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No, the Church of England shouldn’t be disestablished

We’re not as secular as many think, and there’s still value to an institution that has stood the test of time

david frost FOLLOW David Frost on Twitter @Davidghfrost; READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion

This week’s data dump from the sadly incomplete (thanks to Nicola Sturgeon) 2021 census told us much new about how our country is changing. One Pavlovian reaction, however, was not new – the usual band of commentators highlighting the decline of Christianity and calling once more for disestablishment of the Church of England. Society is secular, they say, and so should the state be. Is that right?

Well, first of all, that is not quite what the census says. It is true that, for the first time, less than half (46 per cent) of our population describe themselves as “Christian”. But it is also true that “Christian” is the single most common descriptor, with “no religion” only the second, at 37 per cent. These figures do not make us a post-christian society quite yet.

Still, establishment can’t be justified on public opinion grounds. Regular church-going of any kind has long been a minority activity. Yet the established Church is still here. Why is that?

I don’t think it is just constitutional conservatism or lack of opportunity. We have had waves of institutional reform, including to the House of Lords where many bishops still sit, and we have even abolished the long-standing provision that the monarch may not be married to a Catholic, a law that reflected the original circumstances of the English Reformation, the reason we have a Church of England at all.

More recently, some have argued that establishment protects the role of faith in society more broadly, rather than a specific set of beliefs. But this doesn’t work logically. Once you have accepted the argument that the state should not give special status to one particular belief, there is no longer a logical argument to think it should give that status to some sort of generic concept of “faiths” either.

No, the case for establishment – which I support – has to be made on its own terms. The argument has to be that it is good for a country, or at least in no way damaging, for a specific set of beliefs in the transcendent to have a particular, albeit limited, role in the workings of the state. Why might that be so?

For me, the fundamental reason is that maybe we are not as secular a society as we like to think.

On the one hand, as Encountering Mystery, the new book by the theologian Dale Allison, shows, religious experience is, in fact, remarkably widespread, affecting large numbers of people. Not all become orthodox believers as a result. Indeed some still describe themselves as having “no religion”, meaning they have no commitment to an orthodox belief structure, but not that they believe this world is all there is.

There is also lots of sublimated religion around. The proponents of the “woke” agenda (for want of a better term) may regard themselves as secular, but clearly represent a set of highly ordered beliefs based on values that, surely, ultimately derive from the tenets of Christianity. Indeed, arguably, in its beliefs that the world is fundamentally disordered and unjust in ways invisible to most people, and that a special group of elect seers is needed to lead society to righteousness, the “woke” world view is just the latest great Christian heresy, more like the Cathars of medieval Languedoc or the Anabaptists of 16th-century Münster than a modern political movement.

The polarisation of society we saw during the pandemic – the retreat of many people to rituals of mask wearing and handwashing and the stigmatisation of unclean outsiders on the one hand; the readiness to see global conspiracies and elite plots on the other – are surely also part of the same phenomenon. So, too, is the determination of so many to live ecologically sound lives in harmony with Gaia.

In short, I think we are kidding ourselves if we believe we are all the ideal modern homo secularis and that society is fundamentally rational. In fact, history shows that when bad things happen, people always reach for beliefs that help them – and that process can be an irrational, troubling and scary one.

That is why I do not abandon, and do not think we should abandon, the role of orthodox Christianity in government. I worry about the dangerous forces currently sweeping through society and I think it is right to hold fast to that which is good – in the form of an established status for beliefs that have stood the test of time and aren’t being made up as they go along, and for an institution that stands for them to all of society.

Of course, we need the established Church to play its part. If its representatives are nothing more than generic “progressives”, as they so often seem to be in the House of Lords, if they obsess about conforming to society rather than standing up for their own beliefs, then the case for establishment is fatally undermined.

But if in their state functions they stand for beauty, for belief, for transcendence, if they speak of those things as the Archbishop of Canterbury did at our late Queen’s funeral, then they can, and should, keep their role in our counsels and national governance.

Letters To The Editor

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2022-12-02T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-12-02T08:00:00.0000000Z

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