Otto English is the pen name used by Andrew Scott, a writer and playwright based in London.
LONDON — The church in the Essex village where I grew up was typical of the kind that dotted the parishes of England well into the 1980s. Its congregation was made up entirely of well-intentioned families, a designated eccentric and an ever-diminishing supply of little old ladies. One of the latter would die occasionally — leaving gaps in the pews that were never replenished.
God was present but not really feared. Numbers spiked at Christmas and Easter, but for the rest of the year they rarely lifted above two dozen faithful and a disappointed priest. This was a benign Home Counties deity — a spiritual bank manager who’d tick you off politely if you ever went morally overdrawn.
When I was 17, I gave up on it all in the same way that you might stop texting a casual acquaintance. Nobody seemed to notice and even if they had, Anglicanism doesn’t really go in for threats of eternal damnation. In the days before the Tories went mad, it was said that the Church of England was the Conservative Party at prayer: solid, reliable and assiduously dull.
That inherent dreariness may account in part for the steep decline in congregations over the last century. Religion has been on the slide everywhere, but there are few places where it has spiraled quite as much as in the U.K. In 1933, 75 percent of British babies were baptized into the Church of England, and a similar proportion defined themselves as Christians. Today fewer than 1 million people regularly attend a church service, and just 2 percent of young adults call themselves Anglicans.
The church is the U.K.’s 13th-biggest landowner, and it is very wealthy indeed.
Despite what Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage and other right-wing pundits might say, the U.K. is no longer a majority-Christian country. And yet, bizarrely, even as the Anglican Church writhes in the death throes of relevance, it continues to wield influence that extends beyond its thinly populated pews.
Start with the fact that 21st century England stands nearly alone among advanced western economies that retain a state religion.
The churches of Ireland and Wales both disestablished a long time ago, and the Kirk in Scotland is a national church, meaning that it has complete independence from the state. But in England, the established Church of England persists. And despite its faintly droll “more tea, vicar” image, it is no paper tiger.
The church is the U.K.’s 13th-biggest landowner, and it is very wealthy indeed, maintaining a £2 billion portfolio of 105,000 acres that includes farmland, forestry, mineral rights and some of the U.K.’s most historic buildings.
Worshippers at Salisbury Cathedral celebrate advent with a candlelit procession | Matt Cardy/Getty Images
Despite all the stuff in Leviticus 25 about inviting the dispossessed into your house, the Church of England has done little to house the poor. Even as its archbishops have railed against the homeless crisis, it has failed to build and maintain affordable properties. It was only after repeated criticism that Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby eventually pledged, in April this year, to build homes for ordinary working people on the church’s land.
Welby, in the job since 2013, comes from the evangelical “Alpha” wing of the Church. That movement was set up in the 1970s as a course in Bible teaching, but since the 1990s has taken on more of a proselytizing role — targeting the souls of affluent middle-class professionals.
Old Etonian Welby is unashamedly evangelical, claiming that he “talks in tongues” most mornings. And when not doing that, he talks to the media instead. Barely a month goes by that our unelected archbishop of Canterbury isn’t making some pronouncement, instructing MPs on how to behave, expounding his views on “rethinking the economy” or offering to chair talks to break the Brexit impasse.
Ten times more Britons subscribe to Netflix than ever darken the doors of an Anglican nave, but you’re unlikely to find the streaming video company’s CEO being sought out to opine on the great issues of the moment. Despite 52 percent of British people saying they have no faith at all, print and broadcast outlets continue to canvass the opinions of the archbishop and his clergy. It’s considered so normal that most of us don’t stop to wonder why.
Welby and his bishops are more than mere social media influencers. They hold actual political power. Bizarre as it may be, the U.K., along with Iran and the Vatican, remains one of just three nations in the world that still has lawmaking clerics: 26 “Lords Spiritual” with a permanent place in the U.K.’s upper house.
The maintenance of this feudal right was deemed unacceptable as far back as the 17th century, when the clergymen were briefly expelled, but since returning in 1660, the bishops have cleaved their cassocks to the red benches and fought off all efforts to be rid of them.
The Lords Reform Bill in 2012 sought to cut their numbers to 12 but failed, thanks in no small part to the bishops themselves, who lobbied hard to justify their survival. The argument goes something like this: The Lords Spiritual are “above” politics while of it, giving a “divine dimension” to parliament and imbuing its debates with otherworldly grace. It’s an argument trotted out so often that even otherwise sensible pundits are known to repeat it, despite the evidence for its truth being about as substantial as a communion wafer.
In recent years, the bishops’ voting record has largely consisted of backing their interests and those of the Tory party. When things have diverged, it has only been that the 26 Bishops might out-conservative the Conservatives.
Nigel Farage has suggested that the House of Lords may be the U.K.’s next political battleground | Frederick Florin/AFP via Getty Images
Take their vocal opposition to the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act in 2013. That bill was bitterly opposed by a hard core of conservative bishops and only passed after an amendment was inserted that forbade Anglican clerics from performing same-sex unions.
Britain’s Christian LGBT community members thus find themselves in the strange paradox where the secular wing of the state allows them to marry, while their own church does not. To our collective shame, in 2019 Britain the state still permits its established church to discriminate against gay couples seeking to tie the knot.
Oh — and against children who want to go to school.
Most of us don’t take much notice of the fact that a third of all government-funded primary and secondary education providers in England are “faith schools” until such moment as we try to send our kids to one. Some 68 percent of these are run by the Church of England, which is permitted to give priority admittance to applicants of a faith that has a quarter of the congregation of Britain’s mosques.
In reality this is just another shameful example of a British state educational environment that benefits the middle classes to the detriment of the poor. The system is wide open to abuse. Everyone knows stories of parents attending church services right up until the day their darlings secure a place. Children of non-church-going families meanwhile risk being excluded from their nearest state primary, because the place has been taken by religious parents living miles away.
Far from discouraging this pernicious practice, successive governments have cheered faith schools on and overseen their expansion.
Even if your child goes to a regular state school, there’s no escaping God. The 1998 School Standards and Frameworks Act insists that “each pupil in attendance at a community, foundation or voluntary school shall on each day take part in an act of collective worship.” This must be “broadly Christian” in nature. So children in the sixth-least religious nation on Earth are still subjected to an act of compulsory collective worship every day regardless of their parents’ beliefs.
It’s likely that the long-term survival of the Anglican faith itself rests on a future separated from the state and reinvented for the 21st century.
Britain’s creaky institutions have long been left to their own devices for no better reason than that they have always been there. In lieu of a revolution, the nation has lumbered on like a patched-up clunker, making incremental changes but doing nothing substantial to fix the underlying faults in our nation.
One has to wonder how long this eccentric, deleterious state of affairs can continue. The Brexit civil war has cast nearly every U.K. institution into question, and with the queen inevitably moving toward the final years of her reign, the U.K. is likely headed into a period of reckoning.
The unremitting influence of the otherwise irrelevant Church of England on the nation’s schools and upper house is a blistering sore on democracy. The clergy and their allies in the Conservative Party will doubtless fight tooth and nail to push back any assault on the status quo.
That would be a mistake. It’s likely that the long-term survival of the Anglican faith itself rests on a future separated from the state and reinvented for the 21st century.
Change, frankly, can’t come soon enough. But with Boris Johnson sitting on a hefty majority, Lords reform now looks to be very far down the agenda indeed. Perhaps as the opposition parties regroup and seek to create new narratives in the coming years, they could seek to push it back toward the top.
Farage, alone among British political leaders, is already suggesting that this is the next political battlefield and for once — and much as it pains me to say it — he’s right.