What an anglican split means for secularism in the UK

2 July 2008

It’s struck me that, as a secularist, I should be concerned with the current crisis within the anglican church, even though it seems at first glance to be simply a tiff between members of the same club who disagree about the rules as set down by a long absent founder. Which, frankly, it is.

My main reasoning here is that, as a bloc, these types of christians would be more effective as a unified force when demanding specific additional entitlement of the state than as two or more sub-cults. As it stands, anglicans, with their especial relationship to the machinery of state in the UK, currently enjoy more particular privileges when compared to any other cultural sub-group.

This isn’t surprising when the UK is actually a de jure anglican theocracy even if it is, in more practical terms, a secular democracy.

Should the anglicans split into, say, two factions — one of a liberal persuasion and one of a more fundamentalist and bigoted creed — that would to my mind significantly weaken the tenacious hold that they have over the established government than they enjoy at present while together. This in turn would also weaken their ‘right’ to demand the maintenance of, or additions to, the privileges they already hold, and would very likely lead to some or all of those privileges being eventually removed, just as the rest of us mere mortals are constrained.

However, the anglicans seem hell-bent on trying to keep themselves as a single entity, to the extent of having signed up the evangelical faction as a ‘church within a church’.

What this means is that they will be able to maintain the incommensurate grip on the state that they already possess and, as they do at present, be further able to express their shared prejudices in the public sphere with more authority than they deserve, while only having to squabble over, as they have done for centuries (and I’d wager for centuries hence), the internal rules of their cult which otherwise doesn’t affect John Q Public.

I support a split in the anglican church, because I’d rather see two churches, a smaller one of a liberal attitude, and another smaller one of bigotry and intolerance, rather than one large bigotry-tolerating church with a state-provided leg-up to power that allows them to make life difficult for the rest of us, especially those of us that don’t subscribe to the baseless and most fundamental claims of their dogma and, it seems, one of the few things they otherwise agree on: the magic man of yore.

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Tags: christianity, government and politics, legal, theocracy/anti-secularism, UK

Comments

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4585 Responses2008-07-02+14%3A39%3A20nullifidian to “What an anglican split means for secularism in the UK”

bugsoup on July 2nd, 2008 5:00 pm

Ah, but you are forgetting that they will always fight together no matter how many factions they have split into. I’m not sure there will be a difference in power between a divided church and a unified church. For the purposes of presenting to the public, they will always work together for the exact reasons you think it’s good that they split.
nullifidian on July 3rd, 2008 8:48 am

@bugsoup: While I agree that there will likely always be in-fighting within any church faction, I feel that if the anglican (and I mean that singular sect) were to be rent in two, they would have less pretext for maintaining their singular state-validated privileges.

My point is not to remove their influence (as citizens they have as much say in the running of this country as any of us entitled to vote) but to diminish their inordinate influence of their institution over the rest of us merely by virtue of national tradition or faux argumentum ad populum.
bugsoup on July 4th, 2008 6:02 am

That makes sense. Certain traditions carry less weight if each sect has a differing belief on those tradition. If that is the case, then they can’t impose them on the rest because they don’t agree in the first place.
heather on July 6th, 2008 8:09 pm

While I agree, on principle , I don’t think that this split will bring the CofE any closer to being disestablished.

What it is doing is making the illiberal wing of the CofE more and more confident.

On the other hand, these right-wing Christians include some pretty scary fundamentalists, bent in taking over the international Anglican Communion. And , another major religion shifting towards fundamentalism would really be a disaster.
literarydeadkittens on July 19th, 2008 11:03 pm

And will this wonderful, right-wing arm of the Church be aligning itself with radical ultra-conservative private groups like those new nutcases CCFON? Given that they spawned from LCF I’m concerned that they’ll be bringing in religious laws using politicians and lawyers just as they do in America.

Fun huh?