Establishment and liberalism: A response to Nigel Biggar

Introduction

This article responds to Nigel Biggar’s essay ‘Why the “establishment” of the Church of England Is Good for a Liberal Society’, published in the recent collection, The Established Church: Past, Present and Future, and also published in the magazine Standpoint. Biggar is mainly concerned to refute what he calls the ‘secularist’ case for disestablishment: that establishment contravenes liberal values. This article will argue that the matter cannot be neutrally settled, because of the flexibility of ‘liberalism’: there are different liberal traditions. One cannot convincingly argue that liberalism naturally entails disestablishmentarianism. What one can do is argue that liberal Christianity entails it. One can give an account of liberal Christianity that shows disestablishment to be at its heart. This, I suggest, is the most coherent Christian grounds for proposing disestablishment: not that establishment violates the integrity of the Church (as most Anglican disestablishmentarians have insisted), but that it disables the articulation of liberal Christianity.

Biggar begins by defining the Church’s establishment. It is marked by four things: the coronation service, the monarch’s ‘special association’ with the Church, the bishops in the House of Lords, and ‘the Church of England’s privileged position in State education’. ¹

There are two arguments against this arrangement, he says, ‘one emanating from secularists and the other from within the churches themselves’. ² He deals with the latter first, and very briefly. ‘The main Christian objection to establishment is that it corrupts the Church, constraining its freedom to speak truth to power.’ ³ But this particular form of establishment, these days, does not constrain the Church in this way: recent archbishops of Canterbury have had public differences with prime ministers over various issues. Biggar relates this misguided objection to establishment to a wider issue, of cynicism about politics. It is a cliché of liberal, and liberation, theology that the state is only worthy of criticism. The Church’s involvement in the state is a counterweight to this negative attitude.

He moves on to the secularist critique of establishment. This holds that, ‘since we now live in a liberal, pluralist society, it is unfair for any one religion to be privileged; and that public institutions and rituals should therefore be “neutral” with regard to rival views of the world’. ⁴ This sounds convincing, he says, but it is flawed. With reference to the thought of John Rawls, he argues that liberalism is a positive tradition, distinct from mere neutrality. But it is not a single tradition; there are different forms of liberal humanism; some are religious, some are secular. The liberal state must privilege one or other of these forms, rather than simply withdrawing from the realm of values. Secular forms may seem more logical, but they are likely to disparage religion: French republicanism is ‘dogmatically secularist towards religious believers’ ⁵ Liberal harmony is at least as likely to issue either from the ‘ecumenical monotheism’ of the US Constitution or from a more explicitly religious basis – such as Anglicanism. ⁶ The latter enshrines a form of humanism, and is therefore a good basis for liberal values: ‘Anglicanism is structurally humanist in its creedal affirmation of the special dignity of human being [sic] made in the image of God – a dignity intensified by God’s assumption of human flesh in the Incarnation.’ ⁷ It favours openness, dialogue and rationality in a broad sense. Of course, Biggar concedes, Anglican establishment has, historically, been in some respects ‘illiberal’, but what tradition hasn’t? And now comes a crucial contention: ‘“Liberal” is a relative term. Only totalitarian societies are simply illiberal; others are more or less liberal. Even medieval Christendom … allowed public space for disagreement and tolerated the expression of controversial views … The difference between pre-modern Christian societies and contemporary liberal ones is a matter of degree, not kind.’ ⁸ Furthermore, he goes on, contemporary liberal societies paradoxically display a sort of illiberalism in their treatment of ‘heretics’, such as critics of homosexuality.

Because liberalism is vague, and also because extreme liberalism has this paradoxical side to it, English Anglicans have no real cause to worry that they are offending against it. This tradition is not at root illiberal, despite its foundational exclusion and persecution of minorities: in fact, it has always nurtured a liberal tradition, even in its most authoritarian phases. Far from being illiberal, the established Church is the way in which Britain’s particular liberal tradition is grounded: those who value ‘liberal humanism’ should be glad of it. What about those of other faiths, or none, who feel put out by Anglican privilege? Such complaints have no substance these days, says Biggar: in Britain’s case, ‘the privileging of a particular religion [is] compatible with the liberal right to religious freedom’. ⁹ The days of non-Anglicans being second-class citizens are long gone. But isn’t there something wrong about the formal, theoretical privilege that remains? No. Biggar returns to his core point, that there is no pure neutral liberalism: ‘it is inevitable that some members of any plural society will find themselves in a public order that affirms a worldview that is more or less different from their own; and will feel somewhat irritated by it’. ¹⁰ Furthermore, ‘an historic religion that is supported more or less actively by a majority of citizens, and which performs valuable social, educational and cultural functions, might deserve certain privileges … Inequality can still be equitable’. ¹¹ Those, such as Martha Nussbaum, who insist that the separation of Church and state is essential to full and robust liberalism are overly dogmatic. It is naïve to think that everyone is treated absolutely equally in such an order: those who lack sympathy with the prevailing ethos will be in some ways marginalized – but they are not thereby less equal.

Biggar sums up thus:

The establishment of the Church of England serves as a public affirmation of one worldview that sustains a humanist anthropology and a liberal ethos, in a world where humanist liberalism is under threat and in need of defence and promotion. Such an establishment is compatible with the free exercise of religion and with the equal dignity of all citizens in a plural society. The secularist argument that liberty, equality and fairness in a plural society require, and are best served by, disestablishment is not cogent. ¹²

Partly for this reason, his brisk treatment of the religious case for disestablishment is hugely inadequate. He simply asserts that ‘the main Christian objection to establishment is that it corrupts the Church, constraining its freedom to speak truth to power’. ¹³ In reality, Christian opposition to establishment is a large and complex phenomenon; there are different accounts of its adverse effect on the Church, rooted in different ecclesiologies. Indeed, it is largely because there are different theological motivations behind disestablishment that no stable movement has emerged. He goes on to associate disestablishment with a rather narrow idea of ‘the prophetic’, which has influence beyond disestablishment advocates: ‘too many leaders in the churches are inclined by the liberal Zeitgeist in general, and Liberation Theology in particular, to take a relentlessly critical view of the State, and to assume that a Christian voice has only one, prophetic register. Or, rather, to assume that prophecy always comes from the Left.’ ¹⁴ Here he seems to be playing the conservative journalist at the expense of the careful theologian. It may be the case that some critics of establishment have sympathized with liberation theology and have put much emphasis on the Church’s need to ‘speak truth to power’ (the radical Anglo-Catholic Ken Leech is an example), but not all can be characterized in this way – and those who do take this approach deserve a fairer hearing: their notion of ‘the prophetic’ is likely to be grounded in a wider ecclesial vision. Biggar’s implication is that advocacy of disestablishment arises from a rather adolescent disgruntlement with the realities of political power, from a vague flirtation with anarchism. This is a narrow view of disestablishment, seemingly based on the Tory assumption that critics of the status quo are at heart irresponsible and naïve revolutionaries. It overlooks the fact that the main disestablishing tradition in the West is that of the United States, and that it has nothing to do with a critical view of the state (if anything, the opposite: the separation of church and state helps to found a robust modern account of the state’s legitimacy). This view also overlooks Roman Catholic opposition to establishment, which is not ‘anti-state’ but anti-state-control-of-the-Church. (The Tractarians introduced such opposition into the Church of England: they flirted with disestablishment on the grounds that the status quo undermined the dignity of the Church.)

The main religious advocates of disestablishment in the twentieth century have been Hensley Henson and Colin Buchanan. Henson was radicalized on the issue by the Prayer Book crisis of 1927–9, in which the Church’s desire for reform was blocked by Parliament. The Church quietly introduced its new Prayer Book anyway, but Henson was unsatisfied. Echoing the Tractarians, he objected to the ability of a Parliament that included non-Anglicans to determine Church policy. He also argued that the reality of pluralism now exposed the idea of a national Church as a fiction; the Church should adapt to reality, and rethink its mission accordingly, rather than pretend to inhabit the past. Neither argument was popular. Defenders of establishment could with some reason argue that reforms were underway to lessen the Church’s dependence on Parliament: these culminated in the creation of General Synod in the 1970s. And the argument that the Church should extricate itself from ‘national identity’ was unpropitious: the mid-twentieth century was a golden age for the Church as national treasure. ¹⁵ Colin Buchanan’s approach has been essentially similar to Henson’s, though he is on the Evangelical wing of the Church. The reforms of the 1970s do not decisively free the Church from parliamentary control but just lengthen the chain that binds it, he has argued. Though he has often used the rhetoric of ‘liberation’, speaking of the need to free the Church from control by the state, his theological motivation is neither liberal nor liberationist in the left-wing sense. In his book Cut the Connection he does not foreground the need for Church leaders to ‘speak truth to power’. His concern is wider: establishment is a general hindrance to the Church’s self-understanding and mission. As he puts it in the conclusion: the core issue is one of ‘obedience to God’; ‘we need a vision of a missionary Church of England, uniting with her fellow-Christians, and witnessing to Jesus Christ in secular, pluralist and superstitious times’. ¹⁶

So for Henson and Buchanan, advocacy of disestablishment is rooted in (slightly differently motivated) demands for ecclesial independence and integrity, and a related claim that the idea of a national Church is a malign fiction, inhibiting mission. Reform, both insist, is the precondition for a renewal of evangelism. We shall presently address the question of whether disestablishment can be advocated on better grounds than these. The present point is that Biggar belittles the religious case for disestablishment, by ignoring its theological scope and reducing it to one sub-issue, and also by relating it to trendy left-wing posturing. He is guilty of setting up a straw man: the religious case for disestablishment is essentially this – which is easily refuted.

Most of Biggar’s article, as we have seen, refutes the ‘secularist’ case for disestablishment – that establishment offends against pluralism and ‘liberal values’. This secularist case is very close to my own religious case. The two cases contain the same information, if you like, but present it differently. This means that I sympathize with the arguments that Biggar ascribes to secularists – I agree that an established Church is at root illiberal, and is therefore to be opposed. The difference is that I have a theological understanding of liberalism, I consider it to be rooted in the gospel.

So the question of liberalism is central to my form of disestablishmentarianism, as it is not to that of Henson or Buchanan. Despite some differences they share a core argument: that an authentic Church cannot be subject to a partly or largely non-Christian state. This is obviously a strong argument, with scarcely disputable New Testament credentials. But there is a problem with it, one that has prevented it from making traction within the Church. The problem is that it cedes the liberal high ground to establishmentarians. For it can be convincingly argued that the Church of England is more liberal than the main ecclesial alternatives (chiefly Roman Catholicism and US-style Protestantism), and that it owes this liberalism to its establishment – for an established Church must remain in touch with the culture around it. The Church of England might offend against a certain sort of theological purism, many would say, but that is a price worth paying for its liberalism.

My approach to disestablishment is to leave ecclesiology to one side and foreground the question of liberalism. What complicates my case is that the illiberalism of establishment is not easily demonstrated. We are dealing with a very tricky term, liberalism, as well as with a very complex phenomenon, establishment. If liberalism is used in a broad, common-sense way to mean freedom, then it must be admitted that the illiberalism of establishment has very largely been reformed away. It cannot be argued, as it could in the past, that non-Anglicans are seriously disadvantaged by establishment. They are no longer excluded from the House of Commons, and most universities, they are no longer forced to pay Church rates, and so on. Maybe some Catholics are riled by the illegality of a Catholic monarch, maybe some atheists, or Muslims, are annoyed that representatives of their worldview do not sit by right in Parliament. Maybe some non-Anglican theologians are angry that they are barred from certain Oxford chairs. Clearly, many atheists and agnostics are angry that so many state schools are attached to the Church – but this is only indirectly related to establishment. Also, homosexuals may object to the officially discriminatory policy of the Church, but there are all sorts of ambiguities here (in general the Church has surely helped to normalize homosexuality by employing a disproportionate number of homosexuals over the last generation). It is difficult to argue that establishment entails any serious infringement of human rights, that disestablishment would bring an objectively measurable enlargement of national liberty.

Similarly, it cannot be shown that secular liberal opinion is seriously bothered by establishment; that the theoretical privileging of this Church angers a significant sector of the population. Liberal pundits very seldom raise the issue, even when discussing constitutional reform. It is often seen as a rather charming, quaint conundrum, of no relevance to the person in the street, or the real business of politics. The voluble atheists of recent years do not bother attacking it: indeed there is a long tradition of English unbelief that sees establishment as a benign brake on religion acquiring real ideological power. Better the soft liberal vicars of the established Church than their slick American counterparts, or their more morally conservative Roman Catholic counterparts – or their Muslim ones. The established Church is not often cited by Richard Dawkins as an example of religion’s danger. Instead, many liberal agnostics see the Church as a valuable bulwark of community, social capital, and see the anomaly of establishment as outweighed by this (Andrew Brown of The Guardian is a good example of this, as is Diarmaid MacCulloch). Such liberals broadly accept the Church’s own self-understanding: the real meaning of establishment these days is not privilege, but the Church’s commitment to serve the entire nation, including its poorest communities. As William Whyte puts it: establishment ‘can be defended precisely because the Church has now had its privileges stripped from it, yet nonetheless continues to conceive its role as a national one’. ¹⁷ Through centuries of gradual reform, a wonderful alchemy has occurred: establishment has been transmuted from dubious authoritarianism to pure social virtue. One aspect of this virtue is the Church’s ability to keep religion ‘public’, rather than allow its privatization and ghettoization, and to keep all faith communities in a state of healthy public conversation. ¹⁸

So the dominant view is that what remains of establishment is almost completely harmless, and probably benign: there may be a theoretical tension with liberal principles, as understood by certain theorists, but this is hardly an urgent problem; it is something the English psyche has always lived with – in its acceptance of the monarchy as well as the Church. Unsurprisingly, this determines the position of the Church: because secular liberal opinion is relaxed about establishment, and accepts it as compatible (enough) with liberalism, the Church has no cause to be too worried about the issue.

I may seem to have undercut my own premise, that establishment is at odds with liberalism. For I have conceded that establishment brings no major infringement of human rights, that to attack it as a serious affront to the liberty of British people would be Quixotic. I have also conceded that British liberal opinion is broadly accepting of establishment as a force for traditional stability, social cohesion. Am I therefore not admitting that establishment is, in effect, compatible enough with liberalism, in its British form? In a sense yes: it is a matter of empirical fact that establishment is compatible enough with liberalism in its British form.

To a large extent, then, Biggar is right, that ‘liberalism’ is too slippery to be used as a stick against establishment. And conversely, ‘establishment’ has become too shadowy to be hit by any such stick. If there were a clear clash between establishment and secular liberal values, then secular liberals would have abolished establishment long ago. Instead, establishment has become politically weak, to the point where secular thinkers have little or no cause to worry about it. Among liberals, indifference has replaced the anticlericalism of old.

In the tradition of Burke, and English conservatism generally, Biggar insists that a pragmatic approach to liberalism is nothing to be ashamed of. It may contain a vagueness that annoys some secularists, who admire the rigorous aura of French secularism or US-style religious liberty, but this vagueness is in fact a virtue, in that it helps to defend the role of faith communities from secularist triumphalism. This older, organic liberal tradition, in which an established Church plays a central role, is something to celebrate.

So on what grounds do I claim that this pragmatic liberalism of English tradition is inferior to that form of liberalism that insists on the separation of church and state? On theological grounds: the claim is firmly rooted in an account of liberal Christianity. I suggest that liberal Christianity cannot be coherently articulated without close reference to this anti-establishment tradition. The reason for opposing establishment, then, is not that it is illiberal according to some neutral standard of liberalism, which modern Christians must respect, but that a liberal version of evangelism demands it. The issue is that we must articulate a coherent liberal account of Christianity. This involves telling a story about modernity that explains the compatibility of the gospel with liberal values. According to this story, liberal Christianity emerges in opposition to establishment; it finds its coherence in this opposition. We must proclaim disestablishment because it belongs to the logic of liberal Christianity.

So the liberal Christian case for disestablishment must be expressed with great care – and also with great boldness. It is not sufficient to say that establishment is ‘illiberal’ – this approach is belied by secular liberal indifference to the issue in Britain. If it is so illiberal, why aren’t secular liberals busy fighting it? Instead, the argument must be that establishment is at odds with a particular liberal tradition – and that this particular liberal tradition has a special affinity with the gospel.

So it is necessary to narrate the emergence of this special liberal tradition – special in terms of its intimate relationship with liberal Christianity. It must be contrasted with the form of liberalism that precedes it. Let us call the latter Liberalism A; this is the pragmatic liberalism of English tradition, which can be traced back to the reign of Elizabeth I, and beyond. About this liberalism Biggar is right: it is a relative concept. It describes any political arrangement that refrains from the rigid imposition of theocracy, or secular totalitarianism. The Lutheran Reformation gave rise to a new species of this tradition: a unity of church and state enabled a new degree of toleration and intellectual inquiry. The Elizabethan regime made much of this (partly so as to mark itself out from Roman Catholic tyranny), but of course it could, and did, decide to persecute dissent. This tradition sees establishment as a crucial source of stability – it is a new expression of the Constantinian tradition. It is hostile to the radical religious reform that wants a purer church, separate from the state. This is deemed anarchic. So this is Liberalism A: the liberalism of the Constantinian state that tolerates a certain degree of pluralism, but reserves the right to privilege the official religion. Biggar is right to say that a particularly sophisticated version of this tradition emerges under the aegis of the Church of England, from Hooker onwards. As he puts it: ‘the Church of England was originally conceived as a relatively liberal space, and, despite parts of itself, it has maintained a continuous liberal strand ever since’. ¹⁹

During the seventeenth century a competing vision arises: Liberalism B. It demands a revolution in toleration, and the dismantling of establishment. It is informed by the radical reformation, but it has a new level of political sophistication. The radical reformers, such as Anabaptists, had focused on the purity of the Church and rejected politics as corrupt. Liberalism B, by contrast, holds that a new sort of state must be created in which different religious forms are tolerated (as long as they are not politically subversive), and none is privileged with official status. Church and state must be separated. But the state is not thereby secular in the sense of non-religious: it is imbued with a decidedly liberal Protestant spirit. This was the vision of Milton, Roger Williams and other radical Puritans during the civil war period. A partial attempt to realize this vision was made by Cromwell’s regime. It was a frail vision: upon the failure of the English revolution it went into retreat. Restoration England decisively opted for Liberalism A (this tradition was soon updated, chiefly by Locke, so as to include a more rigorous account of toleration). But in the following century Liberalism B rose again – in the new nation of the United States of America. Disestablishment was demanded by Jefferson, Madison and others, and the separation of church and state was put at the heart of the new national ideology (though it took a while to stick there). Again, the state was not non-religious; it was imbued with a liberal Protestant spirit, which found some expression in national ceremonial convention. The American model shows that the separation of church and state is compatible with the retention of some national Christian symbolism, and a deep national respect for religion – indeed, in everyday cultural terms, a deeper respect than obtains in Britain (a point that Biggar ignores).

At the same time the French Revolution launched another new political tradition, largely defined by hostility to traditional religion. In this tradition (Liberalism C, I suppose), the state is non-religious; it is imbued with a post-Christian spirit. This development is important to our discussion, for it strengthens the hand of Liberalism A: it gives credence to the idea that all departures from the traditional model tend toward irreligion, and indeed illiberalism.

It is my claim that Liberalism B, which demands the separation of church and state, is the essential basis of liberal Christianity. Of course ‘liberal Christianity’ can be defined in other ways: I am defining it thus. For Liberalism B fully and explicitly rejects the traditional link, current since Constantine, that ties the gospel to state power. Only on such a basis can Christianity’s affinity with freedom be fully expressed. This affinity was partially expressed in Luther’s rejection of ‘the law’, following Paul, but he assumed the necessity of state-enforced religious uniformity – which is a form of religious law, though it comes with a political stamp. The rejection of establishment enables a fuller break with legalism (Milton’s religious writing, including Areopagitica, is clear evidence of this Pauline basis for the separation of Church and state.) ²⁰ In short, this tradition, Liberalism B, establishes an unprecedented link between Christianity and political and cultural freedom. Of course a Christian tradition can reject Liberalism B and still be relatively liberal, but it falls short of liberal Christianity in the full sense. And of course there is more to liberal Christianity than the separation of church and state – but this is its essence. And of course this fully liberal Christian tradition was flawed and incomplete in all sorts of ways (in particular it became far too influenced by Enlightenment rationalism), but that does not discredit its core insight, that Christianity rejects coercion, especially that of a state church.

So the matter can be put thus: the Church of England, while established, is structurally at odds with fully liberal Christianity. It implicitly disparages the narrative, sketched above, in which liberalism and Christianity join forces, effecting a break with Constantinianism, or Christendom. However liberal the Church may be in certain respects, its formal structure remains at odds with liberal Christianity in the full sense. It disrupts any attempt to articulate a fully liberal Christian position. This might sound dogmatic: an Anglican priest might reply that he keenly supports various liberal causes, and sees establishment as a harmless platform that enables him to do so. But liberal Christian identity is not defined by support of various liberal causes but by support of one cause: liberal Christianity. His tacit affirmation of establishment prevents the clear articulation of the liberal Christian vision. For he gives the impression that there need be no decisive break with the era of Christendom, just a series of nuanced readjustments.

Biggar might respond as follows: Liberalism B might be theoretically attractive, and it may have suited the newly independent America, but let’s start from where we actually are; the brute fact is that we have inherited a highly sophisticated form of Liberalism A. It undergirds our political culture, and our particular tradition of ‘liberal humanism’. Should it really be thrown aside because it is less theoretically tidy than Liberalism B? There is no guarantee that Britain could imitate the American fusion of disestablishment and respect for religion – maybe that arrangement was the product of a very particular cultural moment that is long gone. Disestablishment would be a risky experiment. Such Burkean conservatism is always powerful, for modernity is indeed full of regrettable risky reforms. But the fact remains: liberal Christianity must be articulated. If the Church of England has spent centuries evading the fact that liberal Christianity entails disestablishment, the evasion must end.

It might also be objected that this form of ‘liberal Christianity’, which is defined by hostility to establishment, is simply un-Anglican. It has been explicitly rejected by the Church of England, which favours a less strident, more nuanced form of liberalism. It was roundly rejected 350 years ago! The case is closed! But it is not closed: the Church of England’s establishment has been subjected to two centuries of liberal revision; it has half-acknowledged that establishment, as traditionally understood, is at odds with gospel freedom (as well as secular justice). And the case has been opened up in another way: the Church of England now understands (or half-understands) itself to be part of the Anglican Communion; this wider identity has become increasingly important to it, in theory. Its fellow provinces see the idea of establishment as alien, to varying degrees, as a feature of the past. It is therefore possible to reject the establishment of the Church from within, or at least semi-within. By giving rise to the Anglican Communion, the Church of England has opened itself to such criticism. It has opened the door to the disestablishing tradition that it officially dismissed as alien for centuries.

So the liberal theological case for opposing establishment cannot be dismissed as un-Anglican. Indeed, from a global Anglican perspective, the Church of England emerges as an eccentric form of Anglicanism that clings to a certain antiquated political arrangement as if Jesus himself ordained it. (Instead, Jesus warned against burdening people with extraneous matter that claims to be central to the gospel.) Non-English Anglicanism has an enviable purity and lightness: it does not come with a requirement that the believer affirm something else, something outside the gospel.

But let me conclude on a partially conciliatory note. It should be acknowledged that the issue is not simple, straightforward, easily resolved. There is a dramatic dilemma here. For Biggar is right to say that establishment is part of a constitutional tradition that has delivered centuries of stability and relative liberty. He is probably right that disestablishment would be a rather traumatic leap for this essentially conservative nation, and that it would leave a very awkward constitutional gap. As indicated, I favour the American model of a firm separation of church and state, combined with vague official acknowledgement of Christianity’s role in the nation’s development: I agree that the French model is too infused with an Enlightenment impatience with religion. But I accept that there is no easy, obvious path towards a British version of the US model: the way forward is unpredictable. So opening this can of worms is a very big deal; there is a very strong case for leaving well alone. Surely the Church should side with the pragmatism of majority opinion, and with what seems its own practical interest, and keep all talk of disestablishment at bay? It has Christian grounds for such a stance: the present arrangement gives it access to an impressive cross-section of communities, and reform might jeopardize this. And yet the Church should admit that its communicative power is limited by its implication in constitutional tradition; in particular it is cut off from a sector of liberal opinion, which might be open to a less politically burdened evangelism. It is a dilemma. Let each English Anglican consider carefully where his Christian duty lies.