Should the Church of England be Dis-Established?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yes, it's a funny area this one. It isn't as if religious practice or general social religiosity has shifted particularly drastically over the past twenty years, and to the extent that it has it's only because essentially everyone born in the 1920s has now died. But younger generations are much less likely to nominally identify for the sake of form or sentiment as Christian. This is a major shift, but not in the way it looks: it's more about national identity, as nominal religious affiliation was an important marker of that for centuries (even for people who were generally very hostile towards religion: consider E.P. Thompson's ugly rant about 'this ancient Protestant Isle' in his rather ill-judged attack on Leszek Kołakowski), and was also an important marker of having the status of a counter-cultural minority: this is why the highest percentages claiming to be Christian in censuses have always been in certain parts of Lancashire. The reality is that someone in their seventies ticking the 'Christian' box isn't in general any more 'Christian' than someone in their twenties ticking the 'No Religion' box. They were just brought up slightly differently: if you went to school in the 1950s you were told that This Is A Christian Country, but if you did in recent decades you will have been informed that This Is A Secular Society.¹ I'm increasingly sceptical of the value of the religion question in the census as there's a lack of consistency as to how people answer it and I'm not sure if the data collected means a lot... at least for the majority population. It is useful for certain minority groups (communal data on South Asian communities especially), and that's actually the main reason why the question is asked.

On a slightly broader point, the phenomenon of Mass Religion - of large congregations and organized church memberships and so on - was very much a product of the social changes of the 19th century and should be seen as part of the wider phenomenon of Mass Society: that whole world of collective organized social and political life, with mass membership political parties, large trade unions, civil society organizations and so on. Religion in Britain before the 19th century had a very different character: even the early forms of Methodism with the famous open-air meetings and so on were a little different, even if they can be seen as its genesis. It is notable Mass Religion in Britain went into sharp decline in the same general period as the rest of Mass Society. Lord Reith would probably have blamed commercial television for this and the hilarious part is that he wouldn't have been entirely wrong.² None of the churches have coped particularly well with the death of Mass Religion: the Church of England has gone from pillar to post trying to work out exactly what its role in society now is (as has the Church of Scotland),³ the Roman Catholic Church has always existed in a social ghetto here and has become increasingly pre-occupied with its own scandals, and the Nonconformist churches went into their long decline decades before the rest. But this doesn't mean that they don't have an important social function and, whether people like this or not, they collectively form essentially all that is left of civil society in large parts of the country. This strikes me as much more relevant an issue (and a problem!) than what box people tick on a census form and I don't think the tendency of some of the clergy to find significance in the latter has been (or is) particularly healthy.

<sub>1. Cynics might point out that neither label was/is exactly entirely accurate.
2. 'Somebody introduced dog-racing into England; we know who, for he is proud of it, and proclaims it urbi et orbi in the columns of Who's Who. And somebody introduced Christianity and printing and the uses of electricity. And somebody introduced smallpox, bubonic plague and the Black Death. Somebody is minded now to introduce sponsored broadcasting into this country.'
3. It gave up its official claim to represent the entire country as early as the 1960s. An awful lot of media discourse that assumes otherwise is reflective of a pretty profound ignorance on this subject.</sub>

[Filuwaúrdjan]

They can be. Will they be? I'm not sure I trust Britain's current political culture to do so, but I'd love to be wrong about that if a UK poster would like to correct me.

The tendency currently is to maintain notable churches that are no longer used as churches through the Churches Conservation Trust, which was set up back in the 1960s. The Church Commissioners transfer ownership, and the CCT then maintains the buildings and allows their use by the community: a good example is St Mary's in Shrewsbury. Generally these churches remain consecrated. This is a much better model than having former churches taken into state ownership or whatever,* but that's something that could only happen after a Jacobin-style disestablishment which is presumably extremely unlikely.

_{*We have an all-too recent example from France of the fact that the State is not, in any country, a good owner of this sort of building, at least not directly, even when if the building is still used as a church, let alone not...}