The Church of England is disestablishing itself
It's becoming a loose federation of different doctrines, writes George Pitcher. And so it's doing the secularists' work for them.
The politics of the Church of England have long been a moveable feast. It was a suffragist and early campaigner for women’s priesthood, Maude Royden-Shaw, who first coined the phrase that it was “the Conservative Party at prayer” towards the end of the First World War. And she didn’t mean it in a good way.
She was urging the Church to be more radical. During the course of the following century, her prayer was answered. Most of the Conservative Party would now consider our national Church to be a hotbed of liberal lefties. Or, at the very least, limp-wristed in defending matters of public and private mores.
Predominantly conservative
My guess, if I were to generalise, is that the Church of England is predominantly conservative in rural areas and socialist (or social democrat) in its urban parishes. In that, it reflects our broader electoral demographics.
A more intriguing question is whether our Church is part of our establishment, in the sense that it is an elitist institution that co-extends with the ruling influences of our polity. Those influences especially keep England in its hegemony of the Union; alternatively, the Church is anti-establishment.
My feeling is that the Church in which I’m a priest and a rector has moved over the past five decades, broadly speaking the apotheosis of post-modernism, from the former to the latter. Recent events and issues have almost completed its transition from organ of state to thorn in its side.
Nanny-state’s apron strings
This process has not been deliberate. There are plenty of socio-theological liberals, myself included, who have long resisted disestablishment of the Church for fear of what we might find were we to release our grip of nanny-state’s apron strings.
Some of the more aggressive secularists of humanism and atheism, who grew in the universities of the last-sixties and early seventies, would wish to sweep the Judeo-Christian tradition from the public square, in favour of their own religions.
For that reason alone – the suspicion of motives of those who argue that the Christian Church is unfairly advantaged in our public life – we defend, for example, the 26 seats in the House of Lords that are reserved for Anglican bishops, the Lords Spiritual.
But it may be that it won’t be its secularist detractors that succeed in removing its status as our established Church, but those who allegedly support it and comprise its management – the bishops, clergy and laity of the Church of England itself. And I don’t think they are doing it deliberately.
Doctrinal role
It is, quite simply, that the Church has progressively abandoned its doctrinal role in our public life. Take the forthcoming Synodical fracas over same-sex marriage. Understand that the establishment issue here is less seriously about Christian dogma and more about the Church’s societal and structural role.
When David Cameron, as prime minister, succeeded in getting same-sex marriage onto the statute book a decade ago, he presumably did not consider the anomalies of jurisdiction it would create. Henceforth, the monarch would preside, as head of state, over a definition of marriage that departed entirely from Holy Matrimony, as defined by the Church, over which the same monarch presides as supreme governor.
It was that legislative act that started the waves of same-sex marriage lapping at the steps of the Church. Naturally, it has become an irresistible tide, the latest consequence of which is the leaked news that the Church’s General Synod will act to allow same-sex blessings of secular weddings at the altar.
Compromise or abomination
That’s variously seen as a sensible or meaningless compromise, or an abomination. Yet, as I say, the implications for the Church of England, established in law as our state institution of Christian religion, are less scriptural or doctrinal than structural.
It is now almost inevitable, some might say simply inevitable, that for ordained clergy of the Church same-sex marriage is to become a matter of conscience. That will mean that liberals will celebrate weddings for same-sex couples in their churches; those of more traditionalist Catholic or conservative Evangelical persuasions will not. Weddings will be at the discretion of presiding ministers and their congregations, rather in the way that provision was made in the Nineties for women priests.
The point here is that the Church is becoming ineluctably less of an institution defined and united by its canon law (endorsed by the law of the land) and more a loose federation of churches that think and believe various things. In that, it is incidentally a microcosm of the worldwide Anglican Communion, in which open homosexuals are celebrated and promoted to bishoprics on the east coast of America and will burn in hell in much of Africa.
This matters in that the Church of England cannot have an established role in law if it isn’t a cohesive instrument of the state. Some might consider that a pity, given all that it has given to the state in terms of education and healthcare policy, the framework of law and the purpose of family in society.
But there we go. The Church of England is gradually but determinedly disestablishing itself.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest