Secular Thought for the Day

I was baptised into the Church of England, as was fairly common practice in the first half of the last century, but my active churchgoing ended at about age 6 when I threw a tantrum to avoid going to Sunday School. The parish church was anglo-catholic and as far as I can remember my main problem was with 'genuflecting'. Looking back, I suspect I found it embarrassingly theatrical, although I wouldn't have been able to find such words at the time. Also vaguely disturbing was the promise that when I was a little older I would be able to go into the confessional box and confess my sins. Up to then I think I hadn't done much sinning. I probably just thought I had better get out while I could.

Brief though my period of church-going was, I believe it instilled in me an appreciation of church architecture. The parish church was (still is) a red-brick Victorian building, now Grade 1 listed, with the richly decorative interior characteristic of its times. Sitting on a hard chair in the north aisle, bored with the drone of the curate my eyes would wander over the ornate furnishings and columns and, flinching from the gory crucifix, come to rest on the stained glass. Years later, some time after my artistic tastes had homed in on Burne-Jones as a Victorian favourite, I discovered that the windows of the church were designed by him.

So, I have no particular ill-feeling towards my early religious experiences, and over the years have become quite fond of the Church of England mainly in its role as a benign custodian of much of England's cultural heritage of architecture, music and the decorative arts. Of course, as an atheist, I have never done anything to support the church and in this I am evidently not in a minority. Churchgoing statistics show that an overwhelming proportion of the population are content to live out their lives without religious faith or, at least, organised religious worship. City churches lie abandoned and threatened with demolition and I strongly suspect that if the anglican church had not been so uniquely entwined with our unwritten constitution it would long ago also have been consigned to the inconsequential sidelines of national life. But it anoints the monarch that is also its titular head, sends its Bishops to the House of Lords and I have no doubt sends its representatives to serve on Govenment quangos where for reasons that escape me it is credited with special moral authority to offer advice.

This system obviously made some kind of sense when we were nearly all Christians or dissenters (who could be ignored) but we are now a much more diverse nation. How can the Church of England continue to justify its unique position in the years ahead as its congregations fall to near zero and the population divides between the atheist or religiously apathetic on one side and various militant religions on the other?

But if the Church of England disestablishes what will fill the vacuum it leaves? Will we discover too late that it was not the Church of England itself that was important but the influence it denied to anyone else? Is anyone producing a master-plan for how we manage without the Church of England: for how we can avoid undue influence of vociferous minorities on our ethical and democratic values: for the maintenance and preservation of redundant historic churches and cathedrals? I fear not.