The Ark

The future of the Church of England as the Established Church is untenable, argues Theo Hobson.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

THEME

Rachael Kohn: Today it's Church and Crown on The Ark, with me, Rachael Kohn.

The Church of England became the established church under Queen Elizabeth the First, in 1558. As monarch, she assumed the title of Supreme Governor, she reduced the Articles of Faith to 39, and adopted Cranmer's Second Book of Common Prayer. Theological and liturgical changes followed, but the Anglican Church remained in e4xclusive partnership with the Crown. Royal Coronations, weddings and funerals demonstrate that relationship most publicly.

But Theo Hobson says it's all show and no substance.

Theo Hobson: The English like to have the church there so that they can not have to attend it, so they can stay away from it, but they like to know it's there in case they need it. And many of them still use it for weddings, and many still baptize their children in a sort of cultural way rather than a very religious way. But that's on the decrease as well. In 1960, half of babies were baptized, but it's only one in ten today, so it's hugely decreased in the last 40 or 50 years.

Rachael Kohn: Do you think that that kind of established power of the church generates a degree of contempt for it?

Theo Hobson: Yes, I do. I think there's a sort of mild, vague, barely articulated disdain, especially among young people, simply because they know that it's built in to the structure of the State and to England's imperial past and so on, and that gives an association that Christianity is tied to old cultural forms for instance, support for the monarchy and so on, in which in reality, everyone has their own opinion about, to put it mildly, so I think there is a sense that Christianity has become irrelevant because it's tied to forms that people no longer feel that comfortable with.

Rachael Kohn: Well Theo, one of the early culprits in your account of establishment, is Queen Elizabeth I. You attribute to her a kind of cult of the monarch. Was that just vanity or were her motives pragmatic?

Theo Hobson: Yes there was a great political achievement going on at that time. Her father, Henry VIII and she really invented the Church of England and you could say England as a modern nation, by uniting the warring religious factions, the Protestants and the Catholics in a united national church.

But in reality of course, it was bringing them under the control of the State, and the Tudor State really built itself upon that religious unity that was achieved by her and her father in the Tudor period.

Rachael Kohn: So was the church then, as you say, under the State, but was the State in any way considered on par with the church? They were both divine institutions?

Theo Hobson: That's right. They were seen as essentially the same thing, Church and State were two sides of the same coin, if you like. That at least was the theory put forward in the Elizabethan Age and afterwards. The big theorist was Richard Hooker, that everyone in England is intrinsically an Anglican, and of course with the rise of pluralism and democracy and so on, that's no longer so convincing.

Rachael Kohn: Well even in the 16th century the Church of England had its opponents in the Puritans. Did the Puritans reject Establishment, or did they themselves want to be established?

Theo Hobson: Yes, they did. They wanted to create a truly reformed, as they saw it, Church of England.

Rachael Kohn: Well eventually the movement of toleration took over. Did that have an effect on the idea of the established Church of England?

Theo Hobson: Well the dissenters were allowed to co-exist with it, but they were seen as marginal and slightly unpatriotic throughout the 17th and 18th centuries really. But to be a proper, fully-fledged Englishman or Englishwoman, one had to be an Anglican, and that continued well into the 19th century, when the old synthesis of Church and State began to crumble.

Rachael Kohn: Well in the 19th century, the conservative Anglican cleric, John Henry Newman, was on of the chief critics of what he called a mere parliament church. But he didn't want disestablishment either; why not?

Theo Hobson: Well he wanted an older form of establishment really. He wanted to see the church as more powerful and the State listening to it more, and he hated the idea that the church was simply becoming the tool of the State, and not taken very seriously for its religious function, but merely a political convenience for politicians to play around with. He wanted to see the church militant, the church back in power. Really he was nostalgic for the sort of Tudor and Stuart periods.

Rachael Kohn: Well isn't that sort of inevitable, whenever a church wants to wield power in society, then its likely to want to become more powerful than even the government. Isn't establishment a kind of brake on that?

Theo Hobson: No, I think not. I think establishment is giving in to the temptation to be powerful.

Rachael Kohn: And yet in your book you argue ironically that the Church which is established is actually weaker and weaker as time goes on.

Theo Hobson: Yes, it's become a shadow of itself. I mean we don't really have establishment in any real sense any more, we have the illusion of it, a nostalgic wish to continue what is no longer the case. In reality we have become, especially since the 1960s, a secular culture. So my argument is simply that we become honest about this, face up to it, and undo the connection that has always been there between the Church and the State, and I'm saying that that would be good for politics as well as for religion in this country.

Rachael Kohn: Theo in your book 'Against Establishment', you identify some of the other luminaries who were pro-Establishment and yet were humanists. You call them post-Christian humanists, Dickens and T.S. Eliot; what were their reasons? Why is establishment such a desired and even for those who seem to be holding a watered-down Christianity?

Theo Hobson: I think it's really because people fear the alternatives. They might look across the Atlantic at America and think that we would be unloosing a very strong evangelical form of religion if we disestablish the Church of England, and so it's keeping a lid on that to keep it established. It means that there won't be too much sectarianism, both within the church and without it, is that religion will simply be an anarchic force that gets in the way of liberal humanism.

Rachael Kohn: Yes, there's the sense that establishment has been a force of stability. Is that what Dickens was getting at?

Theo Hobson: Yes, I think so. I mean it's in the background in Dickens and other literary writers, that they prefer the established church to any other because it is mild and it's tolerant and it's largely good-natured, and its abuses seem to be the least worst alternative, compared to on the one hand, sectarian Protestantism and on the other hand, Roman Catholicism, which was still of course, a big fear in the 19th century.

Rachael Kohn: So it's the lesser of the evils?

Theo Hobson: That's right. That's how it has been up to the 20th century but in the 20th century Roman Catholicism is no longer such a political threat, and so that justification has eroded.

Rachael Kohn: Well more recently some of England's most beloved writers, like Alan Bennett have waxed a bit sentimental also about the Church.

Theo Hobson: That's right. There's a strong tendency of what I call cultural Anglicanism in which people bemoan the liberal changes that have come upon the Church of England, including moving away from the Book of Common Prayer and so on. With part of themselves, they're nostalgic for an earlier time, in which the church was more culturally prominent and bound the nation together with its liturgies and so on. But I find that rather hypocritical because that in reality, went with the church having authority in matters that these writers would not really like if it happened again today.

Rachael Kohn: So that kind of sentimentality has a lot to do with Englishness, does it not? I mean is the established church really a symbol of English identity?

Theo Hobson: Yes, absolutely. It's very much bound up with English identity as it has happened so far. But I'm arguing that there comes a point where you have to cut loose from the past and be a bit more honest about where we stand today, and affirm the way in which we've changed, which is the emergence of secular pluralism, multiculturalism and so on.

We are at the moment fundamentally dishonest about wanting it both ways. We want to pretend that we're still a sort of mediaeval society with one religion and one monarch and so on, although everyone with their heads, rather than their hearts, knows that to be false.

Rachael Kohn: Now your book really has a very strong critical edge to it, against establishment, but it also reveals your own interest in the kind of true and authentic Christianity. In fact you seem to be arguing that establishment has sounded the death knell of Christianity itself.

Theo Hobson: I wouldn't say Christianity itself, I would say the old understanding of the churches I think, certainly, because I think not just Anglicanism but really all the conventional models of church have quite strong sympathies with establishment as an idea, even if it might not be explicit.

For instance, for Roman Catholicism, is not very often officially established but it's very sympathetic to establishment in a wider cultural sense. Roman Catholicism for instance is in quite a contradictory position in this matter because ideally it would like itself to be the established church as it once sort of was before the Reformation.

Rachael Kohn: Well isn't that precisely what people are afraid of, that if they let go of the Church of England as the established church, there'd be an unholy war of all the traditions competing for that supremacy?

Theo Hobson: Yes, but that's just life, that's just freedom, that's what happens in the United States for instance and it should not be feared too much. We ought to have a bit more confidence in secular political life.

Rachael Kohn: Well you call yourself a post-Anglican; what is that, exactly?

Theo Hobson: It simply means that I come from Anglicanism in that I am born and bred an Anglican, and I studied Theology under Anglican teachers and so on, and I'm very much in sympathy with the tradition, which I agree is the richest of the Christian traditions, but I cannot continue affirming the Church of England as it is constituted. Its establishment, its situation in relation to the monarchy for instance, and its implicit denial of secular pluralism.

Rachael Kohn: Do you think then that Anglicanism can be reborn perhaps in a more vital way, if it gives away establishment?

Theo Hobson: Yes, I do. I think that that's a very difficult thing to imagine still, simply because it's so new, and it hasn't really been tried yet, but I see no alternative to it being tried, because in reality, establishment is over, and we are clinging to the rafters, so to speak, and instead we should draw a line under that, look ahead and say How are we going to be Anglicans or continue this tradition after that political basis has gone? And that's a difficult question to answer, especially while people aren't wanting to ask it.

Rachael Kohn: Well I was just going to ask you, how vital is this debate right now in England?

Theo Hobson: Well I think it's vital, but on the other hand, it's not popular. People don't want to talk about this issue particularly within the church, because they fear that things are bad enough already for Anglicanism, with the disputes going on, and that establishment should be defended or seen as common ground between the evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics and so on, and people don't want to get involved. But I see it as the underlying issue and that no real solutions can be found unless we are honest enough to tackle it.

Rachael Kohn: Theo Hobson's book, Against Establishment: An Anglican Polemic is a provocative but very worthwhile read. It's published by Darton Longman and Todd, and details can be found on our website.

Theo Hobson was speaking to me from London.

Guests

Theo Hobson
is the author of The Rhetorical Word and is a regular contributor to the Guardian and the Spectator. He has a Doctorate in Theology from Cambridge University, and describes himself as a 'post-Anglican'.

Further Information

Theo Hobson's Homepage
http://www.theohobson.co.uk

Publications

Title: Against Establishment: An Anglican Polemic
Author : Theo Hobson
Publisher: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2003