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Self-Government Without Disestablishment: From the Enabling Act to the General Synod

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2019

Colin Podmore
Colin Podmore*
Affiliation:
Former Clerk to the General Synod
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Abstract

The process of Church–State separation began 90 years before the 1919 Enabling Act, which gave the Church Assembly legislative powers. The Assembly was conceived not by William Temple's Life and Liberty movement but by aristocratic Conservative politicians, motivated by practical efficiency and High Church principles. With Church lawyers, they dominated it for 40 years. The Church's response to Parliament's rejection of the 1928 Prayer Book, to the Matrimonial Causes Act 1937 and, in the 1950s, to the impossibility of fully articulating in the Church of England's canon law its doctrine on marriage discipline and the seal of the confessional, was united, confident and defiant. The Worship and Doctrine Measure 1974 largely completed efforts to achieve legislative autonomy without disestablishment. The General Synod era has seen changes in both Church and State. The traditions that eclipsed the Church's former ‘Centre-High’ consensus have been less concerned to underline the Church's distinctive identity and doctrines, about which the Synod has been less united. Among MPs, Conservative High Churchmanship and concern for minorities have waned, while expectation that the Church's practice will reflect contemporary social attitudes has increased, placing the long-term survival of the 1919 settlement in question.

Keywords

Parliamentestablishmentself-governmentHigh ChurchmanshipChurch AssemblyGeneral Synodlegislationliturgydoctrine
Type
Articles
Information
Ecclesiastical Law Journal , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , September 2019 , pp. 312 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical Law Society 2019 

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Footnotes

1

This article is based on a paper given at the Ecclesiastical Law Society conference ‘Church and State in the Twenty-First Century’, 5–7 April 2019.

References

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3 Archbishops’ Committee on Church and State, Report, with Appendices (London, 1916), p 29.

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5 See the long title: ‘An Act to confer powers on the National Assembly of the Church of England constituted in accordance with the constitution attached as an Appendix to the Addresses presented to His Majesty by the Convocations of Canterbury and York on the tenth day of May nineteen hundred and nineteen, and for other purposes connected therewith’.

6 Archbishops’ Committee, Report, p 62.

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28 Ibid, p 968.

29 Iremonger, William Temple, pp 244–246, 257f.

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31 See Morris, High Church Revival, p 247.

32 See Bell, Randall Davidson, p 966f.

33 The Marquis of Salisbury, Lord Hugh Cecil, Lady Florence Cecil (brothers- and sister-in-law), Viscount Wolmer (son) and Earl Grey (son-in-law).

34 The Official Year-Book of the Church of England, 1921 (London, 1921), p 23.

35 H Chalmer Bell, ‘Eight years of the Church Assembly’, (1929) 105 Nineteenth Century and After 59–71 at 66.

36 Hastings, History of English Christianity, pp 64 and 252f; J Lockhart, Cosmo Gordon Lang (London, 1949), p 334.

37 Hastings, History of English Christianity, p 64.

38 S Mews, ‘Religion and English society in the First World War’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge (1973), p 275, quoted with approval by M Grimley, Citizenship, Community, and the Church of England: liberal Anglican theories of the state between the wars (Oxford, 2004), p 18f.

39 Iremonger, William Temple, p 281. Kenneth Thompson called the two forces ‘autonomist’ and ‘instrumentalist’: Bureaucracy and Church Reform, p 165.

40 Convocations of the Clergy Measure 1920, s 1.

41 Thompson, Bureaucracy and Church Reform, p 201.

42 O Chadwick, Hensley Henson: a study in the friction between Church and State (second edition, Norwich, 1994), p 188f.

43 Hastings, History of English Christianity, p 205; E Kemp, Counsel and Consent: aspects of the government of the Church as exemplified in the history of the English provincial synods (London, 1961), p 202.

44 Maiden, National Religion and the Prayer Book Controversy, p 70f.

45 Ibid, p 161.

46 Church Times, 6 July 1928, p 5.

47 Bell, Randall Davidson, p 1358f.

48 R Beaken, Cosmo Lang: archbishop in war and crisis (London, 2012), p 153f (emphasis in original).

49 Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, p 170.

50 Bell, Randall Davidson, p 1360.

51 Beaken, Cosmo Lang, p 157f.

52 Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, p 146 (emphasis in original).

53 Ibid, p 160.

54 Thompson, Bureaucracy and Church Reform, p 182.

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61 Chronicle of Convocation, 1958, pp 253–255.

62 Riley and Graham, Acts of the Convocations of Canterbury and York, p 111; Chronicle of Convocation, 1959, pp 224–231.

63 For further details, see C Podmore, ‘The seal of the confessional: “an essential principle of church doctrine”’, (December 2018–January 2019) New Directions 14–15.

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65 Marriage Act 1959, s 5B, inserted by the Gender Recognition Act 2004.

66 Re-enacted in the Matrimonial Causes Act 1965, s 8(2).

67 See Canon B 30(1).

68 For the period before 1995, see Asma Said Khan, ‘Parliament and the Church of England: the making of ecclesiastical law’, unpublished PhD thesis, King's College London (2011).

69 HL Deb 3 July 1989, vol 509, col 1012.

70 Reports of the Ecclesiastical Committee upon the Priests (Ordination of Women) Measure and the Ordination of Women (Financial Provisions) Measure, HL Paper 116, HC 895 (London, 1993).

71 HC Deb 21 November 2012, vol 553, col 578.

72 Reports of the Ecclesiastical Committee, p 64 and passim.

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