Book Review: Church and State in 21st Century Britain: the future of Church Establishment

22 May 2009
Review by Theo Hobson

Church and State in 21st Century Britain: the future of Church Establishment
R.M. Morris
Palgrave Macmillan

Imagine a line-up of 100 English people, of all ages and types. Only two or three of them are active members of the Church of England, which is England's official religion (establishment has a separate Scottish edition). What does establishment consist of? It's hard to say: what we now have is the vestige of a very intimate intertwining of Church and State, a vestige which, in practical political terms, seems negligible. But in terms of national symbolism it is very considerable: the fact that our head of state must pledge to defend this Church is of no small relevance to "national identity".

So is this still what we want? It's hard to say: Christians seem in favour, and the rest of the people in that line-up seem indifferent. Progressive opinion occasionally picks up the issue, as if it were some weird exhibit in a museum, and then shrugs and returns to something more pressing.

But events are forcing the issue on to the table: the House of Lords is being reformed, although at a speed that would bore a tortoise; and the heir to the throne is occasionally to be heard tinkering with his future religious role. And recently Gordon Brown renounced his right to appoint bishops, one of the last expressions of Parliament's theoretical supervision of the Church. the rest