Anglican Establishment: How is it Liberal?

Abstract

This article argues that the kind of religious establishment that currently obtains in England is sufficiently liberal in the sense that it accommodates rights to religious freedom and is compatible with political equality. What is more, insofar as it expresses a Christian anthropology, established Anglicanism can generate the ‘thick’ set of virtues necessary to make citizens capable of respecting liberal rights. In the course of defending its thesis, the argument disputes John Rawls’s description of the ‘overlapping consensus’ as one that stands free of its supporting comprehensive doctrines; and it reads Martha Nussbaum as, ironically, confirming that an established orthodoxy of some sort is inevitable.