THE public legitimacy of the Church of England was discussed at Pusey House, in Oxford, this week. The future of firm was among the many topics debated.
The “complete ignorance of essentially the most basic fundamentals of biblical stories” amongst children, the dislocation between mainstream opinion and the Church’s teaching, and the blandness of the Church’s voice were among the many challenges presented. Voices from those that had worked in Parliament, nonetheless, offered reassurance and encouragement.
The annual conference of the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life was held in partnership with the Centre for Cultural Witness, based at Lambeth Palace. An early provocation was offered by Dr Jonathan Chaplin, honorary fellow of Wesley House, and writer of Beyond Establishment: Resetting Church-State relations in England (Books, 22 July 2022).
The “hospitable, earthed” form of firm — the Church’s embedded presence across the nation — may very well be lost provided that the Church “lost or repudiated its vocation to serve all of the people of England”, he suggested. But “high establishment”, corresponding to the presence of the Bishops within the House of Lords, may very well be abolished without having an impact on this.
He feared that “we’re within the grip of some sort of mythical pondering here as if establishment . . . [is] in some way standing within the breach between us and a deluge of secularism.” Larger forces were at work, while “remarkable missional opportunities” would open up if the Church were to voluntarily divest itself of such privileges, he said.
Canon Mark Chapman, Professor of the History of Modern Theology within the University of Oxford, suggested that the choice won’t lie within the hands of the Church. Tensions between the Church and Parliament had been “stretched now to breaking point”, he said.
“The stability of firm depended largely on a way of consensus, as politicians saw Parliament as a sort of lay synod that represented the religious views of the country, roughly. This I don’t think is any longer the case. The old, what one might call Tory Anglicanism . . . has been virtually extinguished.”
Same-sex marriage may be what “breaks the camel’s back”, he suggested. “The few people in Parliament who show much interest within the Church are looking somewhat incredulously on a Church hellbent on tearing itself to pieces over same-sex marriage: something that’s opposed by only 13 per cent of the population.”
He warned: “The logic of failing to maneuver with public opinion is, I believe, to maneuver inexorably toward disestablishment. Where the Church isn’t any longer useful to Parliament, it’s going to simply be removed by that Parliament.”
Dominic Grieve KC, a former Attorney General, offered a more optimistic perspective, in remarks that focused on the “interweaving of public service inside our country”, including “the status of the monarch as a one that takes a coronation oath in a spiritual setting”. Such “entanglement” was “really fundamental”, he argued. “The idea that you could magic it away is, for my part, not possible. . . You are going to be left at present with absolutely nothing, no basis for ethical governance in any respect.”
Far from being exclusive, establishment was “astonishingly inclusive . . . If you’ve gotten some view that there must be some fundamental religious or spiritual ethic which should underlie the best way by which governance is conducted, it appears to be uniquely reassuring.”
The same view got here from the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Daniel Greenberg, who suggested that establishment “appears to be rather more controversial among the many ranks of its own leaders than in most other forums”. This may very well be explained by the incontrovertible fact that it brought with it “a responsibility to represent transcendence in a way that’s restrained, responsible, and balanced, and that necessarily contributes more to cohesion than to division.
“The incontrovertible fact that this will likely be a positive or negative force for the event of the Church as a faith explains partly why establishment is continually controversial throughout the Church.”
Arguments that the numerical decline of the Church posed a threat to establishment “missed the purpose”, he suggested. “Establishment was never really about the proper to parliamentary representation for the vast majority of worshippers or believers. . . In a world increasingly fragmented by destructive division of so many kinds, an establishment that represents the societal force of faith in a way which is deliberately and necessarily transcendent of those divisions provides a singular and invaluable resource for each single resident of the country.”
The Lords Spiritual “appear to have intuitively” understood this, he said. “They don’t as a rule seek to inject right into a debate the demands and even advice of Christian practice, nor do they often purport to moralise or preach from a Christian perspective.” Rather, they appealed to “fundamental concepts corresponding to charity, mercy, and forgiveness, that will have a selected foundation and resonance throughout the Church, but have an indisputable moral claim at a level of straightforward humanity, and by doing in order that they cement the claims of those religious values in the guts of Parliament and the structure”.
Questions about how the Church maintained a particular voice because the Established Church in a pluralistic society surfaced throughout the day. The historian Tom Holland suggested that the 2 options available to it (“Does it affirm its distinctiveness, the sense that it’s the embodiment and expression of God’s purpose, or is it the religious wing of multi-culturalism?”) each seemed “fairly invidious”. “In the a technique, you’re proclaiming the sectarian identity that is not going to go down well, and, on the opposite, you lose every thing that makes the Church distinctive.”
The Archdeacon of Hastings and Dean designate of Chichester, the Ven. Dr Edward Dowler, suggested that, while one danger was that the Church’s voice may very well be suppressed as one outside mainstream opinion, there was an “equal and opposite danger that the Christian voice could develop into so much like the prevailing noise around it that it has no distinct quality . . . absorbed in order that there’s nothing value listening to”. There was a risk of the Church’s “dying of boredom”, he warned.
Shermara Fletcher-Hoyte, principal officer for Pentecostal, Charismatic, and multi-cultural relations for Churches Together in England, spoke of a current study of Millennials and Generation Z on the Oxford Research Centre, which suggested “an actual openness to the transcendent. . . There’s actually a hunger in society right away for what will not be on this planet; so let’s not be embarrassed by that, let’s share our spiritual practice.”
The Archbishops’ Council’s Director of Faith and Public Life, Canon Malcolm Brown, suggested that one future path may be to form “alliances between those faiths that do consider that this life will not be the top, not only for the sake of ecumenical and interfaith dialogue, but because actually the long run of the world is dependent upon making that believable again”. He heard, he reported, few funeral homilies that affirmed the “sure and certain hope” of resurrection.
To laughter, Mr Holland told the conference that he had loved the Coronation “in the best way that I’d have loved seeing a Triceratops roam across a Dorset field”. After suggesting that “we live through a means of cultural and moral change in the meanwhile that’s analagous to the Reformation,” he observed that the Prince of Wales “could also be a king that’s more in tune with a rustic that, in a decade, or twenty years, or every time he’s crowned, can have slipped the moorings of Christianity much more”.
One reason for that was that, despite running large numbers of colleges, the Church didn’t “appear to be inculcating a familiarity with the Bible. Generations are growing up in the meanwhile with a whole ignorance of essentially the most basic fundamentals of biblical stories.”
In his remarks, the Bishop of Ramsbury, Dr Andrew Rumsey, noted that, while 51 per cent of kids in his diocese attended an Anglican primary school, just one.7 per cent attended its public worship. He referred to this as evidence that, “whilst our congregational membership has long been shrinking like a balloon, this slow puncture has not against this shrunk the Church of England’s own view of its social reach and responsibility. National allegiance to the Church could also be in heavy and long-term decline, however the Church’s allegiance to the nation stays as lofty as ever.”
Anglican local attachment was, at its best, “good for each faith and society, being a bulwark against increasing religious sectarianism and an indication that the nation, the state, or society, isn’t any mere pragmatic, political, existential contract, but it surely’s also a sacred and a transcendent thing with a meaningful narrative leading us to a greater place”.
The Bishop of Hull, Dr Eleanor Sanderson, opened the conference with reflections on having served as a bishop within the Anglican Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia. “It is simply too soon for me to say whether being an Established Church will enable a distinct reality of transformation in areas which might be a priority for me,” she said.
“What I can say is that, in England, the Rt Revd and the Rt Hon. are joined together in a singular way. Those for whom that is the case have taken oaths to a people and to a spot, to be loyal to the gospel purpose, and, from my cultural lens, for one’s identity to be so shaped asks: what or who will we reverence?”
