1st December 2022
If you pick up a constitutional law text of a certain age you may find passages, perhaps even a chapter, setting out the relationship between the government of the United Kingdom and the Church of England.
You may even get passages on the Church of Scotland and the now disestablished Churches of Wales and of Ireland.
Next year at the coronation, there will be a great deal of religious content to the ceremony – and even when Charles III acceded earlier this year, one of the first required acts was to swear an oath in respect of the Church of Scotland.
Meanwhile bishops of the Church of England sit in the House of Lords and in our courts the first thing a judge and a jury will find out about you as a witness is whether you believe in a god or not.
Just over one hundred years ago, the state was even more fused with the church and, before 1828-32, some historians even speak of a “confessional state” which, at least in England, structurally privileged the Church of England.
The established churches were (and to a limited still extent still are) part of the constitution of the United Kingdom – if that constitution is understood descriptively as the answer to the question: how is the United Kingdom constituted.
As a non-militant atheist, I would welcome a state which was suddenly and entirely secularised, that is if it could be done painlessly in an instant of a blink.
But as someone interested in practical constitutional reform, I am less enthusiastic about disestablishment, given the time and trouble it would take.
Yes, get rid of the bishops from their automatic seats in the legislature, and also get rid of the presumption in favour of religious oaths in courts.
But that is about it: the rest can join the long list of constitutional reforms it would be nice to have, but not perhaps yet.
This is, ironically, an Anglican form of atheism: a via media between being religious and militant atheism.
And given the relationship between the Crown and the Church of England in particular under the new King – the defender of faith, without any definite article – there is no likelihood of any disestablishment in the near future.
So the current compromise will continue for a while.
That is: four nations; two established churches; and one of those established churches with seats in parliament.
And it is: a semi-confessional state at a time where there are many religious faiths in society, as well as an increasing amount of us free from any religious faith.
If we were starting from scratch, we would probably not give the Church of England such an elevated position within our polity – just as we would not now build that nice parish church around the corner.
But given that it is there, we cannot be bothered to get rid of it entirely.
And many of the parish churches are quaint to look at, and nice to visit about this time of year.
Let us put disestablishment off to another year.
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I remarked to a chap the other day on Twitter that “For a lot of people, believing in God isn’t compulsory when it comes to the Church of England.”
More of an optional extra than an absolute necessity.
I also observed, “To be CofE is for many people to be areligious. It’s why so many people find the Church of England comforting.”
It was one of a number of interesting, lively exchanges sparked by this surely uncontroversial Tweet of mine:
“Christians are now the largest single group in the United Kingdom defined by religion.
“The religion people connect or identify with (their religious affiliation), whether or not they practice or have belief in it.”
Office for National Statistics
Faith or the lack of it is not captured by the Census.”
In a later Tweet I asked:
“When do we start debating the true meaning of Christmas?
Seven days after we’ve got over the religious data from the 2021 Census?”
No takers as yet.
Happy Winterval from multi-cultural, multi-faith, multi-ethnic Birmingham!
To my mind, there are significant constitutional implications if King Charles’s title includes the phrase ‘by the Grace of God’ (as his mother’s did) which would be worth exploring.
Personally, speaking as a pantheist, I’d say Britain departed from the Grace of God in Autumn 2019, when The Queen ratified an Act of Parliament that demonstrated contempt for the concept of constitutional integrity (by deeming that an explicit requirement in a clearly constitutional law for approval of two-thirds of MPs was satisfied by a simple majority approving an ad-hoc Act).
“and in our courts the first thing a judge and a jury will find out about you as a witness is whether you believe in a god or not.”
Indeed, and the court also finds out whether each member of the jury believes in god or not when the jury are sworn in, if I remember correctly from my one stint at jury service.
I mean, that’s not strictly true… Anyone of any faith, witness or juror, can take the Affirmation if they prefer.
(Call me petty, but I want to reserve my right to swear my Juror’s Oath in the name of the Living Force, while holding a VHS copy of A New Hope
It must have been 1960 or 1961 when BBC Television had a book-review series, in one episode of which a scene was dramatised where a witness refuses to swear on the Bible and insists instead on a copy of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. On receiving it he begins, “I swear by…” (inspects the spine) “Harriet Beecher Stowe…”.
Technical aside: there is no plus-sign on my birth certificate. Why has one suddenly appeared?
A fair point – I stand corrected. I didn’t think of the use case of a Christian who chose the affirmation – and elsewhere in these comments we have a real life example of that.
Among evangelical Christians, this is a very common practice. Would be hard to put figures on it, I know.
I think I must be the Christian cited as affirming rather than swearing – unless there are two of us on this thread – but I am by no measure considered, or consider myself, as an evangelical.
I have found the other responses to this blog interesting: very few seem to have been responding from a Christian position of any kind, most seem to be from a liberal atheist or agnostic position. Does that mean that English Christians are so comfortable with the status quo that they believe it to be above challenge? Or is it that (as I believe) any form of any religion which has its hands on the levers of secular power is inherently a Bad Thing, and thus there is no credible defence beyond “But we’ve always done it this way”?
And we must also acknowledge the possibility of an atheist who chooses to swear.
What we know about witnesses and jurors is whether they choose to swear or affirm. And, if they swear, we know what scriptures they choose to swear on.
I’d swear on the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
As an ordained Methodist minister, I engendered a certain raising of eyebrows at a Crown Court hearing twenty six years ago in Cornwall, when having been called into the witness box to give evidence, I declined the “Testament”, and elected to Affirm. I was dressed in a suit and black clerical shirt, so I looked the part, and the Judge asked me why I chose to Affirm rather than swear. I was happy to point him to the passage in the very gospels upon which I was being invited to swear, where Jesus instructed his followers to swear upon nothing, neither the hairs on their head nor the gold of the Temple, but merely “Let your yes be yes, and your no be no.”
I won the case!
As a minister in a non-established church, I woukd be very happy to see Parliament and the Law completely secularised. The Christian religion – indeed all religions – should stand on their own feet, and the Christian religion should also stand on the sidelines with the poor and marginalised, not be propping up and legitimising the rich and powerful. Apart from anything else (paradoxically) the church would be far more powerful and its words would carry more weight if they truly embraced a true Christian role in society.
Excellent comment thanks and bravo for your stance on affirmation vs swearing on a supposed holy writ two decades ago in court. That was brave for the time.
On your point about secularising all of life, and with you being a Methodist Minister, I was reminded that in the Netherlands all marriages are civil in the sense that they are are not valid unless performed by a (secular) official and in a local government office.
Of course the couple are free to have a separate religious ceremony by the rite of their choice but it has no legal force.
Doing that would certainly be a step forward in the UK and in fact King Charles & Queen Camilla were married in this way at a Registry Office first and then with the subsequent church service in Windsor Chapel not being a wedding but an exchange of vows and a service of blessing and all done that way because both were previously married & divorced which gave the C of E conniptions about a second marriage using a ceremony with ‘holy’ vows to remain together until ‘death us do part’.
As Methodists, we are not obliged by law, as the C of E vicar would be, to marry anyone (from the “Parish” in the Anglican case, we would understand that as our Methodist “Circuit”) who demands to be married, regardless of the couple brandishing the correct state certification (although we can’t legally marry people without it, of course) so are in a different position. I will always marry people who admit at least to the possibility of God, and couples where one has spiritual beliefs and the other doesn’t, and will tailor the liturgy to accommodate them both. I only draw the line at marrying a couple in church using Christian liturgy if they are both avowed atheists, because I wouldn’t want to be a party to intellectual and spiritual dishonesty. Thankfully, we don’t generally fall prey to the “pretty church” conumdrum. If people come to us to marry them, they usually really WANT us to marry them, for other than aesthetic reasons!
Thanks for the reply and explanation of your practice.
My contention is rather more severe as I’m saying that a ceremony of marriage by a minister of any faith should not have any legal standing whatsoever.
It is a religious rite and while I fully understand that for those of a faith it’s only the religious ceremony that will be the signifier of them being married it should not be of any legal significance in the public square.
I don’t disagree with you at all! I also think that civil marriage ought to be compulsory, and involve no religious content at all, and that any public religious ceremony should hold no legal status. I am convinced that the intertwining of church and state around marriage grew up entirely for practical purposes, in that the state wished to control who married and who didn’t, property rights being involved at higher levels, and that the paraphernalia of control – ie, documentation – was only practicable by dint of using the only generally literate locals to register them… ie, priests; so what should always have been a purely secular institution became pretty quickly enwrapped by religion as a post hoc excuse for control.
I’m very hsppy for my colleagues (I retired this summer, so haven’t benefitted from the change) that our previous (intertwined!) role as Authorised Persons has been reduced to signing a prepared certificate that the marriage took place in an authorised building officiated by an Authorised Person.
The sooner that goes as well, the better!
It seems to me the state is only interested in whether the two people concerned have made a commitment to each other which is sufficiently strong to justify treating them as a unit.
I can see why a church wedding between a couple with no reverence for the divine would not qualify – and, from that perspective, the obligation Alan Jenkins mentions that C of E vicars must marry anyone from the parish should go. But, simply from a practical point of view, I can’t see any reason why the state should not recognise a genuine spiritual commitment, however and wherever it’s made.
The significant party in a marriage ceromony is not the celebrant, but the couple. It is they who enter into commitments and exchange vows, and it is their vows which the state attaches significance and consequences to.
So surely you need to produce an argument as to why the state should disregard the vows and treat them as a nullity if the couple choose to exchange them before a religious celebrant?
There are formal relationships between the CofE and the state, and there are informal: the latter not insignificant.
The CofE is far from monolithic (and that’s been so for centuries). It contains a significant conservative evangelical component which is more like the politicised evangelicalism of the USA than it cares to recognise. When a prominent CofE theologian, close to the Archbishop of Canterbury, gives public support to a genocide-denying, AfD-sympathising US ‘scholar’, and speaks at conferences organised by an Orban-Fidesz associated organisation, it’s as well to keep an eye on the CofE’s informal role as well as the formal role.
Personally, as a CofS member, where the church established – a national church but not a state church, I wish the CofE had renounced its established status of its own accord years ago.
Aaah DAG you are more of a CofE man than you take credit for – the CofE being a classic English fudge between the extremes of Roman Catholicism and Calvinism though it’s liturgy is amongst the most poetic and lyrical in the world thanks to Thomas Cranmer (a Midlander from Nottinghamshire), and Elizabeth I’s determination not to look to closely into “men’s souls”. Hence we have High and Low Church Anglicans. Indeed, the fudge extends even to the very heart of the Eucharist and “hoc est corpus meum” – “this is my body”: the Roman Catholics believe in transubstantiation – the bread and wine literally change into body and blood; the Zwinglians aver it is no more than an instruction for memorial “do this in remembrance of me”; and the good old fudging CofE believes in consubstantiation – the bread and wine turn into body and blood but also remain bread and wine. Like you, I am a non militant atheist. But I love the music and the poetry of the old BCP.
Another nice thing about parish churches is that many of them provide soup kitchens, food banks, clothing banks, warm spaces, and all sorts of things like that. Ideally, there’d be no need. But there is and they – (and mosques, etc) meet this need with respect and kindness.
Parish churches also provide a place within which people treat each other with respect and in which they can serve each other and the wider community, and come to know each other over a period of years and years – an intermediate space between the public and the private that is essential to a good society and to human happiness
There’s a real shortage of such places, in these times, in this country.
One issue not mentioned in DAG’s blog is Church of England schools, of which there are thousands. The CofE does not fund those schools but does govern their ethos. And, as I am sure many readers will know, parents often have to pretend to faith in order to get their children admitted.
By all means, ditch the bishops in the Lords but ditch the CofE’s influence on state schools too. If any church wants to run schools, that church should pay for them, not the taxpayer.
The Church of England did pay for its church schools, providing land and buildings which are still vested in trustees or diocesan boards of education. Voluntary Aided (VA) schools, which make up about half the number of C of E schools, are also committed to meet a proportion of their current capital costs.
How many primary schools are branded, and influenced directly by, Church of England?
It isn’t just government that religion has inserted itself into.
As a parent this is one of my problems. My catchment school is CoE and it is a good school. But there’s quite a lot of preaching (literally…) that happens in it and I don’t feel comfortable with that.
Admitting the iota of doubt that reason demands, I’m certain gods don’t in fact grace people with thrones, rights and so on. It follows that – almost undoubtedly – this country is constituted on the basis of a fantastic myth.
I can only agree that replacing one silly story with another is pointless hard work. The evidence of history demonstrates that our modern grasp of eternal truth will become the incoherent ramblings of the ancients in due course. Furthermore, we don’t seem to have a good plan for ensuring there will be any people far enough into the future to laugh at our current ‘views’ about founding principles.
As for the bathwater: Bishoprics require one to misrepresent facts about the mutability of truth itself, which ought to disqualify the bearer from governance. Having witnesses promise not to lie seems silly too when every knows it doesn’t count if you cross your fingers or are Boris Johnson. A simple explanation by the presiding Judge of what perjury is and its consequences would have a more sober feel to it, and that’s reason enough to get the good book out of court.
Why is it that hard? Why is it too hard?
It’s only easy to do nothing as you suggest. Easy is not the answer.
Let’s improve things now. Disestablishment is the answer to give us a fairer society that doesn’t legalise bigotry by giving privilege to a select few based on their real or supposed beliefs.
Quite agree, Steven.
As the saying goes, nothing worth doing is easy; and if ever something difficult was worth doing, it’s putting this intellectually lazy, medieval nonsense behind us.
The most up to date attempt to articulate CofE establishment that I know of was by the Queen in 2012: https://www.royal.uk/queens-speech-lambeth-palace-15-february-2012
Charles as Prince of Wales did float being “the defender of faith, without any definite article” but in the proclamation he is “defender of the faith” with the definite article. I presume the idea has been quietly shelved, I was surprised how little comment there was about it.
I have come to see blogs and blog comments as a sort of restaurant. One finds plain fare and nourishing fare and some plainly rotten fare. But this blog is especially good. Always has hearty dishes as well as subtle delicately flavoured dishes.
This offering is very good and touches on the delicate balance between religion and hard nosed sense. Like salt and pepper, too much of either spoils the flavour.
The local village church hosts a delicate cross section of English society. The middle class ladies who Brasso the lectern and the volunteers who mow the graveyard and patch up the walls. But under this prosaic surface lies a delicate web of connections and experiences.
From those WI ladies who know rather more than is comforting about the role of pills and ‘end of life’ to those older hands with tales from the plumber’s wife that would make Lawrence’s hair curl. The occasional murder and suicide and marital shenanigans and that unmentionable incident… The old lady who has lived forever and has a very firm grasp of human psychology and ‘the sins of the fathers are visited…’. They are.
We have the usual modern vicars and an elderly Catholic priest who have toned down the religion to suit modern tastes. Probably a good thing, they are now a pleasant meld of social worker and waste disposal, a good traditional role. Let us hope King Charles does not disturb it much.
I suspect that the number of those claiming to be Christians would increase significantly if only Christians could benefit from those bank holidays linked to the Christian calendar.
I suspect that the number of those claiming _not_ to be Christians would increase significantly if Christians were required to “sell what [they] possess and give to the poor” in order to benefit from their Christians-only bank holidays. A certain Jacob Rees-Mogg springs to mind as one who might waver…
I briefly joined the Labour Party but when Corbyn became leader realised that I couldn’t honestly stay a member.
My answer in the Census or surveys is ‘No religion’ for the same reason. Too much baggage.
The pithy saying “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful” is often falsely attributed to Seneca. In fact it’s a paraphrase of something from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, and the initial uncited attribution was probably to get more attention for it by its author, as also happened with many books of the bible.
Nevertheless, it’s a relevant thought when thinking about the religious establishment of states, and not just the most theocratic. Certainly many powerful people today continue to find religion useful. Just look over the Atlantic. Despite explicit attempts to avoid religion in their constitution, even politicians whose behaviour is visibly irreligious strengthen their power through appealing to it.
You ask, would we incorporate religion into the state if we were starting again. We shouldn’t. But the risk is that the powerful would still attempt to do that, because they would still find it useful.
I don’t see how the religious beliefs of a witness are necesarily disclosed. The default oath is “I swear by Almighty God that . . . . . .”. It does not say that the witness believes that this Almighty God is anything but fictional. If the default was “I swear by Harry Potter…” it would mean no more and no less. The only important thing is that the witness tells the truth and the only useful purpose of the oath is to make it explicit when exactly this responsibility applies.
“The only important thing is that the witness tells the truth and the only useful purpose of the oath is to make it explicit when exactly this responsibility applies.”
I’ve thought for some years that, if there is a divine power that can be invoked in a courtroom, the way to do it would be to treat the witness’s oath as one side of a contract.
So, as long as there’s no ‘consideration’, the oath is not going to be binding (unless the witness already has a personal commitment to truth-telling). But if the judge, on behalf of the court, vowed an oath to believe, and honour, the truth (however far outside their prejudices it might lie) then there would be a valid contract between court and witness …
All other agreements don’t need consideration – for example, deeds.
And you shouldn’t need any reward for telling the truth.
What matters is the specific kind of agreement that applies in the specific circumstances. If the gods regard an oath sworn in court as a form of contract which requires there to be consideration on both sides, the fact that other forms of agreement can exist is irrelevant.
And, as I said, someone who already has a personal commitment to truth-telling will be bound by their oath anyway (and possibly wouldn’t even need it). But we know that many people don’t always do what they should – and they are the ones we want to put under an obligation that cannot be ignored.
As an ordinary member of a CofE church I couldn’t care less whether or not the CofE is established or disestablished. It makes not one jot or tittle of difference to everyday life. But …
The Church (worldwide) is the Bride of Christ – the human partner in the task of ushering in the Kingdom of Heaven here on Earth. Jesus said “the Kingdom of Heaven is here” (“at hand” in earlier translations – i.e. “close enough to touch”). Not pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die.
The Kingdom of Heaven is about Love, Joy, Peace, etc (Galatians 5), standing up for Justice and Righteousness (Amos 5 and numerous other OT references), and looking after the poor (everywhere in the Bible).
Incidentally, when Jesus says we will always have the poor with us (Matthew 26) he probably meant ‘because some people will always put getting rich before the needs of others’.
So, if the state wishes to disestablish itself completely from the Kingdom of Heaven, then “brace, brace”.