Tensions between secular liberals and Christian apologists are once again bubbling over. Recent developments (or lack thereof) in the Church of England have brought impassioned supporters from both sides of the argument out into the open to, again, don gloves and scrap for public support. The Church’s recent rejection of the proposal to allow women to become bishops, combined with its feeble concession to gay men that they can be bishops if they are in a civil partnership, as long as they promise not to express their love for each other even in the privacy of their own homes, offers further insight, if any more were necessary, that the Church of England’s core principles are completely at odds with the values we today cherish and send people to die in defence of. Now, while the Church has every right to defend its beliefs , just as the rest of us do, it is surely clear that support for the disestablishment of the Church of England and denying it exemption from equalities legislation is the only conceivable option for anyone of an egalitarian and progressive disposition.
I would like you to take a moment just to think about the absurdity of the grand status that the Church of England has in society. It alone, of our official state bodies, does not have to abide by equalities and employment legislation, freely allowing it to discriminate on the grounds of gender. The Church of England, then, is essentially one of the last examples in the UK of the dusty, squalid, smoky gentlemen’s clubs that encapsulate everything regrettable about our Age of Empire. If the Church of England were nothing more than this, one could almost forgive them of that slight idiosyncrasy. But can you imagine how you would react to new legislation that stated that 26 places in the House of Lords should be reserved for Bertie Wooster and his coves down at the Drones Club, or that the manager of a gentlemen’s club is entitled to found a primary school in which he tells the children that it is impossible to be a moral human being without being a member of, or the wife/property of a member of, his particular club? Laughable, right?
But this is exactly the privilege that is awarded to the Church of England, all because of its unfalsifiable and irrational claims that not only does God exist (a belief I do not share but could never hope to disprove), but, as luck would have it, the god they have been brought up to believe in is the ‘correct’ one and that this god will judge you based on which orifices you derive your sexual pleasures from. Are we not mature enough to say that such extraordinary dogma has no right to be granted special dispensation without any evidence to justify it? With an ever-secularising population, one can no longer defend having an established Church that is not subordinate to Parliament nor bound by its legislation. By all means, believe whatever you like; just don’t expect your government-sanctioned misogyny and homophobia to triumph over freedom, democracy and the rule of law for much longer.