by Martyn Percy, Professor of Religion and Culture at the University of St. Joseph in Macao and Provost-Theologian at Ming Hua College, Hong Kong and Research Professor of Theology at Institut für Christkatholische Theologie, University of Bern, Switzerland. His The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism: Empire, Slavery and Revolt in the Church of England is just published by Hurst.
Once upon a time, nostalgia was not just a longing for the past, but a potentially fatal disease. First used as a medical term in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the context of Swiss soldiers and mercenaries, it referred to (nostos is the Greek for homecoming, and algos is a word for pain). Or rather, a sickness for order and things being put back where they once were or belonged. Nostalgia, in this sense, is not a benign sentiment, but an anxiety caused by displacement and dislocation. However, nostalgia is also a dangerous emotion that can lead to self-imprisonment through false memory.
For those who speak nostalgically of the Church of England and wider Anglican Communion, the debt to the nostalgia narrated by the British Empire and the unity provided by the service of imperialism are obvious. Even recently, Bishops could be heard to speak with wistful admiration of a denomination stretching from Malagasy to Mongolia, from Sweden to South Africa, from India to Tasmania, and from the United Kingdom across the whole of the Americas. The London office for the Anglican Communion also invests in this narrative. Such nostalgia paints a rose-tinted picture of global coverage, as though the extent of the Church of England were akin to every community having a local post office.
The reality is quite different. Coverage across the Anglican Communion is patchy, and it is increasingly difficult to understand how, in terms of compatibility, coherence, and commonality, the various components constituting this church can claim the label ‘Communion’. Even if the term is used, many who use such language no longer mean the same thing. Furthermore, others regard the term as problematic – either a dangerous fiction or a disingenuous description. ‘Anglicanism’, it seems, is increasingly a term of ascription that is contested and divisive.
Nostalgia is a vehicle that tries to carry a community through the uneasy conditions of modern and contemporary life and the politics of fear and anxiety. However, it is unlikely to be able to carry any meaningful freight going forward. The challenges of the present now require a large dose of realism. Otherwise, fantasies and wishful thinking will be mistaken for vision.
Is there any way past this nostalgic pathology under which the Church of England labours? The only way through this is likely to be rooted in harsh realities. Across the global Anglican Communion, the days when directives from the Church of England freighted authority and power are long gone.
We live in a post-colonial age. Honesty and clarity about the past can only help. Otherwise, amnesia and myth-making memory will reign unchecked. The roots of the Anglican Communion and the Commonwealth arise from the British Empire, which was driven by trade, consumerism, military action, conquest and imperial expansionism. This was primarily an English project in which the Church of England served as a legitimating spiritual arm for an empire, capitalising on the territorial expansion, giving it an aura of global territorial catholicity.
Yet, at present, the Church of England is run by a tiny elite operating a model of leadership that is a hybrid of monarchy and autocracy. Any democratic accountability is strongly resisted and, as clergy and laity repeatedly find, the will of the people barely counts for anything. Like grumbling serfs, however, congregations are nonetheless expected to fund a hierarchy that is aloof, never liable or culpable, and operating as a law unto itself
With the appointment of a new Second Estates Commissioner there may be an opportunity for a significant change – one that will snap the Church of England out of its self-induced coma. Marsha de Cordova (MP for Battersea) was the confirmed choice. It took almost 100 days for the government to find an appointee, the longest time lag since 1832.
Perhaps the lengthy lacuna of 2024 reflects the ambiguous nature of the role. In the past, the Second Estates Commissioner has functioned as an apologist for the Church of England when faced with questions and scrutiny from Parliament. But the present demands a different approach, namely making the Church of England accountable to parliament, church members, taxpayers and voters.
Marsha de Cordova attends a church run by the Holy Trinity Brompton network, which has recently taken the lead in secessionism over the Church of England’s slow, gradual embrace of equal marriage. Yet Marsha has previously served in the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Secretary of State for Women and Equalities and Shadow Minister (Work and Pensions) (Disabled People). She also served on the Work and Pensions Select Committee and the Petitions Committee.
It would be hard to find any MP who could, in conscience, act as a parliamentary apologist for the Church of England in the 21st century, with its position being so clearly anomalous and democratically indefensible. With clergy having few employment rights, and LGBTQ+ clergy still discriminated against, it is hard to imagine the Church of England hanging on to its powers and privileges in the next ten years.
Most citizens expect equality and accountability from their institutions as a prerequisite for trust. Moreover, serious questions must be asked as the number of paid-up members of the church has effectively fallen off the cliff edge—and there is no sign that this decline is temporary. These questions relate to the fitness and role of an established church in one nation, yet within a devolved union of three nations (and Northern Ireland).
Meanwhile, there are hardly any – indeed, no – examples of the much-vaunted new models of the church making a net contribution to their diocese for the investments they have received. It is impossible to find one of these new strategic initiatives of the Archbishops’ Council paying its way. Ordinary parishes are funding a fetishised experimentalism that is not subject to any scrutiny, fiscal accountability or even much in the way of legally authorised protocols.
Meanwhile, stipendiary clergy numbers are set to fall to around 5,000 by 2034. January 2025 marks the tenth anniversary of Reform and Renewal, the much-vaunted strategy document of the Archbishops’ Council. In 2014, General Synod and the Church of England were promised more clergy, more churches, growth and a major turnaround in fortunes. Not one target has been met. In fact, the decline has accelerated.
If the Archbishops’ Council were a company’s board of directors, the shareholders would have passed several votes of no confidence by now. Indeed, were this a school, it would be in special measures. But the Archbishops’ Council has no accountability. A recent public survey shows that public confidence in ordained ministry has collapsed in just a few decades, as its senior leadership are no longer believed or trusted inside the church, let alone outside. The recent report commissioned by the Archbishops’ Council on the very subject of trust and trustworthiness ran out of time in debate, but not without members of General Synod expressing their lack of trust in the same report’s origins, methodology and political aspirations. That’s right, nobody trusted a report from the bishops that was all about trust.
Some churches are now breaking away and conducting their own bespoke versions of licensing and ordination. This has been slowly gestating since the 1992 Act of Synod, which sought to appease those aggrieved at the decision to ordain women to the priesthood. Long before Burger King adopted their most famous slogan – “have it your way” – the Church of England turned its reliable set menu into a proverbial buffet car. Take it or leave it, the customer is king.
The new Estates Commissioner will only be able to be a credible respondent for the Church of England in parliament when it can be demonstrated that bishops are to be held accountable to ordinary secular employment laws and legal provisions on gender, sexuality, data protection, and safeguarding. At present, this is an established church lecturing the world on human rights yet having secured legal opt-out provisions under the Human Rights Act (1997). This is unconscionable.
The current situation of weak autocracy is arguably the worst of all worlds. As there are no operational conflicts of interest policy or register of interests amongst the highest echelons of the Church of England’s leadership, concealment of malice, malpractice and incompetence is relatively straightforward. Those who try to speak out will quickly be frozen out – the church created its own ‘cancel culture’ centuries ago. This is an organisation that really knows how to bully its people. It can be brutal.
The Archbishops’ Council secretariat recently replied to a question put to the previous Second Estates Commissioner, Andrew Selous MP, in December 2023. In the response from Lambeth Palace, the Church of England’s most senior officer explained there are no plans for independent external review or performance management of the Church of England’s treatment of victims.
Furthermore, the Secretary General added, supporting victims of abuse in the longer term should be a burden carried by the taxpayer. The invoice for abuses perpetrated by the Church of England should be forwarded to HM Treasury. Ironically, the same body that gives millions of pounds back to the church through Gift Aid.
Such hubris is breathtaking. Yet the ruling culture of bishops, courtiers, Synod lawyers, and ecclesiocrats remains unaccountable, mercurial and aloof. Nothing of this can be defended in any democratic parliament in the 21st century. Reform cannot come quickly enough.
Any thoughts?