Church and State in 21st Century Britain: The Future of Church Establishment

Abstract

Once a rather obscure subject, the nature of church-state relations has again become a lively topic. In part this is because the migration of non-Christians to the West has challenged the various arrangements that evolved in the nineteenth century as Christian monopoly churches were challenged by Christian dissent. Renewed interest has also been sparked by attempts to explain national differences in the degree of secularization by some version of Alexis de Toqueville's classic observation on the contrast between France's stagnant but monopolistic religious culture and America's vibrant but competitive religious market. While it is relatively easy to classify countries according to the degree of religious diversity, it is more difficult to divide them into those with legally established state churches and those without because the precise details of establishment are often extremely complex. In such comparisons, Britain is often described as having a state church, but it actually only had one state church for a few months during the Civil War of the 1640s when Parliament accepted the various templates for the beliefs, structure, and ritual of a national church prepared by the Westminster Assembly of Puritan Divines. Those documents became the standards of the Church of Scotland and inform Presbyterianism to this day, but the English quickly rejected them. Further complexity was added at the start of the twentieth century when the Episcopalian Church in Wales (still commonly called the Church of England) was disestablished. Thus even leaving aside Ireland (where the Episcopalian church was disestablished in 1871), the UK has three different elements: Wales, with no established church; Scotland, with an established Presbyterian church that derives no significant advantages from that status; and England, where the established church has some status privileges (such as a role in crowning the monarch and seats in the upper house of the legislature) but little or no real power.