State and religion in Great Britain: constitutional foundations, religious minorities, the law and education.

• Author: Catto, Rebecca
• Position: Report

Introduction

This article examines the relationship between the State and religion in Great Britain. It begins by outlining Great Britain's constitutional foundations and then sets the Church-State dynamic in the different regions of Great Britain within an historical context. Next it describes the current (and much changed) religious landscape and the various religious minority groups that are present in the country. Particular attention is paid to Muslims, who now comprise the largest religious group in Britain after Christians. The main features of contemporary law regarding religion are then outlined. A section on education follows, as this is a crucial issue in the British case, covering the ownership and management of schools, religious education itself, and the place of religious worship in the public educational system. The article then looks at chaplaincy in its different contexts, chaplaincy being a key site of state-religion engagement in Britain, which demonstrates both the continuity of the country's Christian heritage and its gradual change to a multi-faith society. The growing non-religious constituency is an increasingly important feature in this mix. The concluding section reflects on the main debates and controversies surrounding religion in Great Britain. What emerges overall is an entangled, varied and contested relationship between religion and the State.

Constitution of the UK

The United Kingdom is made up of four distinct countries: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. However, "Great Britain" consists of England, Wales and Scotland only. The latter term was developed after an Act of Union united England and Scotland under the same monarch and Parliament in 1707. England and Wales had been united much earlier--in 1536 to be precise--when Wales was in effect incorporated into England. Another Act of Union followed in 1801, which merged Great Britain with Ireland to produce a new kingdom called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, or the UK for short. The Government of Ireland Act 1920 established Northern Ireland out of the six north-eastern counties in Ireland; the remaining 26 counties, initially "Southern Ireland" became the independent Irish Free State in 1922. Thus Northern Ireland has never been part of Great Britain.

There are several levels of government in Great Britain. The supreme legislative body is Parliament, which meets in Westminster (London). Headed by the Sovereign, it has two chambers: the upper chamber, or House of Lords, and the lower chamber, the House of Commons. Currently around 790 members are eligible to take part in debates in the House of Lords; the majority of these are life peers. Although there are over 800 hereditary peers, since 1999, only 92 have been eligible to sit in the House of Lords. No peers are currently directly elected, although House of Lords reform has been on the political agenda since the late 1990s. All 650 members of the House of Commons (which includes representatives from Northern Ireland) are directly elected.

While subject to the British Parliament, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland also have their own separate parliaments or assemblies. The Scottish Parliament was restored in 1999 after an interval of nearly three centuries, while the National Assembly for Wales and the Northern Ireland Assembly were set up in 1998. All three bodies have elected members. The Scottish Parliament is responsible for "devolved matters", including education and training, health and social services and local government; and the UK Parliament in Westminster holds responsibility for "reserved matters" such as defense, foreign policy and employment. There is a similar distinction in Wales between "devolved" and "reserved" powers, although more powers are reserved to Westminster in the National Assembly for Wales than in the Scottish Parliament. In September 2014, a referendum on whether Scotland should become an independent country was conducted; 45 per cent voted in favor and 55 per cent against, thus Scotland remains in the UK.

Northern Ireland is excluded from the remaining discussion, first because it is not part of Great Britain, but also because it has its own very complicated history, resulting in a particular political and legal situation. The role of religion is crucial in Northern Ireland, but is utterly different from that in Great Britain. (1)

There are other significant differences between England and Wales, on the one hand, and Scotland, on the other. Scotland has a separate system of education, and a distinctive legal system which is partly codified; England and Wales, in contrast, are subject to a common law system based on judicial precedents. Important differences also exist in terms of religious establishment as discussed below. To avoid confusion, the rest of this article focuses on the situation in England and Wales, unless otherwise stated.

Church and State

Prior to the Reformation of the 1530s, the Church in England was under the authority of Rome, with the Pope as head of the English Church. Under the Act of Supremacy 1534, King Henry VIII replaced the Pope as the "Supreme Head" of the church. In 1553, Rome's jurisdiction was temporarily restored under Queen Mary I, but this was reversed after the accession of Queen Elizabeth I in 1558 who became "Supreme Governor" of the church in 1559. The first Elizabethan Archbishop of Canterbury was appointed in December 1559 and has remained the "Primate of all England" (i.e. the first bishop) ever since, except between 1646 and 1660 when episcopacy was abolished by Parliament before being restored by King Charles II. In addition to his primacy in England, the Archbishop of Canterbury is also recognized as the head of the wider Anglican Communion, which includes all churches throughout the world in communion with the Church of England, although he does not exercise direct authority over them.

Although the Church of England became the established church through an act of Parliament, it does not mean that it is identified with the State or that it is a department of State operating under a Ministry for Religious Affairs. (2)

On the contrary, several different government departments have responsibilities for religious issues. These include the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), established in 2006, which has a Minister for Faith and a Faith Engagement Team as the main point of contact with the government for faith-based organizations. (3) The nature of establishment as such has evolved and weakened over time, but some key features remain. The Sovereign is still the Supreme Governor of the Church of England and must be a member of it. The Sovereign formally appoints all bishops, but in practice the appointments are made by the Crown Nominations Commission and approved by the Prime Minister. Since 2007, the convention has been that the Prime Minister will accept the Commission's recommendation.

Before 1919, unlike all other religious denominations, the Church of England was not free to govern itself. All changes had to be introduced into and approved by Parliament as public statutes. This changed in 1919, when a Church Assembly (known as the General Synod since 1969) was established to recommend changes--called 'Measures'--which, if approved, have the force of statutes. The Synod has three sections, called houses, one for bishops, one for clergy and one for laity. Major changes recommended by the General Synod still have to be approved by Parliament; for example, Church of England ministers are not permitted to carry out marriages of same-sex couples under legislation enacted in 2014 and for this to change, the Measure would have to be passed first by the General Synod and then by Parliament. (4) Equally, however, the General Synod can block changes favored by the Government and a majority of the Members of Parliament. It did so notably in November 2012 when a Measure to allow the appointment of women bishops failed to achieve the required two-thirds majority in each house. It was finally passed in July 2014. (5)

The most senior 26 Anglican bishops serve in the House of Lords as Lords Spiritual until they retire; they attend on a rota basis. Other religious leaders have also become members of the House of Lords, but on the basis of their personal and professional roles rather than the offices they hold. (6) While bishops and archbishops have made repeated, valuable and generally well-received interventions in debates in the House of Lords in recent decades, (7) they tend to vote less than other members of the House and their numbers rarely affect the overall outcome. (8) One partial exception occurred in June 2013, when an unusually high number of bishops (14) attended the key debate on the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill. They did not vote as a bloc, however, with nine voting for an amendment to deny the Bill a second reading and five abstaining. (9)

Welsby (10) emphasizes that the supposition that the Church of England receives large sums of money from the State is incorrect. The only money received from the State is, firstly, money paid, as salaries, to chaplains in the armed forces, prisons and National Health Service (see more on this below) and, secondly, government grants for the care of listed buildings. The Church of England has an annual budget of around 1,000 million [pounds sterling]; around three-quarters of this is raised by worshippers in parishes, with the remainder primarily coming from money raised from investments and other assets and from reserves. A significant amount (around 80 million [pounds sterling] annually) is recovered in tax from Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, but there are no special taxes to pay for church expenditure unlike those, for example, that help fund the Catholic Church and major Protestant Churches in Germany. (11) The point is reinforced by Cranmer et al, who state: 'Not since the first half...