each equally problematic. This is not to deny the importance of ‘Constantinian’ Christianity – both Church and State were radically changed by the emperor’s decision to embrace the faith.35 But it is worth considering whether establishment was ever as allencompassing or widely accepted as its critics sometimes suggest. Certainly, even in the high days of medieval Christendom, Church and State never mapped easily on to each other. Indeed, the author of the standard work on the subject, Brian Tierney, points to the continued conflict between the two as a key factor in the growth of political liberty. ‘The very existence of two power structures competing for allegiance instead of only one compelling obedience greatly enhanced the possibilities for human freedom’, he claims.36 This is about as far away from the dangers of Constantinianism as you can get. Even after the Reformation, the English State was never able to enforce confessional uniformity on the people. There remained significant Roman Catholic minorities and an ever-growing group of Protestants who objected to the direction in which the Church of England was developing.37 These tensions underwrote the Civil War and were to be institutionalized after the Restoration. From 1689 onwards, indeed, the Church of England found itself just one denomination amongst many. True, it exercised what the historians John Walsh and Stephen Taylor have termed a ‘powerful social and political ascendancy’.38 But the place of 34 35 36 37 38

Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the practice of non-violence (London: SPCK, 2004), p. 43. Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (London: Penguin, 2009), ch. 6. Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, 1050–1300 (Englewood–Heights, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1964), p. 2. G. W. Bernard, ‘The Church of England, c.1529–c.1642’, History 75 (1990), pp. 183– 206. John Walsh and Stephen Taylor, ‘Introduction: the Church and Anglicanism in the “long” eighteenth century’, in John Walsh, Colin Haydon, and Stephen Taylor (eds.), The Church of England c.1689–c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) p. 61.

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William Whyte Dissenters and Catholics within society was legally recognized, and the State increasingly came to acknowledge that there was no one Church with which it could have an exclusive relationship.39 The nineteenth century saw this process continue apace, with Nonconformity (as it was now called) growing in strength and confidence – and demanding concession after concession from the State.40 It was this that created Jeremy Morris’ ‘Partial Disestablishment’. Yet, as this all-too brief survey should suggest, there was in fact never a period in which the Church and the State were mere equivalents; much less an era in which Church, State and society were the same. Even at the height of Erastianism, the State always had to recognize that the Church did not encompass everyone. The Church, likewise, had to acknowledge that its interests were often different from those of the State. Pace Hauerwas, the two were always distinct. Pace Hobson, there was never a time in which everyone was a member of the established church. It was simply not the case that by the early nineteenth century, for example, ‘Non-Anglicans were still widely perceived to be unpatriotic.’41 Not only is this statement factually inaccurate – Protestants of all denominations, as Linda Colley has shown, were drawn together within a wider British identity over the eighteenth century42 – it is also deeply revealing in a more general sense, too. What it speaks of is a wider problem amongst Anglican writers, whether they are in favour of establishment or not. They almost always write, as Theo Hobson does, as though there was a moment in the past when the issue of Church– State relations was simple, uncomplicated, and uncontroversial. They imagine a time in which establishment worked – and it worked because everyone (or, at any rate, everyone who mattered) was an Anglican. This Anglican chauvinism is highly regrettable. It ignores the experiences of those who were outside the established Church. It also downplays the 39 40

41 42

Eamon Duffy, Peter and Jack: Roman Catholics and Dissent in Eighteenth Century England (London: Dr Williams’s Library, 1982). For overviews of this, see G. I. T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain, 1832–1868 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), and Politics and the Churches in Great Britain, 1868–1921 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Hobson, Against Establishment, p. 82. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), ch. 1.

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What Future for Establishment? very real suffering created by attempts to enforce establishment over the centuries. The burnings of the sixteenth century; the imprisonments of the seventeenth century; the riots of the eighteenth century: these are all written out of the conventional Anglican accounts of establishment. Even Jeremy Morris seems content to reproduce this account, characterizing the eighteenth century as a period when ‘To most people there was still just one Church of England.’43 This was certainly the attitude of Anglicans, and they were undoubtedly in a large majority, but it is hardly a satisfactory description of the very complicated religious landscape of the period, nor of the ways in which Dissenters increasingly resented – and resisted – this domineering asssumption.44 Moreover, Anglican writers tend to explore the period after the eighteenth century in ways that gloss over the objectionable aspects of ‘Partial Disestablishment’. For the Church fought long and hard to keep its old privileges and, in the process, behaved badly towards all manner of groups within society. Less high-profile than the battles that went on before, the petty indignities and local dramas that characterized this nineteenth-century process are also worth recalling. Take the tragedy that played itself out in the Cambridgeshire village of Bassingbourne in the early 1840s, for example. Here, the vicar refused to bury Jane Rumbold, the infant daughter of two Nonconformists, not once, nor twice, but five times between 1840 and 1845. She was, he said, a heretic and a schismatic, and not entitled to have the burial service read over her.45 Here was the ‘earthed establishment’ indeed; little wonder that in his contribution David Carter talks of a need for Anglicans to deal with the ‘past hurts’ of establishment. The Church of England’s failure to engage with this history of intolerance and exclusion has resulted in a situation in which almost all Anglican writers on establishment fall into the same trap. Attracted by the notion of establishment pictured by authors like Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot, in which societies witness an organic unity between Church and State, they are

43 44 45

Morris, ‘Future of Church and State’, p. 165. Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 291–6. Titchmarsh v. Chapman (1844). See especially English Reports 63, pp. 920–30, and Bury and Norwich Post, 14 February 1844, p. 1.

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William Whyte understandably disappointed by what they find in the modern world.46 They forget, firstly, just how offensive both Arnold and Eliot were to those outside the Anglican Church and, secondly, that the establishment they pictured did not exist.47 Indeed, it had never existed. For Anglican advocates of establishment, however, a sort of Arnoldian Church–State nexus remains the desideratum. It is hard, for example, not to find echoes of this in Paul Avis’ call for an establishment based upon ecumenism.48 Anglican critics of establishment, by contrast, compare the mythical era of organic unity with contemporary circumstances and conclude that the link between Church and State should now be broken. This certainly appears to be the assumption underlying both Colin Buchanan’s and Theo Hobson’s critiques.49 By now it should be clear that both these responses, resting as they do on a misunderstanding of history, are inadequate. Instead of grieving for a golden age that never was, it is worth considering exactly how the establishment works now. The Church of England retains a privileged position in parliament and in relation to the monarchy. It also still asserts its responsibility for the nation as a whole: maintaining universal parochial provision and seeing itself as providing ‘a Christian presence in every community’.50 Yet, as the Roman Catholic writer Adrian Hastings observed more than a decade ago, ‘it no longer provides any privilege for Anglicans in general over or against other British people, Christian or nonChristian; it no longer makes the rest of us into “second class citizens”’.51 In reality, in fact, establishment gives the Church of England all of the responsibilities of being the national Church and very few of the advantages. It is still subject to parliament. It still has ‘cure of souls’ for all those residing

46 47 48 49 50 51

Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1948). See, for example, [Henry Allon], ‘Mr Matthew Arnold and Puritanism’, British Quarterly Review 52 (1870), pp. 170–99. Avis, Church, State, and Establishment, pp. 84–8. Buchanan, Cut the Connection, ch. 3; Hobson, Against Establishment, pp. 52–84. http://www.cofe.anglican.org/ (accessed 28 September 2010). Adrian Hastings, ‘The Case for Retaining the Establishment’, in Tariq Modood (ed.), Church, State, and Religious Minorities (London: Policy Studies Institute, 1997), pp. 40– 46, p. 40. This is a précis of his Church and State: the English Experience (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1991).

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What Future for Establishment? within its parishes. It still has the onerous duty of maintaining more than 16,000 church buildings. And it does all this within a legal, social and political framework that increasingly challenges its authority and may even imperil its autonomy. As Jeremy Morris puts it, ‘Establishment does not preserve significant influence for the Church at the very heart of government. On the contrary, the very development of the British State over the last century and a half has almost taken for granted the Church’s irrelevance in most areas of policy.’52 Does this mean, then, that establishment is a burden that the Church could do without? That would undoubtedly be one reading of the situation – and it seems to be what Archbishop Rowan Williams once believed.53 It is possible, however, to reach another conclusion. Establishment, indeed, can be defended precisely because the Church has now had its privileges stripped from it, yet nonetheless continues to conceive its role as a national one. As Wesley Carr argues, it is not clear that a disestablished Church of England would continue to pursue its universal, national role.54 In fact, if R. M. Morris is right to suggest that disestablishment might also involve disendowment, it is not at all clear that the Church could sustain ‘a Christian presence in every community’ even if it wanted to.55 Establishment in that sense is a bulwark against sectarianism. And because the established Church has duties without any real concomitant rights, this ‘responsibility for all and sundry’, as John Habgood puts it, can be seen – perhaps for the first time in Anglican history – as genuinely prophetic, the action of a true servant Church.56 Certainly, this is all a long way away from the Erastian command economy of salvation, in which membership of the established Church was enforced. Today, the Church of England is required to offer its services to everyone – and it does so expecting very little in return. In many ways, the link between Church and State is also easier to defend now than it ever has been. It is no longer exclusive and no longer excludes. 52 53

54 55 56

Morris, ‘The Future of Church and State’, pp. 167–8. Sunday Times, 27 January 2002. See also Hobson, Against Establishment, pp. 126–9. Quite what Williams now believes about establishment is – as with so much else – unclear. Carr, ‘A Developing Establishment’, p. 5. Morris, Church and State in 21st Century Britain, p. 7. Habgood, Church and State in a Secular Age, p. 98.

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William Whyte Except in the case of the monarch, no high office remains restricted only to Anglicans. The Bishops in the House of Lords do not – as they did in the eighteenth century, for example – exercise a disproportionate influence on legislation.57 On the contrary, this enforced participation in the parliamentary process exposes the Church to challenges that it might otherwise duck. As Nigel Biggar points out in this volume, establishment requires the Church of England to engage with the realities of politics: forcing it to face up to the real world of contingent decision-making rather than abstract questions of absolute right or wrong. In the words of John Habgood: ‘To be close to those in power is to have some first-hand knowledge of the complexity of the actual choices facing them. This has a devastating effect on prophetic certainties. And actually to share responsibility is even more devastating.’58 Here again, establishment can be seen making the Church behave better than it might otherwise be tempted to. Instead of hiding in comfortable opposition, complacently criticizing from the sidelines, the formal link between Church and State emphatically establishes that it is the job of the Church to live in the real world. More than this, as Nigel Biggar goes on to argue, establishment serves to emphasize the ambitions – and the limitations – of secularism. It consequently places the Church of England in a genuinely prophetic role: resisting the growth of a solely secular politics. This is a calling which is more than merely self-interested. For in asserting the importance of religion in politics, the establishment today defends pluralism in a way that it has never done before. As we have seen, until comparatively recently, the established Church was a determined opponent of religious heterogeneity. It claimed a monopoly on faith. In the age of ‘Partial Disestablishment’, however, it has increasingly come to embrace pluralism – and even to be seen as a guarantor of it. As the ‘liberal polity’ outlined by Raymond Plant grows ever more all-embracing, indeed, the establishment serves as one way of resisting the claims of secularism. This may be particularly true for Muslims and other members of minority religions. Certainly that is what the political theorist Tariq Modood has claimed. He writes: 57 58

G. M. Ditchfield, ‘Ecclesiastical Policy under Lord North’, in Walsh, Haydon and Taylor (eds), The Church of England, pp. 228–47. Habgood, Church and Nation in a Secular Age, p. 105.

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What Future for Establishment?

The minimal nature of an Anglican establishment, its proven openness to other denominations and faiths seeking public space, and the fact that its very existence is an ongoing acknowledgement of the public character of religion are all reasons why it may seem far less intimidating to the minority faiths than a triumphal secularism.59

This is certainly not something that could have been said a hundred – or perhaps even fifty – years ago, and it suggests that within the context of a secularizing state on the one hand, and a pluralist society on the other, establishment has a new validity, a new purpose. If it is not something that the Church would have chosen, then perhaps that makes its new calling all the more important. Once again, it seems that contemporary establishment is more about service than it is about command. Of course, it is important to be realistic. It would be as wrong to paint today as a golden age as it is to look back to the past and seek to find one there. The fact of the matter is that establishment does not matter to many people. Nonetheless, the current relationship between Church and State is undoubtedly less objectionable than at any other previous time. Indeed, it can be argued that it is really only now that establishment functions as a potentially positive influence: inspiring a Church that no longer automatically sides with the powerful and punishes the excluded, but instead tries to sustain the importance of religion within a polity that increasingly seeks to sideline it. Rather than granting privilege, establishment now exacts a price from the Church, preventing it from abandoning a nation that often appears to have abandoned it. Establishment, in other words, requires the Church of England to serve the people of England. It also exacts a price from the State by symbolically asserting the State’s spiritual dimension. It thus compels both Church and State to confront issues that they would each probably rather ignore. This is certainly good for the Church. It is also probably good for the State. In his last Prime Minister’s Question Time, Tony Blair said that he was ‘not bothered’ by establishment. At one level, this echoing of Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard was a typically superficial response from a man whose 59

Tariq Modood, ‘Establishment, Multiculturalism and British Citizenship’, Political Quarterly 65 (1994), pp. 53–73, pp. 72–3.

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William Whyte memoirs contain no real mention of the Church, but do have an index entry for the singer Charlotte Church.60 More fundamentally, it reflects a wish to separate the political from the religious. It is, however, not just politicians that would like to do this. Many Christians would also like these categories to be clear and neat: with one issue religious, and another political; one issue private, and another public; one issue to do with the Church, and another to do with the State. Unfortunately, though, this is just not possible. The categories bleed into each other. Ultimately, establishment is just one way of dealing with this truth. In the past, the implications of this have been highly problematic for those who were not part of the Anglican Church. In the present, it may seem that the demands of establishment are actually more problematic for the Church itself. And as for the future, it seems likely that attempts will be made to drive the Church and State further apart. Nothing, however, is inevitable. If the Church can be grown up enough to accept its involvement in the State, then perhaps the State will come to accept its involvement in the Church. If Anglicans can stop mourning for a golden age that never was, they can start confronting the opportunities of the present day. And if this book does nothing more than help promote a more mature, better informed and broadly based discussion of establishment, then it will have served its purpose well.

60

See also, Mark Chapman, Blair’s Britain: A Christian critique (London: DLT, 2005).

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Index Act of Synod (1993) 102–3 Adie, Michael 106, 108, 122 Ahdar, Rex 17, 18 Alison, Michael 81, 92 Alli, Lord Alli 150-1 Allister, Donald 90 Anglican–Methodist Conversations 169–74 Anglicanorum coetibus 176 Arnold, Matthew 14, 190–1 Avis, Paul 69, 187, 191 Baldry, Tony 98–101, 113, 117–18, 155 Barth, Karl 37 Baxter, Christina 95, 107 Bell, Stuart 116–19 Benn, Tony 53–4, 113 ‘Big Society’ 129 Biggar, Nigel 126 Birrell, Augustine 43 Blackie, John Stuart 143 Blair, Tony 180, 194 Blanning, T. C. W. 38 Bogdanor, Vernon 36 Bradley, Ian 30 Bradshaw, Timothy 94 British National Party 135–7 Britishness 133–7 Broadhurst, John 107 Brown, Gordon 181 Bryant, Chris 117–19, 155 Buchanan, Colin 50, 76–8, 84, 88–97, 185, 191

Cantle, Ted 127, 133 Carey, George 86 Carr, Wesley 126, 139, 183, 187, 192 Chadwick, W. Owen 40 Charles, Prince 52, 54, 185 Chillingworth, William 13 Christian Institute and Christian Concern for our Nation 83 Church and State (Selborne Report) (1916) 143–4 Church and State (Cecil Report) (1935) 44, 45, 143–5 Church and State (Moberly Report) (1952) 46–8, 80, 143, 154 Church and State (Chadwick Report) (1970) 49–50, 69–70, 75, 79–80, 84 Church Commissioners 156 Church of Scotland 141–2, 145–9, 151–2, 154–7 Church Schools 2 Church Society 81–2 Churchill, Winston 39 Coggan, Donald 51 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 30–1, 34 Cormack, Patrick 110, 112–13 coronation service 1, 27, 45 Craig, Hugh 80, 87 Cryer, Ann 116

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Index Davie, Grace 186–7 desecularization 128 Diana, Princess funeral 35 Dominus Jesus 179 Dudley-Smith, Timothy 76, 80 Duffield, Gervase 84 ‘earthed’ Establishment 139, 183, 187 Ecclesiastical Committee 106 Education Act (1902) 162 Education Act (1944) 46 Edwards, David 92 Eliot, T. S. 45, 190–1 Enabling Act (1919) 141, 149 Erastianism 100–1 extremism 137–9 Faith in the City 2, 69 Faith in the Countryside 87 Falkland, Viscount 12–14 Field, Frank 107–8, 111, 112, 113 Figgis, J. N. 61–2 Fisher, Geoffrey 156 Froude, R. Hurrell 59 Furlong, Monica 116 Gaita, Raymond 15 Garbett, Cyril 45, 50, 53 Garnett, Jane 130–3, 135 George V 44 Giddings, Philip 86, 93 Gidley, Sandra 115 Gladstone, William 184 Golden Jubilee 28 Gore, Charles 65–8

‘Great Tew Circle’ 11–14 Green, Simon 46, 48 Griffin, J. R. 58 Gummer, John Selwyn 107–8 Habermas, Jürgen 15, 128 Habgood, John 53, 87, 187, 192, 193 Harris, Alana 130–3, 135 Harris, Evan 181 Hastings, Adrian 51, 191 Hauerwas, Stanley 187–8, 189 Henson, Herbert Hensley 39–43, 45–6, 142 Herbert, Christopher 89, 93–4 ‘high’ Establishment 29, 139, 183 Hoare, Timothy 79–80, 87 Hobson, Theo 16, 186–7, 189, 191 Holloway, David 84, 87–8 homosexuality 10 House of Commons 110–13 House of Lords 1–2, 26–7 Hughes, Hugh Price 168 Hughes, Simon 107, 112, 117 Inge, W. R. 44 Islam 54 Jackson, Thomas 159–61 Jacob, E. F. 144 James, Eric 52 Jefferts Schori, Katharine 114 Johnston, Raymond 83–4, 91–2 Jowett, Alfred 48 Jowett, Benjamin 143

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Index Joynson-Hicks, Lancelot 47 Keble, John 56–61 Keeble, Sally 117 Kemp, Eric 47, 49 Key, Robert 116, 117–18, 121 Know, D. Broughton 90 Laski, Harold 62–5 Leech, Kenneth 185–6 Leigh, Ian 17, 18 Lewis, Richard 93 Longley, Clifford 104 Lowles, Nicholas 136 McClean, David 106, 108–10, 122 McKechnie, Alexander 165–7 McKibbin, Ross 53 MacKinnon, Donald 52, 72–3 Manchester Statement (1993) 103–6 March, Andrew 35–6 Meiwes, Armin 3 Melvill, Andrew 146 Methodist Conference Report (2004) 170–4 Moberly, Walter 47 Modood, Tariq 16, 37, 54, 126, 193 monarchy 1 Morris, Jeremy 183, 192 Morris, R. M. 23, 126, 184 Mortimer, Robert 47 multiculturalism 126–30 National Evangelical Anglican Congress 75

Neill, Stephen 85 Newman, John Henry 56, 60 Nockles, Peter 56, 57 Norman, Edward 15 Nussbaum, Martha 18–20 O’Donovan, Oliver 77–8 ordination of women 81–2, 102–23 Parekh, Bhikhu 33–4 Perry, Michael 17 Pitt, Valerie 70–2, 75, 79, 86, 96 Plant, Raymond 185, 193 Prayer Book Crisis (1927–8) 39–43, 78, 100 Prism 48, 71 Provincial Episcopal Visitors (PEV) 102–3 Putnam, Robert 129 Ramsey, A. Michael 49–50 Rawls, John 3–6, 19, 35 receptive ecumenism 178 Reed, Andy 118–20, 184 Robinson, J. A. T. 48–9 Sacks, Jonathan 152 St Bartholomew’s, East Ham 130–3 Samuel, David 81 Saward, Michael 79 Scott-Joynt, Michael 122, 150 Selby, Peter 101, 120–1 Sentamu, John 149–50 Shanahan, Chris 137 Shanks, Andrew 33–4 Shephard, A. P. 47 199

Index Shrewsbury, William 162–5 Simpson, Patrick Carnegie 42–3 Slee, Colin 89 Skinner, Simon 58 slavery 9–10 Stark, Werner 31

Trustram Eve, Malcolm 156 Turnbull Michael 93

Stevenson, Kenneth 89 Stibbs, Alan 90 Storkey, Elaine 94 Stott, John 85 Stout, Jeffrey 38 Stride, Eddie 86

Wakeham Commission 2, 16, 17, 151–2 Wales and Monmouthshire 152, 153 Wesley, John 158, 164 Williams, Rowan 72 Williams, R. R. 84–5 Witte, John 17 Wolsterstorff, Nicholas 16 women bishops 113–23 Wright, N. T. 87–8, 94, 100–1, 119

Tearfund survey 21–2 Temple, William 30, 42, 144 Tierney, Brian 188 Townley, Peter 89 Trott, Stephen 82–3

Ut unum sint 176 Vidler, Alec 48

Younger-Ross, Richard 180

200