It Isn’t Only Justin Welby That Should Go – So Should the Church of England

It’s easy to dismiss Justin Welby’s resignation as a story about historic abuse in an increasingly irrelevant religious sect – sad for the victims, glad he’s gone, but mostly irrelevant to modern Britain. After all, the Church of England’s community of regular attendees is just 1.7% of England’s population. More people go to Mosques and professional football matches every week. In England and Wales in 2022, by my sums, only 14% of marriages and 18% of funerals were conducted by the C of E. Only 2.5% of people went to C of E Christmas services.

Many of us feel like the Church’s connection to the state is a weird anachronism but not really something to worry about as the planet burns and Israel genocides Gaza. It’s probably this “meh” sentiment, as much as actual traditionalist support for the institution, which leaves it in place. Yet our apathy about the church is entirely unfounded, particularly if we consider ourselves leftists.

According to research by Essex University, if you break down the Brexit vote by religious affiliation, every major category other than Anglicans – Catholics, Methodists, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and non-believers – voted remain. Brexit happened because of overwhelming support among the roughly 25% of the country that identifies as Church of England, particularly the non- or occasional attenders. This trend held even when researchers normalised for other demographic factors. In other words, take an Anglican and a Catholic, Muslim, Hindu or atheist of the same age, social class and education level, and the Anglican is much more likely to have voted leave.

Similarly, in 2017 and 2019, people who identified as Anglican were 20% more likely to vote Tory.

Despite low attendance, wider feelings of Anglican affiliation still have a pronounced effect on British politics, bending it gently to the right. As Exeter researcher Stuart Fox has written, “being a member of the Church of England helps foster an attachment to the English heritage and national identity of which the church is a key component.

“Anglicans are also likely to … be sceptical about the benefits of social, economic and political change that erodes national borders and the power of the British state. In other words, Anglicans are more likely to hold to English national identities and to be conservative when it comes to social, economic and political change.”

It’s true that other northern European countries – including Scotland – have national churches, which are often constitutionally recognised but operate independently of the government. Yet virtually none has a state church quite like Britain’s, with bishops given seats in the legislature, the prime minister choosing and king appointing the archbishop, the archbishop crowning the monarch, supposedly (depending on which bit of state doctrine you read) on behalf of God, and the king or queen effectively being the Anglican pope – the closest you get is perhaps Denmark, where the Evangelical Lutheran Church has government oversight and receives support through taxation, though isn’t as closely embedded with the government as the C of E.

Elite fetish.

I don’t think we can understand England’s bizarre monarchy worship and ongoing acceptance of its caste system more generally without thinking about the way that faith is mobilised behind it.

In general, Britishness is distinguished from other national identities by its elite worship. Other countries’ national days celebrate overthrowing their aristocracies or imperial rulers. Britain, on the other hand, throws street parties for royal weddings, jubilees and the failure to blow up parliament. Other national anthems commemorate liberation from royal servitude, while we merrily sing “God save the king”.

Binding the Church of England into the state was a way of tying deep feelings of religiosity up with this pro-elite national sentiment. These days, while fewer actively worship God, vague loyalty to Anglicanism and the occasional feelings of collective joy that accompany collective rituals extend into a sense of the correct order of things based on the fusion of church, monarchy, state and the class system. And so to conservatism.

Of course, it is true that Protestantism everywhere has a conservative bent – just look at Appalachian politics. But England has elected Conservative governments more than any country on Earth has elected one party – 24 times – and the unique elision between what is still the main faith – if only weakly felt, a hereditary monarchy and the state contributes to that.

These feelings express themselves in other ways, too. The idea that we are “a Christian country” is one often spat by Islamophobes, antisemites and other bigots who resent Britain’s increasingly heterogeneous religious and ethnic makeup, and wish that the country would return to an imagined former monoculture (one that never truly existed). The problem is that they are, technically, right: Britain is a Christian country, and we do not think about that fact enough.

Anglicanism – and its connection to the monarchy and the state – forms a central, often under-examined pole of British identity. Britain is a wonderfully multi- and no-faith country, with all kinds of religious beliefs sitting under the collective umbrella. But only Christians are allowed to hold the umbrella’s handle, and people from other faiths are always the first to be pushed out into the rain when times are tough.

State schools across the UK are still expected to hold an act of collective worship “of a broadly Christian nature” every day, constantly functioning to remind children of other faiths that they aren’t normal or connected to the core of the nation. And this extends into adult life – our bank holidays rotate around the Anglican calendar. The BBC still has a special place for Christian worship through programmes like Songs of Praise, which doesn’t have equivalents for other faiths proportional to their representation in the population. Again, there is a clear implication about who are insiders and who, outsiders.

Disestablishing the church wouldn’t change these feelings immediately. However, it would remove one of the ways that profound feelings in Britain are carefully bent into sentiments of support for the ruling class. And future generations need us to do that now.

And think about the current scandal. While Anglicanism likes to present itself as a liberal faith system, its steeply hierarchical nature is a profound problem. It’s not a coincidence that sex abuse scandals keep happening in top-down religious institutions. It’s not surprising that horrendous abuses of power occur in contexts where power is very centralised – compared to more democratic faiths (Presbyterians, many Muslim communities, much of Judaism), where congregations have much more say in choosing preachers and teachers. If you have a religion built around elite worship, expect that members of its upper echelons will, sometimes, abuse their power.

In Ireland, revelations of abuse and cover-ups in the church – such as the mistreatment of unmarried women and their children in mother and baby homes, and the sexual abuse of children in the care of Church-run institutions – triggered massive disillusionment with the church and laid the groundwork for constitutional change, such as the legalisation of gay marriage and abortion. The allegations surrounding John Smyth – the British lawyer reported to have abused over 100 boys and young men since the 1970s and 1980s – while awful, aren’t on the same scale. But perhaps they can prompt us to finally detach our state from religious monarchism?