BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
Part of the sickness of the modern British state is a constitutional one. It mistakes the ghost of a single, established faith for its national soul. We are governed by a contradiction: a democracy that grants automatic power to bishops, a plural society whose supreme authority is bound by oath to a specific sect.
This is more than an antique absurdity; it is a fundamental dishonesty. It is the original sin from which a host of other corruptions spring. The remedy is not tolerance, but surgery. The state should be cut free from the church, utterly and without apology, on the principle the French call laïcité.
Not to make men unbelievers, but to make them equal. Not to abolish the British monarchy, but to modernise it to make it fit to last.
Given today’s circumstances, the argument against establishment should be an argument against privilege. It should be deemed ‘immoral’ that in a nation containing mosques, synagogues, and temples, one church should hold a monopoly on political power. This state-sponsored favouritism is the thin end of the wedge. By sanctioning the idea that religious law has a place in the chambers of government, we legitimise the very concept of theocracy.
We have no answer, then, to those who would see a different code—sharia, for instance—take root. Its tenets on blasphemy, apostasy, and the status of women are a negation of Britons’ centuries-old struggle for individual rights and common-law justice. Yet by retaining our own religious establishment, we forfeit the moral and logical ground to oppose it. We cannot condemn a rival theocracy while maintaining our own.
The only consistent defence against the blinkered and erroneous judgements of savages dressed up as clerics, of whatever denomination, is the absolute rule of secular law.
The partisans of the old order will cry that this is a war on tradition. It is not. It is a war on hypocrisy. The established church is not a pillar of faith but a creature of the state, its spirit suffocated by political compromise.
True belief needs no legislative prop. Disestablishment would not destroy religion; it would liberate it, returning it to the voluntary enthusiasms of the people, where its health truly lies. A faith that requires a place in the House of Lords is a faith that is already dead on its feet.
The task is not complex. It is merely difficult. It requires the intellectual courage to state a simple truth: the modern state must be godless. Its currency must be citizenship, not creed. Its foundation must be human right, not divine grace. We must dismantle the unholy alliance between the cross and the crown. We must build a republic of laws, even if we keep the name of a kingdom.
Only then will every man and woman stand, for the first time, as a true and equal citizen under a single, impartial sky.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Conservatism (2024).