It now seems a different age, but in fact it is less than two years since Gordon Brown became Prime Minister. When he did so, he declared: “Now let the work of change begin.” Luckily, perhaps, the work of change was quickly snarled up. Today, Mr Brown barely has the authority to change a light bulb (an action, this newspaper has recently revealed, that MPs can charge to the taxpayer).
But one obscure, sudden change that the Prime Minister did institute was to remove his own role in appointing bishops in the Church of England.
Thanks for posting this book review, Kendall. I hadn’t seen or heard of the book before, and I’ll have to obtain a copy from a library and read it. Of course, as an American, I’m not really qualified to address the issue of how Church/State relations work or don’t work in England. So I hope that some Brits from across the Pond will weigh in on this topic.
But I remain firmly convinced that we’ve entered a Post-Christendom era, and that the disestablishment of Anglicanism in America was a very good and necessary thing. It almost killed us here in Virginia where I live, but like a rose bush or grapevine that’s been pruned way back, we did recover and bounced back to bear more and better fruit than before.
One suggestion: for those interested in the topic of disestablisment, the classic attack on the whole idea of an established state church is Soren Kierkegaard’s “Attack on Christendom.” And the revealing quotation from the Danish queen cited in this book review helps illustrate why the famous Danish philosopher and theologian was so furiously opposed to the Constantinian model. Just to confine myself to one line: Kierkegaard said that when everyone is (supposedly) a Christian, NO ONE is a Christian. And I think he was basically right.
David Handy+
I am a bit baffled by this review. Charles Moore is a Catholic convert, and for one mad moment I wondered whether he had written the article with the hope of keeping the Church of England subjugated and enfeebled. Because, dear friends, he does not raise, let alone address, the major problem of being a state church: namely, that if you have to be all things to all people, what do you actually stand for? Or, to put the same question differently, what doctrine or teaching of the Church can you say is definitively what you believe? I do not doubt that many Anglicans are fine Christians. I have sat at the feet of several. It is just that, as frequently is mentioned on this site, as soon as some central doctrine is affirmed by Anglicans, some loon pops up somewhere and says, actually the Resurrection/Atonement/Trinity is not necessary for Christian belief and as an Anglican I do not believe it, and do not even have t believe it, because we are a broad church.
An interesting comparison is the Church of Wales – which was disestablished in 1920. I haven’t done the research but one could look if it has declined more slowly than the Church of England.
One can unknot the legal entanglements – with some difficulty – but the cultural entanglements (in other words history) can’t simply be undone even if one wanted.
Long live antidisestablishmentarianism.
This is an interesting review which I think is asking people to think seriously about the consequences before disestablishing the Church of England. As an Anglo-American who spent most of his ministry in the USA I lean heavily in the direction of a healthy separation of church and state (although I am not enthusiastic about the ludicrous extremes to which things are sometimes taken in the States). However, when looking at the Church of England within the context of Britain’s unwritten constitution, and where I now work, it seems increasingly dangerous to me to try to end its establishment than just to leave things as they are.
It is true that people of the range of other Christian denominations by and large do not object to there being an established church here, and I have even heard thoughtful Muslims express a similar viewpoint. If one were starting again from scratch obviously such a thing would not be considered, but we stand on the shoulders of a long and complex history which has produced this particular culture and this should not be overlooked in our postmodern tumble to forget where we have come from.
A relative of mine recently had an operation to remove a benign growth from his innards. Most of the tumor was taken but some was left to be treated in other ways because of how it is entangled with vital organs. His surgeons have said that any effort of theirs would more likely do more damage rather than healing him. I suspect this is a reasonably fair analogy for the Church of England situation.