The Fact That Does the Work
There are, at the time of writing, twenty-six Church of England bishops who hold seats in the House of Lords as of right. Not because they were elected. Not because they were appointed on the basis of expertise, public service, or any scrutiny of their fitness to legislate. They sit there because they hold particular ecclesiastical offices within a single Christian denomination, and because a constitutional arrangement that predates the English Reformation in its roots, and that has never been fundamentally revisited in the democratic era, says that they may. They vote on welfare policy, on equalities legislation, on reproductive rights, on education, on the criminal law. They vote on every matter that Parliament considers, and their votes count exactly as much as those of any other peer.
The United Kingdom is one of two countries in the world that reserves seats in its national legislature for clerics as a matter of constitutional right derived from their religious office. The second country is Iran. That comparison is not a polemical flourish designed to provoke. It is a structural description of two constitutional arrangements, and it is accurate. Iran’s Guardian Council and its Assembly of Experts are separate bodies, but the Iranian constitution explicitly reserves a proportion of parliamentary seats and institutional power for Islamic clerics by virtue of their religious office. The United Kingdom explicitly reserves twenty-six seats in its upper chamber for Church of England bishops by virtue of their ecclesiastical office. The theological content of the two systems could scarcely be more different. The structural principle is identical: a single religious institution is given guaranteed representation in the legislature of the state, not because of anything its representatives have done or demonstrated in the civic realm, but because of who they are within their own religious hierarchy.
That is the argument in its plainest form. Everything that follows is elaboration, evidence, and response to the objections that will inevitably be raised. The reader should hold that structural fact clearly in mind throughout, because it has a tendency to become obscured by the very British instinct to reach for the comfort of tradition and to treat longevity as a form of justification.
1. Who the Lords Spiritual Are and How They Got There
The Lords Spiritual, as they are formally titled, are the senior bishops of the Church of England who hold seats in the House of Lords. The full complement, under the Bishoprics Act 1878, is twenty-six. The seats are held by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, who sit for the duration of their offices, and by the Bishops of London, Durham, and Winchester, who also hold permanent seats by virtue of their sees. The remaining twenty-one seats rotate among the other diocesan bishops of the Church of England in order of seniority of consecration, meaning that a bishop joins the Lords when enough of those above them in the queue have retired or died to bring them to the front. When a bishop retires from their see, they also vacate their seat in the Lords, unlike life peers, who retain their seats permanently. In that narrow sense, the Lords Spiritual are somewhat less entrenched than they might be. In every other sense, the entrenching could barely be more thorough.
The arrangement has roots in the medieval Council of Lords, where senior churchmen sat alongside secular magnates as a matter of course in a society where the Church was not merely one institution among many but a parallel governmental structure with its own courts, its own law, its own land, and its own claim on the loyalty of the population. The Church held roughly a third of the land of England at the time of the Norman Conquest. It administered education, poor relief, hospitals, and record-keeping. Its separation from the state was not the medieval understanding; rather, the ecclesiastical and the civil were understood as two expressions of a single divinely ordered society. The presence of bishops in the legislature was, in that context, not an anomaly but a reflection of how power actually operated in a world where religious and civic authority were considered different facets of a single God-sanctioned arrangement.
That world ended, in stages, across the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and was definitively superseded by the democratic settlements of the nineteenth and twentieth. The Church of England no longer administers the courts. It no longer holds a third of the land. It no longer provides the primary infrastructure of education or welfare, though it remains a significant provider of state-funded schooling through the voluntary-aided system, which is itself a separate and substantial problem. The theological justification for its privileged position, the idea that England is a Christian nation whose laws derive their legitimacy from divine sanction expressed through the established church, is not a claim that any serious constitutional theorist now openly defends. And yet the twenty-six seats remain, maintained not by any coherent argument but by institutional inertia and the peculiarly English conviction that the fact of an arrangement’s survival is itself a reason to preserve it.
2. What the Lords Spiritual Actually Do
It is worth being precise here, because defenders of the current arrangement tend to oscillate between two incompatible positions: that the bishops are active and valuable contributors to parliamentary business, and that they are largely ceremonial and therefore harmless. Both claims cannot simultaneously be true, and neither, on examination, is quite right.
The attendance and voting record of the Lords Spiritual varies considerably between individual bishops. Some attend frequently and speak often; others appear rarely and contribute little. The House of Lords Library publishes data on attendance, and the picture across recent sessions is mixed. In the 2022 to 2023 session, for instance, the average bishop attended on roughly a third of sitting days, which is lower than the average for life peers overall. Several individual bishops attended on fewer than ten per cent of sitting days. The Archbishop of Canterbury is among the more active participants, appearing in debates about poverty, international development, and asylum policy. The Bishop of Durham has been a persistent and sometimes effective voice on welfare reform, speaking with evident knowledge about the practical experience of food banks and debt in his diocese.
None of that, however, is the decisive point. The argument for removing the Lords Spiritual is not that they make bad speeches or that individual bishops are not genuinely motivated by concern for the poor. The argument is that the principle of their presence is indefensible, regardless of the quality of their individual contributions. A body that does valuable work does not thereby acquire the right to sit in a legislature by virtue of its theological affiliation. If the bishops’ contributions on poverty and welfare are genuinely valuable, the obvious solution is to appoint distinguished individuals who have demonstrated expertise in those areas as life peers, through the same process by which any other expert or public servant enters the Lords. The argument that the bishops contribute good things proves nothing about whether they should be there as of constitutional right. It merely raises the question of whether their views, if valuable, would find any other route into the chamber, and the honest answer is that they plainly would.
On matters where religious doctrine bears directly on the legislation being considered, the Lords Spiritual have voted in ways that reflect their institutional position rather than the balance of public opinion. During the passage of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, the bishops collectively opposed equal marriage. During debates on assisted dying, the bishops have been consistently and actively opposed to any relaxation of the law, voting against proposals that command majority public support. On matters relating to religious education and the protected status of faith schools, the bishops have understandably voted to defend arrangements that benefit the Church of England’s institutional interests. None of this is surprising. These are people whose professional and theological commitments produce predictable positions on contested social questions. The problem is not that they hold those positions; it is that those positions receive automatic legislative expression through guaranteed seats in a chamber that has real, if limited, power over the law of the land.
The bishops also fulfil a ceremonial function, leading prayers at the start of each Lords sitting day. This is one of the more theatrical expressions of the establishment, and its defenders occasionally advance it as a reason to retain the bishops’ seats, as though the two things were constitutionally inseparable. Prayers could be led by a rota of invited representatives of various traditions, or by an appointed chaplain with no legislative role, or simply discontinued, without any effect on the chamber’s ability to legislate. The ceremonial and the legislative functions are entirely distinct, and their conflation is a rhetorical convenience rather than a logical necessity.
3. The Iran Comparison and Why It Matters
The comparison with Iran is one that British commentators tend to find either offensive or amusing, and the discomfort itself is instructive. The usual response is to argue that the comparison is unfair because Iran is a theocracy in the full sense, whereas the United Kingdom is a liberal democracy that happens to retain a ceremonial religious establishment. This is true, and the distinction matters enormously in terms of what daily life looks like in each country. It does not, however, address the structural point being made.
The claim is not that Britain is equivalent to Iran in its overall character as a state. The claim is specific and structural: of all the world’s national legislatures, only two reserve seats for clerics as a matter of constitutional right derived from their religious office, and Britain and Iran are those two states. Saudi Arabia does not have a legislature in the relevant sense. Afghanistan under the Taliban abolished its parliament. Israel does not have reserved clerical seats in the Knesset; Israeli religious parties win seats through democratic elections, which is an entirely different arrangement. Other states with state religions, including Denmark, Norway, and Greece, do not reserve legislative seats for clergy as of right. The comparison set is genuinely narrow, and the United Kingdom’s membership of it is genuinely anomalous among liberal democracies.
The discomfort the comparison produces is, in a sense, the point of making it. If a British parliamentarian were told that a proposed constitutional reform would leave Britain sharing a particular structural feature exclusively with Iran, they would almost certainly oppose the reform on those grounds alone. The reaction to the comparison reveals that the underlying principle, clerical seats reserved by right of religious office, is one that most people, when they consider it abstractly, find difficult to defend. Only the familiarity of the existing arrangement softens the reaction. We are accustomed to the bishops. We have always had the bishops. They are part of the furniture of British public life, and furniture, however oddly placed, eventually stops being noticed. The Iran comparison is useful precisely because it forces the question to be considered on its structural merits rather than through the fog of inherited familiarity.
This is not to suggest that anyone drawing the comparison intends to insult the bishops themselves, or to imply any equivalence between the institutional cultures of the two countries. The comparison is a tool for making a constitutional principle visible, and it does that work effectively. The squeamishness it produces in defenders of the current arrangement is a reasonable indicator that they know, on some level, that the principle is hard to justify on any grounds other than the fact that it has existed for a very long time.
4. The Arguments for Retaining the Lords Spiritual, Examined
The case for keeping the bishops in the Lords is made in several distinct forms, and it is worth taking each seriously rather than dismissing the lot as mere establishment conservatism, though establishment conservatism is undeniably part of what drives them.
The contribution argument holds that the bishops make valuable contributions to debate, particularly on poverty, social care, and international development. The response has already been given above: contribution, however genuine, does not justify constitutional entrenchment by religious affiliation. If individual bishops have genuine expertise, they can be appointed as life peers through the ordinary process. The contribution argument, pressed to its logical conclusion, would justify giving guaranteed seats to the leadership of any organisation that consistently produces thoughtful public interventions. The Trades Union Congress, the Royal Society, the Confederation of British Industry, and the British Medical Association all employ people who could make valuable contributions to legislative debate. We do not give any of them guaranteed seats, and rightly so. The bishops’ contributions, whatever their quality, do not amount to a constitutional special case.
The moral voice argument is a softer version of the above, holding that the Church of England provides an institutional moral voice in the legislature that acts as a counterweight to purely commercial or political interests. There are two problems with this claim. The first is the assumption that religious institutions have a privileged claim to moral expertise, an assumption that is empirically unwarranted and philosophically threadbare. The second is the identification of the Church of England’s institutional positions with morality as such. On same-sex marriage, on abortion, on assisted dying, on the ordination of women, a matter the Church of England resolved only in 1994 for priests and 2014 for bishops after decades of internal resistance, the bishops’ record is not one of moral vanguardism. It is one of institutional conservatism that has repeatedly been overturned by the broader moral consensus of British society. The idea that the chamber needs a guaranteed religious moral voice implies that secular moral reasoning is insufficient, which is precisely the kind of assumption that ought to be examined rather than embedded in constitutional structures.
The tradition argument is probably the most honest of the defences, in that it does not attempt to disguise what it is. The bishops have been there for centuries. The arrangement is part of the architecture of British public life. Removing it would be a disruptive break with a long tradition. The difficulty with this argument is that it proves far too much. Rotten boroughs were a long tradition. The restriction of the franchise to property-owning men was a long tradition. The criminalisation of homosexuality was a long tradition. Traditions are not self-justifying, and the mere age of an arrangement tells us nothing about its merits. If anything, the great age of the bishops’ presence in the Lords is a mark against it: it means the arrangement predates the very concept of religious plurality as a feature of British public life, predates the admission of Catholics to Parliament in 1829, predates the removal of the bar on Jews in 1858, predates the arrival of significant Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, and non-religious populations who are now full British citizens with every legitimate interest in the laws their legislature passes. An arrangement designed for a confessionally homogeneous mediaeval state does not become appropriate for a plural democratic society simply by surviving long enough to feel normal.
The establishment argument holds that the Church of England’s broader constitutional establishment, its position as the state church, justifies the presence of its bishops in the Lords as an expression of that establishment. This is logically coherent but proves less than its proponents hope. It establishes that the Lords Spiritual are consistent with establishment. It does not establish that establishment is itself justified. The question of whether England should have an established church is a prior question, and one that the existence of the bishops is sometimes used to avoid answering directly. The circular reasoning runs as follows: the bishops are in the Lords because the Church is established, and the Church should be established because, among other reasons, it has representation in the Lords. Neither half of the argument supports the other without external justification, and that external justification, a theological account of England as a Christian nation whose laws require ecclesiastical expression, is not one that most citizens, or most parliamentarians, would openly endorse if asked to defend it plainly.
The better-than-nothing argument is occasionally advanced by those who recognise the anomaly but argue that, in the absence of Lords reform, the bishops at least provide some ballast against purely partisan interests. This is a counsel of despair dressed as pragmatism. If the Lords requires reform to make it more democratically legitimate, the answer is to reform the Lords, not to retain a theologically anomalous appointment system because everything else is also imperfect. The defects of the upper chamber do not become arguments for any particular feature of that chamber; they are arguments for reform of the whole, and the Lords Spiritual should form no part of any reformed settlement.
5. What Has Been Proposed and Why It Has Not Happened
Reform of the Lords Spiritual has been proposed repeatedly, and the political history of those proposals illuminates why structural religious privilege tends to survive even when it commands little principled defence.
The House of Lords Act 1999, which removed the right of most hereditary peers to sit and vote, was a significant moment of reform. At the time, many expected it to be the first stage of a comprehensive overhaul that would address the upper chamber’s composition in full. The Royal Commission on the Reform of the House of Lords, chaired by Lord Wakeham and reporting in 2000, recommended that the Lords Spiritual be retained but that the representation of non-Christian faiths be increased by adding representatives from other traditions. This recommendation managed to avoid the structural question entirely: it took for granted that religious representatives should have guaranteed seats, acknowledged the obvious objection that the current arrangement privileges one denomination over all others, and proposed expanding the privilege rather than abolishing it. The recommendation was never implemented, in part because the wider Lords reform it was embedded within stalled, but its logic is revealing. When faced with the anomaly of established religious representation, the instinctive political response was to make it more inclusive rather than to question whether it should exist at all.
The 2012 House of Lords Reform Bill, introduced by the coalition government and largely the work of Nick Clegg, proposed an elected upper chamber and would have ended the automatic right of bishops to sit as a consequence of that broader settlement. The bill was defeated, killed off largely by Conservative backbench rebellion with significant assistance from Labour ambivalence. The bishops were not the primary reason for the bill’s failure; the broader question of an elected Lords produced sufficient opposition to doom the entire enterprise. But the episode illustrated that the political will to address even the most obvious anomalies of the upper chamber is difficult to sustain against organised resistance, and that individual anomalies tend to be protected by the complexity of the larger reform they are embedded within.
More recently, during debates about Lords reform in the early 2020s, several proposals have circulated among constitutional reformers. The most modest would cap the Lords Spiritual at fewer than twenty-six and require that bishops demonstrate a record of contribution before taking their seats. The most radical would remove the right entirely and allow bishops, like any other distinguished citizen, to be considered for appointment as life peers on merit. The Labour government elected in 2024 has indicated some appetite for Lords reform, including the removal of the remaining hereditary peers who retained seats under the 1999 Act’s compromise arrangement, but it has been noticeably cautious about the Lords Spiritual. The political calculation is not obscure: the Church of England retains cultural weight disproportionate to its actual practising membership, its bishops are not generally perceived as malign actors, and the fight required to remove them is judged to be larger than the political capital it would consume.
That political calculation may be correct as a short-term assessment of parliamentary arithmetic. It is not a principled position. Structural injustice does not become less unjust because addressing it is politically inconvenient. The history of British constitutional reform is largely a history of anomalies that were defended on the grounds of tradition and practicality until the argument became sufficiently embarrassing to sustain, at which point they were abolished and rapidly forgotten. The Lords Spiritual are now at the stage of the argument where they can be defended only by changing the subject: by talking about what individual bishops say in debate rather than why they are there, by invoking tradition without examining it, by gesturing at the complexity of Lords reform without engaging with the specific principle at stake. These are the moves made by people who know that the underlying case is lost but who are not yet politically obliged to concede it.
6. The Plurality Problem
Even if one were prepared to accept the presence of religious representatives in the Lords as a matter of principle, the specific arrangement currently in place is indefensible on its own terms, because it privileges one denomination of one religion in a country that is now characterised by substantial religious plurality and a large and growing non-religious population.
The 2021 census for England and Wales recorded that 46.2 per cent of the population described themselves as Christian, down from 59.3 per cent in 2011. For the first time, fewer than half the population of England and Wales identified as Christian. Meanwhile, those identifying as having no religion rose to 37.2 per cent. Islam was identified by 6.5 per cent, Hinduism by 1.7 per cent, Sikhism by 0.9 per cent, and Judaism by 0.5 per cent. Even within the Christian 46 per cent, the Church of England represents only a fraction: the Catholic population of England and Wales is comparable in size to the Anglican population, and there are significant Methodist, Baptist, Pentecostal, and other Protestant communities who have no representation through the Lords Spiritual. The arrangement that gives twenty-six seats to Church of England bishops therefore represents not Christianity broadly but one particular Protestant denomination, and one whose active Sunday attendance, according to its own published data, has fallen to somewhere around 690,000 in a country of more than fifty-six million people in England alone.
The Lords Spiritual, in other words, represent approximately 1.2 per cent of the English population’s active membership, and they represent them in a legislature that passes law for the entire country. The idea that this constitutes a reasonable reflection of the religious landscape of modern Britain requires a very particular definition of the word reasonable. It reflects, instead, a constitutional fossilisation: the preservation of an arrangement designed for a confessionally homogeneous society that ceased to exist several centuries ago, maintained in amber while the country around it changed beyond recognition.
The most common response to this demographic objection is the Wakeham-style proposal: extend the representation to include leaders of other faiths. This would be a constitutional innovation of some significance, since it would move from an arrangement that happens to have survived from the medieval period into one that is actively designed on the principle that religious organisations, as religious organisations, deserve guaranteed legislative representation. That is a more radical position than the current arrangement in one important sense: it would require Parliament to endorse, explicitly and newly, a principle that currently exists only by default and historical accident. That explicit endorsement would immediately raise further questions. How many representatives does each religion receive, and by what formula? Who determines whether a religious organisation is sufficiently established to warrant a seat? Does the fastest-growing Pentecostal church in South London receive representation alongside the Diocese of Canterbury? Does the British Humanist Association, representing those with no religion, receive a seat alongside the imams and the archbishops? The proposal dissolves on contact with the reality of a plural society, because no principled line can be drawn that includes some groups and excludes others without importing arbitrary judgements about which world views deserve constitutional recognition and which do not.
The only constitutionally coherent positions are either the current arrangement, maintained on grounds of historical inertia and justified by nothing more principled than longevity, or the removal of guaranteed religious representation from the legislature entirely. There is no stable middle ground, because the principle of guaranteed representation by religious affiliation cannot be applied in a plural society without either favouring one tradition arbitrarily or creating an unworkable proliferation of guaranteed seats. The current arrangement chooses the arbitrary option and relies on the fact that the arbitrary choice was made long enough ago that it has acquired the false authority of common sense.
7. State Neutrality as a Democratic Principle
The deepest objection to the Lords Spiritual is not about demographics or political arithmetic. It is about what a democratic legislature is for and whom it represents.
A democratic legislature derives its authority from the people it represents. That is not a controversial claim; it is the foundational principle of democratic theory. The people a legislature represents are, in a modern pluralist state, people of diverse beliefs, diverse values, and diverse religious and non-religious commitments. The law the legislature passes binds all of them equally. It follows from this that the legislature ought to be constituted in a way that does not structurally privilege any subset of the population defined by their adherence to a particular world view, whether religious or otherwise. This principle is sometimes called state neutrality and sometimes described as the separation of church and state, though in the British context the latter phrase has never had the constitutional weight it carries in the United States, where it has been read into the First Amendment since the republic’s founding.
Robert G. Ingersoll, the nineteenth-century American orator who argued the case for secular governance with greater consistency and clarity than almost any contemporary politician dared, put the founders’ reasoning plainly: “I account in part for the civilization of America by the fact that our fathers were wise enough, and jealous of each other enough, to absolutely divorce church and state. They regarded the church as a dangerous mistress, one not fit to govern a president.” The phrase “jealous of each other enough” is the key one. The American settlement was not the product of principled secularism alone; it was also the product of competing religious communities that did not trust one another sufficiently to allow any single tradition to dominate the civic space. Britain never had that particular dynamic at the critical moment, partly because the Church of England was established before significant religious pluralism developed within England itself, and partly because English political culture has always been more comfortable with informal compromises than with constitutional principles stated in their full rigour. The result is that the structural question of religious representation in the legislature has never been forced into political debate with the urgency it deserves.
Britain has therefore never been required to argue the case for state neutrality from first principles. An arrangement that predates the democratic era has been grandfathered through successive rounds of reform without ever being examined on its merits. This essay is, in one sense, an attempt to force that examination, on the grounds that arguments which are never properly confronted have a tendency to survive by default rather than by merit.
State neutrality does not require that religious people be excluded from public life. Bishops, like anyone else, can stand for election, engage in lobbying, contribute to public debate, appear before parliamentary committees, and make every argument available to any other citizen or any other organisation. What state neutrality requires is that no religious organisation receive, by virtue of its religious identity alone, a guaranteed seat at the legislative table. Under a genuinely neutral constitution, the bishops are not excluded; they are treated, like every other citizen and every other institution, as participants in democratic life who must make their case through the spaces open to everyone. That principle, far from being hostile to religious participation in public life, is the precondition for a civic realm in which all participants stand on equal footing, and in which no world view carries a constitutional head start simply because it was the dominant one when the current arrangements were first constructed.
The argument from state neutrality also has implications for the broader question of what a reformed legislature should look like. The case for an elected upper chamber, or for a reformed appointed chamber constituted on principles of expertise, regional representation, and democratic legitimacy, is strengthened by the recognition that the current arrangement includes, as a foundational element, a block of seats allocated by religious office. If we are serious about building a legislature that represents the country as it actually is, that seriousness has to encompass the removal of constitutional privileges that have no basis in democratic principle, however comfortable those privileges may have become through long familiarity.
8. The Harm Done
It is possible to acknowledge that individual bishops are often decent people making thoughtful contributions and to simultaneously insist that their institutional presence in the Lords has done, and continues to do, measurable harm. These are not contradictory positions, and the distinction between them is important. The argument here is not against the bishops as people; it is against the principle of their presence as a constitutional fixture.
The harm is not primarily the harm of bad votes, though bad votes there have been. The harm is systemic and structural. It consists, first, in the signal the arrangement sends about whose voices count in British public life. A legislature that guarantees seats to the leadership of one religious denomination tells every citizen who does not belong to that denomination, and there are now more such citizens than those who do, that the constitutional order was not designed with them fully in mind. It tells the Muslim constituent in Bradford, the Hindu constituent in Leicester, the non-religious constituent in almost every constituency in the country, that the baseline assumption of British governance is one that does not include them without effort on their part. The Church of England, by contrast, is there as of right. That asymmetry is not trivial. It shapes the texture of public culture and the distribution of civic dignity in ways that are real even when they are difficult to quantify.
The second form of harm is the influence the bishops have exercised, and continue to exercise, on legislation that directly affects the lives of people who do not share their theological commitments. The most visible current example is assisted dying. The Church of England’s formal position is one of opposition to any legislation that would permit assisted dying for terminally ill adults, and this position has been consistently articulated and voted upon by the Lords Spiritual. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which passed its Commons second reading in November 2024 by 330 votes to 275, moved to the Lords for detailed scrutiny, and the bishops’ opposition to the bill has been open and organised. Whether or not one supports the legislation, the question of whether terminally ill adults in Britain should have the option of an assisted death is not a question whose answer should be determined, in any part, by the theological convictions of twenty-six Church of England bishops sitting in the legislature by right of their ecclesiastical office. It is a question about individual autonomy, about medical practice, about the sufficiency of safeguards, and about the values of a society that includes people of every faith and none. Those are questions for the whole of society, expressed through its democratic representatives, not for a body of clerics whose presence in the chamber was never the result of a democratic decision and has never been subjected to one.
The third form of harm is more diffuse but perhaps more significant in the long run. The presence of the Lords Spiritual in the legislature, and the broader constitutional establishment of the Church of England, sustains a cultural presumption that religious belief, and specifically Anglican Christian belief, has a privileged relationship with public morality and civic virtue. This presumption is not stated explicitly by most politicians; it operates instead as background assumption, shaping what seems natural and what seems transgressive in public discourse. The result is a persistent mild pressure toward treating non-religious citizens as participants in national life who are tolerated rather than as people whose world views are as legitimately British as any other. The residual cultural weight of religious authority continues to constrain what can be said and who is invited to say it, even in a country where the majority no longer identifies actively with any religion. The Lords Spiritual are not the sole cause of this cultural condition, but they are among its most visible expressions, and their removal would be among the clearer signals that British public culture is prepared to organise itself on genuinely neutral ground.
9. The Objection from Gradualism
Some readers who are sympathetic to the arguments above will nevertheless resist the conclusion on the grounds that Lords reform is a large and complex enterprise, that there are more pressing priorities, and that focusing on the bishops risks giving the impression that secular reformers are more interested in scoring symbolic points against religion than in addressing the structural problems of the legislature as a whole. This is a reasonable concern and it deserves a direct answer rather than a dismissal.
The objection proves too much. If the argument is that addressing any particular anomaly is premature until the whole system is reformed, then the whole system will never be reformed, because every element of it can claim the protection of complexity by pointing to every other element. The removal of the Lords Spiritual does not require a comprehensive constitutional settlement. It requires amending the Bishoprics Act 1878 to remove the automatic right of Church of England bishops to sit, and either removing those seats altogether or converting them into standard life peerages available, through the ordinary appointments process, to individuals of demonstrated expertise and public service from any background. This is not a simple political task, but it is a constitutionally straightforward one: it requires political will, not constitutional ingenuity.
Nor is it accurate to characterise the removal of the Lords Spiritual as merely symbolic. Symbols matter, and the symbol in question, that a single religious denomination has guaranteed representation in the legislature, shapes real political outcomes and real civic expectations. The bishops’ votes on assisted dying, on equal marriage, on faith school policy, and on other contested questions are not symbolic acts. They are real legislative interventions with real consequences for real people. Treating the bishops’ presence as merely ceremonial misunderstands what legislatures do and, more importantly, misrepresents what the bishops themselves claim to be doing when they speak and vote.
The gradualist objection also underestimates the extent to which the specific anomaly of the Lords Spiritual is an obstacle to broader reform rather than a complication within it. Any serious proposal for an elected or significantly reformed upper chamber will face the question of what happens to the bishops. If that question is treated as too sensitive to address directly, it becomes a lever that opponents of broader reform can use to stall the entire enterprise. The more straightforwardly it is addressed, the cleaner the path to a more legitimate legislature becomes. The bishops’ seats are not a complexity that makes reform harder to design; they are a clear example of an indefensible arrangement whose removal makes the overall case for democratic reform easier to articulate and easier to sell to a public that is, on the whole, more secular than the constitutional arrangements that govern it.
10. What a Secular Legislature Looks Like
There is a positive case to be made here, and not merely a case against the current arrangement. A legislature that has no guaranteed seats for any religious or ideological grouping is not a legislature from which religion has been expelled. It is a legislature in which religious citizens, like all other citizens, participate through the democratic and meritocratic processes available to everyone. Religious perspectives enter the political debate through elected representatives who hold those perspectives, through witnesses called to give evidence to parliamentary committees, through public campaigning and lobbying, through the appointments process for life peers that is open to distinguished individuals from any background. None of these routes is closed to religious people or to religious organisations, and none of them should be.
What changes, in a secular legislature, is the presumption of entitlement. No organisation, religious or otherwise, is owed a seat at the legislative table as a matter of constitutional right by virtue of its identity rather than its democratic mandate. Every perspective that seeks to influence legislation must do so through the processes available to all citizens. Treating religious world views the same as any other world view is not discrimination against them; it is the refusal of special treatment, which is a different thing entirely, and a thing that a genuinely neutral state is obliged to maintain consistently across all the world views represented within its borders.
The countries that have achieved this neutrality most fully are not culturally impoverished or hostile to religious life. The Netherlands, Germany, the Scandinavian countries that have disestablished their state churches in recent decades, and the United States in its constitutional design if not always in its political culture, all demonstrate that democratic societies can function without guaranteeing legislative seats to clergy. Religious communities in those countries remain active, influential, and in many cases growing. The absence of guaranteed seats does not silence them. It places them in the same constitutional position as every other citizen and every other institution, which is precisely where they belong in a society that takes seriously the idea that all citizens stand equal before the law and that no world view is written into the constitutional furniture as a matter of inherited right.
Britain’s failure to reach this position is not a reflection of the country’s values so much as a reflection of the institutional conservatism that characterises British constitutional development. Change in Britain tends to happen slowly and partially, through accumulated pragmatic adjustments rather than principled settlements, and the British political class has a strong preference for allowing anomalies to wither rather than addressing them directly. The removal of the Lords Spiritual will almost certainly happen eventually, because the arguments for their retention are growing weaker as the demographic and cultural context that might have sustained them continues to shift. The question is whether it happens because the argument was made clearly and persistently enough to force the political class to act on principle, or whether it happens through the quiet attrition of an arrangement that everyone eventually stops bothering to defend in public.
The preference here is emphatically for the former. Laws ought to reflect the values of the society they govern, and they ought to be made by institutions whose composition can be justified to every citizen, not merely to those whose religious affiliation happens to be written into the constitutional furniture. The positive vision is straightforward: a second chamber whose members are there because they were elected, or because they were appointed through a process open to all on the basis of what they know and what they have done, rather than because of what they believe and whom they serve within a single denomination’s hierarchy. This is not a radical vision. It is a modest one. It is, in fact, the vision that most British citizens would endorse if the question were put to them plainly, without the softening effect of centuries of familiarity.
11. Steelmanning the Strongest Remaining Defence
Before concluding, it is worth constructing the strongest possible version of the case for the bishops’ presence, stronger than its usual proponents manage, in order to test whether anything survives the scrutiny applied above.
The strongest version runs something like this. The House of Lords is not a democratic chamber and has never claimed to be one. It is a revising chamber whose constitutional function is to scrutinise legislation produced by an elected lower house, to introduce amendments, to force reconsideration, and to bring expertise and perspectives that the Commons, driven by electoral calculations, tends to lack. Given that function, the relevant question is not whether any particular group of members has a democratic mandate, since no member of the Lords has one, but whether their presence contributes to the chamber’s revising function. The bishops, on this argument, contribute a perspective, grounded in long institutional engagement with poverty, community life, and social welfare, that is genuinely underrepresented among the legal professionals, former politicians, and business figures who make up the bulk of the peerage. Removing them without replacing that perspective would make the chamber less rather than more capable of performing its constitutional function. The argument for their removal should therefore be accompanied by a positive account of how that perspective is preserved in a reformed chamber, and in the absence of such an account, the reformers bear a burden of proof they have not yet discharged.
This is the most coherent version of the pro-bishops case, and it deserves a serious response. The response is as follows. The argument concedes, implicitly, that the case for the bishops cannot be made on constitutional principle; it retreats instead to a claim about functional contribution in a chamber that is itself constitutionally anomalous. That retreat is significant, because it means that even the strongest defence of the bishops is not a defence of them as such but a defence of a particular kind of perspective, namely genuine engagement with poverty and community welfare, that the bishops happen to carry. If that perspective is what matters, then the obvious solution is to appoint people who carry it through a process that is open to all: community organisers, social workers, food bank administrators, housing charity directors, welfare researchers. The Church of England does not have a monopoly on this experience, and the assumption that it does is itself a residue of the cultural presumption discussed earlier, the assumption that the bishops represent something broader and more morally authoritative than their institutional affiliation actually warrants. The perspective is valuable; the mechanism for delivering it is not justified by the value of the perspective, because better mechanisms are available and have not been tried.
Furthermore, the argument from functional contribution assumes that the bishops’ overall contribution to the chamber is a net positive when all their interventions are considered together. On issues of welfare and poverty, some of the bishops’ contributions may well be positive. On issues of sexual equality, reproductive rights, and end-of-life autonomy, the bishops’ institutional positions have consistently placed them on the wrong side of the moral consensus that British society has subsequently reached. The net calculation is not obviously favourable, and even if it were, the contribution argument cannot, as argued throughout this essay, do the constitutional work that is being asked of it. A good argument, made by the wrong constitutional mechanism, does not vindicate the mechanism. It simply confirms that the argument deserves to be heard through a better one.
There is a further subtlety worth addressing here. Some defenders of the bishops make a structural argument about the Lords itself: that the upper chamber, being an unelected body, is already a departure from strict democratic principle, and that this departure is the source of its value as a revising chamber. An elected upper chamber, this argument runs, would simply duplicate the political dynamics of the Commons, adding nothing. The appointed and hereditary elements of the Lords, including the bishops, are therefore not anomalies within a democratic system; they are features of a deliberate constitutional hybrid. This argument has genuine force as a description of what the Lords is for. It does not, however, constitute a defence of the bishops specifically. A constitutional hybrid that deliberately includes non-elected expertise can include that expertise through any number of routes. The argument for a hybrid upper chamber is an argument for a particular kind of balance between democratic accountability and independent expertise; it is not an argument for guaranteed religious representation. The bishops benefit from the argument without being justified by it, because the argument justifies any form of independent expertise, not their particular form of religious appointment.
The distinction matters because it is precisely here that defenders of the current arrangement tend to perform a sleight of hand: they move from the general case for a revising chamber with diverse membership to the specific case for bishops, as though the first argument entailed the second. It does not. A diverse revising chamber requires many things; it does not specifically require, and cannot be shown to require, that twenty-six of its members hold their seats by virtue of their position in the hierarchy of a denomination to which fewer than two per cent of the population actively belong. The general argument for diversity is strong; the specific argument for episcopal diversity, derived from religious office, is not.
12. The Question of Precedent and International Standing
Britain’s constitutional anomaly also has implications beyond its domestic political culture. The United Kingdom is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, a founding member of NATO, a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, and a country that regularly argues, in international forums, for the principles of democratic governance, human rights, and the rule of law. The Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, is a document Britain helped draft. The principle that the state should not favour one religion over another is a cornerstone of the international human rights framework that Britain has consistently supported and promoted.
The domestic arrangement sits awkwardly alongside these international commitments. When Britain criticises states that privilege one religious community in their constitutional arrangements, the criticism is not wrong, but it is delivered from a position of structural inconsistency. When governments in the Middle East, Africa, or South Asia are challenged over constitutional provisions that advantage a majority religion at the expense of minority citizens, the British response would carry considerably more moral authority if it came from a state whose own legislature did not include twenty-six seats reserved for the clergy of a single denomination. This is not to say that the existence of the Lords Spiritual invalidates British commentary on other countries’ constitutions; it is to say that the removal of the Lords Spiritual would strengthen that commentary by closing a gap that attentive critics are entirely entitled to point out.
There is also a question of what Britain’s constitutional arrangement signals to minority religious and non-religious communities within the country itself. The Equality Act 2010, which includes religion and belief as protected characteristics, reflects a commitment to treating people of all faiths and none with equal dignity before the law. The existence of the Lords Spiritual sits in tension with that commitment, not because the bishops are individually hostile to minority groups, but because the constitutional architecture signals, at the deepest level, that one faith community has a structural relationship with the state that no other community shares. Commitments to equality made in legislation are harder to sustain in political culture when the constitutional framework that surrounds them embeds the opposite principle.
The point generalises. Constitutional arrangements are not merely functional mechanisms; they are expressions of the values a state takes to be foundational. The presence of the Lords Spiritual expresses the value that one religious community has a special claim on the legislative process, a claim derived from history rather than from democratic principle, from theological tradition rather than from the consent of the governed. That expression is incompatible with the values Britain otherwise claims, and the incompatibility is not a minor technical inconsistency to be tolerated by those who understand the context. It is a substantive constitutional failure that can be clearly stated, clearly understood, and clearly corrected, if the political will to correct it can be assembled.
13. The Cultural Moment and Why It Matters Now
The argument for removing the Lords Spiritual is not new. It has been made, in various forms, for as long as there have been secularists in Britain prepared to make it. What has changed is the cultural and demographic context in which it is being made, and that context now makes the case considerably more urgent than it has been at any previous point in modern British history.
The 2021 census data, discussed above, reflects a transformation that has been under way for decades but has now crossed a threshold of significance. For the first time, fewer than half the population of England and Wales identifies as Christian. The non-religious population, at 37.2 per cent, is now the largest single category of belief in many age cohorts and the second largest overall. Projections based on generational replacement suggest that the non-religious will constitute the largest single group in the country within the next ten to fifteen years, if they do not already do so when those who identify nominally rather than practisingly are discounted. The Anglican Church’s own data on Sunday attendance, cited above, tells a still more striking story: the actively practising Anglican population is a small fraction even of those who identify culturally as Church of England on a census form.
Against this backdrop, the case for retaining twenty-six guaranteed seats for Church of England bishops in the legislature grows weaker with every passing year, not merely as a matter of political arithmetic but as a matter of cultural logic. The arrangement was defensible, in a narrow historical sense, when the overwhelming majority of the population was practising Anglican and the Church of England was the primary institution of civil society. Neither condition now holds. The arrangement persists not because it reflects the society it purports to serve but because it reflects a society that no longer exists, one that has been replaced by something considerably more diverse, considerably more secular, and considerably more likely, if asked directly, to find the arrangement puzzling or objectionable.
The cultural moment also matters because of the specific legislative debates now under way. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is the most prominent, but there are others: debates about abortion access in various parts of the United Kingdom, debates about the continued public funding of faith schools, debates about religious exemptions from equalities legislation. In each of these debates, the bishops have institutional interests that are not identical with the interests of the wider population, and in each of them, the bishops have guaranteed access to the legislative process that no comparable secular organisation possesses. This is not a minor procedural advantage; it is a structural weighting of the legislative process in favour of a particular theological tradition, at the moment when the population that tradition represents is smaller, and declining more rapidly, than at any point in the modern era.
The argument for reform is therefore not only principled but timely. The principled case could have been made, and has been made, at any point over the last century. The demographic and cultural shift now under way makes it additionally urgent, because the gap between what the constitutional arrangement expresses and what the country actually is has never been wider. Closing that gap is a straightforward act of constitutional honesty, and the tools for doing so are entirely available. Only the political will remains to be found.
Conclusion
The case against the Lords Spiritual is not a case against the bishops as individuals, nor against the Church of England as a religious community, nor against the citizens who find meaning and community within it. It is a case about the constitutional principle that a democratic legislature ought to be constituted in a way that can be justified to all the citizens whose lives it governs. That principle is not satisfied by an arrangement in which a single religious denomination holds guaranteed seats by virtue of ecclesiastical office alone. It is not satisfied by the observation that the bishops sometimes say valuable things. It is not satisfied by the tradition of the arrangement or by the political difficulty of reforming it. The principle of democratic legitimacy is either met or it is not, and in the case of the Lords Spiritual it plainly is not, and the company Britain keeps by failing to meet it is not the company a liberal democracy should want to keep.
The arrangement should end through legislation: through a commitment to constituting the second chamber on grounds that every citizen can accept, and through the plain recognition that a state which reserves its legislative seats for the clergy of one denomination has not yet fully decided what kind of state it wants to be. The decision is overdue. The arguments against making it are not strong enough to justify the further delay. The bishops should be free, like any other citizen, to seek influence through the processes available to all, and the legislature should be free, at last, to claim a legitimacy that it currently cannot.