The National Secular Society published its analysis in July 2026, and the argument it made was as clear as it was uncomfortable for those invested in the current constitutional settlement: no amount of modernising imagery, interfaith symbolism, or carefully curated palace communications can conceal the fact that Britain’s head of state is simultaneously the Supreme Governor of one specific Christian denomination, that twenty-six bishops of that denomination occupy seats in the legislature as a matter of ecclesiastical right, and that every citizen who does not belong to the Church of England lives in a country whose foundational constitutional architecture was not designed with them in mind. The monarchy can commission focus groups, hire diversity consultants, and arrange photogenic appearances at Diwali celebrations and Eid receptions until the very last page of the calendar. None of that touches the structure. The structure is what matters.
This essay is about that structure: what it is, how it operates, what it costs in practice, and why the cosmetic rebranding that has occupied so much palace energy in recent years is not merely insufficient but is, in a meaningful sense, dishonest. Not dishonest in the sense that the individuals involved are consciously deceiving anyone, because it is entirely possible to sincerely believe that a warm press release and a more diverse set of patronages constitute genuine pluralism. The dishonesty is structural, in the sense that the public face of an institution systematically misrepresents its constitutional reality. Britain is a society of increasing religious diversity and growing non-religion, in which roughly 37 percent of the population now identify as having no religion at all, and in which the Church of England’s own attendance figures have collapsed to a fraction of what they were a generation ago. Against that social reality, the maintenance of an established church with genuine legislative, ceremonial, and symbolic privileges is not a neutral tradition. It is a choice. And like all choices, it has costs, and those costs are borne unequally.
1. What Establishment Actually Means
The phrase “established church” is used so casually in British public life that it has almost ceased to mean anything. It functions as a piece of constitutional furniture, inherited and unremarkable, something people nod at before moving on to more pressing matters. This is precisely the problem. The comfortable vagueness of the phrase does real ideological work: it obscures the specificity and the concrete implications of what establishment actually entails. Being precise about what we are discussing is therefore worth the effort, because the precision is somewhat alarming once you stop treating it as furniture and start treating it as a policy.
The Church of England is established by law. Its relationship with the state is not merely historical or ceremonial; it is constitutional and active. The monarch is its Supreme Governor, a title that is not honorary but legally operative: the monarch must be in communion with the Church of England and must, under the Act of Settlement 1701, be a Protestant. This requirement alone disqualifies every Roman Catholic, every Muslim, every Jew, every Hindu, every Sikh, every atheist, and every person of no religion from the position of head of state in their own country, not as a matter of practical politics but as a matter of law. That is not a quirk. That is a structural statement about who fully belongs in the constitutional order and who is merely accommodated within it as a secondary category.
The Lords Spiritual are the twenty-six bishops who sit in the House of Lords by virtue of their ecclesiastical office. They do not stand for election. They are not appointed because of any demonstrated expertise in the areas on which they legislate. They are there because they hold senior positions in one particular Christian denomination. No other religious tradition receives equivalent representation. The Chief Rabbi does not sit in the Lords by right. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s counterpart in any other faith has no equivalent constitutional seat. The imam, the pandit, the humanist celebrant, the person of no religion: none of them has an institutional voice in the legislature on the same terms. This is not discrimination in the aggressive sense; nobody is being expelled or silenced. However, it is structural preference, and structural preference has consequences that persist long after anyone has stopped intending them.
Beyond the Lords Spiritual, establishment manifests in other ways that are easy to overlook individually but significant in aggregate. Church of England bishops and clergy must have their appointments confirmed, in various forms, by the Crown. Parliament has historically had the power to reject changes to Church doctrine, though this has been modified over time. The monarch’s coronation is conducted as a Christian religious ceremony by the Archbishop of Canterbury, with oaths sworn on the Christian Bible, in a ritual whose entire symbolic grammar is Anglican. State occasions, from Remembrance Sunday to royal funerals and weddings, are framed within Church of England liturgy as the default. The national broadcaster treats coronations and state religious ceremonies as events of unquestioned civic importance, broadcasting them in full, with commentary that rarely pauses to note how unusual this constitutional arrangement is by international standards. A citizen who does not share the faith of the established church is not excluded from watching these ceremonies. However, they are watching someone else’s religious tradition being performed as though it were their own.
The cumulative picture is of a denomination that is not merely permitted to exist and flourish, as every voluntary religious organisation in Britain is, but that is woven into the operational machinery of the state in ways that no other tradition is. That distinction between permission and privilege is the central one in this debate, and it is consistently blurred by defenders of the establishment who treat criticism of the constitutional arrangement as if it were hostility to religious expression as such. Those are categorically different arguments, and conflating them is the oldest evasion in this particular debate.
2. The Numbers and the Constitution Are Moving in Opposite Directions
The constitutional case for an established church has always rested, at least implicitly, on the claim that the Church of England represents something nationally significant about British religious identity. When Henry VIII established the church in the sixteenth century, this was not even a premise that required argument; it was simply the demographic reality of a society in which Christianity was the only serious game in town and Anglicanism, once established, was the dominant expression of it. The argument carried more weight in 1953, when the present late Queen was crowned, than it does today, and even then it was more comfortable assertion than careful reasoning.
Today, the numbers are devastating for anyone still trying to make the representational case. The 2021 census recorded that, for the first time, fewer than half of the population of England and Wales identified as Christian, with the figure standing at 46.2 percent. Of those, only a fraction belong to the Church of England specifically, and a smaller fraction still attend regularly. The Church of England’s own Statistics for Mission report consistently records average weekly attendance figures in the low hundreds of thousands, in a country of some 57 million people in England alone. The number of people who identify as having no religion has risen sharply with every successive survey, and among younger age cohorts the proportion is higher still, suggesting that the trajectory is not an anomaly but a structural shift in British society’s relationship with religious identity.
Meanwhile, the religious landscape of those who do hold a faith has diversified dramatically. Islam is now the second largest religion in England and Wales by self-identification. Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism, and Buddhism all have substantial and well-established communities. The idea that the Church of England can serve as a national church in any meaningful representational sense, that it speaks in some way for the religious and spiritual life of the nation as a whole, is not merely contested; it is demonstrably implausible as a matter of demographic fact. The constitutional structure has not moved to reflect any of this. The twenty-six bishops are still there. The Act of Settlement is still there. The coronation oath is still Anglican in its grammar. The question that the establishment’s defenders have never adequately answered is this: on what legitimate basis does a religious denomination that a large majority of the population does not belong to, and that an increasing plurality actively rejects, retain structural privileges in the legislature, the head of state, and the symbolic life of the nation?
The honest answer is that there is no principled basis. There is a historical basis, which is a different thing entirely. History explains how an arrangement came to exist; it does not justify its perpetuation when the conditions that generated it have changed beyond recognition. Feudalism has a historical basis. The divine right of kings has a historical basis. We do not treat historical basis as a sufficient argument for preservation in those cases, and there is no obvious reason why we should treat it as sufficient in this one. The argument from historical continuity is, when examined carefully, not an argument for justice but an argument for inertia, and inertia is not a principle.
There is a further statistical dimension that receives less attention than it deserves, which is the age profile of the declining religious majority. The proportion of people identifying as Christian is substantially higher among those over sixty-five than among those under forty. This is not a coincidence or a sampling error; it reflects genuine generational change in religious identification that has been consistent and measurable across successive surveys for decades. The implication is not merely that the Church of England represents a minority today, but that it will represent a smaller minority tomorrow, and a smaller one still the generation after that. A constitutional arrangement locked in by historical inertia is not merely unjust in the present tense; it becomes progressively more unjust as the society it claims to represent continues to move in a direction directly contrary to its premises.
3. What Christian Privilege Costs in Practice
The concept of privilege is used so often in contemporary discourse that it has acquired a kind of numbness, a tendency to register as a rhetorical move rather than an analytical claim. Being specific about what Christian privilege in the context of establishment actually costs non-Christian and non-religious citizens is therefore worthwhile, because the costs are real and measurable even when they are not always dramatic.
The most obvious cost is representational. When the state frames its most important ceremonial occasions within Anglican liturgy, it sends a message about whose traditions are the default and whose are the guest. This is not a trivial matter. Symbolic representation has concrete effects on how citizens understand their relationship to the political community. A Muslim citizen watching a coronation conducted entirely within Anglican ritual is not being persecuted; they retain all their civil rights. However, they are being told, through the grammar of the ceremony itself, that this is someone else’s country in a way that they are permitted to live in. The distinction between persecution and structural relegation is real and important, but acknowledging the first does not require us to pretend the second does not exist.
The legislative cost is more concrete. The Lords Spiritual vote on legislation. They have done so on matters ranging from assisted dying to welfare reform to education policy. Their presence in the chamber means that the perspectives of senior Church of England clergy have a structural weight in legislative debates that the perspectives of other traditions, including the growing non-religious plurality, simply do not have. In the debates around assisted dying that have recurred in the Lords over recent years, the bishops’ bloc has been a consistent and influential presence on the conservative side of the argument. Whether one agrees with that position or not, the structural question is the same: why should the theological commitments of one denomination carry institutional weight in a secular legislative chamber? The question is not whether bishops should be allowed to speak in public debates, which they obviously should; the question is why their clerical office entitles them to a vote that nobody else’s professional or religious role entitles them to.
The educational cost is perhaps the most significant and the most contested. The Church of England runs approximately 4,700 schools in England, making it the largest provider of state-funded education outside the government itself. Church of England schools, like other faith schools, are permitted under current law to discriminate in their admissions on the basis of religious criteria, to conduct acts of collective worship that are “wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character” as a matter of legal requirement, and to teach religious education in a framework that privileges the established faith. In areas where the local church school is the only primary school available, parents who do not share the relevant faith have no realistic alternative. The requirement for collective Christian worship in all state-funded schools, introduced in the Education Reform Act 1988 and never seriously revisited, is one of the most brazenly sectarian provisions in British education law, routinely ignored in practice by many schools but still legally in force and still a statement about whose religious tradition belongs in the public square by right rather than by accommodation.
George Orwell, writing about class and charity in a different context, captured something that translates with uncomfortable precision to the religion and state question. As he observed: “It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.” The ecclesiastical parallel is not perfect, but the structure of the presumption is identical. The established church takes it for granted that it has a right to conduct the nation’s ceremonies, to sit in its legislature, to run a significant portion of its schools, and to be represented as the default religious tradition of the head of state, without being required to justify any of these privileges to the increasing majority of citizens who do not share its faith. The presumption is written into the architecture, and the architecture insulates it from democratic challenge.
There are also subtler costs that accumulate in ways harder to quantify but no less real for that. Public funding channelled through faith-based institutions carries with it assumptions about whose values are sufficiently mainstream to deserve support. Hospital chaplaincy provision is weighted toward Christian denominations. Prison chaplaincy has historically been dominated by Anglican clergy in a prisoner population that increasingly reflects the full diversity of British society. Civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths involves a legal framework that has historically privileged religious ceremonies over secular ones. None of these represents oppression in any serious sense. However, in aggregate they constitute a landscape shaped by one tradition’s assumptions, and that landscape is what citizens who do not share those assumptions must navigate at some of the most significant moments of their lives.
4. The Rebrand and Its Limits
It would be unfair to suggest that nothing has changed in the monarchy’s public presentation over the past decade, because things clearly have. The palace communications operation under the present reign has been more sophisticated, more aware of the diversity of the population it represents, and more willing to engage with traditions and communities beyond the Church of England than its predecessors were. King Charles III expressed, before his accession, a wish to be seen as a “defender of faith” rather than merely the defender of the faith, a formulation intended to signal a broader inclusivity. His coronation incorporated, in a manner unprecedented for a British coronation, representatives of other faith traditions in the ceremony, with readings and blessings that reached beyond the Anglican liturgical frame. These are real changes, and dismissing them entirely would be ungenerous.
The problem is that they are cosmetic changes layered on top of a structure that has not changed at all. The King is still the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. The Act of Settlement still bars Catholics from the throne. The Lords Spiritual are still there. The coronation was still fundamentally an Anglican ceremony, with the anointing, the oaths, and the central liturgical substance drawn from the same tradition that has governed every coronation since the medieval period. The presence of a rabbi and an imam at a ceremony whose constitutional core is Anglican does not make that ceremony pluralist; it makes it Anglican with interfaith decoration. This is not nothing, but it is considerably less than genuine structural change, and treating it as equivalent to structural change is precisely the kind of category error that the establishment benefits from promoting.
The “defender of faith” formulation is worth examining more closely, because it illustrates the limits of the rebrand with particular clarity. The phrase is elegant and superficially inclusive. However, “faith” is not a generic category that stands apart from particular faiths. To be a defender of faith in general is either to be a defender of all specific truth claims simultaneously, which is incoherent given that many of those claims contradict one another, or to be a defender of the social role of religious belief as such, in which case one is defending an institutional category rather than a spiritual commitment. Neither formulation does the work that its advocates want it to do. Meanwhile, the constitutional reality is unambiguous: the King is the Supreme Governor of one specific church with one specific set of doctrinal commitments. The rebrand offers pluralist language; the constitution offers Anglican structure. When the two conflict, the constitution governs.
As Christopher Hitchens stated with characteristic precision: “The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.” This is not merely an elegant observation; it identifies the exact mechanism by which the current British arrangement fails its own pluralist aspirations. A state that has an established church cannot be genuinely neutral between religions, regardless of how warmly its head of state smiles at representatives of other traditions in the forecourt of Buckingham Palace. The neutrality that genuine religious pluralism requires is structural, not performative. It requires that the state have no official religion, that no religious denomination have privileged access to legislative power, and that the ceremonial and symbolic life of the nation not be conducted in the liturgical grammar of one tradition by default. The British state has none of these things, and the rebrand cannot supply what the constitution withholds.
What the rebrand does accomplish, and this is not nothing from an institutional perspective, is to make the demand for structural reform seem churlish. If the King has publicly committed himself to honouring all faiths, the argument runs, then surely the remaining constitutional architecture is a mere formality, too minor to agitate about seriously. This is precisely the political utility of the cosmetic change: it raises the social cost of continuing to press the principled case without actually conceding any of the substance of that case. The progressive-sounding gesture is deployed to absorb reformist energy that might otherwise be directed at the structure. Recognising this mechanism does not require attributing conscious cynicism to anyone involved. Institutions protect themselves through the path of least resistance, and a warm public statement costs considerably less than a constitutional amendment.
5. The Steelman: What Defenders of Establishment Actually Argue
The case for establishment is not entirely without content, and intellectual honesty requires engaging with it at its strongest rather than at its weakest. There are at least three serious arguments made in its defence, and they deserve to be considered before being overturned.
The first is the argument from historic continuity. The Church of England is woven into the constitutional fabric of England in a way that makes its extraction genuinely complicated, with implications that extend well beyond the merely ceremonial. Church courts, the system of faculty jurisdiction that governs listed buildings, church land law, the legal status of church marriages, and numerous other provisions depend on the church’s constitutional position in ways that would require substantial legislative work to unwind. The defenders of establishment argue, not entirely without force, that this complexity counsels caution and that the effort involved in disestablishment might be disproportionate to the practical benefits achieved. This is a genuine argument, not a frivolous one, and it deserves a genuine response rather than dismissal.
The second argument is what might be called the social capital argument. The Church of England, through its parish network, its schools, its chaplaincies, and its community activities, delivers a substantial volume of social goods. Food banks run out of church halls, hospital chaplains provide comfort to the dying, community centres operate in converted church buildings, and neighbourhood networks are sustained by parish life in many parts of the country. The argument is that establishment, by giving the church constitutional status and resources, supports this social delivery, and that disestablishment might undermine the institutional capacity that enables it. This is an empirical claim that would require careful investigation to assess properly, but it is not a contemptible one.
The third argument is the moderation argument. The Church of England, precisely because it is established and therefore subject to parliamentary oversight and public accountability, is constrained in ways that a purely voluntary church might not be. The establishment relationship, on this view, acts as a moderating influence on the church, keeping it engaged with public reason and accountable to democratic norms rather than allowing it to retreat into sectarianism. Compare the Church of England’s approach to evolution or homosexuality with that of some American evangelical denominations, and the argument is not without some plausibility. Establishment, paradoxically, may have made English Anglicanism more moderate and more empirically literate than it might otherwise have been.
These are the arguments at their strongest. Now consider why they fail. The historic continuity argument is essentially a counsel of inertia dressed in legal clothing. The complexity of disestablishment is real, but complexity is not a principled objection; it is a practical one that calls for careful legislation, not permanent preservation of an unjust arrangement. Many countries have carried out church-state separation under conditions of comparable legal complexity, and while none of them has done so without difficulty, none of them has found the difficulty insuperable. The mere fact that something is hard to undo is not a reason to maintain it indefinitely, particularly when the cost of maintaining it is borne by citizens who never consented to the arrangement in the first place.
The social capital argument confuses the church’s charitable activity with its constitutional position. The Church of England’s food banks, community centres, and hospital chaplaincies do not depend on the Lords Spiritual sitting in the legislature or on the monarch being the Supreme Governor. These activities are carried out by voluntary communities of faith in the same way that mosques, gurdwaras, synagogues, humanist groups, and secular charities carry out comparable activities without any constitutional privilege whatever. Disestablishment would not close the food banks. It would merely remove the unjustified legislative and ceremonial preferences that accompany the church’s charitable work and, in doing so, would treat the charitable work of all communities on a more equal footing. The argument essentially says: the church does good things, therefore it deserves special constitutional status. This does not follow. Many organisations do good things. We do not give them seats in the House of Lords as a reward.
The moderation argument is perhaps the most interesting of the three but also the most historically contingent. It is true that the Church of England has been, by the standards of global Christianity, relatively moderate on a number of social issues, and it is possible that the establishment relationship has contributed to this. However, this is an argument for the incidental effects of a particular constitutional arrangement on one denomination’s internal culture, not a principled argument for the arrangement’s justice. It is also worth noting that the moderation the argument celebrates is not unlimited: the Church of England’s official position on same-sex marriage, maintained until the most recent and still contested developments, caused real harm to real people, and the moderation of the establishment has not prevented the Lords Spiritual from voting to slow or block progressive legislation on multiple occasions. Moderation relative to a very low bar is not a strong argument for constitutional privilege. And the argument, followed to its logical conclusion, would justify constitutional preference for any institution that can demonstrate it would be worse without the preferential arrangement, a standard so accommodating as to be analytically worthless.
6. The Non-Religious Citizen and the Invisible Cost
There is a constituency whose interests are almost entirely absent from public debates about the established church, and that is the growing proportion of the British population that identifies as having no religion at all. This is not a small or marginal group. The non-religious now constitute the largest single category in many surveys of British religious identity, and among people under forty they are a clear majority. Yet their relationship to the constitutional settlement is not even that of accommodated outsiders; it is more like that of people who have arrived at a conversation structured around assumptions they were never invited to challenge.
The state does not merely preference Christianity in its constitutional architecture. Through the requirement for acts of collective Christian worship in state schools, through the automatic presence of religious content in national ceremonial, and through the absence of any equivalent civic institution that speaks for secular values in the way that the established church speaks for Christian ones, it structurally marginalises the non-religious. A secular humanist whose child attends a Church of England school does not have the option of withdrawing them from the institution’s fundamental character in the way that they can, in principle, withdraw them from a specific act of worship. The school’s ethos, its admissions criteria, its collective life: these are not separable from the Anglican framework in the same way that a single assembly is separable from a school’s daily timetable. The non-religious parent is not persecuted; they are simply offered a set of choices that have already been shaped by someone else’s theological commitments.
The point extends beyond schools. When a non-religious person is bereaved and seeks a humanist funeral, they are navigating a ceremonial landscape that has historically been dominated by religious provision because the state has invested in religious institutions rather than secular alternatives. When a non-religious person serves on a jury and is asked to take an oath, they have the option of affirming rather than swearing, but the default assumption built into the ritual is still theistic. When a non-religious person serves in the armed forces, the chaplaincy provision they encounter is predominantly religious, with secular alternatives chronically underfunded by comparison. None of these is a crisis, and none of them amounts to persecution. However, in aggregate they add up to a consistent message: the default citizen, the citizen for whom the state’s institutions were designed, is a Christian one, and everyone else is accommodated as a gracious concession rather than recognised as an equal participant in a genuinely plural civic life.
The invisibility of this cost is itself part of the problem. Privilege is most effective when it is least visible, when the arrangement that benefits one group at the expense of others is so thoroughly naturalised that it reads not as a policy but as simply the way things are. Describing the Church of England’s constitutional position as a “tradition,” as British commentators consistently do, is precisely this kind of naturalisation. Tradition is the name we give to policies whose costs have been absorbed so thoroughly into the landscape that we have stopped noticing them. The non-religious citizen, for whom the question is not abstract but practical and daily, has rather less capacity to afford this comfort. You can read more about how this kind of inherited assumption functions in the broader context of faith and national identity in The Accident of Faith.
There is also an asymmetry of expectation that the establishment produces and that is rarely acknowledged. Religious citizens in Britain are not required to justify their faith’s constitutional privileges; those privileges are inherited and presumed. Non-religious citizens who object to those privileges are routinely asked to explain why they are making such a fuss, to demonstrate that they are being harmed in some legally cognisable sense, and to justify the effort and disruption that reform would involve. The burden of proof is systematically placed on those who bear the cost of the arrangement rather than on those who benefit from it. This reversal of the normal liberal burden, which should require privilege to justify itself rather than requiring its absence to do so, is one of the most revealing features of the establishment debate, and one of the clearest indications that the debate has not yet been conducted on genuinely equal terms.
7. Parliament, Law, and the Constitutional Question
One of the consistent evasions in public discussion of the established church is the claim that it is essentially a parliamentary matter, that Parliament could, if it chose, reform the arrangement at any time, and that the absence of parliamentary action reflects a democratic endorsement of the status quo. This argument has a surface plausibility that dissolves on examination. The absence of parliamentary action on any given issue reflects the distribution of political power, the priorities of governing parties, the influence of interested lobbies, and the costs of expending political capital on a question that carries symbolic weight without obvious electoral reward. It does not reflect a considered democratic judgement that the arrangement is just or appropriate. Parliament has declined to act on many things that a democratic majority might endorse if the question were put directly; the absence of action is not equivalent to the presence of consent.
The constitutional arrangements that would need to be reformed to achieve genuine disestablishment extend well beyond Parliament’s ordinary legislative business. The Act of Settlement, the relationship between the Crown and the church, the legal status of the Lords Spiritual: these are not matters of ordinary statute that a parliamentary majority can adjust with a single bill. They are embedded in the constitutional fabric in ways that would require sustained political will across multiple parliamentary sessions and, in some cases, would engage constitutional conventions that parliamentary arithmetic alone cannot resolve. The fact that the establishment is difficult to remove is one of its most important political features. It is not impossible to remove; if a government chose to prioritise it and carried sufficient parliamentary support, the legislative path exists. The difficulty is real, however, and it serves the interests of those who benefit from the existing arrangement that it should remain so.
The legal question intersects with the rights question in ways that have begun to attract more serious attention in recent years. The European Convention on Human Rights, which remains incorporated into British law through the Human Rights Act despite the political pressures on that Act, guarantees freedom of thought, conscience, and religion under Article 9, and prohibits discrimination on the grounds of religion under Article 14 read with other Convention rights. The relationship between these guarantees and the constitutional privileges of the Church of England is not one that British courts have been asked to resolve directly and comprehensively. However, the increasing willingness of litigants to challenge religion-based discrimination in education, employment, and public life suggests that the constitutional settlement’s compatibility with rights law is not as settled as its defenders tend to assume. You can read more about the legal dimensions of this question in Law of the Land, Not a Suggestion.
There is also a longer-term political dynamic that deserves attention. Each general election returns a parliament that is less religiously homogeneous than its predecessor. The proportion of MPs who identify as non-religious has grown consistently, and the proportion who identify as Church of England has shrunk correspondingly. At some point, the political calculus around disestablishment will shift, not because the principled arguments will have changed, but because the political costs of defending an arrangement that the majority of legislators no longer personally inhabit will have risen to the point where they outweigh the costs of reform. That point has not yet arrived. The demographic trends suggest it is closer than the comfortable inertia of the current settlement implies, however, and each parliament that passes without action makes the eventual reckoning more rather than less certain.
8. The International Context: How Britain Looks From Outside
Considering how Britain’s constitutional arrangement looks from the perspective of comparable democratic societies is instructive. Most liberal democracies have either formal constitutional separations of church and state, as in France and the United States, or more informal arrangements in which no single religious denomination holds the privileges that the Church of England holds in Britain. The French laïcité model is, admittedly, not without its own problems; taken to its logical extreme in the French context it has produced forms of state secularism that interfere with the expression of minority religions in ways that a genuine liberal pluralism would find uncomfortable. The American model has produced its own contradictions, as the Supreme Court’s recent jurisprudence on the Establishment Clause amply demonstrates. There is no perfect model of church-state relations anywhere.
The British model is unusual even by the relatively varied standards of international comparison. Allowing one specific religious denomination to occupy seats in the national legislature is exceptional among functioning liberal democracies. The combination of an established church, a confessional requirement for the head of state, and the integration of that church into the educational system at scale is not replicated in any comparable society. When British politicians and commentators describe the current arrangement as appropriate for a modern, plural democracy, they are making a claim that most comparable democracies have implicitly rejected through their own constitutional arrangements. The comparison is not dispositive; it would be a genetic fallacy to conclude that because other countries have done things differently, Britain must be wrong. The comparison does place the burden of justification rather firmly on those who wish to maintain the current arrangement, however, and that burden has rarely been met with arguments that go beyond tradition, convenience, and the social capital case discussed and found wanting above.
The contrast is particularly sharp when one considers countries that have undergone disestablishment within the past two centuries. Ireland severed the constitutional connection between the state and the Church of Ireland in 1869, under Gladstone’s government, at a moment of acute political controversy. Wales disestablished its Anglican church in 1920, after a campaign that stretched over several decades and generated fierce resistance from the church and its supporters in Parliament. Scotland has a different and somewhat more complex relationship with the Church of Scotland, but one in which the church’s independence from the state is constitutionally emphasised rather than its integration into it. None of these disestablishments produced the catastrophic collapse of religious social life that opponents had predicted. The churches in question continued to function, to serve their communities, and to contribute to public life. They simply did so without constitutional privileges that most of their fellow citizens did not share. It is a remarkably untroubling precedent, and one that receives remarkably little attention in English debates about establishment, where the question is frequently discussed as though the experience of Wales and Ireland were irrelevant data points rather than directly applicable historical evidence.
9. On Prayer in the Body Politic
The essay’s title advertises a prayer problem, and being explicit about what that problem is seems worth the detour, because “prayer” in this context is both literal and metaphorical. In the literal sense, the House of Commons begins each sitting day with prayers led by the Speaker’s Chaplain, an Anglican clergyman, using Christian liturgical language. MPs who are not Christian, or who are not religious, or who find the practice alien to their understanding of what a secular legislature should be doing, must wait outside the chamber or participate in a ritual that does not represent their convictions. This is not a catastrophic injustice measured against the scale of the problems that the legislature must address. It is, however, a telling symbol: the legislative body of a plural democracy beginning its daily business with a specifically Christian act of devotion, conducted by a specifically Anglican clergyman, in a chamber that represents a population the majority of whom are not Anglican and a growing proportion of whom are not Christian at all.
The daily prayers in Parliament are notable not merely for their sectarianism but for the fact that they attract so little comment. A proposal to begin each parliamentary day with a recitation from any other religious tradition would generate immediate controversy and demands for justification. The Anglican prayers generate neither, because they have been absorbed into the background furniture of the place and are treated not as a policy choice but as a neutral feature of the parliamentary environment. This is, once again, the normalisation of privilege doing its work: the arrangement that advantages one tradition is rendered invisible precisely by its antiquity and familiarity.
In the metaphorical sense, “prayer” captures the posture of the monarchy’s relationship with the religious question more broadly. To pray is to appeal to a framework of meaning that lies beyond rational argument and democratic accountability. The monarchy’s relationship with the Church of England is precisely this kind of appeal: it locates the legitimacy of the institution in a historical and theological framework that pre-dates and claims to transcend ordinary democratic scrutiny. The rebrand is the palace’s attempt to make that appeal palatable to a population that is, by any empirical measure, increasingly secular. The appeal is still being made, however. The framework is still in place. The claim that the constitutional settlement has a kind of sacred inevitability, that it represents something organically right about the nation’s history and identity, is precisely the kind of reasoning that resists engagement rather than inviting it.
The question of how the state should relate to religion is not, at the level of principle, a particularly complicated one. A state that wishes to be genuinely neutral between its citizens’ beliefs and non-beliefs should not have an established church, should not require its head of state to belong to a specific denomination, should not give any denomination automatic legislative representation, and should not conduct its most important ceremonial occasions in the liturgical grammar of one tradition. These are not radical propositions. They are the common ground of most modern liberal democratic theory and the actual constitutional practice of most comparable societies. The complication in Britain is not principled; it is political, institutional, and historical. Those are real complications, but they are the kind that political will and legislative persistence can resolve. They are not the kind that require us to pretend that the current arrangement is fair, or plural, or appropriate for a society that has changed so dramatically since the arrangement was last seriously revisited.
10. What Genuine Pluralism Would Actually Look Like
Critics of the establishment are sometimes accused of wanting to eliminate religion from public life, of seeking a militantly secular state that treats all religious expression as suspect and confines faith to the entirely private sphere. This is a caricature worth dispelling, because it conflates two very different positions. The case against an established church is not a case against religion; it is a case for equal treatment of all citizens regardless of their religious or non-religious identity. These are not the same argument, and conflating them is a rhetorical move that serves the defenders of establishment rather than the clarity of the debate.
Genuine pluralism in this context would mean a state that is formally neutral between its citizens’ beliefs, that provides equal civic standing to Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, humanists, and the non-religious alike, and that conducts its legislative and ceremonial business in a civic rather than sectarian register. It does not mean a state that suppresses religious expression, that bans faith schools, or that treats publicly expressed religious conviction as inherently suspect. The Church of England can continue to exist, to conduct its worship, to run its community activities, and to participate in public life as a voluntary institution in exactly the same way as every other religious and civic organisation. What it cannot justifiably do, in a genuinely plural democracy, is claim constitutional privileges that no other tradition shares.
The practical steps toward this kind of pluralism are not a mystery. The removal of the Lords Spiritual from the House of Lords, either as part of broader Lords reform or as a standalone measure, would be the most symbolically and practically significant change available to a government with the will to pursue it. The repeal or amendment of the Act of Settlement to remove the confessional requirement for the monarch would be a constitutional change of comparable importance. The replacement of compulsory collective Christian worship in schools with a genuinely inclusive civic assembly, and the reform of faith school admissions to remove religious discrimination, would address the educational dimension. The reform of public funding for chaplaincy services to ensure parity between religious and secular humanist provision would address the pastoral dimension. None of these changes would require the abolition of the Church of England as a religious institution. None of them would prevent the church from doing everything it currently does as a voluntary body. They would simply remove the constitutional architecture that gives it something more than equal standing in British civic life.
The National Secular Society has made versions of these arguments consistently and carefully for many years, and its July 2026 analysis is a useful addition to that body of work. It is significant that these arguments are gaining more traction in public debate at precisely the moment when the monarchy is investing most heavily in its modernising rebrand. The rebrand and the secular critique are, in a sense, responses to the same underlying pressure: a British public that is less religious, more diverse, and more attentive to questions of equality and representation than it was a generation ago. The monarchy’s response to this pressure is to change its public face while preserving its constitutional structure. The secular response is to note that the public face is not the problem, and that responding to a structural argument with a presentational concession is not engagement but evasion.
Some defenders of the establishment argue that the moment for disestablishment has not arrived because there is no public appetite for the change, no mass movement demanding it, and therefore no democratic mandate for reform. This argument is weaker than it sounds. Public appetite for constitutional reform is notoriously difficult to generate in the absence of political leadership, and political leadership on questions of this kind requires a party willing to absorb the short-term costs of challenging a powerful institution with deep cultural resonance. The absence of a mass movement is better explained by the structural difficulty of organising around a diffuse set of grievances than by genuine public satisfaction with the arrangement. Survey evidence consistently shows that large majorities of the British public, including many who identify as Christian, support the removal of automatic seats for bishops in the Lords. The appetite for the most obviously indefensible element of establishment is already there. The leadership has not yet followed.
11. The Deeper Dishonesty
There is a kind of institutional dishonesty worth naming directly, not as an accusation of bad faith against specific individuals but as a description of how large institutions behave when their legitimacy is challenged. The dishonesty consists in offering cosmetic change as if it were structural change, in responding to principled objections with performative gestures, and in allowing the language of reform to do the work of reform while the underlying arrangement remains untouched. This is not peculiar to the monarchy or the Church of England; it is a general feature of institutional self-preservation. The gap between the monarchy’s modernising rhetoric and its constitutional reality is so very large, however, that it is particularly pronounced in this case.
The argument that the monarchy is an inclusive institution because it has diversified its patronages, or that the establishment is compatible with pluralism because the King expressed a personal commitment to all faiths, is precisely this kind of cosmetic response. It takes the genuine underlying concern, which is about constitutional structure and equal citizenship, and redirects attention toward surface presentation, where change is easier and cheaper. A palace that genuinely wished to respond to the secular critique of establishment would not invite a greater diversity of faith leaders to ceremonial occasions; it would begin the political process of reforming the constitutional arrangements that make those occasions Anglican by default. The former is a communications decision that takes an afternoon to implement. The latter is a constitutional commitment that requires years of legislative effort and genuine political will. The gap between them is the measure of the rebrand’s inadequacy.
The establishment does not merely advantage the Church of England in its constitutional relationship with the state. It also, perversely, constrains the church’s freedom to define itself on its own terms. A church whose internal governance requires confirmation by the Crown, whose property and legal status depend on parliamentary statute, and whose senior appointments involve state machinery is not a fully autonomous religious institution, whatever its theological claims. The establishment that gives the church its privileges also subjects it to a form of constitutional dependency that sits uneasily with any serious doctrine of spiritual authority. The arrangement is, in this sense, uncomfortable for both parties: the secular citizen who must accept the church’s constitutional presence in their legislature, and the church that must operate its spiritual mission through a constitutional framework designed by a Tudor monarch for purposes that had very little to do with the advance of Christianity and rather more to do with the advance of a specific king’s marital ambitions.
If you are interested in how these questions of institutional religious identity intersect with arguments about the legitimacy of blasphemy as a concept, the essay Blasphemy Is Not Real develops the related case that the special deference claimed for religious ideas is precisely what makes the establishment question so important: an established church is an institutional claim that one set of religious ideas deserves the deference of the state, and that claim is not categorically different from the claim that blasphemy laws make about the deference owed by individuals. Both rest on the premise that religious ideas occupy a protected category beyond ordinary critical scrutiny, and both are wrong for the same reason.
12. History as a Constraint, Not a Justification
British public discourse has a particular fondness for the appeal to history, and nowhere is this more apparent than in discussions of the constitutional settlement. The establishment of the Church of England is described as part of Britain’s “long history,” as something that has “served the country well for centuries,” as a connection to a past whose very antiquity is treated as conferring a kind of legitimacy. This is a form of reasoning that operates in almost no other area of constitutional or policy debate. We do not defend the exclusion of women from Parliament by pointing to the centuries during which it obtained. We do not defend the property qualifications that once restricted voting by noting how long they were in place. We recognise, in those cases, that the longevity of an injustice is an aggravating circumstance rather than a mitigating one.
The selective application of the historical argument to the establishment reveals something important about the nature of the privilege involved. The appeal to history is available as a rhetorical resource precisely because the arrangement is so old that its costs are invisible to those who bear none of them. A Muslim family in Bradford whose child attends the only available local school, which happens to be a Church of England school, is unlikely to find the historical argument particularly persuasive. A secular humanist required to participate in or absent themselves from parliamentary prayers is unlikely to feel that the centuries of Anglican parliamentary tradition constitute a sufficient answer to their objection. The historical argument works best for those who have never had occasion to notice that the history in question was not made with them in mind.
The honest relationship with history, for a society that takes its liberal and democratic commitments seriously, is one that uses the past as evidence and context rather than as authority. We know from history how the establishment came about, what purposes it was designed to serve, what social order it was constructed to reflect, and what alternatives were suppressed in the process of its creation. All of that is genuinely useful historical knowledge. None of it tells us that the arrangement is appropriate for the present. The present is a country that has extended the franchise to all adults, abolished the property-owning qualification for political participation, removed most forms of explicitly legal discrimination on grounds of sex, race, disability, and sexual orientation, and committed itself constitutionally to a set of rights that apply equally to all citizens. Against that background, the maintenance of a system in which one Christian denomination receives constitutional privileges unavailable to any other tradition is not a piece of living history; it is a surviving anomaly, and the question is simply when the political will to address it will finally materialise.
There is something additionally revealing about which parts of history the defenders of establishment choose to emphasise and which they pass over quickly. The history of the Act of Settlement is also the history of anti-Catholic discrimination codified in law. The history of Church of England establishment in Ireland is also the history of a colonial imposition on a predominantly Catholic population, so thoroughly resented that its disestablishment in 1869 was widely celebrated as an overdue act of justice. The history of compulsory Anglican worship in schools is also the history of systematically marginalising the children of Nonconformists, Catholics, Jews, and eventually all the other traditions that subsequent waves of immigration brought to Britain. Selecting from this history the parts that reflect well on the establishment and treating those as the authoritative account, while declining to dwell on the parts that reflect rather less well, is a kind of curated nostalgia masquerading as constitutional continuity.
Conclusion: The Structure Is the Argument
The monarchy’s prayer problem is not solved by better photography, more diverse guest lists at garden parties, or carefully worded statements about the King’s personal commitment to interfaith dialogue. The prayer problem is structural, which means that its solution is also structural, and that solutions offered at any other level are not solutions but evasions. A rebrand that leaves the constitutional architecture intact is not a response to the secular critique; it is an attempt to make that critique seem unnecessary by simulating the outcome without incurring the cost.
Britain has changed, is changing, and will continue to change in ways that make the current constitutional settlement increasingly difficult to defend on any principled basis. The Church of England’s declining attendance, the growth of other religious traditions, and the rise of the non-religious to plurality status in the population are not temporary fluctuations to be waited out. They are the direction of travel of a modern, urban, educated, and increasingly diverse society. The constitution has not moved to reflect this travel, and the gap between constitutional structure and social reality is now wide enough to be a source of legitimate grievance rather than merely academic interest.
To acknowledge this is not to be hostile to the Church of England, or to Christians, or to religion as a human phenomenon. It is simply to apply to constitutional arrangements the same standard of justification that we apply to any other policy: does it treat all citizens equally, is there a principled basis for it that does not depend entirely on historical accident and institutional inertia, and does its continuation serve the public good or primarily the interests of those it happens to privilege? The established church fails all three tests. The rebrand was never going to pass them. Hitchens was right: the secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism, not its enemy. Britain has not yet found the political will to take that truth seriously at the level of its constitution, and the National Secular Society’s July 2026 analysis is a useful reminder that the argument will not go away simply because it is inconvenient for those who would prefer to manage it with a fresh coat of paint and a more inclusive seating plan at the next state ceremony.