Thoughts from a Life: The Church of England

by Richard Chartres

For much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a minority of English people became obstinately metaphysical. Some quit these shores, not so much for religious liberty in the abstract, but in the hope of building a more rigorously godly Commonwealth in New England.

The 17th century English Civil War, in which a greater proportion of the male population perished than in the First World War, was fuelled by religious passions. 

Roger Scruton in his 2012 book Our Church identifies this as the seminal period in the creation of the ethos of the Church of England and of what Joseph Addison described in 1712 as the ‘particular bashfulness in everything that regards religion’ on the part of the English people.

Scruton’s funeral in the surviving fragment of the mediaeval Malmesbury Abbey was an eloquent testimony to what he loved about the Church of England, its undemonstrative and ceremonious dignity and its rich inheritance of words and music. He was the organist for more than twenty years of the nearby, rural Wiltshire parish of Garsdon. 

The village is also close to the birthplace of the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Writing his Leviathan during the Civil War, Hobbes knew very well how dangerous religion could be since people are disposed ‘to stand in awe of their own imaginations…making the creatures of their own fancy, their gods’. We have seen in our own time how the bruised ego can surreptitiously re-ascend by worshipping some projection of its own rage and lust for power. All religions are perennially menaced by this kind of lethal idolatry. Religion can be a community former but also a community destroyer.

The Civil War bred in the Church of England a horror of “enthusiasm”. As the late 17th century Archbishop of Canterbury, John Tillotson said, “stirring up men’s passions is like the muddying of the waters – you see nothing clearly afterwards” 

Like Hobbes, Scruton was convinced that civil government is superior in every way to the rule of priests but as he writes, “Life has also taught me that a nation that strives to live without religion, in however muted and moderated a form, will never be able to call upon the loyalty of its citizens, and is destined to disappear.”

The Church of England as re-constituted after the blood-letting of the Civil War, channelled and contained the Christian Revelation in noble language, glorious music and community ceremonies and rites of passage. Scruton confesses his attraction not so much to abstract doctrine as to ritual performance “through which the profoundest truths of human life are enacted and acknowledged”. Despite a strong attraction to Roman Catholicism, Scruton made his home in a Church which while not lacking its own saints and aura of holiness is content, as he said, “to minister to the spiritually second rate”.

This dispensation survived for three centuries into the lifetime of the immediate post World War II generation. Religious and national sentiments endorsed each other and tempered one another’s excesses but Scruton writes in the awareness that “That dispensation has gone and what we celebrate in Garsdon is the memory of it”.

It is a fate which has overcome other parts of the Christian economy in England. The very moderation of the Church of England and its closeness to the Civil State has exposed it to continuous rebellion by enthusiasts. Among the most notable sons of the Church of England were John Wesley and Cardinal Newman and neither in the end could make their home in a Church which values membership and belonging above strict morality or dogma.

The Church of England in the aftermath of the civil broils of the 17th century was re-constituted but failed to achieve a religious monopoly. There have always been at least three strands of the Christian tradition nourishing genuine pluralism in England. The Church of England was compelled to live together with Protestant Non-conformity and surviving Roman Catholicism. The failure to achieve the kind of cultural monopoly which various churches acquired in neighbouring countries, notably France, Spain, Prussia, and Italy proved to be a blessing. It meant that when the economic and social status quo was challenged in the 19th century, the challenge came from Methodists rather than Marxists. Now however Methodism is little more than a memory in Scruton’s home town of Malmesbury and this contributes to the elegiac tone of his writings on English religion.

He recognises that the Church of England is now largely reduced to one province of an “ism,” disconnected from any particular place or story - “Anglicanism”.

There is sadness in Scruton’s vision. Something beautiful and significant has been lost. But Our Church is not a despairing book. It is shaped by wide sympathies and profound reading especially in classical Islam and with the knowledge that, while the Church is eternal, her various forms are subject to change.

Scruton’s own faith is movingly described in the concluding chapters. Its premise is that our being here is mysterious, that we will always fail to explain it but that our lives are worthless until we learn to love and give. The religious life is one lived in the full consciousness of judgement. “All that is most gross and offensive in the world, in which we live, comes from the inability of people to live in judgement, to accept the need for remorse and atonement and to accept that in begging forgiveness they must also offer it”. He knows the transformation that comes when gift and love re-order life.

And there is hope for the future. The deceitful doctrine of non-discrimination which in the Anglosphere is directed principally against the Christian Church will not survive the demise of the temporal institutions it has so relentless sought to undermine. Then the memory of the Church of England surviving in its texts, its music and its shrines may well seed new ways of seeking God. There remain words of comfort and hope, words that are ancient but always fresh, in which the Spirit will communicate with those who come after us in the tumult which is surely coming.

Richard Chartres, Baron Chartres, GCVO, ChStJ, PC, FSA is a retired bishop of the Church of England. He was area Bishop of Stepney from 1992 to 1995 and Bishop of London from 1995 to 2017.