Religion in the public square
Some people attack clergy when they engage in political debate but we have an established church: the clash is inevitable
Last week there was a fluttering of excitement in the House of Lords, which was felt beyond the walls of the upper chamber. As the new prime minister put the finishing touches to his government, dealing with junior appointments and whips, the headlines had been caught by his reappointment of the former home secretary, Suella Braverman KC, to the post from which she had resigned six days before. The opposition adopted its best outrage and asked how it could be right that she went from committing a resigning offence to being restored within the space of a week. That is the job of oppositions, and the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, managed to land some hard blows on the government.
Rishi Sunak is unlikely to have expected incoming fire from the episcopate, however. The lords spiritual can be a somnolent lot, rarely appearing in the Lords en masse, but on 27 October, with a question tabled about Braverman’s reappointment, the Bishop if Durham, Rt Rev Paul Butler, joined the otherwise-partisan controversy. He couched his views in the gentle, circumlocutory manner of the Lords, but the meaning was clear, and pointed.
My Lords, I do not come at this from any party-political angle. The question in my mind is this. Even if all the justifications are correct—and there are big questions about that—was it wise, in seeking to offer integrity and leadership, to appoint someone so rapidly who had raised so many questions about whether she was suitable to hold the office?
“Wise” is a very Church of England word to have chosen. It is cerebral, thoughtful, considered and goes to the heart of character. It is not sharp, or hostile, or aggressive: but it is profound. “The Lord giveth wisdom,” as the Book of Proverbs says, while James reminds us that “the wisdom that is from above is first pure”. However, if it was a question which had some noble lords nodding sagely, the minister at the despatch box was not long detailed. Baroness Neville-Rolfe, minister of state at the Cabinet Office and formerly a member of the board of Tesco, returned the serve crisply.
Ms Braverman apologised. She resigned from a great office of state. She accepted the remedies of the Ministerial Code. Things then moved on at great speed. We have different circumstances. We have a Government who need to deliver for the British people in difficult economic circumstances. She needs to be able to play her part in making our borders safer and better, and she needs the support of this House.
That was that, so far as the House was concerned. But the matter would not lie. Richard Holden, the Conservative MP for North West Durham, felt that the bishop was guilty of partiality: he argued that neither the bishop nor any other senior church figure had criticised appointments made by Jeremy Corbyn, nor Lord Mandelson’s two returns to cabinet after his first resignation in 1998. “Seems pretty party political to me,” he tweeted, throwing Butler’s disclaimer back in his face.
Politicians are ambivalent about clergy straying into political controversy. While they frequently welcome the support of prelates, they tend to regard opposition from bishops as being inappropriate, illegitimate and outwith their ecclesiastical bailiwicks. Earlier this year, Andrew Tettenborn, a conservative law professor from Swansea, wrote disapprovingly in The Spectator of a plan in the Church of England to assign bishops “portfolios” or specific policy areas on which to concentrate and comment. He warned of a “direct threat to the political neutrality” of the Church, and predicted darkly that the proposal would mean that “the C of E will wither away as a broad church with a home for varied political and theological views. Instead it could become simply a prescriptive sect: an organisation with an official line which its prelates are expected to toe.”
As a political community, we are not accustomed now to men and women in clerical collars expounding on current affairs. We expect something more nebulous, more ambiguous, more ambivalent from bishops. After all, the active membership of the Church of England has an active membership—those attending services every week—of less than a million, though it retains a broader and fainter footprint in society when one counts those who are baptised, or attend one service a year, or participate in some kind of common Anglican worship. It is more than a century since Maude Royden described the Church of England as “the Conservative Party at prayer”, and instinct tells me that the Tories would not enjoy the support of even a majority of churchgoers now.
The Church is losing not only its overall numbers but its pre-eminence. Some studies now suggest that, in terms of weekly attendance, the Roman Catholic Church may be larger than the Church of England, and recent Catholic leaders, especially Basil Hume and Vincent Nichols, have proved adept at the use of mass media and sometimes more persuasive and prominent than their Anglican counterparts. This might lead a casual observer to conclude that it is even less appropriate for Church of England bishops to take political stances, as the congregations which they represent diminish.
This is, I think, wrong. The Church of England is the established church, and the sovereign is its supreme governor. At his coronation next May, the King will be required to assent to the following oath, administered by the archbishop of Canterbury:
Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel? Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law? Will you maintain and preserve inviolable the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England? And will you preserve unto the Bishops and Clergy of England, and to the Churches there committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges, as by law do or shall appertain to them or any of them?
This status of the Church of England as the established church—effectively, the state religion, though conformity is no longer enforced by statute—dates, of course, from the 16th century, when Henry VIII rejected the authority of the pope and declared himself head of the church in England. The royal supremacy went through several iterations as different monarchs adjusted it to fit their personal and confessional preferences, but, save for the Commonwealth period between 1649 and 1660, we have had a national faith and a national church (in England, at least) ever since.
This is not simply an abstract matter of words. The Church of England, alone among religious denominations, has prescriptive representation in the legislature. The House of Lords includes the two primates, the archbishop of Canterbury and the archbishop of York; the three senior diocesan bishops of London, Durham and Winchester; and the 21 most senior of the other bishops by date of consecration. These 26 lords spirituals have exactly the same rights as any other member of the House of Lords, may speak and vote, and serve on select committees. There is also an internal roster of “duty bishops”, so that the Church of England always has a representative in the chamber when business is being considered.
This is not a privilege which is universally accepted. Humanists UK, of course, as they stand in opposition to organised religion, think the prelates should have no place in the legislature, but many groups which are willing to co-exist with theism argue that it is inappropriate in a multicultural and multifaith society to have one religious tradition—indeed, one denomination of one tradition—given a special place which allows it to influence the laws which govern our lives. The Electoral Reform Society, for example, pointing out that the only other countries which allow clergy to participate in the legislative process are the Vatican City and Iran, supports the removal of the lords spiritual to achieve “fair, democratic representation for the whole of Parliament.”
The Church of England itself regards its current representation as a redoubt which will soon have to abandoned. A briefing paper leaked earlier this year revealed that the Anglican leadership is resigned to the number of bishops in the House of Lords being at best reduced in the future.
The Church says it wants to be simpler and humbler. But increasing funding for the bishops' bench, as the briefing suggest, is entirely at odds with goal. A humble church is not one that seeks to impose its religion on society by wielding parliamentary power.
The most recent attempt to reform the composition of the upper chamber, the House of Lords Reform Bill 2012, proposed that the five ex officio bishops—the archbishops of Canterbury and York and the Bishops of London, Durham and Winchester—would remain in the Lords as of right and would be supplemented by seven “ordinary lords spiritual”, chosen from the ranks of the diocesan bishops by the Church itself. However, the bill, which was exhaustively scrutinised by a joint committee on the staff of which I served, stumbled after its Second Reading in the Commons and was withdrawn as it had no realistic prospect of passing in the face of fierce opposition from Conservative MPs.
It is worth noting that those 26 bishops who still sit in the Lords are a slender contingent in a House of 766 members. And the Church’s influence is as weak as it has ever been. Before the Reformation, when the Lords included not only all of England’s bishops but also 27 senior monastic leaders known as “mitred abbots”, heads of the country’s greatest abbeys. As there were then two archbishops and only 19 other bishops, the monastic lords spiritual in theory predominated, though many attended infrequently.
The Church of Ireland, created in 1534 during the break with Rome, was also an established church until the Irish Church Act 1869. After the Act of Union 1800, one archbishop and three bishops from Ireland, chosen by rotation, were given places in the House of Lords. The Church of Wales, the Anglican community in the principality, was also established until 1920 when it lost that status under the provisions of the Welsh Church Act 1914, by which it was also renamed the Church in Wales. After that date, the bishops of Wales (who had been part of the province of Canterbury) were no longer eligible for membership of the Lords.
One idea to balance the presence of the Anglican bishops has been the inclusion in the Lords of representatives of other Christian denominations and other faiths. This is problematic. For example, Catholic clergy are not allowed to sit in secular legislatures under canon law, so the Catholic community could not be represented by its bishops, even though they are the authoritative teachers of the faith in a strictly hierarchical organisation.
In 2018, the faith minister, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, told The Times that he was keen for other religions to be represented in the upper house. He suggested that “broader representation” than simply Anglican prelates would benefit the legislative process, pointing out that the Lords then included a former chief rabbi, Lord Sacks, and Sikh members like Lord Singh of Wimbledon, the director of the Network of Sikh Organisations (UK). This is, prima facie, a reasonable suggestion, as many believe that faith communities have a contribution to make to public life and it might increase a sense of engagement in the legislative process among non-Christian communities.
However, most of the UK’s non-Christian religions do not have the same kind of clear hierarchy as do the Church of England and the Catholic Church. While there is a chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, he is head of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, a group of Orthodox Jewish synagogues. He does not enjoy authority over other traditions of Judaism like the United Synagogue, the Federation of Synagogues and the Movement for Reform Judaism. Likewise, Islam, as well as being split between its Sunni and Shia branches, identifies among its individual mosques and their imams, and there is no national body which could speak for all Muslims. Likewise there are several organisations representing Hindus and Buddhists.
Realistically, the choices boil down to two: to retain the principle of the established Church of England being represented in the House of Lords (the numbers are an administrative issue); or to remove any explicit faith representation for the upper house. In general, those against reform of the Lords and those who believe in gradual evolution will tend to prefer the former idea, while radicals (let alone unicameralists, a strange and rare breed) while tend towards the latter.
This brings us back to Richard Holden’s objection to the Bishop of Durham’s intervention last week. Should the lords spiritual intervene in political matters, and does their privileged position in institutional terms really make much difference? It seems to me that if we accept the notion of an established religion and the presence of bishops in the Lords, it is impossible, not to mention unwise, to try informally to circumscribe the issues on which they may speak and vote. After all, if they are to be retained in the House of Lords because they represent the established Church, what is the point of their being there if we then say that there are matters from which they must stand back. The argument for their presence is that they bring a faith-based dimension to public policy, not that they speak solely on moral issues or matters relating directly to the Church. It is a truism that all religion is political: the precepts of the Bible and the Christian religion more widely apply to the whole of life, to the “life of a Christian man”, as John Calvin called it.
Does this all matter? To purists, of course, to political and constitutional theorists who dream of platonic ideals of institutions, it matters a great deal: any imbalance or inequality in the tools through which we govern ourselves is an injustice and must be expunged. Those people, however, will struggle to contemplate the British constitution.
It is often said that we have an unwritten constitution, but this is absolutely false: we have a series of documents from which we derive our government, from Magna Carta through the sovereignty of Parliament, the Bill of Rights, the Acts of Settlement and the Acts of Union to the Parliament Acts and the Representation of the People Acts, as well as the common law, precedent and the Royal prerogative. More accurately, we have an uncodified constitution, one which is not gathered together in a single justiciable document. For myself, I am comfortable with the venerability, flexibility and accreted wisdom of this uncodified constitution.
Those who take my view, that our political arrangements have evolved to suit circumstances and flow from many parts of our history, will be more relaxed about the lords spiritual. I am by no means a communicant Anglican (though, as a public schoolboy, I participated in the daily rhythm of worship and practice); but I find it difficult to exercise myself over the participation of 26 Church of England bishops in our weaker, revising chamber, over which the House of Commons has had primacy since at least 1911. I struggle to think of a major issue of public policy in my lifetime over which the Church, let alone its senior prelates, has had an impact which would not have been exercised by any other group, and therefore I tend to fall back on Jefferson’s attitude that it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
We are a very old country, with institutions which have a broad continuity of much greater length than those of many other countries. Our parliament can trace its origins back to 1265, the Court of the King’s Bench was founded in the late 1100s, the Exchequer first appears in records in 1110, the monarchy at a conservative estimate dates from AD 927 and the Church of England takes as its foundation date St Augustine’s mission in AD 597. This dense patchwork inevitably contains idiosyncrasies and irregularities, and we tolerate many of them without ever noticing. It seems to me, then, as a gradualist in constitutional terms, that the presence of religious leaders in the House of Lords is a very small one, existing in a House which most agree is in any case ripe for reform. To concentrate on the role of the lords spiritual surely is a kind of political myopia. It tops no-one’s list of priorities, might well be in its final days, and makes very little difference to the flow of our national life. Let us have some perspective and use our energies wisely. Sorry, Mr Holden.