Essay
Comment
Penitence
9 min read

A present focus on future change should trump paying penitence

Reparations are in fashion for compensating for the past argues John Milbank, asking whether taking a stance about the past is more important than achieving an outcome in the present.

John Milbank is a theologian, philosopher and poet. A co-founder of the Radical Orthodoxy movement, he is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Nottingham.

An accounting entry in copperplate writing.
Entry in Queen Anne’s Bounty Accounts showing money received from the executors of Edward Colston.

Reparations are in the news these days. Poland is demanding $1.3trillion from Germany for the destruction to their country by the Nazi’s invasion 84 years ago. The Mayor of New York City Mayor is advocating reparations payouts as a solution to the wealth gap between blacks and whites in the city, and Caribbean countries are considering approaching the United Nation international court of justice for legal advice about reparations for slavery. 

In line with this trend, the Church of England intends to spend £100m on reparations for its past involvement in slavery.  

As many have already pointed out, the receipt of any money from slavery profiteering was minimal and marginal at best, such that the rationale given for this intention involves a strange exaggeration of its own past faults.  

The problem with this is that it implies a kind of boasting about its sins, which is itself a mode of sin, all too akin to the agreeable shudders produced when a supposedly repentant sinner details his past wrong doings before the altar. The greater the lapse, the greater the grace, in a kind of gross liberal parody of an already gross exaggeration of a more authentic Protestant legacy.  

Why should the Church seek to do this? The answer surely is nothing to do with its reckoning with its own past shortcomings. It is rather the same old courting of middle-class respectability that has always afflicted Anglicanism at its worse, despite entirely opposite tendencies of which it can be proud. Reparations are fashionable in middle class circles and the Church wants to be in on the act. One should not mistake this for radicalism, nor for real repentance. If the West was really sorry for what it has done wrong in the past, it would not pretend that this wrong was not mixed up with a lot of good (in the case of overseas empires for example) but would seek in the present to act in an entirely different way: to abandon economic and ecological exploitation of the rest of the world in the present, and to seek to act always in a globally collaborative manner.  

Rather than seeking to change the present, it is far easier to continue to condemn the past, which cannot seriously be undone. 

The reasons it does not do so concern not only its continued commitment to an unqualified capitalism, but also and more subtly the truth that if we seriously wished to act positively and helpfully, we would have to resume some of our past paternalistic concern in a new idiom, that would no doubt prove unacceptable to a now liberal-dominated left. Increasingly, respectable liberal opinion cares far more about formal stances than about actual beneficent outcomes.  

Rather than seeking to change the present, it is far easier to continue to condemn the past, which cannot seriously be undone. Financial compensation is itself a substitute for any real change of heart. For if we really regretted past exploitation, we would not continue to sustain it in a less involved and more purely economic, and therefore worse form today.  

Furthermore, to imagine that one can set a price on damaged heads is only to repeat the quantification and monetarisation of humanity that was the logic of slavery in the first place. The fact that so many non-white people nonetheless back the call for reparations is only a sad proof that they are covertly locked into a capitalist logic and a liberal-rights thinking that tends to tilt over into the unchristian (despite Nietzsche) ethics of ressentiment.  

Rather, one should say that our involvement in the Atlantic slave trade was so bad that nothing can offset it, save the sacrificial blood of Christ (recalling that he was betrayed for money) and our sharing in this atoning action through repentance and compensatory, embodied action in the present.  

So why on earth would the Church of William Wilberforce and Trevor Huddleston feel that it needs to regret its supposed slave owning and racist past? 

This was initially and most of all demanded and carried out by Anglicans of a usually High Tory persuasion, and though we should not forget some enlightenment opposition to slavery, which sometimes inspired the revolt of slaves themselves, it is an illusion not to consider this to be also Christian or at least post-Christian. After all, pagan republicans were not just at ease with slavery, they built their entire republican systems upon it. To a degree the United States tried at first to repeat that, till eventually a radical Christian vision (taking it beyond the qualified Biblical acceptance of slavery) won out in that country also, though it lagged in this respect behind Britain and the Anglican Church. 

So why on earth would the Church of William Wilberforce and Trevor Huddleston feel that it needs to regret its supposed slave owning and racist past?  

One might say that it is more important to feel shame and regret than to boast. But to celebrate one’s past saints is not to boast of oneself, but to accord honour where honour is due and to raise up admirable examples for admiration and imitation. To be human and to be creative in the image of God is continuously to praise as well as to blame, as the Anglican poet Geoffrey Hill frequently argued.  

Moreover, if we only follow fashion in our blaming, which is also important, then we will tend to miss the more hidden and subtle culpable targets. Uncovering the latter is surely especially incumbent upon anyone claiming to follow Christ, who constantly located sin where it was unsuspected and inversely found hidden if suppressed virtue to be present amongst those publicly deemed to be sinners.  

In reality our coming to see the Good is always the work of time and is always revisable. 

But in the case of both praise and blame what matters most is to take the drama of past history as instructive: not to claim that we can finally undo its past injustices as past. This is blasphemously to appropriate the prerogatives of God at the last judgement and to newly extend the false logic of sacramental indulgences.  

For a kind of unspoken presentism lurks behind the reparations mentality. The assumption is that we all really live in an ahistorical eternity within time, such that if we were always thinking rightly we would always see, in any time or place, the truth of current liberal nostra, despite the fact that they are themselves incessantly changing, for example with respect to gender and sexuality.  

In reality our coming to see the Good is always the work of time and is always revisable. What the Greeks and Romans regarded as acceptable treatment of ‘barbarians’, women and slaves we can now see to be horrendous, and we are right to do so. And yet it would be a mistake to suppose that classical nobility was a self-delusion: by their own lights people in antiquity acted virtuously and in certain ways which we can still recognise today, with regard to fortitude, magnanimity, forbearance and so forth. We can also allow that they developed acceptable notions of virtue in general, even if they filled them with often highly questionable content. 

In the case of the Bible, the notion that ethical insight changes with time is still more foregrounded than with the pagans. It is a record not just of backsliding, but of constantly new prophetic and visionary insights, culminating in the drastic New Testament revisions of what is ethically demanded of us all the time, even if this is often cast as return to lost origins.  Yet despite this, the forefathers continued to be praised as well as blamed, celebrated as well as condemned, even in the New Testament. 

In the case of both pagan and Jewish antiquity it was realised that even if we can claim to have surpassed our predecessors in insight, our new insights still depend upon their earlier ones, such that we stand upon the shoulders of giants.  

We have then no warrant to condemn people in the past who were good by their lights of their times, including benefactors like Edward Colston of Bristol who were also slave traders, and whose statues should therefore be left to stand. They were perversely blinkered indeed, but they lived in a blinkered age. It is pointless to blame them and more important to praise the rare visionaries who were able to think beyond this. One may say well ‘everyone could have seen the point if some did’ but this is to ignore the truth that most of us usually find such people awkward and that they have not always thought through an alternative way forward. After all, a failure of Northern abolitionists adequately to do that was in part responsible for the continued pervasive misery of African Americans through many decades and continuing today, after the American civil war.  

Everything in time and space is infinitely ramified and ramifying. Absolutely everything is contaminated and yet the bad is interwoven with the good. 

Another problem with reparations is, of course, the problems of identifications and the selectivity involved.  

Just who are the current descendants of slaves and the continued legatees of disadvantage thereby accrued? All African Americans, of every class, despite much intermarriage? All the inhabitants of the Caribbean, again despite social hierarchies? African countries, despite past African complicity in, and indeed originating of, specifically modern slavery?  

And then why only certain selected ethnicities? To focus on only black people looks candidly like supporting a will to power and a reverse anti-white racism. What about all women, and all gay people so mistreated in the past? What about the working classes in Britain whose children were sent down mines and up chimneys under conditions of dependence little better in practice than outright slavery? Are they deserving of compensation? After all, their ancestors are often readily identifiable by both family and region. 

So wherever would one stop? Should Anglo-Saxons demand at last justice from the conquering Normans, since these different ethnic legacies are still somewhat identifiable by class, as anyone suddenly summonsed into the arcanum of old county money lurking within guarded private estates with unimaginably huge old trees, will readily testify.  

Everything in time and space is infinitely ramified and ramifying. Absolutely everything is contaminated and yet the bad is interwoven with the good. If we start to try to break with all of the bad through a sort of Maoist cultural revolution (in relation to the British imperial past, for example) then we will end up losing the fruits and flowers as well as the tares and political terror will ensure that even only the most privileged weeds survive such a purge.  

So, the Church of England needs to stop following fashion and lose its current obsessions with reparations, diversity, excessive safeguarding and all the rest of it. Instead, it needs to recover its genuine legacy of paradoxically conservative radicalism, nurtured at once by evangelicals and ‘liberal Catholics’, by radical Tories and Christian socialists. It is just this which can truly challenge the economically and culturally individualistic times in which we live, to the ruin of us all.  

At home it needs first to set an example in its own backyard, by entirely reversing the current policy of parish destruction, which all the evidence now shows is partly responsible for Christian decline in this country and entirely cripples Anglican mission in all its dimensions. The more that the Church returns to a policy of putting sophisticatedly trained clergy in socially prominent and capacious parsonages (enabling hospitality discussion) within single or very small groups of parishes, then the more it can start directly to nurture rooted and genuinely inclusive communities, socially responsible enterprises and integrated local ecologies, beginning with churchyards. 

This is where the church’s money should be spent: on substantial nurture, not questionable and futile gestures.   

On the global scale, Anglicans need to turn from a presentist abolition of the past to a future-orientated preoccupation with the present.  If our current way of living is everywhere destroying the planet, promoting ever more inequality and inhibiting human health and intellectual capacity, then surely the question to be posed is whether this is the result of abandoning past spiritual priorities?  

Instead of mounting the liberal bandwagon of futile and counter-productive virtue-signalling, the Church of England should ask what an alternative ‘psychic politics’ based on a mixture of genuine hierarchy and participation would look like, and turn its energies towards supporting those already seeking to enact this. 

Essay
Comment
Identity
Nationalism
Politics
15 min read

Could a constitution capture the essence of Englishness?

A proposal for St George’s Day.
A St George's Cross flag flutters on a tower.
St Helen's Church, Welton, Yorkshire.
Different Resonance on Unsplash.

Somewhere behind the concrete-and-glass façade of modern official Britain, one can still find some traces of England: folklore and folk music, country customs and local traditions – wassailing, maypoles, cheese rolling and bounds beating – that neither brutal 19th century industrialisation nor callous 20th century deindustrialisation could completely erase.  

This idealised ‘Quaintshire England’ lurks somewhere in the psycho-geographic triangle formed by Anthony Trollope’s Barchester, Thomas Hardy’s Casterbridge and Geraldine Granger’s Dibley. It is always indeterminately, reassuringly, old. It has a lot of past, but not much future. Yet its traditions are neither stagnant nor dying. Take, for example, the recognition of St George’s Day. Once upon a time, and not so very long ago, St George’s Day came and went with hardly anyone noticing. It was relegated to handful of nasty, shaven-headed, right-wing cranks. Now St George’s Day is marked by respectable newspapers and by the media classes, through the annual ritual of the Great Debate About Englishness.  

For those not familiar, the Great Debate About Englishness takes the form of a stylised conflict between two sides: the Guardians and the Telegraphs. The Guardians start, with a stick-knocking assault on Saint George and all his works: he was Turkish (or, better still, Palestinian); he never visited England (which is just as well, because, as they are eager to insist, England does not really exist anyway, and if it did it would be hopelessly white and racist). Then the Telegraphs move forward, with Scruton bells on their toes, to lament the fact that we no longer celebrate St George, and how all the ills of the world are the fault of the kind of people who say ‘Mumbai’ when they mean ‘Bombay’. At this, the Guardians caper forth, wielding Billy Bragg quotes about ‘progressive Englishness’ in an intricate manoeuvre known to afficionados as a ‘Full Toynbee’. This done, the Guardians retreat before the onslaught of the Telegraphs, who counter-attack with the clincher than English is an ethnic marker, which necessarily excludes anyone whose ancestors were swarthier than a Flemish Huguenot. So concludes the ritual, which is then forgotten about until the following year. 

England, becoming everything, has thereby become nothing. It is the only nation in the United Kingdom without a political life of its own. 

These cathartic ritual confrontations rarely acknowledge that debating the nature of Englishness is itself a symptom of the English nation’s statelessness. Like Kashmiris, Kurds and Uyghurs, the English must debate the nature of their existence because England is – to borrow the term used by Austrian Chancellor Metternich to refer to pre-unification Italy – ‘a geographical expression’.  

The institutions, symbols, and icons of political identity are all British. Despite its historical position at the core of the Union and the Empire, England remains a curiously under-developed nation in constitutional terms. It has almost no formal recognition as a national community. Indeed, England’s dominance over the United Kingdom has had the paradoxical effect of denying England – as England ­– a voice in its own affairs. England, becoming everything, has thereby become nothing. It is the only nation in the United Kingdom without a political life of its own. There is no English Government, nor English Parliament. Even the banal markers of national identity that people might have in their pockets, like coins, stamps, and passport, are British, not English. The absence of such markers means that English identity has high barriers to entry. In other words, we obsess about the ethnic and cultural boundaries of Englishness, because there is no English civic, legal, or political community – let us call it a ‘constitutional community’ – of which one can be a member as a matter of legal right.  

Such a ‘constitutional community’ could take two forms. It might take the form of an independent England, re-founded as a nation-state after Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have freely gone their separate ways. Alternatively, given the need for collective defence and international clout in a dangerous world, it could take the form of an England which remains one of four constituent states in a voluntary, equal, confederal Union.  

Either way, an English constitution, understood as a codified supreme and fundamental law, should establish political institutions of England’s own: an English Parliament, an English government, an English judiciary, and an English civil service. Only by this constitutional means can England, now that the British Empire is no more, become a normal nation, make peace with itself, and re-find its place in Europe and the world.  

In part, this is a matter of good government. As the great post-war Commonwealth constitutional scholar Sir Ivor Jennings famously put it, ‘A Constitution is but a means to an end, and the end is good government.’ An English constitution would enable the renewal of a system of government that has become too centralised, too top heavy, and long overdue for reform. It would clarify the rules of political life where these have become contested, reinforce the boundaries of power where these boundaries have been pushed to breaking point, and restate the principles of public ethics which have been neglected. It would protect democratic institutions and norms from erosion by unscrupulous authoritarian populists.  

A list of priorities for consideration in an English constitution, enjoying support across the broad centre of the political spectrum, might include devolution to English cities and counties, electoral reform, reform of the Lords, codification of parliamentary conventions to limit the abuse of Crown Prerogatives, strengthening of the civil service and rebuilding of lost state capacity, restoring standards in public life, and better protection of civil liberties.  

If you are reading this in England...  you are probably not very far away from a place where old stones echo with the words and songs, the faith and the prayers, that have held the English nation together. 

Yet constitutions are more than dull, dry, legal charters of government. They are also national covenants. They set out a vision of who we are, who we want to be, what we stand for, and what we will not stand for. Aside from all the mechanical, institutional, provisions one expects to find in a written constitution, constitutions also contain what we might call metaphysical provisions: those that bear the identity, and bare the soul, of the nation. An English constitution would help to anchor English identity in the midst of changing times. 

While the mechanical constitution is in need of reform, England’s ‘metaphysical constitution’ is not so lightly to be tinkered with. It represents a mystical union of past, present and future, embodying an idea of English nationhood – and English statehood – stretching back to Anglo-Saxon times. At the heart of this metaphysical constitution is the ideal of Christian monarchy, institutionalised through constitutional relationships between the church, state, Crown and nation.  

While the institutional structures of the mechanical constitution are British – and essentially imperial, rather than national, in character – the metaphysical constitution has remained steadfastly English. The Church of England is the only major all-England public institution. The General Synod, which has power to enact Measures having the force of law in England in relation to ecclesiastical matters, is the only England-wide legislative body. England (not Britain, nor the United Kingdom, nor the British Empire, but something older and deeper) can most readily be found in its great cathedrals: Salisbury, Norwich, Wells, Lincoln, Ely, Gloucester, Hereford, Durham. It can be found, too, in the abundance of ancient village parish churches with hand-tapestried hassocks, musty smells, memorial plaques and an almost tangible presence of congregants gone by. England is etched in the moss and lichen of their old gravestones. It is haunted by the Ghosts of England Past, speaking the words of the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible. If you listen carefully, you can hear them. If you are reading this in England, even in the midst of a busy city, you are probably not very far away from a place where old stones echo with the words and songs, the faith and the prayers, that have held the English nation together over the centuries. 

Confusion arises, however, from the failure to distinguish between the mechanical and the metaphysical aspects of constitutions. 

That heritage is valued not only by Christians, but also by those who are not believing or practising Christians, but who are pleased to belong to a culture that has been shaped by Christianity. Cutting the Church totally loose from the state, by disestablishment, would abandon custody of this cultural and social heritage to a merely private organisation, having no public recognition, patronage, or connection to the national community. That would be a particularly savage form of cultural privatisation. 

England’s metaphysical constitution is mostly buried beneath the accumulation of ages. If you are good with the constitutional trowel, however, and know where to dig, it is not hard to unearth it. Sometimes it even pokes above ground, as easily seen as the billowy bench of bishops in the House of Lords. The topsoil of modernity is dramatically stripped away at the coronation, when the king swears not only to govern ‘according to the statutes in Parliament agreed on and the Laws and Customs of the same’, and to ‘cause law and justice in mercy to be executed in all [his] judgments’, but also to ‘maintain the laws of God, the true profession of the gospel, and the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law’. The King’s covenant with God and the nation is outwardly and visibly signified when, at the climax of the ceremony, he is anointed, by the Archbishop of Canterbury, with holy oil.  

Thus, the descendants, according to the flesh, of Anglo-Saxon kings, become at their coronation the descendants, according to the spirit, of David and Solomon. The birth of this metaphysical constitution can be traced to the baptism of King Aethelbert, the first Anglo-Saxon king to become Christian. As Bijan Omrani notes, in God is an Englishman, this act transformed the nature and expectations of English kingship, from pagan warlordism to a holy kingly office, responsible under God for bringing God’s peace and justice to England.  

All this is very strange, and easy to mock. To paraphrase a famous scene in Monty Python’s ‘Holy Grail’, ‘supreme executive power derives from the confidence of the House of Commons, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony’. From a purely mechanical point of view, that is of course quite right. As Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution said of Sir Robert Walpole, the first modern Prime Minister, ‘he ruled England because he ruled that House’. Confusion arises, however, from the failure to distinguish between the mechanical and the metaphysical aspects of constitutions. Many constitutional conservatives, eager to uphold the metaphysical constitution of England’s Christian monarchy, set their face against even moderate and beneficial reforms to the mechanical constitution. On the other hand, many constitutional reformers, eager to mend the broken mechanical constitution, would pave over the metaphysical constitution with all the misplaced zeal of a solar farm company. 

The established church is a particular target of the reformers’ wrath, evidenced most recently by a proposed amendment to the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill, seeking to remove bishops from the upper House. According to Lord Birt, former Director-General of the BBC, ‘Embedding the Church of England in our legislature is an indefensible, undemocratic anomaly.’ There are only two countries in the world, so we are informed, where clerics sit of right as legislators: the United Kingdom and Iran. The clear implication is that this connection puts the United Kingdom in bad company, as if having a couple of dozen bishops in the House of Lords were comparable to the rule of Ayatollahs. 

Incidentally, remarkably incurious of comparative practice, the people who say this always forget about Belize: a relatively stable and well-functioning Westminster Model democracy, whose tiny upper House includes a Senator nominated by the Belize Council of Churches and Evangelical Association of Churches. They also forget about tiny Tuvalu, a democratic Commonwealth Realm in the South Pacific, where the established church was planted by the London Missionary Society. Perhaps these examples do not fit the narrative that insists that church establishment must inherently be regressive and anti-democratic. 

To those of us who must live also in the here-and-now, not only as Christians but also as citizens of a particular nation and polity, it all looks very bleak.

Even without deliberate abolition, we must nevertheless admit that the metaphysical constitution of England, no less than the material constitution, is in crisis. The most recent census showed that, for the first time since the conversion of Anglo-Saxon England, Christians are now a nominal minority. Of course, the invisible church of born-again Spirit-filled believers was probably always a minority of the population, in England as in any nation. Nevertheless, from the Early Middle Ages until just a few generations ago, nominal Christianity was the norm, and Christian ideas held sway over the narratives, ethics, and assumptions of English society. Not everyone conformed to a model of Christian holiness and goodness – far from it – but there was a common view, shaped by the pervasive cultural, social, and educational influence of Christianity, of what holiness and goodness looked like

That Christian consensus is what has been lost in the social and demographic change – some might call it, a cultural revolution – since the 1960s. The Church of England is still doing excellent work in parishes up and down the land, multiplying the loaves and fishes of its limited resources to provide everything from foodbanks and debt advisory services to parent-toddler groups and pensioners’ clubs, filling the social gap that a failing state no longer even tries to fill. Yet, numerically, the Church of England – except in a few bright pockets of revival – is in free-fall. In the lands of St Ethelbert, St Edmund, and St Cuthbert, empty church buildings have been turned into private houses, gyms, carpet warehouses, soft play centres, mosques, pubs and nightclubs. Looking at things through a spiritual rather than natural lens, we should not be discouraged. We can of course have confidence that the risen King has triumphed, is triumphing, and will ultimately triumph – reconciling all things to the Father, and restoring the whole cosmos to glory. Nevertheless, to those of us who must live also in the here-and-now, not only as Christians but also as citizens of a particular nation and polity, it all looks very bleak. It is a spiritual trial, but a civilisational tragedy. 

Christianity – in particular in the form of mainline Protestantism - has provided the moral, ethical, sociological and institutional props on which constitutional democracy in the Anglosphere was built. Remove those props, and the whole edifice becomes a lot less stable. When we look at the egregious behaviour of Trump and his ilk, we get a taste of how rotten pagan politics would be, unseasoned and unpreserved by the salt and light of Christianity. 

This is, of course, is not to say one cannot have democracies in societies where Christianity has been less historically prevalent. Democracy can exist in a wide range of religious cultures, including in majority Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist societies. Nevertheless, at least within the Westminster Model, it depends upon an institutional subculture - a set of norms, values, traditions, expectations - which, even if successfully transplanted and adapted to different contexts, owe a lot to the kinds of Christianity that emerged from the English Reformation. The restoration of England’s Christian metaphysical constitution is, therefore, integral to restoring the health of the democratic mechanical constitution. By the works of the law – even constitutional law – shall no flesh be justified. Any constitutional refoundation of English democracy worthy of the name must be led and accompanied by a revival of the English Church and by the re-evangelisation of the English people.  

The cross atop the crown represents the principle that public authority has itself been humbled and crucified; the state exists not to be served but to serve the public

his case must be made with careful nuance. It could be misconstrued as an apology for Christian nationalism. Sadly, those who make the most noise about ‘Christian values’ all too often seem, judging by their attitudes and actions, to be reading a different gospel – one from which the Magnificat and the Sermon on the Mount have been expunged. It is galling to watch far-right authoritarian reactionaries parading their Christianity for public display, while pursuing compassionless policies that hurt the poor, the disabled, and outsiders.  

A restoration of England’s Christian metaphysical constitution would not limit freedom of religion, nor diminish the equal rights of all citizens regardless of their religion or lack thereof. The principles of religious liberty and non-discrimination, which go back to Catholic Emancipation and to the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in the early nineteenth century, should be guaranteed. Rather, establishment would simply give honourable public recognition to the place of Christianity in the nation’s heritage, grounding the state upon a core of shared Christian values, norms and traditions. If that core is maintained, tolerance and diversity can be built upon it, without undermining the nation’s historic character. In practice, this might involve a more prominent role for Christianity in public life. Public authorities might pay more attention, in their official pronouncements, to the church calendar, and less to those of other faiths, or of post-Christian causes. There might be a more obvious Christian influence in education. One of the by-products of the 1960s cultural revolution is that the clergy have retreated into a narrowly defined churchy role: the academic and the school master in holy orders have all-but vanished. Public broadcasting, too, might return to the broadly Christian assumptions of Lord Reith.  

One of the constitutional functions of an established church is to act as a reminder: to remind the King, Ministers, parliamentarians, civil servants, judges, magistrates, councillors, police constables, teachers, opinion-formers, and every citizen, that to govern is to serve. The cross atop the crown represents the principle that public authority has itself been humbled and crucified; the state exists not to be served but to serve the public. Without such a concept of ethically responsible servant leadership – grounded upon truth, justice, and compassion – democracy can easily deteriorate into cruel, crude, and crass populist perversions of itself.  

Another constitutional function of an established church is to remind us what freedom is for. If applied as mere abstractions, shorn from the Christian root from which they have sprung, and the teleological objectives towards which they point, human rights – valuable as they are – can produce absurd results, actually harming, rather than protecting, freedoms of conscience and expression. Taking the metaphysical constitution seriously again would certainly mean interpreting and enforcing our human rights laws in ways congruent to the Christian principles upon which they are based. After all, it is very odd, in a country where the king has sworn to maintain the true profession of the gospel, that people are being arrested for silent prayer, and that local councils are trying to ban street evangelism. 

Finally, the metaphysical constitution, no less than the mechanical, needs checks and balances. The church cannot perform this constitutional function, as the ethical conscience of the state, if it is – like, say, the Russian Orthodox Church – dependent upon the state. The establishment of the church must not, therefore, compromise the autonomy of the church, to govern itself synodically, and to choose its own bishops. The current process of episcopal selection through the Crown Nominations Commission might leave much to be desired, but going back to the days of political appointment by the Prime Minister is not a viable option. Rather, the principle should be acknowledged, at a constitutional level, that – in the words of Magna Carta - Anglicana ecclesia libera sit: the Church of England shall be free. If we can create constitutional rules that enable judicial independence, and the impartiality of bodies such as the Electoral Commission, we should be able to square this constitutional circle, too.