Setting the Church of England Free: The case for disestablishment.

Colin, Bishop of Woolwich, reviews a book edited by Kenneth Leech with contributions from Southwark people, (Jubilee Group, 97pp, paperback, 2001).

Tom's is entitled 'Disestablishing the Kingdom', and it starts far back and circles round hermeneutics and the person of Jesus in the Gospels (and Revelation) before asking on its penultimate page 'So what does all this have to do with establishment?' It is a proper question because the generalizations up to that point have not touched on the British constitution or the place of the CofE in it. Tom gives it a fleeting answer which is a very brief denunciation of monarchy and an even briefer tilt at an archbishop who is part of the establishment rather than a prophet against it.

Simon Barrow provides the swansong in the book, a very substantial essay on 'Unravelling the Rhetoric of Establishment'. He claims he is not actually dealing with substance but with the 'language of persuasion'.

He picks on the language used by leading bishops according to whom, if the Church of England were disestablished, the message would be blazoned out that the state was repudiating its theological basis.

'What is contained in such arguments is the idea of a subterranean "Christian nation" mysteriously preserved from secularity only by the binding and suffusing of the church into the symbols and structures of the state.'

This is a truly discerning analysis. That 'Christian nation' is certainly subterranean, and those who walk on the surface without accurate instruments to measure the subterranean geology are left simply to assert that their particular invisible all-pervading subterranean rock formation is truly 'there'. I assert it is not, and the odd fragments of rock they may perhaps be able to bring to the surface give no logical grounds for asserting this enormous solid formation.

He is ready also to call the bluff of those who think the establishment of the CofE is protection of English Christianity from 'virtual oblivion'.

'Amen' say I. South-East London gives good proof of that - there is a vast reservoir of non-established Christianity around, far outstripping the Church of England in many many ways.

But the most damaging charge he brings - one of far greater relevance to-day than Barrow can have suspected when he wrote it - is that the establishment blunts the edge of political criticism:

'...the Archbishop of Canterbury, almost alone of among religious leaders quoted in the press, was persuaded to adopt a broadly sympathetic stance towards the controversial British-backed military strikes against Iraq in 1997 and again in 1998-99.. .Dr Carey, even when offering criticism of government policy and performance.. .not infrequently feels the need to lace his comments with highly cautious qualifying remarks.'

This may be unfair - that is, even if the sweeping observation is true (which I somewhat doubt), we cannot be sure that the reining in of criticism does not arise from the office-holder's personal fair-mindedness, or an understanding of the complexity of political problems, rather than from a structurally compromised position.

But, in the Barrow world of rhetoric, the fact that the damaging charge can even be stated, and certainly cannot easily be refuted, itself becomes a vital feature of the scene. Barrow turns every stated advantage of the establishment by ruthless logic or ironic deflation into a cumulative knock-down argument for getting rid of our bondage to a secularized pluralistic state machinery.

Read it for yourself. Barrow brings distinction to radical Southwark by his essay.

But the rest amount to poor stuff - poor, because so dated. Kenneth Leech says in his introduction, dated March 2001, that 'the survival of an established church in England is a quaint but dangerous anachronism'.

Too true, but why treat us to a collection conceived in 1984 as a way of defeating the anachronism?