Beyond Establishment

Jonathan Chaplin

Description

The Church of England finds itself colliding with society at large on regular occasion. Has the time come, therefore, where the advantages of being the established church are at last outweighed by the disadvantages? Is there a case for disestablishment, and if so, what might a fresh vision of the church’s relationship with wider society be?
Separating the question of establishment, from the question of presence in the community, Jonathan Chaplin argues that the time has come for the ending of privileged constitutional ties between the Church of England the British state. Rather than offering a smaller place for the Church of England within society, he suggests, such a separation would in fact enhance its ability to maintain an embedded presence in local parishes, and allow it the room to speak out about the deeper, bigger challenges which face society today.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• State
• Politics
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd
• Date de parution: 31 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334061755
• Langue: English

Extrait

Beyond Establishment
Resetting Church–State Relations in England
Jonathan Chaplin






© Jonathan Chaplin 2022
Published in 2022 by SCM Press
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Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
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978-0-334-06173-1
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Contents
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Awakening ‘the dog that didn’t bark’.

1. Defining ‘Establishment’
2. A Theology of Disestablishment
3. Deconstructing Establishment: Church, Crown and Government
4. Deconstructing Establishment: Church and Parliament
5. Disputing Establishment: Secularism, Neutrality, Sectarianism?
6. Disputing Establishment: Disengaging from the Nation?

Conclusion: Life Beyond Establishment




Acknowledgements
I am much indebted to Paul Barber, Malcolm Brown, Daniel DeHanas, Doug Gay, Jenny Leith, David McIlroy and Julian Rivers for many valuable comments on earlier drafts of this book. It is a better book for their input, but their being named here does not imply agreement with everything in it, even its central thesis. Any errors of fact or judgement remain my own. Although I was privileged to enjoy the status of Associate Fellow of Theos while writing the book, it was not the product of my association with them and I do not speak on their behalf on this issue. Chapter 2 draws on material first appearing in ‘Can nations be “Christian”?’, Theology (November/December 2009), pp. 410–24, and I am grateful to the editor for permission to use it here. Warm thanks to David Shervington and all involved at SCM Press for their professionalism and good cheer. It has again been a pleasure to work with them.
Some of my intellectual debts are evident in the references. But I would, unusually, like to dedicate the book to three people I have never met but who have been among the most articulate and principled advocates of disestablishment in my lifetime and whose writings have inspired my own. The first is Bishop Colin Buchanan, the leading Evangelical advocate of disestablishment over the last 40 years. He is author of Cut the Connection: Disestablishment and the Church of England (1994), which lovingly lambasted the Church for meekly accepting the persistence of state supervision of its affairs. The second is the late Fr Peter Cornwell, former Vicar of St Mary’s University Church, Oxford. Fr Cornwell was author of Church and Nation (1983), a theologically rich and generous-spirited statement of the Anglo-Catholic case for disestablishment, and a dissenting member of the Chadwick Commission (1970). The third is the late Professor Valerie Pitt, the only woman on the Chadwick Commission and also a dissenting Anglo-Catholic member. She was author of some of the most penetrating and eloquent critiques of Establishment in the last half century. I regret only discovering Fr Cornwell’s work on disestablishment in 2021, shortly after his passing. I also regret missing the chance to meet Professor Pitt in 1996 at a conference on Establishment to which I was invited but which my employer declined to grant me leave to attend. I hope their family and friends might take satisfaction from the fact that their work is still inspiring readers today. There are, in fact, few arguments in this book that were not already anticipated in the writings of these three authors. At times seen as mavericks, their aim was only to summon the Church to greater theological clarity, integrity and courage in its relation to society and nation. If my book does no more than remind the Church of England of the continuing importance of these unheeded saints, it will have been worth the effort.
All Saints’ Day 2021




Introduction: Awakening ‘the dog that didn’t bark’
According to one constitutional expert, the established status of the Church of England is ‘a vital part of how our current society constructs its political identity in ways that make sense to all citizens’. 1 That will come as a surprise to those in the churches or wider society for whom the question never crosses their mind. 2 Could it really be that the arcane workings of one of the most ancient and seemingly ineffectual parts of the British constitution actually matters to contemporary British – or at least English – citizens? 3
Establishment hardly seems the most pressing issue at stake in the larger question of the place of faith in British society. 4 The business of the Ecclesiastical Committee of Parliament, for example, which few British citizens will even know exists, seems light years away from much more pressing questions of public religion, such as whether the latest iteration of the ‘Prevent’ programme stigmatizes Muslims, or what are the religious motivations of Extinction Rebellion protestors who shut down Westminster Bridge for several days in 2019. Yet the established status of the Church of England – the church ‘by law established’ – continues to arouse animated responses from both the Church and sections of wider society, in spite of the fact that it is a shadow of what it was 50 years ago. 5 In classifications of church–state regimes, English Establishment is typically placed well into the category of ‘weak’ establishments on account of the relatively modest obligations it imposes on Church and state. 6 The Church of England is not the state’s lapdog. It is not a ‘state church’, defined by Paul Avis as existing where there is a confluence of national and church government within a confessionally uniform nation. 7 Such a state of affairs has not existed in Britain since the late seventeenth century. 8 The state does not own the Church, order it around or subsidize it. 9 A chief aim of twentieth-century Church reformers (mostly aristocratic Anglo-Catholics) was effective self-government for the Church in matters of doctrine and liturgy, while retaining the status of a ‘national Church’. This was largely achieved in 1969 with the creation of General Synod and in the subsequent Worship and Doctrine Measure 1974. 10 As a result, many observers doubt that it is worth expending any significant energy on Establishment. A report of the Evangelical Alliance in 2006 concluded that ‘government and churches should not divert significant resources to [wholesale disestablishment]’. 11 Or, as Oliver O’Donovan put it more crisply in a submission to that report, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!’ 12
Yet the issue is resurfacing again today with renewed vigour, for at least three reasons. First, the accelerating secularization and pluralization of British society, combined with a precipitate decline in membership of the Church, is making it decreasingly plausible for the Church to present itself as ‘the Church of the nation’, still less to sustain the myth that England is a ‘Christian nation’. 13 It is hard to disagree with Robert Morris’s blunt assessment that ‘the weight of evidence about the state of religious belief and its plurality beyond Christianity render the surviving late seventeenth-century settlement in principle indefensible even if its increasingly emaciated formal remnant may stagger on.’ 14 Second, escalating conflicts over the place of religion in the public square seem to be reinforcing the resolve both of defenders of Establishment to protect it and of secularist critics to terminate it. 15 The unedifying, if at the time unavoidable, conflict between Church and state over same-sex marriage in 2013 is a painful recent case. 16 To many on the state’s side, the Church was simply digging in to defend an obviously reactionary position. To many on the Church’s side, it was yet another example of a state-led campaign to impose an ideologically driven regime of egalitarian rights on social organizations generally. 17 Third, the imminent prospect of having to revise the coronation service for a new monarch is the most time-sensitive factor concentrating minds (and events may already have overtaken us by the time this book appears). Revisiting a national Christian ceremony in the light of the momentous cultural changes over the 70 years since it was last held will inevitably thrust Establishment as a whole back into public debate. The issue of Establishment does, after all, retain the potential to touch a deep nerve of constitutional and spiritual anxiety in the British body politic.
Writing as a lifelong Anglican, I argue in this book that Establishment is not simply an idea whose time has long gone but an arrangement that has always been theologically problematic, and that it continues to be distracting and compromising both for English Anglicanism and for the British state. The book calls for a planned sequence of steps towards ‘disestablishment’ – the severance of the special legal ties b