Dis-establishment by stealth, or How to live with difference

Dear Prime Minister,

This morning you put a written statement before the House that concerns the one Act of Parliament with my name on it, and I find I disagree with you about what it means.

Worth knowing. Section 18 of the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 makes it unlawful for a Catholic “directly or indirectly to advise His Majesty” on any appointment in the Church of England or the Church of Scotland. The Jews Relief Act of 1858 extended the same bar to Jews. Since the Prime Minister formally advises the King on the appointment of bishops, you can’t do that part of your job. So you’ve transferred it to the Lord Chancellor - which is sensible, was quite easy, and has a precedent as recent as last year, when Parliament amended a 1689 statute so that Lady Elish Angiolini, a Catholic, could represent the King at the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly. Problem solved, and it freed up some time for you to focus on funding social security and national security all at once.

Having solved it, you announced a Bill. It is, you told the House, “unacceptable for there to be a legislative bar against people of any faith performing all the functions of my office,” and this “antiquated and archaic anomaly” will be corrected at the earliest possible opportunity.

I’m a Jew. I feel a certain degree of personal ownership of the 1858 Act as a British inheritance. So let me be the one to tell you that I don’t want what you’re offering, and that I think you’ve misread what the bar is for.

It isn’t a statement about Catholics or Jews. It’s a statement about the Church. The Church of England is the established church of this country. The King is its Supreme Governor; the law requires him to be in communion with it; at his Coronation he swore to maintain the Protestant Reformed Religion. The Prime Minister who advises him on its bishops is, for that moment, standing inside the Church’s own life. The Acts of 1829 and 1858 don’t say that Catholics and Jews are second-class citizens. They say that this one thing belongs to the Church, and should be done by someone who can in conscience be part of it. That isn’t a slur. It’s a courtesy designed to preserve a part of our national identity in a country with an established Church.

Turn it round. I’d be horrified if the Archbishop of Canterbury were given a hand in choosing the Chief Rabbi. Not because I think ill of her, but because it isn’t her role or her community. It’s part of the ordinary respect one community pays to another. The 1858 Act pays the Church of England exactly that respect on my behalf, and I don’t feel slighted by it. I feel about as excluded from appointing Anglican bishops as I do from taking communion, which is not at all, because I’m not part of the Church.

I speak as a proud British Jew. Britain is a Christian nation. Not an especially devout one, and it hasn’t been for a while; but Christian in the way it is a monarchy - by constitution, by history, in the shape of its calendar and the skyline of its towns. My family came here and took the deal the country offered: learn the language, obey the law, join in, and you’re one of us. Part of that deal, never spoken because it never needed to be, was that there was a church at the centre of public life, that it wasn’t ours, and that we were welcome without being asked to be of it. I went to a Christian school and didn’t attend the religious services - not a problem.

A country that knows what it is can afford to be generous, and a country that is generous can be loved. I’ve written elsewhere that the British state has lost its confidence in its own culture. The established church is one of the last places where that culture is still, in law, allowed to exist. I would like it left alone.

Here is my difficulty with your Bill. It changes nothing in practice. The Lord Chancellor is already doing the job. No Catholic Prime Minister has been prevented from governing by this clause in the 197 years since it was passed, because there wasn’t one; and when one arrived, the fix took an afternoon. A Bill that fixes nothing practical exists to make a point. The point you’re making is that the office of Prime Minister must be faith-blind in every one of its functions, including the function of choosing the leaders of the national church.

Follow that through. If the adviser may be of any faith or none, the Church of England’s bishops are chosen by a process that owes nothing to the Church of England. The sensible next question - Humanists UK were asking it before your ink was dry - is why the Prime Minister should be involved at all; why the King must be an Anglican; why twenty-six bishops sit in the Lords. Each of those is, on your own reasoning, an antiquated and archaic anomaly. Each will go in its turn, one written statement at a time, and at no point will anyone have stood up in the Commons and said the words “I wish to disestablish the Church of England.” That’s the part I mind. Not the argument. The absence of one.

There is an honest version of your position, and I’d respect it. It goes: Britain is no longer a Christian nation in any sense that should bind the state; an established church is a relic; the state should stand neutral between faiths and between faith and none; here is a Disestablishment Bill, let’s have the fight. I’d be on the other side of it. But it would be a real argument, made in the open, about what kind of country this is, and the country is entitled to have it.

What the country is not entitled to is disestablishment by tidying up. The anomaly you’ve found isn’t a loose thread, it’s a seam. It’s the exact point at which the constitution says: this is a church, not a department, and the people who run the state don’t automatically run it. Pull it because it looks untidy and the whole garment goes, whether openly or by stealth.

You are a serious man with a serious faith, and I don’t believe you want to be remembered as the Catholic who quietly took the Church of England apart. So say what you mean. If you believe the establishment should stand, let the Bill lapse, let the Lord Chancellor advise the King, and let the Acts of 1829 and 1858 stand as what they are: a mark of respect paid by the state to the Church on behalf of those of us who belong to a different one. If you believe it should fall, say so, in those words, and let us argue like citizens.

I am not asking you to defend the Church. I am asking you to defend the settlement - the un-radical proposition that a Christian country may keep a Christian church, and that the rest of us can pray for its King without wanting to run it.

I’m a Jew who would decline the power to choose his bishops - not because the law forbids it, but because it isn’t my perogative. That is what living happily in a Christian country looks like from the inside. I’d like my children to have the same chance.

Yours, in the English settlement we both hold,

Ashley Hirst