Not Angels, But Anglicans

This blog is resolute in its antidisestablishmentarianism.

The sheer objectionable nature of a church whose doctrine was whatever the Crown, and so eventually the Crown in Parliament, said it was at the given time, has been an enormous force for the creation of a pluralistic society, and thus by necessity a representative democratic political system, in this country.

Without it, there would have been neither the Nonconformist Conscience (because there would have been no Nonconformists) nor Catholic Emancipation (because Rome really was a long way away in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so some accommodation really would have been reached by those who still felt themselves Catholics, as if feelings mattered here, and who would consequently have had no need of Emancipation in 1829).

From the Crucifix between the Speaker’s Chair and the Royal Coat of Arms in Quebec, to the Lord’s Prayer at the beginning each day in the Australian House of Representatives, every public role of Christianity throughout the world is to be defended without compromise.

I did not hear Rowan Williams’s interview on Today, but I very much doubt that he used the term “the separation of Church and State”. I most profoundly hope not. But the alleged link between, on the one hand, the ritualised Deism and antinomianism of places like public school chapels, and, on the other hand, something supposedly definitive about English culture (it isn’t, but of that another time), will in any case be lost on a Welsh Nonconformist convert to Anglo-Catholicism.

It is a strange feature of the Church of England that neither of its Archbishops is currently an Englishman, nor even, I believe it is correct to say, a native speaker of English (although all Welsh-speakers in Wales rather than in Patagonia might as well be). Both Dr Williams and Dr Sentamu are really figures of the Anglican Communion rather than of the Church of England. And the Anglican Communion was overwhelmingly created by people who did not like the Church of England.

Most were either hardline Anglo-Catholics or hardline Evangelicals, and had deliberately gone to the ends of the earth (by no means only within the British Empire) in order to escape from the Church of England and start again from scratch, keeping in touch for purposes of spiritual and material support only with parishes whose clergy were, and are, seldom or never made bishops in England.

The Episcopal Church in the United States is a product of the American Revolution, deriving its name and orders from the Episcopal Church in Scotland, which then had a recent history of armed insurrection against the Hanoverian monarchy, and which remains heavily concentrated in the area where the SNP is also strongest. The Church of Ireland has provided two Presidents of the Irish Republic (including the first), both in the days when that Republic’s Constitution still laid claim to “the whole island of Ireland”.

And so on, and on, and on.

It is no wonder that there is such bafflement at the smug English oligarchic suggestion that Anglican identity consists in unity with whoever some Muslim or atheist Prime Minister of the United Kingdom chooses to give a seat in the British Parliament. It is not so much that most Anglicans have, say, moved away from that sort of thinking. It is that they had never, ever heard of it in the first place.