As Rowan Williams retires as Archbishop of Canterbury Martin Bashir in the Mail pays tribute to his work:His has been a miserable tenure marked by the sharpest theological divisions within the worldwide Anglican Church, the deepest entrenchment and animosity between evangelical and liberal clergy and, worst of all, the most foggy and frustrating presentation of the Christian faith we’ve probably ever heard from such a senior cleric.While acknowledging it’s a difficult job, Bashir criticises Dr Williams for failing to articulate the case for marriage, for getting too involved in politics, and for wanting to discuss anything but Christianity.
Rowan has had his moments, but I can guarantee that in 10 years' time, when the next poor man to take this position retires, a similar article will appear saying what a terrible job he’s done and how he’s failed to keep the whole mess together. In the meantime Dr Williams, like George Carey, may well start making sense and speaking up as a genuine Christian leader.
The problem with the Church of England is not just that it’s a broad church, encompassing some very, very liberal Christians and some very, very conservative ones, or that it’s led by people so open-minded that their brains have fallen out. Its real problem is establishment, which makes it less the nation’s conscience and more a dinosaur national industry, kept dysfunctional by state subsidies.
In theory the Church of England gets a lot from this relationship. It runs lots of schools, which cements its popularity with young middle-class families; it operates lots of state-subsidised charitable organisations; its bishops (rather absurdly) help make laws; it gets to preside over royal events; its vicars get to work at lovely old medieval country churches, while the Catholics are stuck with 19th-century urban redbricks or the truly ennui-soaked 1960s suburban monstrosities.
But in return, people with wildly divergent beliefs are forced into maintaining an uneasy union for the sake of the assets. Not that I’m advocating divorce (as far as our lot are concerned, that’s what caused this mess), but shouldn’t they be allowed to go their own separate ways?
I propose disestablishment because I want Christianity to flourish in England, and renew itself, and the best way to do this is through a free market – but when you have a powerful state tied to a weak church, you get a statist church pushing a statist agenda. See how Anglican (and Catholic) charities, subsidised by the state, increasingly bury any Christian identity they have in favour of the state’s ideology of “equality and diversity”.
The Big Society, as its heart, was an attempt to push the state out of those areas in which it has no real business, such as the charitable, volunteering and caring sectors. The churches should be leaping at this opportunity.
So here’s a possible solution. The Church of England is disestablished, and becomes just another independent church. The government passes a law that no religious building can change function, while taxpayers stop funding church maintenance through groups like English Heritage (which costs £15 million a year).
Therefore if a congregation feels that they are sick of Canterbury and want to break off to join a breakaway liberal or evangelical or Anglo-Catholic church they can do so, so long as they can raise the money to buy the building, which since it cannot change function and costs a lot of money to maintain is not much.
If the local Buddhists or Muslims or Jews want to buy an empty church they can, too, so long as they don’t make too many internal changes to the furniture.
(But it’s important to restrict the function to only religious buildings, because places of worship provide an important social function, and this being England within 10 years every second church would be a chain pub or block of flats.)
Only a free market in religion will save Anglicanism.