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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