It is time for antidisestablishmentarianism

Antidisestablishmentarianism is, almost certainly, the word that most people know without really thinking what it means. The longest word in English is due a revival from being just a Scrabble player’s dream to being something thought about more seriously. 

To be an antidisestablishmentarian is to oppose removing the links between church and state which — despite the ill informed America brained musings of plenty in the public sphere — we do not have in this country. Or, more precisely, we do not have in most of this country.

The mammoth word really entered wider public consciousness over a hundred years ago as Lloyd George prepared his last assault on the constitution — the disestablishment of the Church in Wales. 

The eventual disestablishment in 1920 followed the removal of the privileges of the Irish Church in 1870 and were followed by the Church of Scotland Act of 1921 which technically kept the Presbyterian polity established but removed many of its actual practical joins to the state.

Since then there have been sporadic efforts to consign the Church of England to the same fate. These ought to be resisted. It’s time to rediscover antidisestablishmentarianism. The examples of Wales and Scotland over the last century show that Church establishment is something worth fighting for. 

It’s worth dealing with the elephant in the room. Most English people don’t go to church every Sunday, and in polling a majority of them seem to be against establishment (although it is worth stating that most of them don’t even know what it is). Some argue that the numbers make establishment ridiculous. It’s worth pointing out that it, like all of the Constitution, was never about numbers, but a statement about the dignified aspects of the state.

The local elections, over which the same politicos who are the only people to ever really suggest any form of constitutional reform, will intrigue 30 per cent of people on a good day. Membership of the House of Lords or the Royal Family aren’t as exclusive as they were but still not majority pursuits. The constitution doesn’t operate on the base conditions of statistics. 

Others have taken up the cudgel of the intensely dislikable GK Chesterton, who mocked the rearguard campaign against the Welsh measures by the great FE Smith with some of his typically doggerel verse:

Men don’t think it half so hard if

Islam burns their kin and kith,

Since a curate lives in Cardiff

Saved by Smith.

Chesterton’s basic contention was that Christianity faced civilisational war against other faiths and the state atheism of the USSR, and so the efforts to defend something silly like Welsh establishment should be treated with contempt. Both faith and conservatism had bigger fish to fry.

Yet everything that we can observe about British decline shows that it is a death which happens by a thousand cuts. Chesterton’s contention that there are worse things going on in the world, especially for Christians, reminds one of a child who asks his parents why he should clean his room if the world is such a mess. If the British Empire at its greatest territorial extent couldn’t wave a magic wand and end persecution, it seems very unlikely that the Britain of 2026 could do so. Equally, it seems trite to point it out but establishment — and indeed constitutional policy more generally — was until recent years never about action in the way that foreign or economic policies were, but rather about the wider coherence of the nation.

That nation is getting less coherent and less at ease with itself. It is no longer able to tell its story convincingly. That there are those who think the solution to this is to rip out one of the longest standing chapters — and the one by which the rest of the plot of the tale is rendered explicable — seems odd to say the least. Wales did so and did not become a suddenly more coherent nation. Nor, contra Chesterton, did it become a country more focused on “real” religion.

Disestablishment only hurried Wales’s wider religious decline

Indeed, disestablishment only hurried Wales’s wider religious decline. The nonconformist movement — once the defining feature of much of Welsh life — has withered almost entirely. Nor did Wales become the integralist ultramontane state dreamed of by reactionary Roman Catholic Zoomers. It just became nothing.

The idea that what will replace Anglicanism’s role in the national story is either a more rigorous non-denominational Christianity or, as in the minds of the more obviously mentally unwell members of the online Right, some sort of strong Christianity-free nationalism is for the birds. Again, Scotland and Wales show us exactly how things will unfold.  

What has replaced the once exceptionally educated, deep and complex religious cultures in both nations has been a mix of intensely depressing indifference and an even more intensely embarrassing slush of feelgood, seemingly unobjectionable modern virtues like being respectful or tolerant or kind, which is presented as being a unique national characteristic if people in Poland or Papua New Guinea aren’t those things either. Perhaps acknowledging this, modern culture dresses these values in tartan or those hats which old Welsh ladies — who almost certainly weren’t tolerant — wore in the 17th century. 

That is a tragedy and a deliberate side effect of both actual and effective disestablishment of national churches. I think it’s probably impossible to get what was there back. But hurrying along the demise of what remains of it — solely, it seems, to try and score a point against trendy vicars — is not going to end well, not least because what conservatives have to offer instead becomes obviously psychopathic when removed from the controlling mooring of established institutions. When most people are given a choice between a national identity expressed by an anthropomorphic dragon telling them to be nice to people, and one that begins with a blood and soil lecture about the Druids or another that starts with a lecture on voluntary trade mechanisms, they’re going to go for the dragon. 

Civic space eventually gets filled with this mush because of the retreat of the thing which has been the central defining centre point of the Western civic square since the days of the Greek polis — namely religion. This happens on a micro, local level as well, as Wales and Scotland show.

In Wales, the vindictiveness of Welsh nonconformity meant that the Church was disendowed as well as disestablished. It required the seizure of land, buildings and institutions. It left a poor, thinly spread church which has spent the intervening years closing ancient places of worship. In Scotland, where decline has been more precipitous and more obviously self-inflicted, you can pick up the ancient Kirk of a Scottish town — founded perhaps by a Celtic saint, reformed by a disciple of Knox, and beautified by a Scots industrialist — for less than fifty grand.

Communion with the past and future is part of the purpose of the Church and of churches

That is the actual reality of disestablishment. It isn’t just an onanistic fantasy for the wonks at the National Secular Society or a war-gamed “what if …” for constitutional nerds. The British state is barely capable of dealing with potholes — the idea that it would suddenly be able to deal with the disendowed assets of the nation’s second largest landowner is complete fantasy. It would mean the removal from the public sphere of the places where people have loved and lost, have honoured their dead and welcomed new life, the actual atoms in which English history was made. Communion with the past and future is part of the purpose of the Church and of churches — we would not only be saying that such an endeavour is not worth bothering with constitutionally but we would also be making it practically impossible.

It maybe isn’t surprising, then, that this is Green Party policy — though it might give cause for the well meaning types in the Home Counties who think Mr Polanski’s party is a sort of reincarnation of the Wombles to take a closer look at what the party actually stands for. However it is a surprise that bashing established religion has become a feature of parts of the right. Abusing lefty bishops might be easy prey for the lazy and terminally online, but the actual consequences of disestablishment won’t be to shut such people up but to shut some very old and very beautiful places down. It will be to radically change the landscape — both constitutional and physical — that such people purport to love. Now perhaps there are conservatives who are happy with that happening, but it then becomes pretty unclear what it is they actually want to conserve.

It doesn’t seem likely that either radical right wingers or left wingers will make up a majority at the next election but we may well see a strange coalition of parties emerge. Disestablishing the Church is exactly the sort of thing our cowardly main parties would throw to junior partners as a sop. Antidisestablishmentarianism might need to make a comeback.