Bishops, Synod, Disestablishment, Same-Sex Blessings, and the Theological Institution That Accidentally Became a Housing Developer
The Established Church: Spiritually Uncertain, Constitutionally Indispensable, and Sitting on Quite a Lot of Property
The Church of England is the established church of England — an institution whose relationship with the state is constitutionally unique, theologically contested, and practically significant in ways that its declining congregation figures do not obviously explain. Approximately 1% of the English population attends Church of England services on a regular Sunday. Twenty-six of its bishops sit in the House of Lords. The monarch is its Supreme Governor. Its clergy are formally appointed through a process involving the Prime Minister and the Crown. Its General Synod can pass measures that have the force of law. It owns approximately £10 billion of assets, manages fifteen thousand historic buildings, and runs approximately four thousand seven hundred schools educating approximately a million children.
These facts exist simultaneously and require explanation. The Church of England’s constitutional position reflects a history in which the Reformation, the Civil War, and the Glorious Revolution each left institutional residue rather than clean constitutional resolution, producing an arrangement that made complete sense in 1534 and has been generating awkward questions ever since. The awkward questions have not produced disestablishment, because disestablishment would require resolving questions about the monarchy, the Lords, faith schools, and the ownership of approximately fifteen thousand grade-listed buildings that nobody is currently enthusiastic about resolving. The arrangement persists.
The Lords Spiritual: Twenty-Six Bishops Who Vote on Your Benefits Cap
The twenty-six Lords Spiritual — bishops of the Church of England who sit in the House of Lords by virtue of their ecclesiastical office — vote on legislation affecting the entire population of the United Kingdom, including the approximately fifty-five percent who profess no religious affiliation, the approximately five percent who are Muslim, the approximately two percent who are Hindu, and the approximately one percent who are Sikh. They are there because bishops have sat in Parliament since before the Reformation, which is either a venerable constitutional tradition or an argument that the passage of time is itself a constitutional justification, depending on your tolerance for institutional archaeology.
The bishops’ voting record is not uniformly conservative. Lords Spiritual have opposed cuts to disability benefits, supported refugee protection, and provided some of the most consistent advocacy for overseas aid within the chamber. The Archbishop of Canterbury has been among the more vocal critics of government social policy. This complicates the simple secularist argument that established church presence in the Lords is straightforwardly anti-progressive — it may be constitutionally anomalous and practically mixed. Both things can be true.
The Church of England’s General Synod — its governing body — has voted to ordain women as bishops (2014), to allow same-sex blessings (2023), and is currently navigating a theological conversation about same-sex marriage that has simultaneously been too progressive for traditionalists and insufficiently so for liberals, a position that is familiar to any observer of broad-tent religious institutions attempting to hold together constituencies with irreconcilable convictions.
Disestablishment: The Reform That Secularists Want and Nobody Else Is Prioritising
The case for disestablishment — separating the Church of England from the state, removing bishops from the Lords, ending the monarch’s role as Supreme Governor — is made regularly by secular organisations, religious minorities, and constitutional reformers. The National Secular Society has been making it since 1866. The arguments are straightforward: in a multi-faith and substantially non-religious society, a state church with constitutional privileges is anomalous; Parliament should not contain unelected legislators appointed by virtue of their religious office; and the establishment of one denomination implies a hierarchy of religious recognition that a pluralist democracy should not endorse.
The counterarguments are less principled but politically significant: disestablishment would require resolving the monarch’s role as Supreme Governor, which touches the monarchy question; removing bishops from the Lords is a Lords reform question that is itself deferred; and the Church of England’s community function — food banks, debt advice, housing support, youth work — provides substantial social infrastructure whose public subsidy through charitable status is considerably cheaper than the alternative state provision. The British state’s relationship with the Church of England is, like so many British constitutional arrangements, held together by a combination of inertia and the calculation that the disruption of change exceeds its benefits.
Faith Schools: The Education Controversy That Predates the Academy Debate by Several Centuries
Approximately a third of state-funded schools in England have a religious character — Church of England, Roman Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, and others — with the right to prioritise admission of children from their faith community and to conduct collective worship of a “broadly Christian” character. This arrangement reflects the historical role of religious organisations in establishing schools before the state school system existed, and has been maintained because removing it would require either compensating religious organisations for assets built over centuries or nationalising them, both of which are politically and legally complex.
The arguments against faith school admissions criteria — that they segregate children by religion, produce socioeconomic selection effects as religious affiliation correlates with social class, and entrench communal divisions in areas where integrated education might reduce them — are well-documented and have not produced policy change, partly because faith school parents and religious organisations constitute a politically engaged constituency and partly because the education policy conversation is usually occupied by academies, Ofsted, and tuition fees, leaving faith school reform as a perennial background concern rather than a foreground controversy.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!
The Church of England is the established church of England, with the monarch as Supreme Governor. Twenty-six Church of England bishops sit in the House of Lords as Lords Spiritual, an arrangement dating to the medieval period. The Church manages approximately 15,000 historic buildings and 4,700 schools. Regular Sunday attendance is approximately 1% of the English population. The General Synod voted to ordain women bishops in 2014 and approved same-sex blessings in 2023. Disestablishment — separation of church and state — is advocated by secular organisations but has not been a government priority. Approximately one-third of state-funded schools in England have a religious character with faith-based admission criteria.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
My mate’s in politics and he said the problem with The London Prat is it’s showing people that their government is architecturally incapable of delivering on its promises.