Church and State in 21st Century Britain: The Future of Church
Establishment R.M.Morris (ed.) Palgrave April 2009
Launch Seminar 15 June 2009 at the Constitution Unit, Department
of Politics, UCL
Speech notes
Respondent: William Fittall, Secretary General to the Archbishops’
Council and the Synod
1. ‘… the Establishment as it now exists is morally discredited beyond
recovery. It cannot permanently continue.’ Compare and contrast that
statement made 80 years ago by the then Bishop of Durham with page
206 of Bob Morris’ book where he writes: ‘the weight of evidence
about the state of religious belief and its plurality beyond Christianity
renders the surviving late seventeenth century settlement in principle
indefensible even if it’s increasingly emaciated formal remnant may
stagger on.’
2. There were moments as I read this excellently researched book when I
wondered whether the mantle of Hensley Henson had fallen on Bob.
Their very readable styles share a love of the arresting phrase, the
assertion of self-evident truths, the periodic sharp blow to the ribs.
Even when you disagree with them- and I disagree with many of
Bob’s conclusions- they are never less than stimulating and
provocative.
3. In the quarter of an hour before we open things up to a wider debate I
thought I ought to try and do three things. First I’m going to offer
some general reflections on Bob’s book. I’ll then offer an assessment
of how all these issues play within the Church of England. Finally
I’m going to try and think myself back into the role which Bob,
Robert Hazell and I had in earlier incarnations as civil servants and try
and imagine what advice I might offer a new ministerial team after the
election next year if they wanted a civil service paper on the
establishment of the Church of England.
4. In practice any such advice would of course have to take account of
which party had won the election, what the parliamentary arithmetic
was and whatever manifesto commitments might have been given, on
House of Lords reform. One also hopes that any such advice would
be prepared by someone who was more impartial than I can now be.
5. First some reflections on Bob’s book. To say that it’s the best in its
field could sound like a back-handed compliment since the field of
books examining Church-State relations has been pretty sparse in
recent years. But, on its merits- and despite some large qualifications
to which I shall come in a moment- this is destined to be a leading
reference work for years to come. It skilfully marshals a mass of
complex, historical and constitutional detail, carefully disentangles all
the separate threads that make up the cord that is called establishment,
though with some associated commentary and opinions that I would
want to challenge, and provides some fascinating context by looking
both at current experience in Scandinavian Churches and the particular
histories of Wales, Ireland and Scotland.
6. Some of the judgements in the book seem to me to be spot on. For
example on page 75 where it is noted that: ‘the UK is markedly less
financially supportive of religion – let alone Church establishment – in
comparison with many of its European neighbours’.
7. The sensitive treatment of the position of the Church of Scotland on
pages 83-87 draws out very helpfully the idea of a Church which is
given a degree of special recognition by the State. And in relation to
Wales and Ireland there is a very important if slightly provocatively
put conclusion where Bob writes: ‘neither dis-establishment could
necessarily function as a model for dis-establishment in England …
dealing with peripheries is quite distinct from tackling the core’.
8. Perhaps best of all are the cautionary words on page 199: ‘every age
that wishes for dis-Establishment must first take an inventory of the
goods that are actually there’.
9. The qualifications that I would want to register are really these. First
in a number of places the unsustainability of some part of our present
arrangements is portrayed as self-evident without acknowledging
sufficiently for my liking the full implications, actual and symbolic, of
moving to a different place.
10.I think this is particularly true in relation to the monarchy where the
book seems reluctant to acknowledge that secularising the monarchy,
while from one point of view perfectly rational, would mean that, for
better or worse, we had become a different sort of society.
11.Parts of the book reminded me of Lord McClennan’s approach in the
House of Lords’ debate of May 2002 which Douglas Hurd described
in his speech as follows: ‘it is a conviction that brings a cool logic –
although in my view not always an irresistible logic – to bear on
modern problems. That is the same logic that would convert our
counties and cities into regions, this House into a body of wholly
elected politicians, and – one day, although not today – our monarchy
into a republic … what I would argue his approach lacks is an
understanding of certain loyalties and emotions that help to form us
and keep us going in this country’.
12.In terms of analysing where this government has been coming from I
think it might also have been worth saying bluntly that it has tended to
bump into these issues almost by inadvertence rather than design.
Thus, when it proposed to abolish the Lord Chancellor it suddenly
found there was an issue to resolve about ecclesiastical patronage. In
relation to House of Lords reform there is indeed an important
question about where if anywhere that leaves the bishops. But clearly
it is not the primary question concerning what sort of second House
we should have.
13.Even the changing role of the Prime Minister’s Appointments
Secretary which the book makes quite a lot of was less about any
considered Government view of its relations with the Church so much
as a consequence of Gordon Brown’s wish to have a wider
constitutional reform package that swept away aspects of the Royal
prerogative and the Prime Minister’s involvement in a miscellany of
appointments- regius professors and the Astronomer Royal as well as
clerics.
14. On that little incident he also underplays the fact that, although there
were divided views within the Church – as on most issues – the most
important single change was actually one that the Church had been
asking for since the 1970s.
15.This cues neatly into my second area, namely how all these things
currently look from within the Church of England. There are two
main correctives that I would want to apply to the book’s analysis.
16.It is certainly the case, as the book makes clear, that whereas during
the nineteenth century, dis-establishment had its main supporters
outside the Church, for much of the twentieth century politicians and
for that matter other Churches had grown bored of the subject. As a
result such interest as there was was sustained by a minority within the
Church of England itself.
17.What the book does not quite bring out, however, is that the 1970s
marked a watershed in attitudes within the Church of England.
Parliament’s acceptance in 1974 of the Church legislation that gave
the Church effective control over its worship and doctrine and Jim
Callaghan’s decision in 1976 to give the Church most of what it
wanted in relation to choosing its bishops removed the grievances
which had made dis-establishment a live issue up to that point.
18.Although the splendid Bishop Colin Buchanan is still happily with us
in deep retirement, talking of him as the best-known example of a
sharp, polemical voice from the present simply illustrates that the
steam went out of the dis-establishment engine in the Church about 30
years ago.
19.There is also what seems to me a frankly unrealistic assessment of the
likelihood or even the capacity of the Church of England itself
agreeing to some of the radical changes that the book clearly favours.
Indeed, the least persuasive part of the analysis was for me the
suggestion that because governments and Parliament would probably
not want to get round to some of these arcane matters the Church
should itself bring forward legislation to amend the Act of Settlement,
abolish the title of Supreme Governor, amend the coronation oaths and
change the status of Church courts.
20.Frankly, if a future government decides for reasons of public policy
that it wants changes in one or more of those areas it is likely to have
to initiate the process itself, hopefully with rather more prior
consultation with the Church than we had in connection with the
reform of the Lord Chancellor or the 2007 Green Paper.
21.Finally, let me have my stab at what someone in the Ministry of
Justice or the Cabinet Office might possibly send new Ministers about
these matters in a year’s time.
22.‘Minister, you asked for advice on the Government’s attitude towards
the Church of England and the continuance of its special relationship
with the State.
23.The Church of England, with its presence in every community in the
land, remains one of the country’s distinctive institutions. Its peculiar
structure tends to obscure the fact that, despite a century of decline, it
remains one of the largest voluntary societies. Its 16,000 parish
churches, half of which pre-date the Reformation, are an integral part
of the landscape and make it our biggest custodian of heritage
buildings. Along with the Roman Catholics, it remains a big player in
the State education system, especially at primary level.
24. For the Church, the two most pressing policy issues will be the new
Government’s attitude towards Church and other faith schools and its
willingness to help the Church, by one means or another, to continue
to shoulder the financial burden of its historic buildings.
25.The Church does not find it easy to come to quick decisions on
internally divisive questions –witness the long running arguments on
the ordination of women and the gay issue. There is little prospect
therefore that, left to itself, it will start to press for a change in its
constitutional position. Indeed interest in dis-establishment within the
church has waned over the years as it has become effectively selfgoverning for all day to day purposes, including now in relation to its
own senior appointments.
26.The only circumstance which could generate pressure from the Church
for more freedom from the State would be if Parliament tried to
second guess it by declining to approve an important change to the
Church’s rule book. The legislation expected from Synod in a couple
of year’s time to enable women to become bishops while also
providing special arrangements for those who have theological
objections to women as priests or bishops could run into
Parliamentary difficulties.
27.But the prudent planning assumption must be that if you are interested
in loosening the ties between Church and State you will have to take
the initiative. One major reform that would, almost by a side wind,
make a big change to the character of establishment would be if your
proposals for reforming the House of Lords left no place for the
bishops. The Church recognises that a decision to go for 100%
elected House would inevitably mean the end of the Lords Spiritual.
28.Other than Lords reform, which primarily stands or falls on other
grounds, any formal changes to Church-State relations turn on
whether (a) the Government wishes to embark on constitutional
change in relation to the monarchy itself and (b) whether, for wider
modernisation reasons, it wishes to explore the possibility of a more
far-reaching dis-establishment initiative.
29.There is a widespread view that the present ban on Roman Catholics
marrying into the line of succession in anachronistic. The difficulties
in the way of reform have, however, so far proved insuperable: first it
would be necessary to acquire the consent of those other countries,
including Canada and Australia, of which the Monarch is Head of
State. For their own domestic political reasons a number of those
would not want to have to open up any monarchy related questions,
certainly during the present reign.
30. The second difficulty is that allowing the Monarch to marry a Roman
Catholic and have Roman Catholic children only really makes sense if
the Government and Parliament are prepared to go the logical next
step and break the present link between the Monarchy itself and the
Church of England. If you were minded to open those matters up the
Prime Minister would no doubt want first to take soundings of the
Monarch and the Heir to the Throne, not least since a formal
separation between Monarchy and Church would change the nature of
the Monarchy and raise questions over the future of the coronation.
31.You would also need to consider what kind of debate proposals for a
formal move to a “secular democracy” were likely to open up. The
interest shown up to now mainly by academics and avowed secularists
is not necessarily a guide to how the subject will play more widely.
There are some deep issues lurking here about history, identity and
our national story that are hard to assess and articulate. They make
what could be portrayed as removing God from the official selfunderstanding of the State a somewhat unpredictable exercise.
32.For what it is worth, other Churches and faith groups have been quite
cautious up to now about fundamental change, tending to view the
present, weak form of establishment as more tolerant and hospitable
than the alternatives.
33.If you want to explore the history further you will find it well mapped
out in the attached book produced last year by Bob Morris of the
Constitution Unit. It is not a dispassionate account. He sets out why
he believes that change is needed. To get an alternative view you may
wish to talk to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York.
34. And even Bob Morris, in a comment on one of the more esoteric
features of Establishment, observes: “… the enforcement of logic
could jettison something of value and abolition could result in more
harm than leaving the situation alone. In the absence of abuse, the
hand of logic seems best stayed”. This may have wider application
than he intended.
35.Much, of course, turns over the medium term both on whether the
Church can continue to hold itself together given its various well
publicised divisions and on whether it gradually itself loses affection
for its present links to the State. What is clear is that there is little
prospect of early pressure for change from that quarter. So whether to
take any initiative is a matter for your political judgement. You may
wish to discuss.’