Would splitting from state control harm the Church of England? Chris Game takes up the debate.
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I RECALL a master at school asserting that the longest word in the English language was the 28-letter antidisestablishmentarianism, meaning opposition to those wanting to end the Church of England’s status as the nation’s state church.
We reckoned we could do better, even back then: before Mary Poppins’ supercalifrag etc and the Guinness Book of Records, which lists an unpleasant-sounding, 45-letter lung disease. And we did. Our class smart-arse found an Oxford English Dictionary and flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication.
The ‘flocky-nocky’ word was barely pronounceable, and almost as artificial as supercalifrag etc – simply a string of four near-synonymous Latin ways of dismissing something as rubbish. But it was in the OED, and it had 29 letters. Schoolmaster’s authority instantly flocky-nockyed.
Now, thanks to the Archbishop of Canterbury, we can have both words in the same sentence, for His Grace has effectively flocky-nockyed antidisestablishmentarianism. Calm down, dears, is his Michael Winner-esque message to conservative Christians everywhere. Disestablishment, should it ever happen, would not be the end of the world.
This was interesting without being exactly hot news – cooler, probably, than that one of the Archbishop’s favourite films is The Muppet Christmas Carol. After all, Rowan Williams (pictured) grew up and was a bishop in the Church in Wales, and he made clear his sympathy for disestablishment of the Church of England before becoming Archbishop.
Disestablishment in 1920, far from ending the world for the Church in Wales, probably on balance boosted it – by comparison, for example, with non-conformist churches. The Church’s independence of both the state and the Church of England – indeed, the fact that the Archbishop himself has no formal authority in Wales – has given it, Williams suggests, ‘a certain integrity’ that the Anglican Church lacks.
It has its own governing body – whose decisions, unlike the General Synod’s, require no parliamentary ratification. It maintains a parish structure, determines its own liturgy, raises its own funds – at least as effectively as the asset-rich Church of England – and, vitally for an institution formerly led almost entirely by Englishmen, it elects its own bishops and Archbishop, with no reference to either monarch or Prime Minister. In short, it works.
At the same time as disestablishment in Wales, the Church of Scotland – Presbyterian since it abolished its bishops in the 17th century – was also severing itself in practice from state control, but in its own unique way.
The Kirk, as it is known, is the established church in Scotland. But the Queen, ‘Supreme Governor’ of the Church of England, is just an ordinary member – albeit one whose Coronation Oath commits her to an odd exercise in personal ecumenism: to ‘preserve’ the Presbyterian Church north of the border while also preserving the Anglican episcopalian church in the south.
That peculiarity apart, the Church of Scotland has a comparable operational independence to the Church in Wales. It has its own, highly democratic, structures of government, its comprehensive parish network, its distinctive form of worship, and, again in welcomed contrast to earlier practice, complete autonomy in appointing its ministers.
Historically, therefore, establishment has been recognised for what, ever since the Reformation, it always has been: a settlement between church and state, involving rights and constraints on both sides.
A century ago, the churches in Wales and Scotland felt their respective settlements had become unbalanced and, to coin a phrase, were no longer worth the candle. They wanted out: to control their own affairs without kowtowing for parliamentary approval, and, above all, to make their own clerical appointments.
Today, the official position of the Church of England and that of most members is the reverse – suggesting that this settlement is unbalanced the other way.
It becomes steadily harder even for the Church itself to justify its privileges over both the non-religious and those of other faiths. Regular Sunday service attendance – even reinforced by parents hoping to get their children into church schools – continues inexorably to fall, as do the numbers of us citing religion as a significant part of our self-identity.
Yet it readily accepts its compromised independence, and will deploy any argument to hang on as the last state church in the 160-nation worldwide Anglican Communion, and, even more contentiously, as the only religious group whose unelected leaders sit as of right in the legislature of a western democracy.
Among the British constitution’s many oddities, the Bishops’ Bench in the House of Lords – the two Archbishops and 24 most senior diocesan bishops – is surely one of the most extraordinary. They date back to the 14th century, their number unchanged since Henry VIII, yet there is still disagreement over whether constitutionally they are even peers at all.
Reason enough in itself, you might think, to get rid of them. And certainly enough not to compound an indefensibly undemocratic aberration by extending religious representation in the Lords – as proposed rather desperately nowadays by the Church itself – to other faiths and denominations. Though not to humanists and secularists, whose contribution to national debates on matters of conscience and morality does not apparently need institutionalising.
Of course, the bishops have never really confined themselves to the narrow parliamentary definition of ‘issues of conscience’, but it is on such issues that their voices tend to be loudest and most co-ordinated – as in their recent derailing of the Bill to legalise ‘assisted dying’.
To any outsider it must seem incredible. A completely unaccountable, unrepresentative, wholly male and middle class élite of just one of England’s hundreds of religious movements can curtail parliamentary debate on an issue for which there is long-term, undisputed public support.
Yet, while there are numerous other strands and ramifications, this is the essence of the current church-state deal. Uniquely privileged legislative participation for 24 bishops in exchange for handing over the final say in their appointment and that of sundry other bishops, deans, canons and assorted postholders to the Prime Minister and/or monarch.
Margaret Thatcher gets to pick George Carey as Archbishop of Canterbury, and Mark Santer as Bishop of Birmingham, Tony Blair chooses David Shephard’s successor as the Bishop of Liverpool – all in preference to the Church’s own favoured candidates. But – and this is the interesting bit – under Gordon Brown the deal is collapsing. The PM is changing the rules.
He has already given up his right of final choice in ecclesiastical appointments, leaving the Church exposed as directly appointing its own legislators. And he is considering at least revising the 1701 Act of Settlement, which would enable a non-Protestant to succeed to the throne and thereby, if there were no further change, become head of the Church of England.
That inevitable consequential change, accompanied or not by removal of the Bishops’ Bench from a reformed and predominantly elected Upper House, would amount in effect to disestablishment.
The government’s official position is that it won’t initiate disestablishment without the Church’s agreement. The truth is, though, that it doesn’t much matter. As Rowan Williams is telling his Church, we are already embarked on disestablishment by stealth. Antidisestablishmentarianism is, in anything but the short term, a lost cause.
* Chris Game is a lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham
