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Tag: Parliament

  • Halcyon Daze? Nostalgia in the Memory of the Church

    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.

     

     

  • Lives Worth Living? Principle and Practice in the Assisted Dying Debate

    by the Revd Dr Charlie Bell, Fellow at Girton College Cambridge, Assistant Curate, St John the Divine, Kennington and forensic psychiatrist

    I will admit to being quite surprised that the Assisted Dying Bill passed its second reading.

    Of course, much of that surprise can be put down to the ever-shrinking social media bubbles we all inhabit – mine, for example, seemed full of MPs saying that whilst they might support the principle, they couldn’t support the Bill as it stands. Yet parliament has spoken, and whilst there is still a long way for this Bill to go, it should make us at least recognise that we are in a new place culturally when it comes to matters of life and medicine. It looks, at the very least, like it is now a case of when and not if, when it comes to assisted dying.

    Plenty of ink has been spilt on this debate, with some of the arguments being put forward more charitable than others. There has seemed, at times, to be a wilful refusal to hear – and rather to simply dismiss – the concerns raised by large numbers of disabled people, and in addition the voting figures (and associated speeches) from UKME MPs might also get us thinking. The professionally religious have, in the main, been opposed (with some notable exceptions), but there is interestingly no neat left-right distinction in this debate. The religious opposition has not always erred on the side of kindness, and yet perhaps this is best interpreted as a sign of how concerned many religious people are about the threat this Bill poses to something so central to how many people of faith understand human life to be. It is worth our all remembering that very few people – if any – are coming at this issue with bad intentions, even if their failure to see the consequences (from whichever direction) of their opinions is frustrating!

    It’s not an original thought, but it is worth repeating that there are already grey areas in this debate that we have all learned to tolerate. Whilst the so-called doctrine of double effect – where a death-inducing dose of medication can be given if the intention is to relieve pain not induce death – really doesn’t have much (if any) actual use in contemporary medical practice (because the reality is that such high dosing is vanishingly rarely, if ever, required), nonetheless we know that patients can quite competently refuse treatment if they have decided that enough is enough. Similarly, we don’t simply go ahead and invasively treat patients when the treatment appears futile or actively harmful – there are decisions to be made on the what, where, when, and how in contemporary medical practice that cannot fit into simplistic binary choices. Yet what is being proposed here really is something new, in my mind, because – I think – it changes what it means to be a doctor, and hence what it means to have a doctor. It changes what choices doctors can legitimately be involved in – and what associated actions they can take.

    I think that’s the angle that I’m approaching this debate from, although I am aware that not only am I a psychiatrist – and hence someone who deals in matters of capacity, competence, suicidal thinking, life and death on a fairly regular basis – I’m also a priest. There have been rather silly suggestions that those with faith cannot objectively talk about this stuff – silly because the truth is that none of us, with or without faith, can talk objectively. We’re all caught up in our different (and sometimes internally contradictory) worldviews, and so whatever we have to say about this is going to impact us differently. What I would like to do, though, is offer some reflections on how this whole debate hit me as a practitioner of medicine – one with faith, sure, but primarily one thinking through how my medical life might change in this new cultural landscape.

    The first thing is how many MPs of various stripes, including some of those who were vocally opposed to the Bill, stated that they didn’t like this Bill but that they did agree ‘in principle’ (often in the stated context of poor palliative care provision). I’m not totally convinced that in matters of assisted dying, it’s quite so easy to separate principle and practice (as many disabled campaigners have made clear in their contributions to the debate), but putting that aside for a moment, it’s evident that more people are now willing to say that they think that there is a genuine choice possible between death and life. This is new, and significant, if it is indeed true (that is, unless the ‘agree in principle but not practice’ argument was simply being used because it was easier than to be seen to disagree in principle too). Assisted dying is, in the main, seen as a liberal, progressive cause – an assertion not without possible challenge, but an assertion that seems to have taken on a widely accepted status. Those arguing against assisted dying are doing so on the back foot.

    Which makes me wonder what precisely the principle is that MPs (and the wider public) agree with. One of the difficulties with all this is the strange bedfellows each of us might find ourselves with, where the thing we agree or disagree on is not actually the same in substance even if it is in effect. Definitions throughout this debate have been shaky and unclear – we might think of the word ‘intolerable’, for example, of which more below – and so the grounds on which we agree or disagree can themselves feel shaky and unclear too. The Church of England has felt a little limited in what it has had to offer on all this – something I found when writing a book on despair and dying – which means that much of the official public output, such as it is, has felt rather last minute, unprepared, and shallow. In the church, we’ve forgotten that a vast number of people don’t speak our language, and our words have lost shared meaning.

    Which brings me back to how words in general have lost that shared meaning in society. We have heard a lot about ‘intolerable’ pain during debates, but what exactly does that mean? When life is ‘not worth living’, again, what does that mean? Just as importantly, who makes the decisions about what those words mean, and against what are these meanings measured? As a medic, I feel uncomfortable with saying that some pain is inevitably intolerable, but who am I to determine what that means?

    As a psychiatrist, too, I wonder about exactly what doctors are being asked to make a judgement on. Historically – in medicine and in law – we haven’t really accepted the idea that living vs dying is a legitimate choice for an individual to make for themselves. The Mental Health Act, and various other bits of medical legislation, make that clear – and our practice mirrors that. Meeting someone who is suicidal in clinic or in an emergency situation, I would inevitably err on the side of caution and see this risk as something that is at least an indicator that a deprivation of liberty is appropriate. Yet whilst it is only in very particular circumstances, this proposed Bill changes that, in a way that fundamentally changes the way doctors and patients interact. For all the talk on the content of the Bill, its safeguards and so on, this aspect seems not to have featured nearly enough.

    Yet that also makes me wonder something else about this Bill specifically, which is whether it actually addresses the question its proponents state it aims to. For all the talk of slippery slopes, this Bill claims to only address those with a likely six-month time limit – ignoring, for a moment, the imprecise nature of any such prediction. In my experience, anecdotal though it is, I have infrequently met people with such a limited lime left on this Earth wishing for less – most, in fact, have wanted more. I can think of situations where ‘intolerable’ might make most sense to me – locked-in syndrome, for example, or degenerative diseases, which might be someone else’s tolerable but might be my intolerable – yet these are not included in this legislation. In other words, the arguments around assisted dying might be more palatable when addressing people in the last six months of life, but are they actually practical or necessary in this group of people? If the answer is, in fact, no, then that opens up a lot more questions.

    This debate is not going to go away, and nor is it going to become much easier or clearer. Those of us who have serious and deep concerns about what this does to medical care – where on the one hand I am expected to see all suicidal thinking as suggestive of disorder, whilst on the other hand can now determine someone to be entirely of sound mind despite this thinking – have a duty to engage carefully and thoughtfully with the debate as it progresses, whilst drawing attention to the realities that underpin it. For all the talk of this being one of parliament’s finer hours, I am not convinced – by the principle, or the practical workings out.

     

     

  • Safeguarding and Patriarchy in the Church of England

    by Revd Martine Oborne, Chair of WATCH (Women and the Church), a group that works for gender equality in the Church of England

    The 253-page Makin report on the Church of England’s handling of the John Smyth abuse case – that has brought about the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury – has been pored over by many people in recent days. But one part that has so far been overlooked is the section that links the abuse with patriarchy.

    In 9.1.9-10 the report describes the patriarchal culture of the camps at which the abuse took place and how this was conducive to that abuse. Makin says that the camps were entirely run by men and a victim states: ‘…it was an incredibly sexist set up, a group of people called lady helpers, many of whom were either wives of the leaders or female undergraduates. These lady helpers were kept out of sight, out of mind, they’d be doing the cooking in the kitchen…’

    The report goes on to say that clinical psychologist, Dr Elly Hanson, also explores how this patriarchal approach… ‘was a conducive cultural and organisational factor,’ describing the impact in relation to this case as follows:

    “Misogyny and patriarchy: men are seen as in authority over women… men are granted more power than women and treated as having more wisdom and insight. As a result, John’s behaviour and justifications may have been given more legitimacy; his focus on young men was not questioned; and potentially valuable perspectives from women were absent.”

    The Church of England still uses its exemptions under The Equality Act 2010 to discriminate against women on the grounds of their sex. For example, it is still permissible for churches to ask only male candidates to apply for a post as a vicar. It is permissible for such churches to limit women’s ministry and prohibit them from preaching to, or teaching, men. It is permissible for such churches to say that they cannot accept oversight of a female Bishop but need to be overseen by a male Bishop such as a ‘flying bishop’ like the Bishop of Ebbsfleet. There are many such churches in London and big university cities and they include All Souls Langham Place, St Helen’s Bishopsgate, St Andrew the Great in Cambridge and St Ebbe’s in Oxford.

    The flip side of this permission is alarming: no one can be considered for training as a priest in the Church if they want women and men to be treated equally and do not accept the institutional discrimination that has been in place for thirty years, ever since women were first ‘permitted’ to be priests. And those who critique this discrimination find it very hard, if not impossible, to progress to senior posts in the Church. Ironically, the arrangements are referred to as ‘mutual flourishing’ which is shorthand for the expectation that both women and those who don’t fully accept women’s ministry can flourish.

    This ongoing discrimination is an injustice to women who, both ordained and lay, work hard throughout the country serving their churches and communities and who deserve to be treated equally with their male colleagues.

    And it is also unsafe.

    A culture which is essentially an old boys’ club is a fertile environment not only for abuse but also for its cover up, as we have seen in the Church regarding the Smyth case. Furthermore, it is an environment in which one entitled group is facilitated in exerting coercive control over another group.

    The Bishop of Newcastle has shown great integrity and courage in upholding safeguarding standards in the Church, not only by calling on the Archbishop of Canterbury to resign but also by publishing a letter she received from him and the Archbishop of York recently, which was patronising and coercive in trying to get her to adopt a certain position on another safeguarding issue relating to John Sentamu.

    Women are called to show ‘gracious restraint’ in the Church and to accept that some of their colleagues have the right to limit their ministry. This practice is essentially coercive, requiring women to accept a diminished status without complaint and gaslighting them, if they resist, by calling them unkind and saying that they are marginalising others.

    Although, as a result of the Makin report, there is an immediate need to arrange for independent safeguarding in the Church, safety will not be fully addressed without changing the culture that has been an old boys’ club for far too long. One helpful step would be to put an end to institutional discrimination by sex. If the Church won’t do this itself then maybe Parliament should consider removing its exemptions under The Equality Act – so that it would be illegal for the Church to continue discriminating.

    And, hopefully, it could then authentically become the spiritual voice for the nation – both safeguarding the vulnerable and treating all people equally.

     

     

  • 30 Years, 40 Years: And Not Equal Yet

    by Chris Polhill, one of the first women to be ordained in the Church of England, and author of Through the Gateways of a Garden (2024)

    This September I celebrate 40 years in ministry, first as a Deaconess, then ordained deacon three years later. Seven years after that, I was one of the first women to be ordained priest in the Church of England. So, those quick at maths will see that I have been a priest for 30 years. These anniversaries have left me very reflective about the Church of England.

    To the outsider we can look as though all is well for women in this church. Women are priests, bishops, deans, and one of the three ‘top’ posts, Bishop of London, is a woman. So the CofE looks like an equal opportunities employer, but it is not. Indeed it is exempt from parliament’s Equal Opportunities Act, and this conceals the minefield that has left me reflective, despondent, angry and not quite seeing the way ahead.

    In November 1992 I joined many others standing outside Church House in London while the Church of England General Synod debated and voted on whether the C of E should ordain women as priests. The legislation had already been debated in diocesan synods and passed with a substantial majority, so it was now coming for the main vote at General Synod, needing a two-thirds majority in each of the three Houses: Laity, Clergy and Bishops. Outside the building with us were many journalists from all over the world. I was interviewed for an Australian radio station, and many others contributed to newspaper reports. Women and men from theological colleges stood with a banner saying ‘Waiting’. We sang; we hoped that this time it would be different from the vote in the 1970s; we prayed. And the vote was in favour of women as priests in all 3 Houses by more than the required two-thirds majorities. We sang outside with joy, while inside it was received in silence to respect those who were against the result. “Vicars with knickers” was the Sun’s headline next day.

    We were very firmly told by our bishops that we were not to celebrate as the pain of those who had lost the vote was so great.

    1993 was a difficult year and it was hard to believe that the Church of England had made a positive decision to ordain women. The talk among clergymen seemed to be around how many of their congregation would leave if their woman deacon was ordained priest. Colleagues, my own among them, changed from being positive about women priests to seeing us as a problem. Their feelings, now that women as priests was a real possibility, did not match their thinking when it had only been an idea. “Gut-lag”, we called it. The old boys’ network in both the church and parliament got together and the House of Bishops was focussed on keeping as many clergy from leaving as they could. According to the press, about 1000 had threatened to leave, some taking their congregations with them. The Church agreed to compensate those who left with large sums of money. The Roman Catholic church agreed that married men from the CofE could serve with them as priests, though all who took this path had to go through some further training.

    There are two extremes in the CofE among those who were then, and still remain, against women as priests. There are those who are waiting for the pope to decide about women before they can accept it; this despite the fact that the CofE was formed as a departure from Rome and from having to accept the pope’s decisions. At the other extreme are those who see the Bible’s instructions about male headship as paramount. The pressure from parliament’s Ecclesiastical Committee was for legal safeguards for those opposed to women, and in consequence the CofE is the only province in the Anglican communion that has legal provision for those who will not accept women as priests. The other provinces managed the issue pastorally. The House of Bishops agreed with those who said that they could not accept a bishop who ordained women as priests, and that they were ‘tainted’ by having done so. This led to bishops representing each end of the argument being consecrated, and some diocesan bishops choosing only to ordain deacons so that they could remain a focus for unity in their diocese. I was told this would be a short-term arrangement, but it is a fixture still. This changed the nature of being a bishop, as bishops were never before selected by theological flavour, as it were. I keep having fanciful ideas of poems and bishops and flavours…

    I am seriously angry that the bishops of the time agreed with the idea that ordaining women tainted the bishop who did so. It is very suspect theology. Look at it this way, if a bishop said to a Black man, ‘I’m sorry, but ordaining you will affect me so that I can’t ordain white men as I usually do, they just wouldn’t accept me, and no, I wouldn’t receive communion from you because, for me, only white men can be priests.’ He would rightly be called out for the appalling racism he had expressed, yet put woman instead of Black man, and men instead of white men, and that is exactly what the CofE is practising. Men who think this are still being ordained. No-one seems to acknowledge the misogynistic sexism that the house of bishops agreed to and continues to agree to in the Church of England.

    The Ecclesiastical committee enabled further delays by talking of expediency. Yes, Synod had voted for women as priests but was it an expedient time?!!! However, come 1994, after many letters to MPs, women were ordained and we did celebrate. I was ordained priest in St. Albans Abbey on 23rd April 1994, and St. Albans diocese had a magnificent celebration 30 years on. I loved it. Smiling women led the service in the Abbey, and many people were there to celebrate as it had been well advertised. I caught up with some friends from long ago. It was very different in the diocese where I have served for the last 25 years though, Lichfield. We were prayed for at the clergy conference.

    In the intervening years I, along with many other women, got on with the job and kept my head down. This 30 year anniversary, however, has caused me to revisit the decisions that were made and wonder why they are still there. I would like to see the House of Bishops wake up to what was agreed then; to see the damage it has done to the office of bishop, and to stop making bishops for specific groups. I was shocked to discover we still accept men for ordination who do not think women can be priests, when there are other denominations they could more justly serve. I would love to see the CofE for once lead the society we allegedly serve, in exposing and wiping out misogyny and sexism from every area of life, so women and men can work together as partners in serving the gospel.

  • What do Others Think of Us?

    by Revd Rosalind Rutherford, a trustee of WATCH and a former member of General Synod during the passage of legislation for Women in the Episcopate

    Ten years ago, the Measure which would finally allow women to be appointed as bishops in the Church of England had been passed by General Synod (at a second attempt) and was working its way through Parliament, before receiving the Royal Assent. A few weeks after it became legal to appoint a bishop who was a woman, the Rev Libby Lane was announced as the new Bishop of Stockport, amid hopes that it really was a sign that gender discrimination had ended in the Church of England – or at least, was on the way out.

    One of the reasons that the Church of England moved quicker than anyone had imagined after the first attempt to legislate for women to be bishops failed (in November 2012) was that Parliament began to put pressure on the Church. The Church of England is the established church so it should not be so obviously lacking in gender equality among senior clergy. Specifically, Parliament wanted the Bench of Bishops in the House of Lords to include women as quickly as possible. In a climate in which bishops of the Church of England automatically having a place in the Lords was becoming less and less defensible, an all-male Bench of Bishops was even less justifiable. However, most diocesan bishops become members of the House of Lords in order of seniority, so without intervention it would still be several years before a bishop who was a woman became a member of the House of Lords. The “glass ceiling” would still remain unbroken in Parliament.

    This is why a simple piece of legislation was introduced in 2015, which stated that when a vacancy for a bishop arose in the House of Lords, the most senior woman would take precedence over any men. The initial legislation was time-limited because it was expected that, after ten years, enough women would be diocesan bishops for the most senior bishops to include women and men.

    But last week the House of Lords began the process of passing legislation to extend this legislation by another five years – the reason being that there are not yet not enough diocesan bishops who are women for there to be equal numbers of men and women introduced to the House of Lords. There are still only seven diocesan bishops who are women (in a month there will be eight). This raises the question of why there are still so few women among diocesan bishops.

    It can be salutary for us to hear what others are saying about the Church of England, so let’s turn to what was said by members of the Lords who spoke in the debate last week. What did they think of our commitment to diversity?

    For example:

    It is such a shame that the Church of England has to revisit this issue, as it was hoped back in 2015 that 10 years would be long enough to ensure that there were enough women diocesan bishops that the Lords spiritual would have some semblance of a gender balance. As somebody who had to organise gender balance among parliamentary candidates in my party, I realise that it is never an exact science. While there is welcome progress, the Lords spiritual still have the lowest proportion of females in the main groupings, at 24%.  (Baroness Brinton)

    In considering this Bill, we should be provided with a better understanding of why the Church has not done more to promote female bishops since 2014. For example, it is notable that, of the five episcopal sees with automatic seats in this House—namely, Canterbury, York, London, Durham and Winchester—only one is currently held by a woman. It would be helpful to know what particular efforts the Church of England is making to ensure gender equality amongst its own leadership and what the barriers that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans references actually are. (Lord Devon)

    But what a fascinating and interesting position the country finds itself in that the Parliament of the UK must give legislative time to deal with the established Church’s centuries of discrimination against women taking senior roles and the slow progress it has made in ensuring that women Bishops have equal rights in this House.  (Lord Scriven)

    Important questions. Since 2015, twenty-two men have been nominated as diocesan bishops but only nine women, one of whom has already retired. In contrast, thirty-four women have been appointed as suffragan bishops and thirty-nine men.  The refusal (or inability) of CNCs to nominate diocesan bishops who are women has been noticed for several years now, and recently is becoming almost a scandal. Women are now among the most experienced suffragan bishops; they have proved their capability and ability, including several women being acting diocesan bishop during a vacancy, but there is a blockage when it comes to being nominated by a CNC. And there are strong reasons to think that this is because there are members of the CNCs who refuse to accept or vote for a woman to become the leader of a diocese.

    Those replying to such criticisms on behalf of the Church of England have invariably refused to accept that there is a structural and an ethical problem in the body that appoints bishops, but the recent failure of two CNCs to appoint now seems to be concentrating their minds.

    For example:

    I think it prudent to confess that we in the Church have made slower progress than we had hoped when it came to ensuring that our senior clergy are representative of the diverse congregations we serve. This is true both of women and of ethnic and racial minorities. We do not yet have proportionate representation of female bishops on these Benches, or in our diocesan bishops.

    Unfortunately, that pattern (or equal numbers of men and women appointed as bishops) has not consisted of as many female bishops as we had hoped, and we humbly ask this House to grant us a little longer to ensure that our excellent and qualified women bishops have enough time to overcome this barrier. (Bishop of St Albans)

    Similarly, the Bishop of Derby also admitted that there is still something blocking the appointment of women as diocesan bishops:

    Attention is being given to how the Crown Nominations Commission deliberates and selects candidates to senior posts, given the rate of appointment of women to such roles and our intent on greater diversity overall. My Right Reverend friend spoke of the pipelines we now have of gifted, experienced women in ministry; there are real questions about why they are not being appointed to diocesan roles more quickly. (Bishop of Derby)

    Is it as coincidence that, the day after this debate – a debate which forced the Church of England to admit that women are still being blocked from appointments as bishops – the House of Bishops announced that they propose to end secret ballots at CNC meetings?

    Such changes might limit the likelihood of CNC stalemates if one or two members refuse to vote for any woman, however experienced she may be and however much she may match the diocese’s person profile.  But it does not deal with the deep discrimination that still pervades all the structures and processes of the Church of England. It took a peer who self-described as secular to make a “The emperor has no clothes” speech! Lord Scriven moved rapidly to what he sees as the heart of the issue:

    We need to look a bit further at why the established Church has been so slow to deal with this discrimination, to see whether it is really committed to equality for women within its structures and to ensure that it is really committed to dealing with the misogyny and believes in the true equality of women within its structures, which is the basis the Bill is established on…

    …Although both sex and religion or belief are protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010, the law is clear that individuals cannot discriminate against their colleagues just because their religion says they should.

    However, that discrimination still exists within the established Church, with a whole system that allows this to happen. The language used to describe and hide it is almost poetic. The CofE calls it “mutual flourishing”. Does that not conjure up a warm and sunlit world, one of equal relationships where all sides are equal and can flourish and reach their full potential based on mutual respect regardless of their sex or who they are?

    In practice, it is far from that. There has been a total abdication of responsibility by the leaders of the established Church since 2014, when women bishops were agreed to by the General Synod. A system has been set up to appease the misogyny—a system that is more about keeping the Church of England together rather than one built on mutual respect and equality for all. It is a system that the present leadership of the Church of England encourages and supports. It is not mutual flourishing but a system of institutionalised misogyny.

    In practice, what “mutual flourishing” means is that individual churches can refuse to accept women as priests or vicars. The CofE also permits churches to reject the authority of a female bishop. So the state Church affirms women as equal while at the same saying that it is alright for some churches not to accept them. In fact, nearly 600 churches reject the authority of women and flock under the frocks of what are referred to as “flying bishops”. Individual churches are permitted to refuse female vicars and are given the right to be overseen by flying bishops who also oppose women’s ordination, instead of their local bishop, male or female, who ordains women.

    How can it be in 2024 that the state Church is still discriminating against women, who represent about two-thirds of its congregation and half the population of this country? Does the Leader of the House feel it is correct that, ultimately, the Church of England should end its exemption under the Equality Act and stop legitimising the theology that some of its churches use to limit women’s ministry and equality when this Parliament is giving time to ensure that women Bishops can sit in this House more equally as a matter of principle? The Church of England loves to give the impression that the battle over women’s ministry is all sorted now but let us be clear: there is a long way to go. (Lord Scriven)

    Not surprisingly, this speech then moved to question the right and value of twenty-six bishops sitting by right in the House of Lords. It’s a different question from the one being debated, but a church which continues to legislate for discrimination will find it much harder to justify any automatic presence in the House of Lords, should it wish to do so. The Church of England likes to present itself as an institution that is able to include diversity – but the lack of women appointed as diocesan bishops is just the tip of a whole iceberg of discriminatory assumptions and practices.

     

    Full debate recorded in Hansard: see this link

     

     

     

  • Marriage Law in England and Wales – Some Reflections

    by Revd Dr Helen Hall, Nottingham Trent University and Professor Javier Garcia Oliva, Head of Law, University of Manchester

    (the third in a series of four: based on a presentation to the June 26th Symposium on Same-Sex Marriage in the Church of England organised by Sir Ben Bradshaw and Jayne Ozanne)

     

    Marriage Law in England and Wales-Current Framework and Proposed Reform

    Jurisdiction

    • Marriage law (and family law more generally) in England and Wales is distinct from that in Scotland.
    • This is not a recent development arising from devolution, but due to the agreement prior to the Act of Union, according to which Scotland would be permitted to keep its own legal system.
    • The analysis below relates exclusively to England and Wales, except where otherwise indicated.
    • Although Anglicanism was formally disestablished by the Welsh Church Act 1914, for the purposes of marriage law, the Church in Wales largely continues to operate as an established Church.
    • However, it should be noted that disestablishment means that the Church in Wales has no power to amend the civil law framework. It is completely dependent on Parliament in this regard.

    Current Framework

    • For historical reasons, there are four distinct routes to a legally binding marriage:  Anglican Marriage; Quaker and Jewish Marriages; Civil Marriage; and Other Forms of Religious Marriage where a faith group has opted-in (hereafter referred to as “Opt-In Marriages” in this paper).
    • Marriages outside of these four categories are not illegal in the sense of being prohibited, but they will NOT create a legally binding marriage in English/Welsh law.
    • Marriages which take place in other jurisdictions are ordinarily treated as creating a legally binding marriage in England/Welsh law, provided that they were legally valid according to the rules of the State in which they were celebrated.
    • Opt-In Marriages are performed by an authorised person, but must take place in a building registered for religious worship.
    • This means that there is no provision for Humanist marriages, nor any scope for faith groups which do not meet in a registered building, either because they lack sufficient members and money, or because their practices involve worshipping at home or in outdoor settings.

    Problems with the Current Framework

    • As a headline, it is unduly complex and bureaucratic.
    • Some parties to non-binding religious marriages are unaware that they have no legal protection until their relationship breaks down. It is only at that point that they learn that they were simply cohabiting, and are, therefore, entitled to no financial relief.
    • Individuals for whom English/Welsh is a second language are at increased risk of confusion.
    • Local decision making on opting-in may add to the confusion; it is not always enough to ask what faith community performed the ceremony, e.g. a Muslim marriage or a Sikh marriage might or might not be legally binding, depending on whether the community in question had opted-in.
    • A significant number of non-legally binding religious marriages are taking place. This leads to unequal outcomes should the relationship break down, or one of the parties die without leaving a will. It can also trap vulnerable people in abusive relationships, especially women. The lack of access to financial relief may make it very difficult for a person to leave their partner, if they have no housing and are economically dependent. The situation is exacerbated still further if they are from a cultural background which stigmatises separation, and their families and friends are unable/unwilling to offer support.

    Proposals for Reform

    • The Law Commission has proposed significant reforms:

    1)         Regulation of the Officiant instead of the venue (i.e. an end to the need to celebrate Opt-In marriages in a registered building).

    2)         Universal rules for ALL weddings

    • Couples would be able to give notice of their intended wedding online, and to choose the registration district where they would then be interviewed by a registration officer.
    • Notice of upcoming weddings would be published online so that the information was accessible to the wider community.
    • There would be great accommodation of the diversity of beliefs e.g. It would be possible to have a religious ceremony in a venue other than a place of worship and without having to incorporate prescribed words into the ceremony. It is suggested that there should also be an option for couples of different faiths to have a religious ceremony led by an interfaith minister that contains aspects of each of the couple’s beliefs. Finally, the rigid division between civil and religious marriages would be axed, allowing couples to have some religious elements, such as hymns and prayers, incorporated into their civil ceremony (as long as the ceremony remained “identifiably civil”.)

    Implications for Same Sex Marriage and the Church of England

    • This does not directly impact on same sex marriage and the Church of England, but there are a number of indirect implications.

    1)         This supports McLean’s thesis of “marriage” being a legal institution offered and regulated by the State, even though it may choose to delegate the ceremonial and administrative elements to third parties, including faith groups.

    2)         Respecting the diversity of beliefs present in contemporary society is a key element of the proposals, and no denomination would be forced to offer marriage ceremonies to all comers on an equal basis. It would clearly violate Article 9 of the ECHR and the rules of statutory interpretation, if any legislation enacted on the basis of the Law Commission proposals were interpreted as requiring all Anglican clergy to offer same sex marriages, or demanding that Roman Catholic priests and Orthodox Rabbis perform wedding ceremonies for non-Catholic/Jewish atheists or members of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti monster.

    3)         The Church of England (and indeed all faith groups) would have to decide how to respond to the possibility of its clergy being involved in interfaith ceremonies, or providing “religious elements” of a civil ceremony, where the parties to the marriage were of the same sex. Given the scope for considerably increased flexibility in respect of wording and ceremonies, it is easy to see how Anglican clergy could be effectively “performing” same sex marriages hosted by a friendly neighbouring denomination, or conceivably even in the context of a civil ceremony, depending on how the “identifiably civil” part was interpreted. The church would have to decide how it wanted to respond to this.

    4)         With a much freer wedding economy, couples would have far greater scope to have a religious/Christian backdrop to their ceremony without going to the local parish church.  Consequently, if the Church of England wanted to continue to encourage weddings as potential opportunities for evangelism/outreach, and source of income, then it would do well to ponder how excluding same sex couples would affect perceptions of Anglicanism and Anglican marriage.

    • It must be stressed that not all proposals of the Law Commission become law, and even those that do often undergo substantial transformation before being enacted.
    • There is a considerable pressure for reform of wedding law, particularly in light of some recent high-profile litigation in relation to a woman seeking some mechanism to obtain financial relief when leaving a non-legally binding religious marriage. The conclusion of the appellate court was that neither divorce nor nullity could help. For the reasons outlined above, the vulnerability of people in this situation means that there is now an urgent reason to overhaul an idiosyncratic and piecemeal system which has been evolving in a haphazard fashion since the eighteenth century.
    • The collateral implications of all of this for same sex marriages in an Anglican setting are indirect, but very significant.

     

     

     

     

     

  • Can Parliament Permit Church of England Clergy to Marry Same-Sex Couples? Should it?

    by Professor Iain McLean, FBA FRSE, Professor Emeritus of Politics, Oxford University and a fellow of Nuffield College. As a Quaker, he was a consultant to Britain Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) for their lobbying on the ‘Alli amendment’ (to the Equality Act 2010, permitting faith communities to conduct civil partnerships) and on the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013

    (the second in a series of four. based on a presentation to the June 26th Symposium on Same-Sex Marriage in the Church of England organised by Sir Ben Bradshaw and Jayne Ozanne)

    On 21 March 2023, Ben Bradshaw MP (Lab., Exeter) introduced a Ten-Minute Rule Bill ‘to enable clergy of the Church of England to conduct same sex marriages on Church of England premises in certain circumstances’. It was co-sponsored by parliamentarians from the Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat, and Green parties (no nationalists; the bill would apply in England only). Introducing it, Mr (now Sir) Ben Bradshaw stated that it had the support of Sir Tony Baldry (former MP (Cons, Banbury) and Second Church Estates Commissioner). He also stated that

    My preference—and, I imagine, that of most colleagues—would be for the Church to do this itself….The main motivation in introducing it is to encourage the bishops to stick to the commitments and timetable agreed by February’s Synod and resist any delay or backsliding at the next Synod in July.

    The current Second Church Estates Commissioner, Andrew Selous, responded

    [I]t is necessary to respond to the Bill in my capacity as Second Church Estates Commissioner because it seeks to usurp the role of the democratically elected General Synod of the Church of England, as well as to remove the freedom of the Church of England to decide its own doctrine, a freedom that members from all parts of this House champion for religions and beliefs all over the world and one that we should therefore apply equally to the Church of England (Hansard, Commons, 21 March 2023).

    Earlier, in response to an Urgent Question, he had said:

    In order to change canon law on the doctrine of holy matrimony, there has to be a two-thirds majority in the House of Bishops, the House of Clergy and the House of Laity of the General Synod, which is itself a devolved body of this Parliament, and the vast majority of whose members are elected. There is not currently a two-thirds majority in the General Synod to change canon law on the doctrine of holy matrimony (Hansard, Commons, 24 January 2023).

    … although he modified this answer two days later to say

    the advice I was given then was by the Church legal office, and I was yesterday asked to make a small clarification. A simple majority in each of the three Houses of the General Synod could suffice to pass a measure and amending canon to change the definition of marriage in ecclesiastical law, but circumstances could also arise in which two-thirds majorities in the House of Bishops and the House of Clergy would be needed, and, as with all authorised forms of service, a two-thirds majority in each House would be required for the approval of the Synod as a form of service for the marriage of a same-sex couple (Hansard, Commons, 26 January 2023).

    A Ten-Minute Bill is purely expressive speech. Mr Bradshaw’s bill received a first reading without a division, but is tabled for its second reading on a day when Parliament will not be sitting. Nevertheless, the matter remains of current interest. The General Synod of the Church of England meets in July and November 2023. The agenda for July contains no such proposed Measure. If the Synod declines to introduce a Measure to permit those clergy who so wish to conduct same-sex weddings in their churches, can Parliament intervene with a Private Member’s Bill, which unlike a Ten-Minute Bill receives substantive debate? And should it?

    Can Parliament intervene?

    It certainly can. The orthodox doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty maintains that Parliament remains supreme, even when it has delegated authority to bodies such as the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments, and the General Synod of the Church of England. Since delegating authority to what is now the General Synod in 1919, Parliament has intervened in the doctrine of the Church of England, most notoriously in the ‘Prayer Book controversy’ of 1927-8. Twice, the House of Commons turned down the Church of England prayer book, on the grounds that it was too close to Roman Catholicism. The decisive majority included Calvinist MPs from Scotland and Ulster. They could vote, because of parliamentary sovereignty, even though it was an England-only matter.

    The doctrines of the Church of England have less protection from Parliamentary interference than do those of the Church of Scotland. Both Parliament and the courts interfered with the doctrines of the Kirk, the former by the Patronage Act 1711 and the latter in various court judgements culminating in the Free Church case (Bannatyne v. Overtoun [1904] AC 515). In 1711 Parliament enacted a right for lay patrons to nominate ministers. In 1904 the judicial House of Lords awarded all those assets of the large United Free (UF) Church of Scotland that had come from the former Free Church to the tiny continuing Free Church, on the grounds that

    the Establishment principle and the Westminster Confession were distinctive tenets of the Free Church; that the Free Church had no power, where property was concerned, to alter or vary the doctrine of the Church; that there was no true union …; and that the appellants were entitled to hold for behoof of the Free Church the property held by the Free Church before the union in 1900.

    To forestall any repetition, the Church of Scotland and the UF Church, who were merging, obtained a remarkable abnegation of Parliamentary sovereignty in the Church of Scotland Act 1921 c.29 (‘An Act to declare the lawfulness of certain Articles declaratory of the Constitution of the Church of Scotland in matters spiritual prepared with the authority of the General Assembly of the Church.’). These Articles Declaratory, drafted by the General Assembly, trump any statutes that might conflict with them.

    This ancient history illustrates two bad ways of interfering with religious freedom. Both 1711 and 1927-8 were instances of what is now called the ‘West Lothian Question’, in which a measure affecting only one part of the UK is enacted against the majority vote of members from that part. The majority of Scots MPs voted against the 1711 Act. The majority of English MPs voted in favour of the Prayer Book. And the courts would not now presume to wade in to identify the fundamental tenets of a religion and use that as a basis for assigning property. Are there, though, any good grounds for parliamentary involvement in religion?

    Should it?

    There are two main arguments against introducing a bill to permit C of E clergy to solemnise same-sex marriage, and two main arguments in favour.

    The first argument against is that what is delegated should stay delegated. By delegating authority to the Church of England, Parliament extricated itself from what had been very time-consuming and messy arguments about, for instance, divorce, the Roman Catholic presence in England, and marriage to a deceased wife’s sister. The second argument against is that espoused by Andrew Selous above: that intervention would ‘remove the freedom of the Church of England to decide its own doctrine’.

    The first argument in favour of intervention is that a purely permissive measure cannot be detrimental to religious freedom. On this argument, individuals have freedom; organisations, not so much. In its zeal to protect the religious freedom of clergy opposed to same-sex marriage, the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act 2013, it is argued, tramples on the religious freedom of clergy supportive of same-sex marriage. As noted in the Ten Minute debate, various denominations have opted in under the 2013 Act or its Scottish equivalent, in all cases permissively. Both Acts protect the conscience of those unwilling to conduct same-sex marriages when their faith group has decided to be open to them.

    The second argument is that the Church of England is for some purposes an agent of the state. Ever since 1753, when it was granted a monopoly of marriage in England & Wales (except for Quakers and Jews, who are still treated differently), it has regulated property and succession rights on behalf of the state. All parish clergy act as registrars – a civil function – when they officiate at a wedding. In addition, they have a common-law duty to marry parishioners, and couples have a common-law right to ask to be married in the parish church of either of them. However, as the Explanatory Notes to the 2013 Act make clear:

    Subsections (4) and (5) provide that any duty of a member of the clergy of the Church of England or the Church in Wales to solemnize a marriage does not extend to same sex couples. In addition, any corresponding right of parishioners to be married by such clergy does not extend to same sex couples. The effect of this is that the common law duty on the clergy of the Church of England and the Church in Wales to marry parishioners is not extended to same sex couples.

    Examples…

    A man lives next door to a Church of England parish church and wishes to get married there. He is getting married to a woman. Neither of them has ever attended services at the church or professes to be Christian. He speaks to the vicar who agrees to marry the couple, given his legal duty to marry parishioners.

    A man who lives next door to a Church of England parish church wishes to get married there. He is getting married to a man. Both of them regularly attend services at the church and are committed Christians. He speaks to the vicar who has to refuse to marry the couple, since it would not be lawful for him to do so and the legal duty to marry parishioners does not extend to same sex couples.

    For a text presumably drafted by civil servants and/or parliamentary drafters, this seems unusually forthright.

    The ‘quadruple lock’ inserted in the 2013 Act at the request of conservative denominations contains a couple of tumblers that are unique to the Church of England. They are section 1 subsections 3-5:

    (3) No Canon of the Church of England is contrary to section 3 of the Submission of the Clergy Act 1533 (which provides that no Canons shall be contrary to the Royal Prerogative or the customs, laws or statutes of this realm) by virtue of its making provision about marriage being the union of one man with one woman.

    (4) Any duty of a member of the clergy to solemnize marriages (and any corresponding right of persons to have their marriages solemnized by members of the clergy) is not extended by this Act to marriages of same sex couples.

    (5) A “member of the clergy” is—

    (a) a clerk in Holy Orders of the Church of England, or

    (b) a clerk in Holy Orders of the Church in Wales.

    Subsection (3) is declaratory, and nobody’s religious freedom would be impaired by its repeal. The effect of repealing subsections (4) and (5) would be to remove the anomaly highlighted in the Explanatory Notes.

    I conclude that a Private Member’s Bill to repeal these subsections would be a simple way of granting parliamentary approval of the consciences of clergy who wish to conduct same-sex marriage, while preserving all the protections already in the 2013 Act for clergy who do not. If such a bill won parliamentary time (which requires at least the tacit consent of the government of the day), the votes on it would be classically ‘conscience’ matters and no party would be expected to whip its members. Unlike in 1927, however, Scottish and Northern Irish members should not vote.

  • Equality, Parliament, and the Established Church:  Some Recent Close Encounters

    Revd Canon Dr Judith Maltby is Chaplain, Fellow and Dean of Welfare of Corpus Christi College, Reader in Church History in the University of Oxford, and a member of the General Synod of the Church of England

    (the first in a series of four: based on a presentation to the June 26th Symposium on Same-Sex Marriage in the Church of England organised by Sir Ben Bradshaw and Jayne Ozanne)

    In February 2023, the General Synod of the Church of England debated and passed by a sizeable majority a paper from the House of Bishops which is intended to move the needle in a positive direction towards equality for LGBT+ people.  Such reform impacts on laypeople and clergy active within the Church but also on the wider public the Established Church seeks to serve, chiefly through the parochial system and sector chaplaincies. This wider public turn to the Church for food banks, youth work and elder care and at key ‘life events’, or ‘occasional offices’ of baptism, marriage and funerals. Marriage, of course, is at the heart of the issue. The House of Bishops’ proposals to Synod in February were the result of a lengthy six-year process known as Living in Love and Faith. I know it was a lengthy and careful process – I was a member of one of LLF’s working groups.

    In February, before Synod, a group of about a dozen cross-party Parliamentarians met with Archbishop Justin. It was, according to the Guardian and Telegraph, a heated meeting, at which Parliamentarians ‘threatened’ disestablishment if the Church did not change its position to allow equal marriage. The Telegraph reported that ‘the Archbishop of Canterbury has vowed that he will not be told what to do by MPs over blessings for same-sex couples’. Later that month, while at the global Anglican Consultative Council meeting in Ghana, the BBC reported that the Archbishop spoke of being ‘“threatened with parliamentary action” in an attempt “to force same-sex marriage” into the Church of England’.

    There is a lot of alleged ‘threatening’ going on by MPs as well as the implied criticism that Parliamentarians were somehow out of line to take a genuine interest in how the Established Church serves the nation. I would like to put the Archbishop’s remarks into historical context in terms of the relationship between Parliament and the Established Church of England. I am principally a historian of the 17th century, but you will be relieved that I only want to go back about 30 years to another significant equality issue in which Parliament and Church interacted: the ordination of women to the priesthood in the early 1990s and the consecration of women as bishops in the 2010s.

    In 2011, I co-edited a collection of essays with two other Oxford colleagues, called The Established Church:  Past, Present and Future.  The book came out of a day conference on the same topic. I am a cradle Anglican but moved to England from the United States in 1979 to begin doctoral studies and have lived here ever since. In my 20s and even into my 30s, I thought Church Establishment to be frankly bizarre – who wouldn’t coming from abroad? But over the years, I have become a ‘critical convert’ to it. The day conference came about because whenever I heard a bishop on the radio defending establishment, I wanted to dis-establish it. Surely, there were more robust and creative ways to understand the public good of Establishment than the tired truisms that get trotted out. That is what we set out to do, though not all the contributors were of one mind on the subject.

    My own chapter looked at gender and Establishment. The research was prompted by an exchange in Synod in 2010, rather like the one I started with, between the new Second Church Estates Commissioner, Tony Baldry, MP and the then bishop of Durham, Tom Wright. Baldry, characteristically, gave Synod some nuanced and honest advice that the Commons would look dimly on a measure to consecrate women as bishops that was discriminatory – that is, that treated bishops who were women differently than bishops who were men. Tom Wright, in his last speech before resigning his see, attacked Baldry in the chamber, claiming that he had said (which Baldry had not) something like ‘the political winds were blowing this way, and so the church had better get in line’. With rhetorical flourish, Wright said: ‘The day the Church ceases to be able to say we must obey God rather than human authority will be the day it ceases to be the Church.’ His remarks were greeted by thunderous applause in the Synod chamber as it is a statement, on face value, pretty much impossible for any Christian to disagree with.

    As I said, this exchange was the motivation for my own chapter in the book. I had a sense, although I had never explored it in detail, that the creation of Provincial Episcopal Visitors (or ‘Flying Bishops’ as they have come to be known) was the result of pressure from the Ecclesiastical Committee of Parliament, as it was not part of the Synodical Measure that passed Synod in November 1992.

    Some of you, like me, will remember that momentous vote in 1992 in General Synod, approving the ordination of women to the priesthood.  The 1992 Measure certainly did not treat women priests equally with their male counterparts. It:

    • Exempted women clergy from any protection provided by the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act
    • Created Resolutions A and B ‘to protect’ parishes from women clergy
    • Explicitly excluded women from the episcopate
    • Guaranteed that no bishop would be ‘forced’ to ordain women
    • Provided financial provision to ‘compensate’ male clergy who felt they needed to leave the Church because of the ordination of women to the priesthood

    You might think that that was quite enough compromise and ‘protection’ for opponents.

    And you might also be thinking, there is no mention whatsoever here of Flying Bishops – an invention entirely without historical precedent to address an issue on which Anglicans were not of one mind. There is a very, very long list of things about which Anglicans are not of one mind, but never before has an episcopal sub-structure been created to meet the needs of a particular theological constituency.(1)  And what a dangerous precedent it set for dealing with disagreement as we now see attempts to apply the model to other theological disputes.

    Where did this theological and ecclesiological innovation come from? Well, Parliamentarians, I hate to tell you, it came from you. Hours spent on Hansard, which in 2010 had the slowest search engine I’d ever come across:  there it all was in the proceedings of the Ecclesiastical Committee, a committee of both Houses, whose job it is to decide whether a Synodical Measure is ‘expedient’ to go to the Commons and Lords for approval.

    A cross-party group of MPs, chiefly Frank Field, Simon Hughes, Patrick Cormack, and John Selwyn Gummer pushed for even greater concessions to those opposed to the ordination of women than were already in the Measure. In fact, the vast majority of time spent by the Ecclesiastical Committee in 1993 was on how to provide even more ‘safeguards’ for those opposed to women in the priesthood. Such involvement by Parliamentarians was entirely appropriate, as Frank Field maintained, as it was part of their:

    … function as parliamentarians … to protect the interests of constituents who may be adversely affected by a [Church] Measure …. we are quite rightly … much concerned with, and will no doubt spend much time on, how the position of minorities is protected.(2)

    Going back to this material recently to prepare this piece, I was struck by the extensive use by Parliamentarians in the early 1990s of ‘safeguarding’ language – that male clergy might somehow be ‘victims’ of some sort of ‘abuse’ merely by the existence of women clergy. It is very chilling language now in the light of the recent series of catastrophic and real safeguarding failures in the Church that are piling up. But in the early 1990s, while Bishop Peter Ball was committing terrible abuse, somehow it was women priests who were seen as the people from whom other Church members needed ‘safeguarding’.

    The bishops, I’m afraid, caved in to this Parliamentary pressure and these ‘threats’ and produced the Act of Synod of 1993, putting it in place for the Ecclesiastical Committee to deem it expedient for the Measure to go to Parliament for a vote in October and November 1993. The Measure passed handsomely – 10:1 in the Commons and 7:1 in the Lords – and several hours of parliamentary time was set aside for debate. Thanks to the Ecclesiastical Committee, even more ‘safeguarding’ was provided and the equality of women clergy even more eroded. Both Field and Hughes spoke in the debate in the House, proudly outlining how the Ecclesiastical Committee had been key in the creation of Flying Bishops.

    I have time to touch only briefly on women in the episcopate, but we can see significant culture change from the early 1990s to the early 2000s. MPs used Early Day Motions from the early 2000s onwards to raise the question, with increasing impatience, of when the country can expect the Established Church to have women bishops. In their remarks, MPs often praised the public good provided by the Church’s parochial system and the women priests who were serving the wider community through it.

    Reflecting on this history challenges any notion that Parliamentarians taking an interest in the affairs of the Established Church is in anyway improper or unusual in the modern era. In the early 1990s, Parliamentarians ensured there was even more discriminatory provision against women priests and gave us Flying Bishops. By the early 2000s, MPs were repeatedly raising questions about the exclusion of women from the episcopate of the Established Church. You will remember the outcry in the Commons when the Measure narrowly failed to achieve a two-thirds majority in the House of Laity in 2012.   As the Church of England obsesses with its narrative of decline and lack of relevance, it is ironic that when the members of the public legislature of the country actually take an interest in the Church because they believe it to matter, such interest is perceived as ‘interference’ and ‘threatening’. In a way, I agree with Frank Field when he said it was their function as Parliamentarians:  ‘… to protect the interests of constituents who may be adversely affected by a [Church] Measure’.(3)

    In 1993, the ‘interests of constituents’ were understood to mean providing yet more discriminatory measures against women. In the past 20 years or so, the attention of MPs to ‘the interests of [their] constituents’ is about promoting equality in the way the Established Church orders its life and serves the wider community. The modern relationship of Parliament and the Church of England is more complicated than accusations of ‘threatening’ behaviour support.

    Notes
    (1) See Judith Maltby, ‘One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, but Two Integrities?’ in Monica Furlong, ed, Act of Synod or Act of Folly?: Episcopal Ministry Act of Synod 1993 (SCM Press, 1998).
    (2) Reports of the Ecclesiastical Committee, p. 64 (19 April 1993).
    (3) Reports of the Ecclesiastical Committee, p. 64 (19 April 1993).
    Further reading
    Judith Maltby, ‘Gender and Establishment:  Parliament, “Erastianism” and the Ordination of Women 1993-2010’ in Mark Chapman, Judith Maltby & William Whyte, eds, The Established Church:  Past, Present and Future (T&T Clark, 2011).

  • Conscientious Objection

    Questions of Conscience (5)

    by Rachel Muers, Professor of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the Society of Friends (Quakers)

    The annual International Conscientious Objectors’ Day commemorates and supports those who refuse compulsory military service. Objection to military service is the modern paradigm for ‘conscientious objection’. Indeed, conscientious objection may be equated with pacifism, so that the argument about whether conscientious objection is justified shades into the debate about whether war can be justified.

    Historically, however, the question of conscientious objection is not about a specific ethical issue, but rather about the deeper question of the relationship between an individual’s convictions and the state’s requirements. The starting point for conscientious objection is saying no to a specific demand, but it points to a wider conviction – that a person cannot hand over her responsibility for moral or religious judgement to an external authority. Objection to military service is a paradigm for conscientious objection, not just because pacifism is a well-established ‘minority report’ in Christian ethics – but also because military service requires one to place oneself fully at the disposal of the state. It is not a coincidence that objection to swearing oaths, particularly oaths of allegiance, is another major context in which conscientious objection arises. An oath of allegiance, after all, is also a ‘giving over’ of oneself to authority – and though the main objection to it from the earliest conscientious objectors mainly arose from Christ’s command not to swear, there was also a deep and frequently-expressed concern that oaths of allegiance were linked to political and religious violence.

    In English law, conscientious objection arises initially in the confrontation between nonconformists – including, but not only, members of what became the ‘historic peace churches’, such as Quakers – and a state anxious to secure the loyalty of its subjects. From the seventeenth century onwards, we see a long and often tortuous process of negotiation around the provisions the state was able or willing to make to legalise conscientious objection. This was a negotiation not just about what constitutes an acceptable range of opinions, but more fundamentally about what it takes to be recognised as a full member of the national community.

    For example, the specific words ‘conscientious objection’ first appear in English law in the title of an 1838 Act, designed to allow Quakers and Moravians to take up elected local offices without swearing the prescribed oaths. The preamble to the Act refers to the ‘conscientious scruples’ of members of these groups – a puzzling eccentricity, obstinately maintained by minority communities. The problem is that these scruples, when they come up against the law, have effects ‘to the manifest detriment of themselves and their fellow subjects’ – and the Quakers and Moravians will accept that detriment rather than swear an oath. Fortunately, in this case to accommodate them will cause ‘no mischief or inconvenience’, so an alternative process is found, and the wheels of local government continue to turn.

    Notice here that from both sides, the nonconformists and the state, conscientious objection was framed in terms of community membership and religious identity. It was Quakers and Moravians, and elsewhere Separatists and other named groups, who, collectively, maintained and were identified with the conscientious objection. What looked like eccentric ‘scruples’ when they cropped up in isolation – refusing to swear an oath in order to take up the post you were elected to – were recognised as belonging to part of a coherent religious framework and a way of life.

    This points to a wider meaning of conscientious objection, at least as it was framed by early objecting communities. Conscientious objection was not just about refusing a constraint or being in charge of one’s own destiny; it was about being free for and in the service of Christ. The objector’s refusal – I will not obey the state – was grounded in an affirmation – I will follow the call of Christ.

    Does this make the conscientious objector more or less difficult to deal with than the common-or-garden objector, the person who simply finds the provisions of the law inconvenient? On the one hand, we might think that it makes the conscientious objector impervious to reason. If she thinks she is obeying a higher law, a calling from God that is at odds with what most other people (including most other Christians) perceive, she will never be persuaded that she is wrong. Our only options will be either to accommodate her scruples, if accommodation doesn’t cause too much ‘mischief or inconvenience’, or to exclude her, if it does.

    The Quaker social scientist Constance Braithwaite, however, offers another perspective on the religious conscientious objector and her faith. For Braithwaite, conscientious objection is both ‘a reminder to all governments and parliaments that they are not infallible’ and an affirmation that a person ‘must act according to [their] own conscience, even though it is fallible [my emphasis]’. Put in a religious context, conscientious objection is thus a way of saying that both the state authorities and the individual objector are open to divine judgement. The objector claims freedom to seek and follow the leadings of God – which might require her to change, or admit that she was wrong – and in doing so, she reminds the powers that be that they might have to change, or admit that they were wrong. Another way to read conscientious objection, then, is that it holds open a space for future change beyond what we can currently imagine as part of the conversation – just as those engaged in the tortuous negotiations of earlier centuries could not imagine a future in which nobody was forced to swear an oath.

     

     

  • Equal Marriage – 1928 Style

    Revd Canon Dr Judith Maltby is Chaplain, Fellow and Dean of Welfare of Corpus Christi College, Reader in Church History in the University of Oxford, and a member of the General Synod of the Church of England.

    One of the things that struck me forcibly during the February 2023 debate on Living in Love and Faith at General Synod was the repeated reference to the ‘doctrine of marriage’, as though this was a constant and fixed set of ideas throughout time. In the debate, only Revd Dr Miranda Threlfall-Holmes challenged this assumption.[1]  Another striking theme, for the more punitively minded, was how bishops might be disciplined for their apparent departure from orthodoxy.

    All this was a response to the modest proposals brought to Synod by the House of Bishops, proposals emerging out of the six-year long Living in Love and Faith process. The bishops maintain that their proposals do not alter the ‘doctrine of marriage’. Marriage remains, in the words of canon B30, ‘a union permanent and lifelong, for better for worse, till death them do part, of one man with one woman’. (Elephant in the Room Warning: except when it isn’t ‘permanent and lifelong’ – but we are steadfastly refusing to talk about that.) Opponents, however, challenge this claim from the bishops.

    I found myself feeling a bit sorry for the bishops as a group: from my ten years on the Crown Nominations Commission, I know the great emphasis we as a Church place on ‘Leadership’. Yet when bishops exercise even a smidgen, all hell breaks loose. Do we want our chief pastors to develop their thinking based on theological reflection and pastoral encounter and then exercise some ‘Leadership’ about it, or not?

    As with most things, we’ve been here before.

    Edward Lee Hicks (1843-1919) was Bishop of Lincoln from 1910 to his death in 1919. He is not a well-known figure in Anglican history. Hicks had the misfortune to follow Bishop Edward King – a figure of such devotion in certain traditions of the Church of England that he has a day in the calendar (8 March). In addition to his legendary pastoral devotion to his diocese, especially to the rural poor, King may have been the first Church of England bishop openly to wear a mitre since the Reformation  – yes, a mitre! – a pretty commonplace practice now even amongst some of the most evangelical on the episcopal bench,  such as the Bishop of Lancaster and the former Bishop of Blackburn. In the late nineteenth century, however, wearing a mitre was a Massive Thing, and at the instigation of the Church Association (an ancestor of the Church Society), King was prosecuted for all manner of now-unexceptional Anglican liturgical practices, such as lighting candles in daylight and making the sign of the cross at the blessing. The statue honouring King in Lincoln Cathedral celebrates his transgressive liturgical behaviour rather gleefully.

    Hicks was also transgressive in his thinking but about something – and here I speak as a good High Church woman – considerably more important than tat. He was a member of the Commission in the early twentieth century revising the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which in the end became the 1928 ‘deposited’ Prayer Book. Parliament, as readers of this blog no doubt know, refused to approve the book, causing a Church/State crisis that was still talked about in wounded tones when I arrived in England as a graduate student in 1979. Nonetheless, from the late 1920s onwards, the revised book was probably used more in the public worship of the Established Church than the 1662, in an impressive collective act of episcopally-sanctioned grassroots passive resistance throughout the Church of England.

    Hicks was committed to equality for women and in 1912 became president of the Church League for Women’s Suffrage, a group working to put laywomen on the same footing as laymen in Church councils. Over many years on the Commission to revise the Book of Common Prayer he worked to have the word ‘obey’ removed from the marriage service and replaced with equal vows for the couple – as Common Worship does. He argued further for the use of 1 Corinthians 13 at weddings in place of Ephesians 5 to avoid any suggestion that the wife is not her husband’s equal. An unscientific sample (that is, my own 30+ years of officiating at marriages – oops – Holy Matrimony[2]), 1 Corinthians 13 is very popular – I’ve never had a request for Ephesians 5. In the end, Hicks got his reform – his change in the ‘doctrine of marriage’ – with the option to have equal vows included in the 1928 Prayer Book provision. Needless to say, no woman would be forced not to vow to obey.  I hope that the irony of that last sentence is not lost on anyone.

    Change, as we are seeing with LLF, is incremental in the life of the Church. The 1928 Prayer Book made no provision for the exchange of two rings – another liturgical expression of the equality of the couple and included the ‘giving away’ of the bride – both changes in Common Worship. I have spent some time trying to track down when two rings become the norm in England but have failed – there is a Master’s thesis topic waiting for someone! Despite neither the English or American 1928 Prayer Books making provision for it, the doyen of mid-twentieth century Anglican liturgists, Massey Shepherd, suggested that exchanging two rings was becoming ‘frequent’ in the American Episcopal Church in the 1950s.[3]

    Nothing exists in a vacuum, and it is important to place the ‘obey’ debate of the 1910-20s in its historic context alongside not only women’s wider political and educational rights, but their inclusion in new Church governance structures, such as Parochial Church Councils and the forerunner of the General Synod, the Church Assembly. Laywomen were excluded from these new bodies. The opponents to equal vows did not use the language of complementarianism but that of good old-fashioned inequality and subordinationism. In the first decades of the twentieth-century, vocal opposition to equal vows came largely from the Anglo-Catholic quarter, based on a clear assumption of the inequality of the sexes. Athelstan Riley told the Church’s National Assembly in 1930 that:

    … in 1923 when the cry of equality between the sexes was at its height, a short measure was pressed putting husband and wife on an equal footing – a cruel and wicked act. There was and could be no equality in matters of sexual morality between men and women. It had pleased God to create a profound inequality; in temptation, in the results of sin to the individual [pregnancy out of wedlock?] … and eventually to society at large.[4]

    It is good to be reminded what a new kid on the block complementarianism is in the gender debates.

    Overshadowed by King, Hicks deserves to be better known. Most importantly for our current discussions of LGBT+ inclusion, the beginning of his theological change on the ‘doctrine of marriage’ had been brought about, in the best Anglican way, by pastoral encounter:  a young couple, whose marriage he was to solemnize, requested the omission of ‘obey’ and that the bride not be ‘given away’ by her father. Hicks’ diary records his puzzlement at the request, but it clearly started him thinking. The year, dear reader, was 1914.[5]

    In the early 20th century, an Anglican bishop was promoting the view that marriage – or Holy Matrimony as we now apparently must call it – was a union of equals and he managed to move the needle in terms of the Church’s expression of doctrine in its public liturgy. How many members of the General Synod realize what a departure from the 1662 Prayer Book’s ‘doctrine of marriage’, equal vows, not being ‘given away’, and the exchange of two rings, expresses? Heaven forbid, that pastoral encounter should be divorced (I choose that word deliberately) from the shaping of doctrine and pastoral practice.

    References:
    [1] General Synod 9 Feb 2023 (at c 3.22).
    [2] The House of Bishops’ paper on LLF, GS2289, argues that the civil understanding of marriage has departed from the Church’s for the first time by Parliament’s introduction of equal marriage in 2013. This is a remarkable statement, given the bishops’ statement that ‘Holy Matrimony is between one man and one woman for life’ and the fact that British people have been able to divorce and re-marry multiple times for decades (see p. 10).
    [3] Massey Hamilton Shepherd, The Oxford American Prayer Book Commentary (OUP, 1955), pp. 301-303.
    [4] Cited in Timothy Willem Jones, ‘Love, Honour and Obey?  Romance, Subordination and Marital Subjectivity in Interwar Britain’ in A. Harris and T. Jones, eds, Love and Romance in Britain, 1915-1970 (Palgrave, 2014), p. 130; an exceptionally good article on the ‘obey’ question in the Church of England. Jones notes that several interwar clergymen reported not using asymmetrical vows before the introduction of the alternative service (p. 128). See also his splendid book, Sexual Politics in the Church of England 1857-1957 (Oxford, 2013).
    [5] See The Diaries of Edward Lee Hicks, Bishop of Lincoln 1910-1919 (Lincoln Record Society, 82, 1993), p. 89 and Graham Neville, Radical Churchman:  Edward Lee Hicks and the New Liberalism (Oxford, 1998), p. 169.