Disestablishmentarianism and Antidisestablishmentarianism

[jack]

Sometimes I feel like the Church of England should either disestablish or bite the bullet and actually represent everyone, regardless of religion or lack thereof. I like having a comparatively fluffy national church, but when I saw it did do things I disagreed with, I suddenly felt uncomfortable having it enshrined in the constitutions.

The first is the obvious choice. But the second has some attraction for me. In many ways, couldn't you say that the right to have services and get married in churches, have "moral" representatives in the house of lords, choose the sexual orientation of bishops, etc, etc, are the equal legacy of everyone English, not just the faction which is currently identified as 'chruch of England'? I realise that's likely to be controvertial to both anti-disestablishment and disestablishment opinions :)

Comments

[liv]

There's actually a really blatant counterexample which is topical at the moment: a clear majority of non-Anglicans support full marriage equality. Most of the Anglican hierarchy at least (although not absolutely all professing Anglicans) believe that same sex couples should be equal but different and have access to exactly the same rights but call the officially sanctioned relationship a civil partnership, not a marriage. In fact, this is a big part of the reason why the media in general is discussing the issues raised in jack's post!

(The other issue where there's a clear Anglican / non-Anglican split is to do with reform of our upper house. The Anglican party line is to keep the status quo, perhaps not surprisingly because it gives the church a certain amount of political power, though the ostensible excuse is that we're on the brink of economic crisis, we don't have spare resources to spend on political reform. The huge majority of non-Anglicans think that we should do away with having Bishops in the House of Lords. But that's kind of a self-referential debate!)