Antidisestablishmentarianism is unpopular today but should the move by secular atheists, and Machiavellian politicians led by Nick Clegg, to disestablish the Church of England be resisted?
The current Establishment of the church involves the Queen, a few Bishops in the House of Lords and a government appointment commission advising on the appointment of senior clergy. Those who are unaware of the British Constitution will imagine that the Queen is like a President and the House of Lords is like a Senate because they see parallel institutions in the USA and Europe. However, in England the House of Commons is Sovereign. The Queen is powerless and the House of Lords is a review body that can send legislation back to the House of Commons for further development and correction up to three times.
The links between the Church and State are weak but they still exist. Why do Clegg and others want to remove the last vestige of Religion from British government?
Nick Clegg, the Leader of the Liberal Democrats, would like to bring British governance in line with European models by enhancing the power of the House of Lords to that of an elected, primary, legislative body. This is a different issue from disestablishmentarianism. Clegg knows that few people understand the constitution and is using the presence of Bishops in the Upper House as a ploy to remove embedded professional and ethical advice from the lawmaking process.
The Secular Atheist position on removing the links between the Church and the State is based on the idea that the Church of England is, in practice, just another NGO like Oxfam. The Secular Atheist view, expressed daily in the media, is that our society is becoming more moral every day in every way and does not require intervention from religions.
It is this idea that society is becoming more moral daily that needs close inspection. The technique that is applied to feel self satisfied about current morality is known as "Historical Presentism". In Historical Presentism we examine a past event and assess whether it is right or wrong according to present values. Here are two examples of Historical Presentism.
It is now illegal for a government agency to pressurise a woman to submit her child for adoption. In the past the Churches declared that having children outside of wedlock was immoral, the woman was of "ill repute" and hence the child should be adopted. Clearly the Churches were evil and we recognise this in law today. This is Historical Presentism. When past events are investigated more closely it can be seen that rates of illegitimate births rose by 600-700% immediately after adoption ceased to be the preferred option for illegitimacy. The moral issues are not clear cut when the adverse consequences of children living in single parent families are considered. The balance between the rights of the child and the rights of the teenage mother has possibly swung too far away from the good of the child.
Another example is our modern approach to homosexuality. This is topical because the Pet Shop Boys are revisiting the history of Alan Turing from a modern perspective. However, protecting the rights of homosexuals is not always a "good thing". In the early days of the AIDS epidemic it was widely believed that homosexuals were the principle sufferers. The right of the sexual contacts of homosexuals to privacy was of paramount importance and far outweighed the rights of others in society to be secure from infection (after all, transmission was by sex and would be contained within the homosexual community). This policy is regarded nowadays as obviously moral and those who opposed it in the past were clearly homophobic. This is Historical Presentism. About 30 million people have died as a direct result of this policy of whom over 50% were women and children. Clearly the balance of rights between the individual adult and children was assessed incorrectly.
There is a pattern emerging, in a secular State the consensus morality, "the moral high ground" represents the interests of active, middle class adults and guards their interests with a rod of iron. As we have seen from the examples above, children or society in general can be secondary considerations. Anyone revisiting forced adoption or quarantine for AIDS in the national media would be mercilessly destroyed because they are obviously evil according to present values. The modern secular state makes puritans look liberal when the interests of its supporters are crossed - do not judge lest ye be judged by the media.
The Churches represent relatively fixed moralities compared with the secular state. Most churches are Foundationalists, believing that somewhere there is an absolute basis for moral judgement and action.
Foundationalists have failed miserably to point out that morality is just a leaf in the wind of change if it has no fixed basis and that civil society will continue to change in essentially random directions if it follows consensus morality. It could be said that morality always depended upon consensus but Foundationalism shapes this consensus to a particular moral code. The only foreseeable endpoint of a society governed by anti-foundationalism and consensus morality is tyranny because there is no barrier to stop it randomly changing until it mutates into a form that imposes an end point of stasis.
So, do we get rid of Foundationalists from every aspect of government? Well, if we don't really give a damn about the direction of society, so long as our interests and the values we learn from telly are protected, we should.
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