The perils when the State decides what the Church believes

9th March 2007
By Michael Scott-Joynt

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‘I think we’ve reached a point where certain things need to be clarified about the rights, liberties and dignities of independent bodies with the State.’ — The Archbishop of Canterbury on BBC, 24 January 2007.

In what follows I want to explore why I think that the Archbishop has offered that careful and profoundly serious observation and to ask, in the light of recent events and with the publication imminent of the long-awaited Sexual Orientation Regulations for the UK mainland, whether there are limits to the ‘reach’ of the state?

Of course there is both irony and novelty, if you take a long historical view, in an Archbishop of Canterbury, and in his wake a Bishop of Winchester, asking such questions.

Was not William Laud a predecessor of Rowan Williams, a resident of Lambeth Palace? Were not the ministries and parliaments that sustained, far into the nineteenth century, the political, educational and religious disabilities of Roman Catholics, Non-Conformists, Jews and many others, closely entwined with the Church of England bishops of their day?

Today the boot seems to many of us to be on the other foot. The government — basing itself in a range of convictions and ideas quite widely but by no means universally held, and often loosely linked to the Human Rights Act — is behaving increasingly as if government and parliament were the sole arbiter of what is right and good and wholesome, whether for individuals or for society.

There is appearing a jealous, if somewhat edgy, and a rather poorly informed intolerance of alternative moral and ethical authorities, and especially of those based in the life and the traditions of communities of faith.

 And unless, to use the Archbishop’s judicious language, ‘certain things ... are clarified’ and certain people think about all this with rather more care, there seems to be a real danger that this country will come to lose the contributions made to every aspect and level of its life by its range of independent voluntary bodies, many but by no means all of which have their roots and motivation in the churches or in other communities of faith.

And this, just at a moment when with its other hand, as it were, government is eager to enlist the assistance of voluntary organisations in a range of tasks which it believes they are uniquely placed to undertake.

This is not the place to enter in any detail into the recent controversy around Roman Catholic, and other faith-based, adoption agencies; but to notice the character of the fundamental issue at stake. The Roman Catholic Church is not, I think, in the main arguing about whether a child can be well and safely brought up by a same-sex couple.

At stake is the status of marriage in British society. Government and parliament are imposing upon the country — and especially upon the churches — alternative concepts of the family and of parenting as the equivalents of marriage.

Where does this leave this country’s hard-won traditions of religious freedom and of the freedom of the individual?

relationship The government is rightly concerned that the Human Rights Act should be valued and welcomed, not misused as whipping-boy by means of all sorts of fantastic charges against it. The government could have used the HR Act, as the Polish government used it, to exempt Roman Catholic and other adoption agencies from the SORs. But instead it has chosen to privilege secular over religious ideologies, perhaps because it thinks it opportune to cut the Churches down to size after the autumn’s arguments over (so-called) ‘faith schools’.

And government is colluding with those who would corral the churches and the faiths into the private sphere, so as to leave ‘the street’, public life and political decision-making open to the influence only of secular ideologies.  

No wonder the RC Archbishop of Southwark has called the recent decisions about Faith-based adoption agencies ‘a triumph of dogmatism over freedom of conscience’.

Nor are these the first examples. Registrars are required, at the risk of their jobs, to officiate at marriages of transgendered people and at registrations of civil partnerships, even if they have conscientious hesitations about doing so. Verified stories abound of Faith-based, and especially Church-based, organisations that offer social care, often to some of the most disadvantaged and demanding individuals and groups, which have had their public funding threatened as officialdom is anxious about a crucifix on the wall or Grace before meals.

Is this ignorance? Or prejudice? Or is it intolerance, even fear of an influence and a source of authority beyond and implicitly challenging, the authority of the State? Must diversity of provision have been designed and authorised by Whitehall and town hall, rather than developed over centuries in a society that has had to struggle hard and long to win its freedom from government.

We shall hear much more in this vein when the government publishes and parliament debates the mainland SORs, because to many people a great deal seems to be at stake.

But a great deal is at stake for government and for parliament too. I have mentioned already the government’s eagerness to deliver essential services through the voluntary sector.

Much of the voluntary sector is church- or faith-based; still more of it is staffed by people, many of them volunteers, whose motivation is their Christian or other faith. For how long, if the present climate develops, will these faith-based organisations and these individuals find it possible to persevere in their work?

And how close are we getting to the point when a religiously-formed conscience will be seen as an obstacle to, rather than an inspiration for, service in parliament and still more in high political office? What an irony, as we celebrate William Wilberforce and all the others, of many churches and more than one faith, through whose efforts in parliament the slave trade was abolished.

Michael Scott-Joynt is Bishop of Winchester.

Filed Under: Church, Religion, State
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