One day in 1954 a brief stop at a ruined church not far from Belfast inspired Philip Larkin to write his first great poem. Church Going is an account of Larkin’s shock at witnessing a church that had been neglected, rather than bombed, into disuse. “Who will be the last, the very last, to see this place for what it was . . . ?” he wondered.
If the Church of England does not learn to adapt we might just find out. The resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury is the end of the line for the strategy of compromise on the ordination of women and gay marriage. Until now, the Church has tried to keep two options open. But the departure of Rowan Williams makes clear that it either makes an accommodation with the world or it keeps the faith and commits a defiant suicide.
This is the moment that the Church has to choose and each candidate for Canterbury ought to publish a manifesto to set out a position on the issues that will define the tenure of the next Archbishop. Dr Williams tried to avoid schism by not deciding. In the academic world to which he is destined to return, logic chopping is possible. In the world of ecclesiastical politics it is not. His successor will need to wrestle with the problem Dr Williams avoided.
This is the dilemma of modernisation. It is one the Labour and Tory parties have faced and one which the trade unions are ducking. But, for the finest example of clever evolution, the Church should look to the monarchy.
Once rulers by divine right, the British monarchy has adapted well to the celebrity age. Reinvented as a bourgeois family, monarchy is in one of its rare popular periods. Ours is now what the historian Frank Prochaska called “the welfare monarchy”, an understanding by which the royals are the only claimants exempt from the £26,000 benefits cap so long as they do some good work for charity.
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In 1997, as the senior royals struggled to summon an emotional response to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, it was tempting to think a republican moment was upon us. How distant that now seems. Last week, the lesser brain of the young princes cheated in a mock sprint against a great Olympian and was written up as a national champion in what was, even by the conventions of royal coverage, a miasma of pathetic fawning.
The Church of England really ought to be as inventive. It was, after all, created in an act of political adaptation. The Church of England exists only because Henry VIII wanted to cast off Catherine of Aragon to try for a male heir with Anne Boleyn. Anglicanism was a political expedient rather than a doctrinal necessity, which explains why its theological content has always been light.
But it is not adapting well at all. The truth is that, in a battle between the Church and gay marriage, the Church will lose. Between 1971 and 2007, the population of the UK grew 10 per cent. Membership of the Anglican Church fell 43 per cent. The average age of churchgoers is 61 and rising. The core congregation is now female, old, posh and rural. If the current rate of departure is not arrested there will be no men left 15 years from now.
I should declare an interest. I am one of those who departed. I count the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as one of the greatest literary works. For these reasons I would never say simply that I am an atheist. I am proud of the tradition I no longer believe in, so it is important to specify that I am an Anglican atheist. My lack of belief is not just doctrinal, it’s national.
So it worries me that the Church is giving in to its chronic weaknesses. Unlike the monarchy, the Anglican Church has never travelled beyond its core congregation in the suburbs and the shires. As long ago as 1851, two thirds of the population of London never attended church. The task for the Church is not to regain the cities.
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It is to win them for the first time.
The Church of England now attracts under 2 per cent of the nation through its doors each week. It is no longer even true, as Larkin says, that the church is the place in which our compulsions are recognised and robed as destinies. In 1950 two thirds of infants were baptised. Today it is less than a fifth. Marriage is moving out of church, too, and so is death.
With no congregation, the buildings are a burden on church finances that were ruined by investment disasters in the 1980s. Churches are being turned into flats, bingo halls and curry houses. Or, as Marcus Binney, then the chairman of Save Britain’s Heritage, said in a letter to The Times in 1976: “Churches and chapels often have the high ceilings required for popular indoor sports such as badminton.”
This could just carry on. It is not ordained, to use an ecclesiastical term, that spiritual belief must rest in the Church of England. It may just migrate: “Power of some sort or other will go on in games, in riddles, seemingly at random”, as Larkin put it. Already, for every believer who is a church member, there are two who never attend. Anglicanism is slowly being privatised.
Something similar saved and then strengthened the monarchy. When it gave up James I’s defiant claim to rule by divine right, the monarchy ensured its survival as an ornamental institution. The very slow draining away of political power was, strangely enough, the salvation of the British monarchy. We are left with a constitutional shell of a monarchy, held together by the dignity of the Queen and a healthy traffic in newspaper sales. The monarchy today has a new contract. So long as it does not matter, we will cherish it.
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The Church cannot turn into a secular institution without discarding its purpose. Belief imposes limits. In its battle against science, and in its persecution of those of other faiths, the Church has usually located them in the wrong place. It is now doing so again. The ordination of women and gay marriage are questions on which the Anglican Church must go with the grain of English society. The Church might get smaller before it grew but it would, at least, have a chance.
Anglicanism will not just disappear, even if the Church chooses wrongly. It will just become a cultural residue. Once, when asked if he was a Jew, Jonathan Miller replied that he was Jew-ish. Culturally, yes, theologically, no. The Church could easily create an identity which is Anglican-ish, which is an idea even if it’s not also a joke.
In time to come, there will be echoes of distant Anglican rituals but they will have been paganised. Prayers may still open the parliamentary day but the Church will no longer be thought worthy of state subsidy. And when, at moments of national communion, we need an authority to preside in pantomime robes, it will be not the representative of the Church but a new king able to conjure the potent mix of celebrity and fabricated history that defines modern monarchy.
For a republican Anglican atheist, there is a lot in this to lament. But it is hard to see how the Church’s current leaders are not charting a future as a sect. It has, as Larkin puts it, “a shape less recognisable each week, a purpose more obscure”. To describe it in the clichés minted by Thomas Cranmer, it is caught in the jaws of death, at death’s door, given up for lost.
This article was updated at 12:45pm on Friday, March 16 to take account of the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The original text can be accessed here.