Unlike either of his two most recent predecessors, Welby appeared to relish the executive side of his job. He knows that networking is meat and drink to an effective operator. Though the Church of England, the Scottish Episcopal Church, the Church of Ireland and the Church in Wales continue to shrink, there is evidence of a tailing off in decline across some quarters. Where misgivings about the direction of travel arise, they tend to centre on the price paid for shiny Evangelical/Charismatic takeovers of smaller congregations which have thereby lost their traditions and distinctiveness.

It was misgivings about Welby’s style that gave rise to Save the Parish, a movement set up in 2018. Marcus Walker, Rector of St Bartholomew-the-Great in London and one of Save the Parish’s leading members, argues that both money and personnel would be available for threatened churches if there had been better management. He points out that the Church Commissioners’ assets total well over £10 billion, and that more Anglican priests are being ordained in England than two decades ago. Save the Parish also argues that the amalgamation of parishes in dioceses including Truro, Leicester and Sheffield is ecclesiological – namely driven by a sense among Evangelical bishops, especially, that the parish structure is dispensable. Meanwhile, money is held to be wasted on new projects that amount to reinventing the wheel.

“Take the purchase of a former Chinese takeaway in Manchester,” comments a priest in the city. “At least £7 million was spent on this venture. Several clergy and a youth worker were recruited. Yet it was only a few minutes’ walk from the 12th century parish church, where the incumbent would have given an arm and a leg for investment on that scale.” This example is not seen as untypical. Another source told me an unnerving story about St George’s, Portsmouth, a more or less viable church that was taken over by HTB when a problem arose with the city centre premises the church-planters had originally rented. “The congregation were told that they could keep their Sunday-morning parish eucharist for year one. But it was made clear that after that, drumkits and a big screen would take the place of the altar.”

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Save the Parish campaigners judge that current forms of church reorganisation are highly damaging. Its mission is to reverse what it describes as the accelerating process of “church closures, parish amalgamations, clergy reductions, increasing parish shares, expanding bureaucracy, mindless central initiatives and general bad governance that are strangling mission at the grassroots level”. Other clerics, while sympathetic to Save the Parish, nevertheless question the value of binary solutions. One of my friends recently spent a year helping out at a cluster of rural parishes in East Anglia. “Many of the churches concerned are on their last legs,” she told me. “Even if it were possible to provide more clergy — and that would be a big ask — it’s not clear what kinds of strategy could simply rebuild traditional Anglican worship from the ground up, except in certain places.”

A priest of great experience close to retirement, she makes several other germane points. One is that church-planting and initiatives such as “Messy Church” — informal worship in café-style conditions — have kept people who might otherwise have fallen away, and drawn in others who might never have attended worship in the first place. Another is that diocesan projects are usually bottom-up processes. The Church Commissioners’ interest is piqued by attractive-sounding proposals. It is no surprise to learn that Evangelical parishes have in the main been quicker off the mark with their funding applications. An archdeacon who himself has a high-church background expressed the matter in salty terms: “Whenever I find that Anglo-Catholics get money, they tend to buy a new set of vestments, but Evangelicals employ a youth worker.” He insisted that, on the whole, “Evangelicals have been more strategic, better organised, more able to exploit contemporary culture — perhaps for obvious reasons — in ways that mean they have a bigger footprint among student populations in particular.”

Another cleric in northern England expressed a less nostalgic view: “Fortunately, we are not polarised between slick HTB plants on the one hand — which may be culturally appropriate in parts of west London but can lack self-awareness about how they appear elsewhere — and Save the Parish on the other, which can become a little like nostalgia.” He has retired with his wife to live a mile or so from the parish church and “the parish priest is never seen on the estate and no one from this estate is a regular worshipper there. Where parish priests have responsibilities beyond the luxury (found in London but not far beyond) of a single parish, the fiction of universal cure of souls within the parish becomes even more ridiculously hard to maintain.”

There was greater agreement among those with different outlooks on the thinning out of theological education in the contemporary Church of England. A major chapter of the recent past has been the rise of St Mellitus College, co-founded in 2007 by the then Bishop of London, Richard Chartres. In the view of some, however, the college is a victim of its own success. Having become a franchise with outposts across the country, it now offers non-residential (and thus much cheaper) training to about a quarter of all ordinands. ( It is also worth noting the high number of candidates for ministry in the C of E: 591 priests were ordained in 2020, almost 15 times the number of new Catholic priests in the whole of Germany.) The current Dean of St Mellitus, Russell Winfield, has emphasised the priority given to academic rigour. But I also heard private complaints that elsewhere in the country students are not learning biblical languages or receiving a solid grounding in theology.

Concerns about a sparse intellectual diet are repeated by critics of the Church’s current leadership. “I regularly encounter bishops with very little theological scholarship or depth,” comments a priest who has served as an episcopal adviser. “This poses enormous problems. There is now not a single diocesan bishop who has taught theology at university level.” His charge in essence is that the “Go for growth” cast of mind much evident under Welby has promoted assumptions that the show should be run by successful middle managers who have demonstrated that they can boost congregations. The shift underlying this change is influenced by changes to vacancy-in-see committees, now usually dominated by local voices. These representatives are likely to say that appointing a theologian could be a good thing in theory, but the best candidate for preferment to the bench is a parish priest.

My friend from East Anglia was gloomy: “We face a really unfortunate mix. Shrinking organisations have very few options. The choice on my own patch is stark. Do we strip the countryside of resources because there are very few people who go to church there, and favour the city, where lots more people attend church? Or do we strip the city of its resources to better prop up the countryside, where churches are in such obvious decline? There are very few good options.” And, she adds, “the dilemma is replicated across the Church of England in so many different contexts”.

Add to all this negative publicity about safeguarding — along with endless debate on sexuality — and it is easy to sound dispirited. But that verdict strikes me as over-hasty. On child protection, the Church is not different in kind from secular settings such as sport and education, where many outrages also took place in less transparent times. Everyone I spoke to while researching this subject insisted that the welfare of minors is now taken with utmost seriousness by British and Irish Anglicans. Meanwhile, sexuality remains a hot topic because it dovetails with wider teaching on biblical authority and the limits of diversity. In response to Living in Love and Faith, a long-awaited report, the Bishops have presented the General Synod with prayers for blessing same-sex unions, a move against which conservatives are fighting hard. Parishes and deaneries across the land remain divided for the same reason as the Catholic Church is split; it is too soon to tell whether a question that has already polarised the Anglican Communion will trigger a formal schism in the Church of England, or (more likely, perhaps) a peeling away of traditionalists to other Christian folds, as happened with the ordination of women. What seems certain is that Anglicans face biting headwinds ahead.

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Does all this tell in favour of disestablishment? Not necessarily. Jonathan Chaplin, author of Beyond Establishment opposes the notion of a state Church on the grounds that it generates “conflicting and inevitably compromising expectations”. He adds that disestablishment ought to be accompanied by the shaping of a positive vision of how the state should engage with religious bodies generally. This would contrast with French-style laïcité, in which the state supervises a thoroughly secularised public realm, where religious identity is largely invisible, and religious voices silenced.

But Chaplin also has the grace to acknowledge the extent of support for the status quo in other faith communities. Tariq Modood, the Muslim political scientist, speaks for many in holding that the vestigial nature of Anglican establishment expresses a recognition of religion’s public character. It is thus less intimidating to minority faiths than a triumphant secularism. (I have regularly heard Hindu, Jewish and Muslim friends express gratitude for the way bishops in the House of Lords speak up for faith in general, rather than just their own version of it.)

At another level — earthier and for that reason all the more compelling — stands the novelist Anne Atkins’s defence of the status quo. Having lived in a number of inner-city vicarages for many years, she has seen lives turned round seven days a week “because we are the Established and official Church of the nation”. When you’re at the end of your rope, she adds, you hold fast to what you recognise. “Far fewer strangers would have rung on our… door — desperate, lost, poor, cold, or without a passport — if we’d been non-denominational, however much purer in heart and freer of fault we might have been.”

Atkins’s comment points to a reality insufficiently acknowledged by secularists and believers alike. The Churches — and Christian endeavour generally — form the largest source of social capital on earth. That will remain true, whatever the scale of institutional failings or the wrongs committed by individual believers.

“But visiting lecturers were rarely disinvited because their views were deemed unspeakable, course readings were not routinely screened in case they contained material that students might find discomforting, and faculty members who departed from the prevailing consensus did not face attempts to . . . end their careers. An inquisitorial culture had not yet taken over.”[1. John Gray, ‘Un-liberty’, TLS, March 30, 2018]

But it has now – and the shift is becoming more and more marked in politics. The secular liberal State now claims more than its due, including the right to govern a citizen’s conscience and set norms as though the government were the only force in society that mattered. In other words, the so-called liberal State isn’t liberal at all. Among other things, it needs religion to provide a crucial reminder of its limits, as well as richer visions of human flourishing with deeper foundations than the thin soil provided by a principle like ‘tolerance’ alone.

The suggestion of a spiritual cure to our malaise comes from Rowan Williams, in a recent lecture on the Victorian historian Lord Acton’s thinking about political and religious liberty.[2. Rowan Williams, ‘Religious and Political Liberty’, the Las Casas Institute Lecture for 2016] The former Archbishop of Canterbury had a subtext. His not very coded message was that Acton, as a Catholic with a keen eye on the rights of minorities, was rolling the pitch for a classically liberal model of Church–State relations which contrasts sharply with the prescriptive models of liberalism we see today.

Given past and continuing evidence of religious authoritarianism, how can self-aware Christians, Muslims and others answer the very influential view that religion should be a purely private matter? By quarrying the thought of many forebears besides Acton, Williams has long shown a talent for reframing stale-sounding debates in fresh ways. As archbishop, for example, he distinguished between good and bad models of secularism, respectively the ‘procedural’ and the ‘programmatic’.

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Procedural secularism grants no special privileges to any particular religious body, but denies that faith is merely a matter of private conviction. It should at least be allowed to nourish the public conversation. Williams continues to see so-called programmatic secularism in a far less positive light, because it insists on a ‘neutral’ public arena and hives religion off into a purely private domain. Rather than resolving clashes of outlook, programmatic secularism risks inflaming social conflict by stoking resentment among faith groups.

In a series of addresses over the past 15 years, Williams has proposed ‘interactive pluralism’ as a recipe for harmony. This encourages robust dialogue among faith communities and between them and the State. No one has received the whole truth ‘as God sees it’, so all have something to learn. Such a model contrasts with the subjectivity implied by multiculturalist attitudes. As indicated, a tag such as ‘tolerance of diversity’ can conceal a multitude of sins.

Acton’s ideas – spelt out in addresses and essays during the 1870s – are worth revisiting in more detail. The future Professor of Modern History at Cambridge made the eye-catching claim that religious liberty or freedom of belief is the foundation of all other liberties, and that political liberty in turn underpins the health of religious communities. The rationale for this lies in his definition of liberty as: “the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his duty. Against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion, the State is competent to assign duties and draw the line between good and evil only in its immediate sphere.”[3. Lord Acton, ‘The History of Freedom in Antiquity’, an address delivered to the members of the Bridgnorth Institute, February 26, 1877]

The State and religious communities thus owe something to one another. If one is to be free, the other must be free. And the State has a duty not only to respect conviction and conscience – especially the conscience of a minority. It also has an obligation not to be swallowed up by any religious body and not to assimilate itself to one faith group. The State, then, is not a Church. The State guards the possibility of there being ‘Churches’ – Acton’s shorthand for communities of conviction and conscience – and the existence of these communities of conscience stands before the State as a challenge and reminder of what it is and isn’t. From this follows a crucial inference. Since the State is the authority that permits you to follow your conscience, it cannot claim the right to dictate what you believe. If it does, you have a severe problem. 

It may seem counterintuitive to suggest that religion can only flourish when the State as such isn’t religious, but the point is certainly grasped by T. S. Eliot in his Essay on the Idea of a Christian Society. This is the text in which the devoutly Anglican poet says that he would prefer to have a competent atheist running a government than an incompetent believer. His point is that the State has its business, but that business has boundaries. Williams’s conclusion is forthright, especially in view of his own left-wing allegiances:

“When a State believes – and acts on the belief – that there are no loyalties more serious than political loyalties, the State becomes idolatrous and diabolical. Thus the presence within the State of communities of non-negotiable conviction is unexpectedly the best thing that can happen to a State. A State faced with communities which deny its absolute and universal reach is benefiting from that. Once the State recognises that there are, within it, communities that it doesn’t, so to speak, franchise – that don’t derive . . . their meaning from the State, the State will have reason to hesitate over any attempt to assimilate all communities to itself. The State will have reason to be cautious of any policy that tries to homogenise, totalise and control.” [4. Rowan Williams, ‘Religious and Political Liberty’, the Las Casas Institute Lecture for 2016]

The point is encapsulated equally well by John Neville Figgis, the early 20th-century Anglican theologian, who wrote of the ‘free Church in the free State’. He held that all you need to make a State a champion of liberty is a community within it insisting on its own liberty over against the State. By recognising its limits, the state would become more fully itself.

For many observers, of course, the problem is precisely that the contemporary State often fails to acknowledge such limits. Like Williams, a Jewish leader such as Jonathan Sacks has highlighted the risks of a liberalism that sees itself as a substantive programme rather than a force for defending diversity and the freedom of conscience. To sum up: liberalism which has itself become a programme risks becoming an orthodoxy imposed from above. Acton’s ideal is very different. The liberal State does not have a moral agenda except the preservation of the liberty of all its constituent communities.

In this light we can see the justice of Jonathan Sacks’s description of religion as:

“…part of the ecology of freedom because it supports families, communities, charities, voluntary associations, active citizenship and concern for the common good. It is a key contributor to civil society, which is what holds us together without the coercive power of law. Without it, we will depend entirely on the State, and when that happens, we risk what [the historian] J. L. Talmon called a totalitarian democracy, which is what revolutionary France eventually became.”

And to boost Sacks’s argument still further, we might add that the standard secular narrative whereby the forces of enlightenment gradually threw off religious shackles in the name of freedom and progress is deeply flawed. Ignore the seductive but shallow story told by Steven Pinker in a recent bestseller, Enlightenment Now, and look instead at the work of a figure such as Larry Siedentop, whose grasp of the intellectual history is far more secure.

In his book Inventing the individual, Siedentop argues that the roots of liberalism were firmly established in the arguments of philosophers and canon lawyers by the 14th and early 15th centuries. These included belief in a fundamental equality of status as the proper basis for a legal system; belief that enforcing moral conduct is a contradiction in terms; a defence of individual liberty, through the assertion of fundamental ‘natural’ rights; and, finally, “the conclusion that only a representative form of government is appropriate for a society resting on the assumption of moral equality”.

I have suggested that the illiberal State, by pushing religious conviction into a purely private sphere, ends by instrumentalising its citizens and seeing them as no more than agents of the State’s purposes and subjects of the State’s decisions. Such illiberalism forms a secular counterpart to theocracy. In cases such as abortion or assisted suicide, to cite two especially contentious areas, Christian and other campaigners will advance theologically based arguments about the sanctity of life, as well as practical arguments endorsed by many secularists.

Religious voices will not and should not always get their way in a free society. They need to be held to account on the basis of cogency, viability and other criteria. But if we follow Acton’s arguments,  believers cannot be expected to accept an interpretation of their beliefs that reduces them to the status of a buttress for secular morality.

Williams judges that “the abrasion and tension” in much ethical debate “does still tell us something about the need to remind the State of its limits and to remind the Church that its job is not only to argue for exemption or special status but to remind the State that it is not the sole form of belonging for citizens. You could put it epigrammatically, as some have, by saying that the best citizen is the person who is not only a citizen. His or her loyalty to the political unit is qualified, enriched and fleshed out by other kinds of important, morally significant loyalties.”[5. Ibid]

The relevance of this argument in an age of populism is obvious. Not just because it points to a need to respect minorities, but also because human rights language and the language of religious liberty should not be seen as mutually opposed.

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