Religious believers who oppose such a move should look to the US, where faith has flourished alongside the country’s secular constitution. Indeed, in an interview with the New Statesman in 2008, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, (who went on to famously guest-edit the magazine) suggested that the church might benefit from such a move: “I can see that it’s by no means the end of the world if the establishment disappears. The strength of it is that the last vestiges of state sanction disappeared, so when you took a vote at the Welsh synod, it didn’t have to be nodded through by parliament afterwards. There is a certain integrity to that.”
1. Disendowment is the elephant in the room, not disestablishment. Both the Church of Ireland and the Church in Wales were disendowed when they were disestablished (which is to say, a significant proportion of their historic assets were appropriated for other public purposes). The Church Commissioners portfolio is approx. 5 billion pounds and they currently pay about 15% of the annual costs of the CofE.
2. I know the New Statesman’s abiding concern for the well being of the Christian faith in England. If they are interested in learning what disestablishment might look like in England the best places to look would be the Church of Ireland and Church in Wales. One might make a quick and nasty start by comparing, say, the relative decline in Sunday attendance, across the established CofE and disestablished CinW over the last 50 years.