Grace Davie, the distinguished British sociologist of religion, has proposed an interesting idea: A strong establishment of a church is bad for both religion and the state”“for the former because the association with state policies undermines the credibility of religion, and for the latter because the support of one religion over all others creates resentment and potential instability. But a weak establishment is good for both institutions, because a politically powerless yet still symbolically privileged church can be an influential voice in the public arena, often in defense of moral principles. Davie’s idea nicely fits the history of the Church of England. In earlier centuries it persecuted Roman Catholics and discriminated against Nonconformist Protestants and Jews. More recently it has used its “bully pulpit” for a number of good causes, not least being the rights of non-Christians. Thus very recently influential Jewish and Muslim figures have voiced strong support for the continuing establishment of the Church of England, among them Jonathan Sacks, the former Orthodox Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, and the Muslim Sayeeda Warsi, currently Minister of Faith and Communities in David Cameron’s cabinet.
Of course it would be foolish to recommend that the British version of state/church relations be accepted in other countries””as foolish as to expect other countries to adopt the very distinctive American form of the separation of church and state. However, as I have suggested in other posts on this blog, the British arrangement is worth pondering by other countries who wish to combine a specific religious identity with freedom for all those who do not share it. For starters, I’ll mention all countries who want legislation to be based on “Islamic principles” (not full-fledged sharia law); Russia, struggling to define the public role of the Orthodox Church; Israel trying to define the place of Judaism in its democracy; India, similarly seeking to fit hindutva into its constitutional description as a “secular republic”. In a globalizing world, cross-national comparisons can be surprisingly useful.
Read it all from the American Interest.
In general I’m a big Peter Berger fan. He is always stimulating and interesting and insightful, and this little piece is no exception. But regular readers of T19 won’t be surrprised that I am in fundamental disagreement with Berger here regarding his quite positive assessment of the “weak establishment” status of the CoE. On the contrary, weak established churches are every bit as bad as stronger state churches.
England is no exception to the rule that state churches are ALWAYS bad for the Church. They ALWAYS end up favoring the interests of the State at the expense of the Church. The alliance with the worldly powers that be is ALWAYS a corrupting influence. The liabilities of state church religion always exceed the benefits over the long run, as is proven by the European experience in every single case. Whether you consider Lutheran Germany and Scandanavia, the Reformed tradition in Scotland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, or Catholicism in France, Spain, and Italy, etc., the European state churches (or former state churches) are universally in bad shape.
I deplore ++Welby’s threat to do an end run around General Synod and use Parliament to force the acceptance of women bishops in the CoE. Such a move would be catastrophic, throwing away the precious relative independence that the CoE has secured from Parliament, and setting an extremely dangerous precedent. Remember the disastrous rejection of the 1928 BCP when Parliament vetoed it? Well, much worse things could happen today.
David Handy+
(As an American, I utterly dislike and distrust state church religion)
P.S. I also am in fundamental disagreement with Berger about church polity being a matter of adiaphora. Luther and Article 7 of the Augsburg Confession are dead wrong about that. Berger’s silly caricature of the idea of apostolic succession is surprising with someone who is usually much more sensible than that. But then Berger is a Lutheran and a Protestant. And I am neither (as an evangelical, charismatic Anglo-Catholic, I am more Catholic than Protestant, and I see Anglicanism at its best as (at least potentially) a true Protestant-Catholic hybrid, rather than merely being the English form of Protestantism).
David Handy+
None of this seems to me to go the hub of the problem: an established church becomes part of the establishment. You are up there with the senior public servants, the politicians, senior offices in corporations, the university presidents and the like. Even humble parish clergy working their guts out in an inner city area become tainted by association. You are part of them, not us. And yes, David is right to compare this with the establishment of the Catholic Church in places like Spain (where it was formally established) and he could have mentioned Ireland (where it was informally a great and terrible power in the land and given a recognition in the state constitution). The public turns on the Church when social perceptions and controls change. Better to keep your distance from the powers and hew your own furrow/paddle your own canoe.
I would echo the sentiments expressed above. I suspect that in the course of the next decade will see an alliance of convenience formed between secularists and Anglican traditionalists both of whom deplore the effects of establishment, though for different reasons. I am currently involved with a project at Durham University that is seeking to digitize and make publicly available the diaries of Herbert Hensley Henson (Bishop of Durham from 1920 to 1939). Henson spent much of his early career as a passionate defender of establishment yet in 1928, when the proposed revision of the English Book of Common Prayer was defeated in the House of Commons, he became the most prominent advocate of disestablishment (and the only bishop to so advocate). This was not because he had any love for the Anglo-Catholic character of the proposed new book but precisely because he recognized that those voting down the revision were (in many cases) not representative of those most likely to use it (including a large number of Nonconformists). It will be interesting to see if Henson’s arguments are taken out and dusted down for the next round of debate.